The Old Tree

There was this old big tree. It stood by for a long time. No one really knew who planted it, no one knew who nourished and  grew it. But the people around it did water it from time to time. A few came to pluck its fruits, a few came to enjoy its shade, a few needed a place to pee. But to most, the tree was just there… it was a reality of that place, It was the landmark of that place. But there was something wrong.

It was a sick tree. Its roots were deep, dry and rotting.

Some said , its rotten to the core. Burn down the whole thing… it isn't worth saving… we don’t need a tree. The fruits numb you. We should learn to live without it.

Some said, uproot and throw it away. Rotten roots give poisonous fruit, the shade will whiter away. Let's get rid of this, and plant a new tree. A good tree, with sweet fruit. It will take time; but it shall be worth it. It'll be better than this rotten tree.

Some said, the fruit is already sweet, the shade is cool and large. Let us fix the rotting roots with care. It shall take even longer, but it shall provide shade throughout, the effort shall be worth it.   

And some said, there's hardly anything wrong with it. A few blemishes on stem, leaves or the fruit perhaps… nothing a few sprays can't fix, nothing major. It's mostly fine.

They keep talking about it. Each one does their own thing.

The tree also does its thing.

The tree keeps changing.

A wedding, and after

She stayed with her uncle and aunt. Her parents were long dead. And she wasn't 16 yet. Her uncle and aunt did raise her up for a few years, but were also seeking for a suitable house to marry her into. They probably didn't want to keep supporting her for much longer.

Soon came a proposal from a nearby village. It was a similarly poor family, with just sufficient land to produce a little surplus. The horrible monsoon had badly affected all families in the region. They had a 17 yr old healthy son, who had to now offer his labours elsewhere to pay their debts, in the absence of a good harvest. The mother was a gem of a woman. She was hard working, straightforward, confident, and overall, known for her progressive values. She had managed to tame her alcoholic husband out of the habit, made important decisions for her family, became a leader of the local SHGs and encouraged others to get out of the debt trap. All this, and she wasn't loud. In short, she spoke little, spoke with amazing clarity and firmness whenever she did. She was respected.

But the last few seasons weren't great for her too. Some medical bills, crop failures and family emergencies all made her household slightly precarious. She was also getting old, and couldn't maintain the entire farm on her own. She thought its high she had some extra hands to help out. There weren't too many others at home too, it wasn't a large and unmanagable family for anyone new, she thought.

So she approached this family she had heard of. She met the girl, her uncle and aunt, and seemed to like them. They too agreed.

They soon got engaged. Our mother here thought it would be a reasonable idea if she  moved over to her new place for a few days. After all, Rakshabandhan was approaching , the girl anyway had to get back to her uncle's place for the festival. The mother felt a few days of familiarising before the wedding would be good. Everyone agreed, and the girl moved.

Soon it was Rakhi time, the girl got back to her uncle's. a few days later, the young couple got married too. As per custom, the groom's side paid a bridal price of Rs.30,000.

They decided the girl could stay for a few more days with her folks. And reach her new home later. The mother said, "you may not have parents, but you now have a home".

As in any place, this uncle did have his share of rivals in his village. The next few days presented an opportunity for them to mouth their opinions to the girl.

The day to leave had come, the girl was all ready. She boarded the bus and finally she left her village once and for all.

The bus halted for a bit at a town midway. The girl got down, boarded another bus, met a few of her villagers, went over to the police station, and lodged a complaint that she was a victim of child marriage, and the wedding to be annulled. And thats that...   

The night of cleansing

I stay with a very generous and sweet family in this village. The couple are from a nearby village, but have been staying here for long. The house we stay in has a soakpit for sewage waste emanating from the washrooms. The house also doubles up as a makeshift office for my organization, hence always has a steady stream of visitors from nearby villages. Since its one of the few houses in the village to actually have toilets, you do have a few people who use the toilets placed just outside our rooms. So, compared to its traffic, the soakpit is comparatively small, and fills up pretty soon.

We periodically pump it out with a motor to our small backyard farm. Even though it is partially decomposed human excreta, it still counts as liquid manure, albeit not a great one. 2 nights back, we had started the motor pump for the same purpose, but it was taking much longer than usual. It was 11 pm and my host and I decided to go to sleep, and wake up at 4am to check and switch off the motor. I slept well. Not a single dream, nothing to remember about the sleep, just blankness, the hallmark of a sound sleep.

