The Age of Kali (18 page)

‘Since those people were arrested, everything has changed,’ she said. ‘Earlier everything was falling apart. Now it is much more peaceful. The villagers have started to talk to me again. It is not back to normal, but it is getting better. And the government has given me some money. Look!’

Bahveri showed us her new shoes and
choli
, and pointed out the new coat of paint on the side of her house, the fruit of a fifteen-thousand-rupee (£300) gift awarded to her by her employers, the Indian Women and Children’s Development Fund.

‘Are you surprised by what has happened?’ asked Sanjeev.

‘No,’ said Bahveri. ‘The truth had to prevail. Even though the police have taken money from the accused, it looks now as if we will win the case. Those men will be jailed for good. Before, rapes like this were very common. Now powerful men will be afraid to touch even a
kumar
woman. If we win the case it will have a very good effect.’

Bahveri shrugged her shoulders: ‘Everything is in the hands of God.’

‘Have you had any word from Badri’s family?’ asked Sanjeev.

‘Yes,’ replied Bahveri. ‘Last month some mediators came from his family. They said Badri admitted he had made a mistake and asked me to withdraw the case. They said that without their menfolk their family would starve.’

‘What did you reply?’

‘That they must go through their jail term. They must be punished for what they have done. Unless they are suitably punished, it won’t be a lesson and they will return to their old ways.’

‘Will their women go hungry?’ I asked.

‘I hope the Gujjar women will not suffer too much,’ said Bahveri. ‘But did they feel bad when their husbands did this to me?’

Before we left the village we went over to the Gujjars’ house. There we found Badri’s womenfolk – four wives and two old grandmothers – as well as a scattering of filthy, half-naked children
covered with flies, all squatting together on the verandah. The situation of the previous year had been reversed; the wheel had turned. The buffaloes had disappeared – presumably sold – and it was now the turn of the Gujjars to be wearing torn, soiled clothes.

‘It’s all a lie,’ insisted Badri’s grandmother, a wrinkled old woman who said she had forgotten her age. ‘We have been framed. Bahveri was prompted to lie by all those educated women from Jaipur who didn’t want us to marry off our children. For the last three months we have been crying. All my sons have been locked up. Badri has been beaten in prison. Now there is no one in the house who works. The only man who is left is my husband, and he is eighty. Who will cut the crops? Who will look after the animals? We are all ruined.’

The old lady began to sob.

‘Where will these children go?’ she cried, pointing to the infants around her. ‘Who will feed them? Oh Maharaj! Look at them!’

We wished her well and turned to go, the old lady still shuddering with grief. As we got in to the jeep she shouted behind us: ‘That woman Bahveri Devi,’ she called. ‘That bitch! She made it all up! Now she’s ruined us all.’

JODHPUR, RAJASTHAN
,
1990

Dr Tyagi stood in the middle of the wreckage of the compound, flashlight in hand. ‘They were high-caste Rajput students from neighbouring villages,’ he said. ‘There were three truckloads of them. They poured over the compound wall, swinging iron bars. There were only twenty of us, and over two hundred of them. What could we do?’

We stumbled around in the dark, past the charred window-frames and shattered doorways, past the little black bonfires of incinerated records that still emitted a dark, carbonised odour.

‘They shouted: “Who is from the low castes?” and if they saw anyone with dark skin they beat them with their iron bars. They set on fire everything that was here: the cots, the clothes, the mattresses. They threw on to the blaze the video recorders and the slide projectors. They uprooted the plants and the trees, broke the chairs and the ceiling fans, the typewriters and the cupboards – everything we had built up over seven years.’

Dr Tyagi spoke quietly, unemotionally, without raising his voice. He was a small, precise man, unremarkable looking. He had hunched shoulders, a rumour of a moustache and a pair of heavy black-rimmed spectacles perched uncomfortably on his nose. His Gandhian homespun clothes were too big and his slight body appeared dwarfed in the immensity of his cotton wraps.

‘Here, look!’ he said. ‘This was the dispensary.’

The torch beam swept around a small rectangular cell, whose door was hanging loose on its hinges. As we stepped inside our
feet crunched on broken glass and a snowdrift of pills and capsules. ‘They attacked it with sledgehammers.’

Outside, the wreckage had been random: windblown textbooks, half-burnt bedclothes, an old glove, a gym shoe. But in here there was order in the chaos. You could still see the cupboards they had pushed over, shattering the bottles of pills and the medical beakers. ‘They destroyed all the equipment, all the medicines. The
Harijans –
the people we used to call Untouchables – used to come a hundred miles for treatment.’

‘But I thought Untouchability was outlawed at independence,’ I said.

‘Technically it was,’ replied Tyagi. ‘But do you know the saying “
Dilli door ast”
? It means “Delhi is far away.” The laws they pass in the Lok Sabha [Indian parliament] make little difference in these villages. Out here it will take much more than a change in the law to alleviate the lot of the
Dalits
[the oppressed castes, i.e. the former Untouchables].’

‘But I still don’t understand why the Rajputs did this. What difference does it make to them if you educate the Untouchables?’

The lower castes have always been the slaves of the higher castes,’ replied Tyagi. ‘They work in their fields for low wages, they sweep their streets, clean their clothes. If we educate them, who will do these dirty jobs?’ Dr Tyagi waved his hands at me in sudden exasperation: ‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘The Rajputs hate this place because it frees their slaves.’

