India 1990

December 1990

All three of my cousins – the ones I know about, that is; no-one I know knows anything about Dad’s brothers after they left Evansganj, or any families they may have had – were married around Christmas 1981. I’d been to India a couple of times in between, but I didn’t spend Christmas in India again until 1990. I asked for and was granted a couple of weeks of unpaid leave from my teaching job, and arrived in India early in December, just before air fares started to rise for the Christmas holiday period.

My two eldest nieces and one nephew were all eight, and there were several younger nieces and nephews. They all climbed all over me, and I’m sure they had a wonderful time. I certainly did.

Ravi and Sushila pressingly invited me to spend Christmas itself in Bartola, with Sushila’s family. I unhesitatingly accepted.

Sunday, December 23rd 1990

The bus to Rampur was very crowded, but not nearly as crowded as it had been the first time I’d ridden on that route, when I went to Ravi and Sushila’s wedding in 1981. Sushila said it was more crowded than usual, because of people going home to their villages for Christmas. But that’s spread over several days, it’s not like a whole wedding party added to a single bus. It seemed almost as crowded as before inside, but there weren’t so many people on the roof.

The road had improved no end in the intervening nine years. All but one of the watercourses that we’d forded in 1981 now had bridges or culverts, and the one that we still had to ford had a concrete roadway under the water rather than just the natural riverbed. The concrete had obviously been there a few years – it was starting to break up, and the driver had to steer very carefully to avoid a wheel dropping into too deep a hole in the concrete. But it was a lot better than when it had just been jumbled rocks.

As before, we had to walk from Rampur, and as before, it was gone sunset before we arrived in Bartola. This time there were only us three adults and Ravi and Sushila’s three children not a whole crowd, but spirits were just as high.With no telephones, and only a slow and unreliable postal service, no-one in Bartola knew we were coming. Sushila’s parents assumed Ravi and Sushila and the children would probably come for Christmas, but they’d no idea I was even in India, much less that I’d be spending Christmas in Bartola. But Sushila assured me that I’d be very welcome, and she was right.

Some of the other bus passengers were also from Bartola, and had left their bicycles in Rampur, so word of our impending arrival preceded us by nearly an hour. By the time we arrived, Sushila’s parents were waiting for us in front of their house. They had a Petromax – a pressurized paraffin lamp, much brighter than the ordinary lanterns – hanging on the wall by the front door. The house had changed a lot since I’d last been there.

As we came up the path across the field towards the house, Sushila’s younger sister Asren ran over to me. She produced a mala from behind her back, and practically threw it over my neck before I had a chance to react. How she’d managed to get one together in the short notice she’d had, I’ll never understand. I must have blushed scarlet, but by the light of a fairly distant Petromax, no-one can have noticed.

We sat cross-legged, or in various similar postures, on grass matting on the floor, around a wood fire in a corner of a little room off the courtyard. There was a double door to the outside world behind us, and a doorless doorway onto the courtyard beside the fire.

The Petromax was extinguished. The only light was the light of the fire, and over the top of a wall, flickering firelight visible on the underside of the roof above another room, which I learnt was the kitchen. I could hear the sounds of activity in the kitchen, and I could smell the smoke from the fires, and something delicious happening in the kitchen.

The things that had happened in maybe an hour between the arrival of the first cyclist off the bus, and our arrival! Sushila’s elder brother Alok had killed, plucked and gutted a chicken, and his wife Anya was cooking it. A fire had been lit and got going nicely in the little room off the courtyard. A mala had been made for me.

I learnt later that the Petromax had been borrowed, as had a khatia – a bed, or charpoy – for me. Why they thought I couldn’t sleep on a grass mat on the floor like everybody else, I don’t know, but I’d got used to not arguing about things like that. No point hurting people’s feelings.

We sat quietly for quite a while, then Sushila’s mother began singing softly. Renu – Ravi and Sushila’s youngest, just three years old – was nearly asleep on her lap. The little girl looked up at her when she started singing, and smiled. In the firelight they made a wonderful picture that sticks in my mind to this day, but the old film camera I had in those days couldn’t have captured it, and I wouldn’t have wanted to get it out anyway.