I then heard this soft voice calling out, I awoke to find my host  guy calling me out. It was 3 am, and I told him the pumping wouldn’t be done yet. He called me out, smiled and showed me the soakpit. Sometime while we were asleep, the pipe got clogged, and the pressure loosened the pipe. The result was glaring in front of us, the pumped sewage waste, spread out on our's and our neighbour's front porch. Many days of partially decomposed toilet sewage just out there… the sight was plain and simply awful.

The village was all asleep, it was still and silent. We were lucky.

We thought... If we wait till morning, the entire village would get to know of this - not a pretty sight. The sight of everyone watching while we clean up was also not to be avoided; for all we know, some might begin to boycott us.  Also, the neighbor whose porch was filled, wasn't the best of friends and was a source of constant complaints over small issues. Compared to the minor issues we have argued profusely on, this was ‘End of Days’.  But personally, my biggest concern was that the neighbour’s place was also the venue for the village’s mini-Anganwadi, with many tiny tots expected the next day. This is the last place to leave in an unhygienic manner.

It was clear what we had to do. My host and I stared at each other, laughed a while. The heavens opened then and it started drizzling too… we were going to be cleaning shit in the rains :P

We assembled a bucket and a mug each, collected the dark viscous liquid waste on the floor by hand, filled the buckets and emptied in on our backyard farm. We had to race against time, we had to finish this entire operation before 4:30, when folks start waking up. Getting caught in such an activity, was not a position we wanted to find ourselves in. It was dark, and we had a tough time handling the torch while operating. It also meant there was no photo opportunities :P

Once we were mostly done, we decided to water down the remaining bits, and wiped them far away. We then prayed for intense rains so as to remove all traces of the night’s work. And as luck would have, it started raining hard. Standing there with all filth on us, with the rains pouring on us, one could so easily visualize an epic scene from a film climax.  

To take a bath at 4:30 after cleaning so much shit with our bare hands, was a truly satisfying experience. I shall remember this bath for a long long time to come. 

Mass Marriage

It was tense. But it wasn't meant to be so. It was meant to be joyous, perhaps a bit of relief, a dash of anxiety for the unknown future lying ahead too. But the nerves weren't that. It was palpable tension cause so few knew what was happening at the present. Cause they just could not relate to it.

The setting was the mass marriage ceremonies conducted by the government of Madhya Pradesh, under the 'Mukhyamantri Kanyadaan Yojna' for couples preferring not to spend extravagantly for their wedding. It is open to the general public, all classes and communities. The couples get a Rs.17,000 Fixed Deposit in the name of the bride, Rs.5000 worth vessels and pressure cooker as 'Kanyadaan', and Rs.3000 spent for arrangements per couple. This particular one had 46 couples, almost all of them belonging to the ST communities of the Korku and the Bhilala. So what exactly was so alienating, that made the air so tense?

The couples had a small fire alter placed in front of them. There were 8-9 pandits chanting sanskrit slokas, and asking the couples to repeat them, and also perform some tasks like pouring various items into the fire, and on each other. They were clueless about what to do and what to say. The pandit went on and on in the incomprehensible language. The only recognisable words were some of the names of the gods like Krishna, Rama, Narayana, etc - words the people have become accustomed to over the decades. Repeated invocation of the "Brahman Devta Abhishek ji Maharaj" had most couples go "kaun?". Once, the grooms were asked to draw a swastika on the bride's hand - the junior pandit went mad as most of them dint know what a swastika was, or why it was needed here. The pandit kids running around to assist the couples were shocked at levels of ignorance amongst the couples. None of these ever made sense to the bulk of them. The new word most folks learnt that day was the one they had repeated the most - "swaahaa". So much so, that when the actual exchange of garlands took place, one couldn't spot smiling faces of relief. But flat faces, of cluelessness. 

