India (9 page)

Every open space was a latrine; and in one such space we came, suddenly, upon a hellish vision. Two starved Bombay street cows had been tethered there, churning up human excrement with their
own; and now, out of this bog, they were being pulled away by two starved women, to neighbourhood shouts, the encouraging shouts of a crowd gathering around this scene of isolated, feeble frenzy, theatre in the round on an excremental stage, the frightened cows and frantic starveling women (naked skin and bone below their disordered, tainted saris) sinking with every step and tug. The keeping of cows was illegal here, and an inspector of some sort was reported to be coming. A recurring drama: the cows – illegal, but the only livelihood of the women who kept them – had often to be hidden; and they were going to be hidden now, if they could be got away in time, in the rooms where the women lived.

The lane twisted; the scene was left behind. We were going down the other side of the hill now, and were soon in an area where a committee ruled. We passed through an open space, a little square. The committees were determined to keep these open areas, the technician said; but that required vigilance. A squatter’s hut could go up overnight, and it was hard then – since all the huts were illegal – to have just that one pulled down. Once, when the technician was out of the settlement for only three days, a small open area had been built over. They had petitioned to have the new structure pulled down; but the offender had pleaded with the committees, and in the end, for compassionate reasons, they had allowed the structure to stand.

We were now back where we had started, at the foot of the hill, at the entrance, with the washing sheds full of women and girls, and the latrine blocks full of children: slum life from the outside, from the wide main road, but, approached from the other side, like a scene of pastoral, and evidence of what was possible.

The Sena men walked with us to the bus stop. From there the hill, variously roofed, and seemingly roofed all the way down, looked small again. The settlement was full, the technician said. They admitted no newcomers now. Sometimes, but rarely, someone left, and his hut could then be sold to an outsider. The current price would be about four thousand rupees, four hundred dollars. That
was high, but the area was central and the settlement was provided with services.

The noon sun hurt; the empty Sunday road shimmered. The bus seemed a long time coming; but at last, trailing a hot brown fog, it came, a red Bombay double-decker, the lower part of its metal sides oily and dust-blown, with deep horizontal scratches, and oddly battered, like foil that had been crumpled and smoothed out.

Back through the chawls then, our red bus mingling with more and more of its fuming fellows, the main roads black and the pavements alive, the cinema posters offering fantasies of plump women and snowy Himalayan peaks, the cluttered, sunlit façades of commercial buildings hung with many brilliant signboards, past the mills and the chimneys, along the fast city highways with the more metropolitan advertisements (‘butter at its buttermost’) to the skyscrapers and the sea: the Bombay of the white towers, seen from that hillside, which already seemed far away.

At dinner that evening – high up in one of those towers – a journalist, speaking frenetically of many things (he was unwilling to write while the censorship lasted, and it all came out in talk), touched the subject of identity. ‘Indian’ was a word that was now without a meaning, he said. He himself – he was in his thirties, of the post-Independence generation – no longer knew what he was; he no longer knew the Hindu gods. His grandmother, visiting Khajuraho or some other famous temple, would immediately be in tune with what she saw; she wouldn’t need to be told about the significance of the carvings. He was like a tourist; he saw only an
architectural monument. He had lost the key to a whole world of belief and feeling, and was cut off from his past.

At first, and especially after my excursion of the morning, this talk of identity seemed fanciful and narcissistic. Bombay, after all, was Bombay; every man knew how and why he had got there and where he had come from. But then I felt I had misjudged the journalist. He was not speaking fancifully; his passion was real.

Once upon a time, the journalist said, cutting through the dinner-table cross-talk – one woman, apropos of nothing, mentioning Flaubert only to dismiss him as a writer of no importance; a dazed advertising man, young but nicely bellied, coming to life to wonder, also apropos of nothing, whether the temperate delights of Kashmir couldn’t be ‘sold’ to the sun-parched Arabs of the Persian Gulf – once upon a time, the journalist said, the Indian village was self-sufficient and well ordered. The bull drew the plough and the cow gave milk and the manure of these animals enriched the fields, and the stalks of the abundant harvest fed the animals and thatched the village huts. That was the good time. But self-sufficiency hadn’t lasted, because after a while there were too many people. ‘It isn’t an easy thing to say,’ the journalist said, ‘but this is where kindness to the individual can be cruelty to the race.’