Every now and then Sushila’s father put a few more bits of wood on the fire, and every now and then he’d rearrange the fire a bit, poking at it with a piece of metal tube, or blowing on it down the tube to coax some part of it into flame. He didn’t actually put the tube to his mouth: he pursed his lips and blew into the tube from half an inch or so away from the end. Of course this drags additional air into the tube, all around the jet from the mouth. Not only does this increase the amount of air you can deliver, it also means that most of it is fresh air, not laden with carbon dioxide and water vapour from the lungs. Presumably for Sushila’s father a matter of long experience, not theoretical knowledge!

I only discovered much later that the tube was a piece cut by the local blacksmith from the frame of an old bicycle that was beyond repair. It must have been pretty far gone – it’s amazing what can be repaired in Indian villages, where a worker’s time doesn’t seem to be an issue, and people just seem to get on with things and get them done anyway.

December 24th 1990

I woke before dawn to a strange sound – a regular creak-thud, creak-thud, creak-thud. I couldn’t work out what it could possibly be. A child playing trampoline on a bed? Scarcely – I had the only bed in the house, and it wasn’t the kind of bed a child could have trampolined on anyway. It went on and on and on. Eventually I went back to sleep with it still going on. I don’t know how long it was before I woke again, but it had stopped.

Sushila, Asren and I spent the day making Christmas decorations. We cut hundreds of little triangles of coloured tissue paper out of big sheets Sushila had fetched from Evansganj. We twisted four strands of cotton thread together into a sort of thin string, and stretched it here and there across the courtyard in the middle of the house. Finally we folded one edge of each triangle around the strings, and glued it down with flour and water paste.

Some of them didn’t seem to want to stick, but we left those ones to dry for a while and then tried them again. We broke a couple of the strings in the process of sticking on the triangles. We tried to knot them together again, but found we needed to put in an extra bit of string. They wouldn’t stretch enough to make a knot without. We’d broken one of them a second time in the attempt.

The whole of the front of the house had been newly whitewashed for Christmas a few days earlier. Asren mixed up a little more whitewash, mixed in a small amount of blue powder pigment Sushila had also brought from Evansganj, and painted a very artistic nativity scene in blue on the white wall. Then she wrote

  Happy Christmas

in English, underneath it, and just to make sure,

  बड़ा दिन मुबारक हो

underneath that.

This seems to me to be the right moment to describe the house a little. It had grown a little since I’d first visited, nine years earlier, with a new room closing off a courtyard that had previously been open on one side.

The walls of the new room were constructed of bricks, but all the older walls were built of unfired, sun-dried clay. Apart from the fact that the walls of the new room were straighter than the old walls, you’d scarcely have noticed the difference unless you were told – all the walls were plastered regularly with a mixture of fresh mud and cow dung, usually with a little carbolic acid (phenol) mixed in as a disinfectant.

The roof had a framework of round timbers – just tree trunks cut by axe, with the bark and branches removed by adze but not sawn into pieces at all. Bamboo spanned across the rafters, and covering all that were rough tiles.

There was no ceiling in any of the rooms, apart from the one room where there was an upper storey above it. You could see the whole structure of the roof from the underneath.

Going to the loo meant taking a lota – a little pot of water – to wash your backside, and disappearing into the jungle out of sight. At least there was jungle to disappear into. Elsewhere in India, you had to, and still have to, make do with the corner of a field, very likely shared with half a dozen other people on the same mission.

There was no electricity or running water. Lighting was by paraffin lamp, normally just a storm lantern, but that Christmas there was that borrowed Petromax. Water came in buckets from the well, twenty-five yards from the house.

In the kitchen, cooking was done over a wood fire in a chulha – a clay fireplace with two round holes just too small for the smallest pan to fall through into the fire, and three lumps in the rim so that the pans were lifted slightly, to let the flames come up round the pan.

The smoke simply rose up through the room and went out through the gaps between the tiles. This did mean that the kitchen could be quite smoky.

I don’t know why I described all that in the past tense. It’s still exactly like that, as are almost all the houses in that area, and in many other areas of India. Navadih has changed a little – it has electricity now! When there isn’t a power cut, which is almost every day, often for hours at a time, just when you want it most, in the evenings. When, if ever, electricity will come to Bartola, who knows?