‘And what did you do,’ I asked, ‘while the Rajputs were beating the place up?’

Dr Tyagi made a slight gesture with his open palm: ‘I was just sitting,’ he said. ‘What could I do? I was thinking of Gandhiji. He was also beaten up – many times. He said you must welcome such attacks because it is only through confrontation that you can go forward. An institution like ours needs such incidents if it is to regenerate itself. It highlights the injustice the
Harijans
are facing.’

He paused, and smiled. ‘You yourself would not have come here if this had not happened to us.’

‘What will you do now?’ I asked.

‘We will start again. The poor of this desert still need us.’

‘And if the higher castes come for you again?’

‘Then we will welcome them. They are also victims of their culture.’

‘You are a brave man.’

Dr Tyagi shrugged his shoulders. ‘I am a common man,’ he said.

The countryside was scorched white desert: hot, flat scrub, all sand-flats and dust-devils. As we drove through it the light sand rose in clouds, gritting my mouth and powdering my hair, so that I emerged from the car like some stage octogenarian. A hundred years ago there was jungle here, but the tree-fellers came and now there is only the occasional flowering shrub, the odd cactus or thicket of desert thorn.

Yet there are still villages here, fighting back the encroaching dunes, and when you see their people – women carrying water, yellow saris billowing in the desert wind, and tribesmen with muttonchop whiskers and mountainous turbans – it seems to the foreign eye as if they are growing almost organically out of the dust, and that what you are seeing is something good, and natural, and harmonious.

But the foreign eye is easily misled, and it cannot read the visual language of the villages. Driving back to Jodhpur from Dr Tyagi’s field centre the following morning, I was shown just how deeply caste is written in to the Indian landscape. Coming over a ridge we saw ahead of us, perched on top of a slight bluff, a small white-stone village. To its side, a short distance away, stood another, larger settlement: a series of round mud huts with pretty conical thatched
roofs. Between the two, a chain of camels lurched along, moving in that strangely beautiful, seasick motion that camels break in to on sand dunes. To me it was a charming picture; but to Dr Tyagi it spoke of repression and caste-apartheid.

‘The stone village with the
pukka
houses belongs to Rajputs. The huts belong to the
Harijans
. They are not allowed to live together, and if a
Harijan
wishes to come past the Rajput houses he must remove his shoes.’

‘Do the castes have separate wells?’

‘No, there is only one well. If a woman from a
Harijan
family wishes to take water from the public well, a person of high caste must come and provide it. The Untouchable cannot touch the bucket. It is the same in every sphere of life. In the village tea-house, the cups for the
Harijans
are kept separately and at a distance from the cups of the other castes. If there is a public meeting, the
Harijans
cannot share the same
durree
[carpet] or
charpoy
as the Rajputs. If
Harijan
children are admitted to the primary school, then they must sit on the floor.’

In Rajasthan, explained Dr Tyagi, caste was an open book which could be read as soon as you knew the local visual dialect. Once learnt, it enabled the onlooker to place, exactly, any individual in the rigid social hierarchy which for centuries has ranked and divided the villagers of India. The language changed from district to district, but among men it was usually the colour and tying of the turban that was significant: around Jodhpur, a white turban belonged to an elderly smallholder of the middle castes – the Bishnoi or the Jats – while a high-caste Brahmin would wear only saffron. The way you trained your moustache – upwards, downwards, or across – and the knot with which you tied your
dhoti
defined you even more closely, and could show even your sub-caste.

Among women it was jewellery and dress colour that was important: blue was the colour of the upper castes, and was worn with heavy ear- and nose-rings. In Jodhpur, the Brahmins even painted their houses blue. Red and green checks, yellow and mustard were
worn by the middle castes, while darker colours, coarse cloth and simple silver anklets defined their wearer as low caste – or an outcaste, an Untouchable.

In the West, as everywhere in the world, there is a caste system of sorts, and dress is an important element of it: a pinstripe suit and tie places the wearer in one caste, a workman’s dirty overalls in another. What is different about the Indian model is its rigidity and its central place in Hindu philosophy.

In much of rural India, caste still defines not only what you wear, but where you live, what trade you follow, whom you marry, even the colour you paint your home. Every detail of life in the traditional Indian village, where 80 per cent of Indians still live, is regulated. But if this is restrictive – and at its worst it is a form of divinely ordained serfdom – it can also be reassuring, a protection against anarchy. Beneath India’s apparent chaos lies a rigid network of three thousand minutely graduated castes and sub-castes. Everyone knows his place, and exactly what is expected of him. Orthodox Hindus believe that your caste in this life is determined by your actions in a previous one. A good life is rewarded by high caste, a bad life punished by untouchability. A good roadsweeper can hope to be reincarnated next time round as a Brahmin, and thence eventually to achieve
moksha
or
nirvana
, so escaping the eternal cycle of suffering and rebirth.

Therefore, in the eyes of pious and traditional Hindus, to rise out of your caste does more than just rock the foundations of society: it breaks the cosmic cycle, it defies nature. So when a man tries to educate the
Dalits
, he must be stopped. And when a government commits itself to raising the status of the lower castes, to reserving government jobs for India’s 152 million Untouchables, that too must be fought. As the Prime Minister V.P. Singh discovered to his cost in October 1990, the upper castes have no option: they must stand together and declare caste war.