It explained his frenzy. His idea of India was one in which India couldn’t be accommodated. It was an idea of India which, for all its seeming largeness, only answered a personal need: the need, in spite of the mess of India, to be Indian, to belong to an established country with an established past. And the journalist was insecure. As an Indian he was not yet secure enough to think of Indian identity as something dynamic, something that could incorporate the millions on the move, the corrupters of the cities.

For the journalist – though he was an economist and had travelled, and was professionally concerned with development and change – Indian identity was not something developing or changing but something fixed, an idealization of his own background, the past he felt he had just lost. Identity was related to a set of beliefs and
rituals, a knowledge of the gods, a code, an entire civilization. The loss of the past meant the loss of that civilization, the loss of a fundamental idea of India, and the loss therefore, to a nationalist-minded man, of a motive for action. It was part of the feeling of purposelessness of which many Indians spoke, part of the longing for Gandhian days, when the idea of India was real and seemed full of promise, and the ‘moral issues’ clear.

But it was a middle-class burden, the burden of those whose nationalism – after the years of subjection – required them to have an idea of India. Lower down, in the chawls and the squatters’ settlements of the city, among the dispossessed, needs were more elemental: food, shelter, water, a latrine. Identity there was no problem; it was a discovery. Identity was what the young men of the Sena were reaching out to, with the simplicities of their politics and their hero figures (the seventeenth-century Shivaji, warrior chieftain turned to war god, the twentieth-century Dr Ambedkar, untouchable now only in his sanctity). For the Sena men, and the people they led, the world was new; they saw themselves at the beginning of things: unaccommodated men making a claim on their land for the first time, and out of chaos evolving their own philosophy of community and self-help. For them the past was dead; they had left it behind in the villages.

And every day, in the city, their numbers grew. Every day they came from the villages, this unknown, unacknowledged India, though Bombay was full and many squatters’ settlements, like the one on the hill above the graveyard, had been declared closed.

T
HE ENGINEER WHO
had introduced me to the squatters’ settlement in Bombay was also working on a cooperative irrigation scheme up on the Deccan plateau, some miles southeast of Poona. In India, where nearly everything waits for the government, a private scheme like this, started by farmers on their own, was new and encouraging; and one week I went with the engineer to look.

I joined him at Poona, travelling there from Bombay by the early morning train, the businessman’s train, known as the Deccan Queen. There was no air-conditioned carriage; but on this rainy monsoon morning there was no Indian dust to keep out. Few of the ceiling fans were on; and it was soon necessary to slide down the aluminium framed window against the chill. Rain and mist over the mainland sprawl of Greater Bombay; swamp and fresh green grass in a land apparently returning to wilderness; occasional factory chimneys and scattered apartment blocks black and seeming to rot with damp; the shanty towns beside the railway sodden, mud walls and grey thatch seemingly about to melt into the mud and brown puddles of unpaved lanes, the naked electric bulbs of tea stalls alone promising a kind of morning cheer.

But then Bombay faded. And swamp was swamp until the land became broken and, in the hollows, patches of swamp were dammed into irregular little ricefields. The land became bare and rose in smooth rounded hills to the plateau, black boulders showing
through the thin covering of monsoon green, the fine grass that grows within three days of the first rain and gives these stony and treeless
ghats
the appearance of temperate parkland.

It doesn’t show from the train, but the Bombay-Poona region is one of the most industrialized in India. Poona, at the top of the
ghats
, on the edge of the plateau, is still the military town it was in the British days and in the days of the Maratha glory before that, still the green and leafy holiday town for people who want to get away from the humidity of the Bombay coastland. But it is also, and not at all oppressively, an expanding industrial centre. Ordered industrial estates spread over what, just thirteen years ago, when I first saw it, was arid waste land. On these estates there has been some re-afforestation; and it is said that the rainfall has improved.