The Bhilala wedding has no place for such fire alters. They have a wooden stump, the 'Kakad' fixed to the ground symbolising their family goddess; it’s the centre piece of their wedding ceremony. There's no place for a pandit chanting mantras in a completely unrecognisable language, and frankly, boring the crap out of them. Their ceremonies have the sister and sister-in-law conducting it, asking for their mutual consents, and fixing what their families would exchange with each other and invoking the sun, the moon, their crop deities and their family goddess. Following this would be the women of the house singing songs about their families, and also some raunchy songs about the pleasures of marriage :P  (Simultaneously of course, you'd have folks having copious amounts of Mahua!)

There are a number of ways of viewing this. I think its commendable that the state launches such schemes, I really do. Weddings are one of those high expenditure activities that cause indebtedness in most parts of our country. Its also one of the several reasons many in our country prefer male kids to female ones. When folks can get together and perform financial transactions through SHGs, or sell crops together through Cooperatives, why cant they get married together! As a development intervention, I think its right up there. I daresay, its ok for the state to subsidise such events. Its got a clever name too. Since the state purchases the items for kanyadaan on behalf of the families, in a sense, the kanyadaan is performed by the state - taking the meaning of the 'paternalistic state' to an altogether different level :)

Now at the implementation phase, the organisers would have had to think about making arrangements. Now, it is at this juncture that our sociological backgrounds come into the picture. The event organisers, mostly block level officers, by default assumed that getting a troupe of Sanskrit pandits to conduct the weddings is the norm - the natural way of doing things. And its quite natural to assume so too. It might not have been something they particularly gave time to think through.  After all, in our lives, we get exposed to marriages of only a certain kind. In pop culture, all portrayals and imageries of weddings involve a sacred thread bearing pandit with mantras and fire alters. The trouble is it’s the norm for only a section of the population - the ones who fall into the patterns set by mainstream Hinduism, along with its thrust on Sanskrit and Vedic rituals. It is precisely this trap that sits like an unmovable block of rock in our heads; it calls for a learning - that our mainstream does not pertain to all. This is even more pertinent when the mainstream norm accounts for the better off in society, while the ones who're outside its fold - the 'others', have been on the receiving end through much of history. The power relations between these two groups blinds the powerful to nuances of the oppressed.

 The 'sickularist' in me naturally tends to laugh at this, but also view this suspiciously through the lens of the state (BJP ruled) attempting to spread Hindutva's tentacles to communities not quite yet within its fold. But it might be too harsh a judgment. I choose to stick with the line of thought of the previous paragraph. 

Another observation on the same note of Hindutva. The block has a sizable Muslim population, especially in the block headquarters. There were no Muslim couples participating in the function. Let us not fool ourselves into thinking expensive weddings are a Hindu problem. It could be that the organisers did not make that much of an effort to canvass for this scheme amongst the Muslim communities, cause we know that there are a few private initiatives amongst the Muslim communities where group weddings do take place. The argument could also be made that the community doesn't come forward for such schemes - as is the favourite right wing argument. But based on how the function went about, I guess it would seem very unwelcoming to couples of other faiths. A small gesture of simply having a Qazi on stage for standby would've been so nice to see - that the organisers had at least given some thought to it. The absence of such things is quite sad.     

Amongst the couples were also two mixed couples - OBC boys with ST girls, specifically landed, moneyed Sirvi boys with Bhilala girls. Being the ravishing romantic, yours truly instinctively took it to be couples madly in love with each other, with parents refusing to accept them. Its only then that it struck me, that a practice has taken off in recent years among the Sirvi community, of marrying Bhilala girls after paying their families, owing to an apparent 'shortage of girls' within their community. At first sight, such a story has all the makings of a torrid time ahead for the girls in question - for it could well be that the boys' folks were 'shopping for cooks'. However, this seemingly strange phenomena should be dealt with in a separate post on the history of the Bhilalas of this place, and their complex relationship with other communities here.

Oh, and by the way, there's apparently a government reward of Rs.50,000 for such inter-caste marriages. Now, go figure that out.

But as the defining piece, I think my everlasting memory of the event would be the following couple, of Savita marrying Gabbar Singh - a match truly made in dreams :)

 With all the youthness in our hearts, let us fervently wish them a truly great future ahead ! 