The smoke in the houses results in a significant number of people, particularly women, getting various eye problems (pterygium, entropion, and ectropion particularly); but against that, it gives significant protection against malaria, discouraging mosquitoes especially in the evening when they’re most active, and people are most likely to be round the fire.

You might think all that makes it sound very primitive. Well, maybe it is. And life is certainly hard in Bartola, but mostly it’s not the things I’ve described here that make it hard. Collecting wood for cooking is hard though, and so is fetching water from the well. Growing almost all your own food, and a little more on top of that to sell to buy clothes, tea, sugar, spices (other than those you grow yourself), paraffin, soap, tools and so forth – that’s what’s really hard. Not so bad for those families where someone, or a few people, have jobs, and can contribute a little money; but they usually expect to get at least a proportion of their food from home, too.

All that said, it’s a better life than the life of the poor in the cities. So why do poor people migrate from the countryside to the cities?

In some cases, it’s because they mistakenly think the streets of the cities are metaphorically paved with gold. In a few cases, they’re not even mistaken, and they do manage to carve out a comfortable niche for themselves in the cities – but in most such cases, it’s a mistake.

But most migrants never thought that in the first place – they don’t choose to go to the cities, they’re forced to. Sometimes that’s due to population growth – their parents’ land is divided between all the brothers, and the resulting plots are simply too small to support them. But very often there would be enough land, if it wasn’t for land-grabbing by the rich and powerful, who want to build a huge dam to irrigate their own huge farms downstream, or to mine for bauxite, iron ore, or coal, or to make a plantation to grow cash crops – possibly for export, and possibly jatropha, a horribly poisonous plant grown to make biodiesel.

You think you’re doing India a favour when you buy Indian produce? You might be doing the Indian middle classes a favour, giving them foreign currency to buy the latest technological gadget – but you might very well be doing the Indian poor a disfavour.

Exactly what the Catholics of Bartola do on Christmas night, I don’t know. Like about a third of the population of Bartola, Sushila’s family are protestant, and belong to the Church of North India.

Sometime probably a little before midnight, we all trooped off to the church. We sat on grass matting inside. All the women, girls, and smaller children sat on the left of the church, and all the men and bigger boys on the right, with a clear gangway down the middle. The same pastor who’d married Ravi and Sushila delivered a relatively short sermon and read a short passage from Luke, Chapter I. Then we sang several Christmas carols from the same hymn books we’d sung from in Evansganj – except that these were an older edition, and they were falling to bits whereas the Evansganj ones were in pretty good condition.

The singing was a little different, too. It was still the same translations of the European carols, and still recognizably the same European tunes. The pronunciation of the Hindi was noticeably different – more like the sound of the local village language, although the words were all the Hindi words, not the local ones. And the singing sounded very like other, non-religious Bartola Adivasi singing, which sounds very unlike Europeans singing – yet the tunes were still perfectly recognizably Silent Night, O Little Town of Bethlehem and so on.

Christmas Day, 1990

And Evansganj church has an organ, but the carol singing in Bartola was unaccompanied.

It was probably about half past one in the morning by the time we got to bed.

Despite the late night, we were up not long after dawn – to the sound of drumming, the tinkle of dozens of little bells, and cheerful singing. A group of young men were in the courtyard, dancing and singing and beating the drums that hung around their necks. One of them was wearing a broad leather belt with a couple of dozen little bells that jingled as he danced. Most were barefoot, but one had a pair of old boots that seemed three sizes too big for him – and no socks. Thud, thud, thud they went on the bare earth of the courtyard.

Well – not exactly bare earth. Once a week or so it got a fresh coat of cow dung, which is mixed with a little carbolic acid and enough water to make a good slurry for spreading, and which dries to a better surface than bare earth.

Everybody was up and about within minutes, and all the children joined in the dancing. Anya, who had anticipated this, soon appeared with leaf-bowls of rice and chicken curry for the visitors – very small portions, because they’d be visiting all the Protestant households in the immediate neighbourhood within the hour!