The plateau around Poona is now in parts like a new country, a new continent. It provides uncluttered space, and space is what the factory-builders and the machine-makers say they need; they say they are building for the twenty-first century. Their confidence, in the general doubt, is staggering. But it is so in India: the doers are always enthusiastic. And industrial India is a world away from the India of bureaucrats and journalists and theoreticians. The men who make and use machines – and the Indian industrial revolution is increasingly Indian: more and more of the machines are made in India – glory in their new skills. Industry in India is not what industry is said to be in other parts of the world. It has its horrors; but, in spite of Gandhi, it does not – in the context of India – dehumanize. An industrial job in India is more than just a job. Men handling new machines, exercising technical skills that to them are new, can also discover themselves as men, as individuals.

They are the lucky few. Not many can be rescued from the nullity of the labour of pre-industrial India, where there are so many hands and so few tools, where a single task can be split into minute portions and labour can turn to absurdity. The street-sweeper in Jaipur City uses his fingers alone to lift dust from the street into his cart (the dust blowing away in the process, returning to the street).
The woman brushing the causeway of the great dam in Rajasthan before the top layer of concrete is put on uses a tiny strip of rag held between her thumb and middle finger. Veiled, squatting, almost motionless, but present, earning her half-rupee, her five cents, she does with her finger dabs in a day what a child can do with a single push of a long-handled broom. She is not expected to do more; she is hardly a person. Old India requires few tools, few skills, and many hands.

And old India lay not far from the glitter of new Poona. The wide highway wound through the soft, monsoon-green land. Bangalore was five hundred miles to the south; but the village where we were going was only a few hours away. The land there was less green, more yellow and brown, showing its rockiness. The monsoon had been prolonged, but the water had run off into lakes. It was from one such lake that water was to be lifted and pumped up to the fields. The water pipe was to be buried four feet in the ground, not to hamper cultivation of the land when it was irrigated, and to lessen evaporation. Already, early in the morning, the heat of the day still to come – and even in this season of rain, the sky full of clouds, the distant hills cool and blue above the grey lake – heat waves were rising off the rocks.

The nationalized agricultural bank had loaned the farmers ninety per cent of the cost of the project. Ten per cent the farmers had to pay themselves, in the form of labour; and the engineer had computed that labour at a hundred feet of pipe trench per farmer. The line of the trench had already been marked; and in the middle of what looked like waste land, the rocks baking in spite of the stiff wind, in the middle of a vast view dipping down to the lake, a farmer with his wife and son was digging his section of the trench.

The man was small and slightly built. He was troubled by his chest and obviously weary. He managed the pickaxe with difficulty; it didn’t go deep, and he often stopped to rest. His wife, in a short green sari, squatted on the stony ground, as though offering
encouragement by her presence; from time to time, but not often, she pulled out with a mattock those stones the man had loosened; and the white-capped boy stood by the woman, doing nothing. Like a painting by Millet of solitary brute labour, but in an emptier and less fruitful land.

A picture of the pain of old India, it might have seemed. But it contained so much that was new: the local agricultural enthusiast who by his example had encouraged the farmers to think of irrigation and better crops, the idea of self-help that was behind the cooperative, the bank that had advanced the money, the engineer with the social conscience who had thought the small scheme worth his while and every week made the long journey from Bombay to superintend, advise, and listen. It wasn’t easy to get qualified men to come out from the city and stay with the project, the engineer said; he had had to recruit and train local assistants.

The digging of the trench had begun the week before. To mark the occasion, they had planted a tree, not far from a temple – three hundred years old, the villagers said – on the top of a hill of rock. The pillars of the temple portico were roughly hewn; the three-domed lantern roof was built up with heavy, roughly dressed slabs of stone. On this plateau of rock the buildings were of stone. Stone was the material people handled with instinctive, casual skill; and the village looked settled and solid and many times built over. In the barrenness of the plateau it was like a living historical site. Old, even ancient architectural conventions – like the lantern roof of the temple – mingled with the new, unrelated fragments of old decorated stone could be seen in walls.