Farms and forests

My work area lies in the ST dominated regions of Bagli block, in Dewas district of Madhya Pradesh. Among the ST communities here are the Bhilala, Korku and the Barela. But among them, for a variety of reasons, the Barela evince much more interest. One of the reasons for coming here was to gain an understanding of the developmental story of the people here. Based on my months here, there is an outline of the Barela story that is quite fascinating. It’s a story that is quite common to so many communities and regions in a world undergoing rapid change. It’s a story of migration, complete with ecological, economic, social and political causations and ramifications.

The Barelas were the latest to migrate into this region, after the Bhilalas and Korkus. Based on oral records, a bulk of them moved in from areas in and around Badwani, beyond the south bank of the Narmada, some 200 kms away.

Oral sources here cite a flood in the early 60's on the Narmada, near the town of Anjad in present day Badwani district. (But I'm yet to find references to this flood  in official records). The exact causes of the migration could be several.

Upon reaching, they received actual land pattas of over 10 Hectares per family from the state government. But all the land they received was forest land with thick bush vegetation; they were poor, red-soiled, loose land. The task of clearing the forest, and make it cultivable was entirely up to them. So, this period witnessed a large government mandated clearing of forest lands, as they were officially parted away through government pattas to these migrant families. Barela families, thus have settlements much closer to the present day forest boundaries. 

This story we see here can now be linked to the story of Land Reforms in India. In brief, Land reforms meant

1.       Tenancy rights to tenant farmers.

2.       Land ceiling to large land holding families

3.       Land redistribution to landless families.

We shall focus on points 2 and 3, as there are more relevant to this discussion. Point 2 meant there was to be a limit over how much a single family could own. The surplus agricultural land over and above the limit was to be seized by the government, with due compensation paid to the families. This was to then create a massive land-bank of seized agricultural land, which was subsequently to be distributed among landless families willing to eager to farm, which is Point 3. Thus, what was envisaged was a more socially equitable ownership pattern of the existing agricultural land. In other words, points  2 directly feeding into point 3.

But Point 2 and Point 3 did not simultaneously occur in Madhya Pradesh. There is extensive scholarship available which highlight the political reasons for which states like Madhya Pradesh did not enforce point 2 effectively - as landed castes were an immensely powerful lobby within the ruling Congress. So in the name of Land Reforms, what got enforced was only point 3. But where would the extra land needed for such distribution come from? Being India's most forested state, Madhya Pradesh ate into its ample forests for precisely this.

This practice also conveniently converged with India's then agrarian policy of increasing agricultural land to produce more food for its population - a policy of extensive agriculture, rather than intensive. Back then, increasing food production was linked to increasing cropped area, rather than increasing productivity. Our focus shifted to the latter only after the mid 60's, when the Green Revolution was sought after. Ecologically, agricultural land increased by eating into forest land. Socially, it did not change the power held by landed castes. 

A check at the official statistics ('India Forestry Outlook Study - MoEF')  conveys the contrary:

One guesses the devil is in the detail, based on the definitions used for forest land - about which lands were considered ‘forest’, which were considered waste land, etc. One would need to explore that further.    

But how and why exactly the government decided and actually managed to give formal pattas to them remains unanswered, especially when it is so hard to set right their land records even now. 

I'll conclude with a clear hypothesis on the implementation of Land Reforms in India, in different states - States where political will to take on the landed gentry was lacking, tended to distribute forest/common land, as part of its Land Reforms and increased the net sown area. 

This hypothesis surely deserves to be tested, and I'm sure there is plenty of work already done on it. 

PS: The full India Forestry Outlook Study is available online here 

A writing on the wall ?

There was this peculiar structure I chanced upon in Junagadh fort, during my travels around Saurashtra last month. Junagadh's fort has structures across so many centuries, and one would have a chance to see various styles of architecture across cultures and times !

Inside the fort, among the various buildings is this curious construction. Unfortunately, I do not have photos of the actual building as such. So you'd have to take my word for it. The building had a clearly Rajput style of architecture. Long pillared halls, with the columns being filled with very intricate chisel work. Based on the kind of work on these columns, one felt that this was certainly a work commissioned by a Hindu king.

However, it was a west facing structure, with some provisions of a pool, and a fountain in front of its entrance. Some paintings on the roofs of the structure too led to think that it might be a mosque. Thus, I was puzzled by what the structure was! It looked both like a mosque, but had none of the standard architectural elements of the Islamic style. What could this structure possibly be? Could this be some synthetic style of architecture that evolved in this region? Questions were floating in my mind.