Bartola is like many villages in the area, in that most of the houses are scattered over a large area, with just a few clustered together in the centre. Neither of the two churches – one Catholic, one Protestant – is in the centre of the village. I learnt that there were three groups of young men in Bartola who would be doing the rounds that morning, each covering about a third of the village.

The young men departed, and we sat down to breakfast in the little room by the courtyard. It was a special breakfast – chilka roti, a sort of flat, course rice flour crumpet; idli, little rice cakes steamed in little dishes rather like egg poachers; and chicken curry.

I say “we sat down to breakfast”, but it wasn’t all of us. Asren, Sushila, and Anya served the rest of us, but they themselves ate later, in the kitchen.

There’s no present giving as such in Bartola, but working in Evansganj, Sushila and Ravi had more money than the rest of the family, and had brought new clothes for everyone. They’d given them out as soon as we’d arrived, but nobody put them on until after breakfast on Christmas morning, ready to go to church at midday.

Outside the church, the young men with drums started playing them again, and the rest of us joined arm in arm in long lines and danced and danced and danced – stepping back and forth in the same way we’d danced at Ravi and Sushila’s wedding all those years before.

The sermon and reading were somewhat longer than they’d been in the middle of the previous night, and we must have sung just about every carol in the book. The smaller children got very restless, but no-one minded them playing around everyone’s feet while we all stood and sang, or even chasing each other around the church laughing and shouting. Their noise couldn’t compete with the singing anyway.

The church was decorated in the same fashion as the courtyard at the house – little triangles of coloured tissue paper glued onto threads strung across from roof beam to roof beam. There was a Christmas tree of sorts alongside the altar rail. It wasn’t a pine tree, which don’t grow around Bartola, but a small tree with waxy oval leaves, of a variety I didn’t recognize. (Years later I did see pine trees growing in India, at Mussoorie. But that’s a very long way from Bartola.)

Renu spent half the time we were in church removing leaves from the Christmas tree. Nobody interfered with this activity. She was totally absorbed, inspecting the leaves closely. Later on she showed me one very proudly. It had intricate patterns of leaf miner tunnels in it.

Then we all sat outside the church on grass mats, chatting and playing games – no, not board games or card games! Games with handfuls of small stones, or just voices and bare hands.

One favourite with the smaller children is Machili, Machili, Beng – fish, fish, frog. One player waves a finger, imitating a fish swimming in the river, and shouting Machili, Machili; the other, the fisherman, suddenly grabs for it, but if the first player is quick enough, the fisherman ends up with the first player’s thumb – a frog – in their grasp, not the fish, as the first player shouts Beng! It reminds me a little of scissors, paper, rock; a similar level of amusement, albeit with very different rules. Ravi, who is full of fun, sometimes plays a trick, grabbing the fisherman instead of sticking up his thumb, and shouting Mugger! – crocodile.

People told stories – some old, some new, some basically just the current gossip. There’s no clear dividing line between this week’s gossip, last year’s gossip, and stories going back generations. I heard a lot of stories about the missionaries who’d lived in a village a few miles away, who’d been gone twenty years earlier. Some people thought they’d been saints; some, even among these Christians, had a very different view of them. There was no rancour about the disagreements though. Everyone laughed about each other’s viewpoints.

Several young men started cooking a communal meal on wood fires between stones supporting the pans, and several older women started making bowls out of large leaves, stitching them together with slivers of bamboo. It was getting dark by the time the bowls and the food were ready, and people began lighting lanterns. I noticed that nobody had brought Petromaxes – it was all storm lanterns.

December 26th 1990

I was woken before dawn again, by the same creak-thud, creak-thud, creak-thud. I was puzzled, but guessed it was something pretty normal, and it was somehow quite a soothing sound really. I considered getting up and investigating, but felt too cosy in my bed. I snuggled down and went back to sleep.

In 1990, it wasn’t yet possible to book berths in Indian trains from anywhere except the station where you were going to start the journey. Each station had a quota of reservable berths on each train. If you couldn’t get a reservation, you could board the train and find the TTI (train ticket inspector). He might be able to find you a berth that hadn’t been used from an earlier station’s quota – particularly if you knew roughly how much to offer him as an incentive.

