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Senior Hindi poets in the early years of freedom like Maithili Sharan Gupt and Sumitranandan Pant wrote gushingly about the pristine beauty of India’s country side. Their poems had deep philosophical thoughts on life and death, religious beliefs and memories of historical battles, warlords and romances that they heard from farmers even as they carried out their tedious everyday tasks.

In prose, however, Suryakant Tripathi Nirala and other greats – Munshi Premchand, Chandradhar Sharma Guleri, Shivpoojan Sahay and Phanishwar Nath Renu – were far less sentimental. Novels like Godan, Dehati Duniya and Maila Anchal speak of poverty stricken villages divided along brutal caste/class and gender hierarchies. They also hint clearly at a growing desire among the young to escape to cities that spell freedom from the squalor of farming life.

Things looked rosy if you were a city-based gentleman farmer and visited your ancestral home occasionally for festivities and leisure. Their successive generations have mostly sold the land at huge profits but harbour romantic dreams about holding on to their cultural roots. They have avidly grabbed the hype the state has actively been promoting of late, as countryside as the heart of both Sanatan Dharma and age-old Hindu traditions.

People light firecrackers as part of Diwali festival celebrations, even as pollution levels surged across Delhi-NCR, with Wazirpur recording severe air quality in New Delhi on October 21, 2025. Photo: PTI/Shahbaz Khan

So with Diwali over and pollution on the rise, most Delhiites start thinking of spending quality time in a country house or rented villa in the hills or a beach in Goa or a shikara in Kashmir or Kerala. The rest choke, cough and wheeze through the winters in India’s polluted metros and save money to buy expensive air purifiers and write letters to........

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