I left the structure, and more than an hour later, finished my walk through the fort, reaching the entrance. This is when I glanced upon this map below. In Gujrati, it points to the very same site as "Jama Masjid and Ranidevi's mahal".
Now there, suddenly all my observations seemed to make sense. This structure might have possibly been a mahal for one of the queens, and later might have been converted into a mosque, when conquered by a Muslim ruler. Or it might have been the other way around.. who knows!

But that is not the story of this pic. Someone has had a look at the writing, had a certain understanding of its history, and then, actually decided to scratch off the "Jama Masjid" part ! Fantastic right ?

Ponder over it...

Youthness on a bus to Ahmedabad

The bus wasn't crowded at all. Surprising, given that it was a bus to such an important city. The bus was well maintained, and the crowd seemed mostly middle class. Couldn't have been more than 25 people in a bus of 65 capacity.

There were two couples who seemed newly married. Such newly married ones are always the cutest. Its such a joy to be around them, and feel their love for each other - though it’s a sin to look, muhahaha :P

Thus the bus was mostly quiet with very little chatter. Yours truly was engaged observing the bus and its passengers, the roads outside and pretending to read 'Following Fish', which in itself was a rather delightfully written travelogue of India's coast. All in all, it was a sort of comfortable monotony.

It was broken by a sudden shrill. Some youth on the third row was listening to music on his phone, suddenly broke into song. And these are the latest, snazzy Bollywood numbers - but the good, old youthy, cheesy 80's ones - the ones that contract labourers and truck drivers all over India have such great affinity for ! 

He went along at full flow, singing both the male and female parts of this unrecognisable duet - youthfully altering his voice for the female versions too, as though he wasn't shrill enough already.

"….Tum hi ho, meri nasha..."  or something to that extent.

The shock of the moment left everyone else stunned. The instinctive reactions were disbelief and incomprehension. Seriously, given the situation, its hard to believe that there's actually a guy singing. Once that shock passed, a quick-to-trigger middle aged hothead raised a cry to stop the nonsense - "Bakwaas bandh kar". But it never seemed to have any effect on our dude, for he continued untroubled by such feeble concerns ! People then looked around to the conductor, the authority in the bus, the representative of the state, which clearly is responsible for law and order - more than hope for action from his side, were actually curious to see how he would react. It’s a sort of unconscious behaviour for most of us Indians. 

It is at this juncture that bus journey came alive (as though this freak show hadn't already livened it!). Sportspersons and sports viewers would know that the audience is always the 12th man - what makes sport such a spectacle isn't just the players, but the audience too. Now in the bus, where our youthy dude is obviously causing discomfort to some of the passengers, and also just rebuffed the efforts to stop him gets an unexpected response from the rest of the crowd.

Of course, being quite a youth myself, I was actually enjoying the proceedings - but the rather quiet and dull atmosphere of the bus led me to certain misjudgments of my passengers. I was worried that this voice of youthness would get muscled out by the normalcy of the bus. I was under the impression that youthness in today's world is under such short supply, that our fuses too have so short - and we have become sort of intolerant of such youth behaviour. The crowd so totally proved me wrong.

As soon the middle aged man's efforts were rebuffed - the crowd started smiling, beautiful smiles on all the 20 odd faces ! And they all turned around to notice that everyone was indeed smiling. And this converted the smiles to laughter. The 20 odd passengers, all strangers to each other, not bothering to engage in conversation previously, were somehow mysteriously connected by this inexplicable force - were laughing at this moment. They displayed their own youthness qualities - an ability to appreciate the oddity of the youth who's singing, the quirky randomness of the situation and the fact that all were able to feel this !

The impact was so much that, this fuelled conversation between the strangers for the next hour, and even when the bus halted for tea - people were sitting together for tea, sharing cigarettes, making Khaini and Miraj (Gujarat's favourite!) mixes for each other. That youth who started singing made such an impact on all the bus. My idea of the world did change momentarily. The world has much more youthness than we think. We need to just open our eyes to it. The world aint a boring place at all - people have an innately youthy, we need to allow ourselves to be so.

We are a society that loved Om Shanti Om - youthness shall always thrive here. And for that, we shall be ever grateful to live in such times.