That’s corruption, of course – but not of a kind that I find terribly objectionable. TTIs don’t earn a high salary, the bribes they take aren’t big, and the people who pay them are comfortably off. People who can’t afford to pay those bribes are not disadvantaged in any very important way by their inability to pay.

The kind of corruption that really gets my goat is things like bureaucrats refusing to register villagers’ payment of their land taxes without substantial kickbacks. The bureaucrats are very much better off than the people from whom they’re extorting money, who often are kept virtually – or completely – destitute by their oppressors.

Back to the TTI’s little scam. I knew all those kinds of trick well enough by 1990, but it’s chancy, especially at busy times. There may genuinely be no untaken berths, and then you have to travel in the very crowded unreserved compartments. I prefer second class to first, but unreserved really is dreadful at busy times. The people are nice enough, but the sheer physical crush of bodies and luggage is a bit much.

The ticket office at Evansganj only opened from an hour before a train was due to depart until half an hour after it actually departed. This sometimes meant that it was open most of the day, but occasionally there were days when all six trains ran on time, and some of them were due within twenty minutes of each other, so on those days the ticket office wasn’t open all that much.

Foolishly, I hadn’t reserved my return to Delhi when I first arrived. Only after we arrived in Bartola did we discover that one of Sushila’s cousins was going to get married on January 1st. Everyone wanted to stay in Bartola.

I needed to get that reservation. I decided to get the bus and the train, back to Evansganj on the 27th of December, reserve my berth, and then come back to Bartola in time for the wedding. That meant getting up very early to catch the first bus in Rampur at six o’clock – if I caught a later bus, I wouldn’t be able to get back the same day.

Sushila promised to wake me in time to get some breakfast, and then she’d walk with me to Rampur. I was confident of finding my way okay, but she insisted.

December 27th 1990

I was woken by the creak-thud again, before Sushila came to wake me. This time I did get up to go and investigate, since I was going to have to get up very soon anyway. My watch said twenty-five past four.

I soon found the source of the noise. I’d never been round the back of the house before. There was an open veranda, and under it was a strange device – well, actually two, but I didn’t discover what the other one was for until much later.

It was like a heavy, asymmetrical see-saw made out of a tree trunk pivoted about a third of the way along. The long end was thick and heavy, with a stout piece of wood jammed at right angles to it through a hole bored in it. The stout piece of wood had a thick iron ring round the bottom end. The shorter end was thinner, but equally wide.

I later learnt this device was called a dheki.

Anya was standing at one end of the dheki, carrying Renu in a sling and holding onto a pole to brace herself. With one foot she was repeatedly pressing on the short, flattened end of the dheki, lifting the other end up and dropping it again.

The iron-shod crosspiece went thud, thud, thud down into a hole in the floor. (It has a cup made of a very hard wood in the bottom, but I couldn’t see that then). Sushila’s mother’s hand shot in and out of the hole between thuds, scooping rice out of the hole into a sort of open-sided basket – a supa, I later learnt. While the thudding continued without a break, she poured some more rice – still in its husks – into the hole. Then she picked up the supa, and tossing the rice up and back, up and back, up and back, she separated the polished rice from the husks, the husks falling on the floor and the rice staying in the supa.

She tipped the rice into a vessel, and started scooping out the next batch.

Since then, I’ve learnt to work the dheki myself, but only the standing up, foot thumping end. I need a child in a sling like Anya had, or a large stone, because like Anya, I’m not heavy enough to do it otherwise. Ravi can do it without.

The other end is quite a skilled job, and I’ve never dared try – it looks only too easy to end up with your hand getting crushed under the iron-shod crosspiece. Even at the foot end you have to be careful to keep a regular rhythm, so the person at the other end can avoid getting their hand crushed.

I’ve tried the supa tossing thing to separate rice and husks, but I’ve not managed to get the knack. You can separate all kinds of things in the same fashion, once you have the knack.

It takes a long time for two people to polish a day’s worth of rice for a large family, using a dheki. You can still hear that creak-thud sound in the pre-dawn all over rural India – although there are nowadays more powered rice polishing machines around, sometimes electric, sometimes driven by a stationary diesel engine, sometimes driven by a tractor. There isn’t one in every home, even where everybody is growing their own rice – but many people have a little money, enough to pay the folks who have the machine – or sometimes they’ll pay for the polishing with a small fraction of the rice. Every home used to have its own dheki, and most still do, even if it’s only used when the money’s running low.

Although I didn’t learn until much later what the other device was, I’ll describe it now. It’s a patni, an oil press (not to be confused with patni, wife, which has a different T – dental, not palatal).

It consists of two lengths of timber supported on two short posts at a low table level, the lower one fixed and the upper one free to slide up and down the posts, which pass through holes near its ends. At one end, the timbers are lashed together, and at the other end, a third, lighter and shorter timber is lashed down close to the main two, and passes over the upper timber at right angles, forming a system of levers. Someone pressing down on the end of this third timber can thus apply a very large force squeezing anything placed between the middle of the main timbers.

Nuts or seeds from which oil is to be extracted are ground to a powder using the dheki, and steamed over a wood fire on the chulha. The steamed powder is placed in a split bamboo basket, woven diagonally so that it can stretch and compress vertically, and pressed in the patni. Oil – for cooking, or for oiling the skin or hair – trickles out, guided by channels carved in the upper surface of the lower timber of the patni, into a pan beneath.

Like the dheki, hard work. At least you don’t have to do it so often. More and more people nowadays grow the oil seed and sell it, then buy factory-pressed oil, saving themselves a lot of work but losing a fair amount in the exchange and risking getting inferior quality oil. In particular, they’re constrained in which seeds they can sell and what kinds of oil they can buy.

The very best oil, mustard oil (it really is the best, not just in flavour, but nutritionally), was banned in India for a considerable period, and in the USA and EU can still theoretically only be sold for non-food uses. This is a scandal of major proportions. But you can read about that in Appendix I.

Sushila called me for breakfast before her mother and Anya had finished polishing the day’s rice. We ate quickly, and then set off for Rampur. Sushila made sure I was safely on the bus before she set off back to Bartola.

The whole area is a bit lawless. It’s well known for it, within India if not, at that time, by the British Foreign Office. Life is full of risks, some bigger, some smaller. You can’t avoid them. I try to avoid the bigger risks, but I’m not going to live a pointless existence in cotton wool. People sometimes get killed by Naxalites (armed revolutionaries) or dacoits (bandits). But not often.

Well, not more than once. Joking aside, it’s a real risk, but a small one, and I don’t worry about it. It’s probably a bigger risk for me, with the white skin that shouts “Money!” in India, but it’s still not a big one.

But on the way back to Bartola, the bus was held up by gunmen. Dacoits, or Naxalites? They said they were Naxalites, but bandits can say that if they think it’s to their advantage. Either type of gunman is after the same thing: money. Either to fund their lives, or to fund their revolutionary activities.

The boundary between Naxalites and dacoits isn’t necessarily always a clearly defined one anyway. Many of the Naxalites are only members of the group for what they can get out of it for themselves, and so are not much different from other dacoits pretending to be Naxalites. Either is liable to summary execution by genuine, or more committed – or rival – Naxalites, but fear of that possibility doesn’t always stop them.

Be all that as it may, two gunmen stood inside the front of the bus, watching everybody, while a third walked calmly down the bus demanding everybody’s money. The bus conductor meekly handed over all the takings, and almost everybody turned out their pockets.

Some of the well-dressed young men on the long seat by the engine had to be reminded that they didn’t keep all their money in one pocket, but they didn’t argue much.

I didn’t have to be reminded. I keep most of my money in a bag hanging round my neck, under my kameez, relatively safe from pickpockets in Delhi or on the major stations, but I knew better than to pretend I didn’t have more than was in the side pocket of my kameez. I handed over the six hundred rupees I had in my bag, together with the forty-odd rupees I had in my pocket. It was a lot of money at that time, probably more than the total of what everyone else on the bus had.

But it left me with absolutely nothing – not even the bus and train fares back to Evansganj. I knew that the other members of my party were unlikely to have much more than their own fares.

Everything had seemed very calm and polite. I took a chance. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t work, but I was also pretty sure it wouldn’t have serious consequences.

“How can I get back to Evansganj now? I don’t have any money at all!”

The gunman turned to his colleagues at the front of the bus. One of them gestured in a way I wasn’t sure I understood, but obviously my gunman did. “How much are the fares?”

“Four rupees on the bus, and two-fifty on the train.”

He calmly counted out six rupees and fifty paise and gave it to me. “Have a nice day,” he said. In English. His face and his tone of voice said he meant it, too. There wasn’t a trace of irony.

While it’s true there’s a continuum between outright dacoits and committed Naxalites, there really is an important distinction between the two. The Indian élite don’t like you to make the distinction, but then they don’t like you to draw the parallels between the outright dacoits and the Indian élite, either. For the ordinary Adivasi villager – and probably the ordinary Dalit (lower caste) villager too, for that matter, but I don’t know any of them very well – the Indian élite are a much bigger threat than the dacoits, never mind the Naxalites.

That’s not to say that I approve of the Naxalites, I don’t. But the dacoits are worse, and the élite are worse again. In principle, the Naxalites are on the villagers’ side, which is more than can be said for either dacoits or the élite.

In practice, the Naxalites usually do more harm than good, with the villagers getting caught in the crossfire, literally or metaphorically.

Villagers often get mistaken for Naxalites by the police. This is understandable, since the Naxalites are often villagers who happen to be Naxalites, and who are consequently indistinguishable from villagers when they don’t choose to identify themselves as Naxalites. Of course there are also policemen who are villagers who are Naxalites, and educated youths from wealthy families who are Naxalites, and so forth – yet somehow those facts don’t seem to result in so many police errors.

Sometimes educated people doing social or medical work amongst the Adivasi villagers find themselves in conflict with the bureaucrats and senior police who are extorting money or grabbing land from the villagers, and then they may well be branded as Naxalites – but they aren’t usually shot dead in fake “encounters”, although they may end up in very unpleasant jails for extended periods.

Naxalites sometimes mistake villagers for police informers, usually with fatal results. And of course Naxalites largely rely on villagers for their money and food, sometimes given freely but more often demanded at the point of a gun. Again, this occasionally has fatal results.

The distinction between “sometimes”, “occasionally” and “often” is important. Naxalites are dangerous, dacoits more so, but the police are very much more dangerous than either. Naxalites and dacoits are a drain on the villagers’ resources, but the police are a bigger drain, and the bureaucrats are a bigger drain still.

Dacoits have no redeeming features at all, but Naxalites do. In my opinion, it doesn’t anywhere near make up for their bad side, but there’s no (reasonable) denying their good side.

Such justice as there is in these areas is administered by the Naxalites. It’s rough justice, with no guarantee that the judgements will be fair, and often with harsh penalties for those judged to be guilty. But it’s usually better, from the ordinary man or woman’s point of view, than the official judicial system.

For example, outside Naxalite areas, if a rich youth rapes a poor girl, he will almost certainly get off scot free. The girl wouldn’t usually be stupid enough to go to the police, who, even if she was very lucky and they believed her and cared, would know there was no chance of getting a conviction. There’s even a significant risk that she’d get raped by one or more policemen. In a Naxalite area, the rich youth would be very unlikely to dare to rape a poor girl.

When a man is killed, either by the police or by the Naxalites or dacoits, the Naxalites generally make sure that his wife and family are looked after. Officially, there is a system for the state to do the same, with “gratuities” paid to the families – when they’re actually paid. Very often by the time the legitimate beneficiary turns up, someone else impersonating them has already collected the money – or so the bureaucrat in charge says. Possibly it’s sometimes even true.

Even when the gratuities are paid out, they’re little enough compensation for the loss of a breadwinner, much less for the loss of a protector. And that’s before you begin to think about love and grief.

I’ve talked with committed Naxalites. They recognize that in the short term, all their good work is generally outweighed by the bad consequences of what they and their hangers-on do. Where they and I differ is that they believe that in the long run, their activities will change the system for the better. I don’t see it.

Uncle John is well known in the area, and to a lesser extent I’ve become so too. The senior Naxalites know who we are, and generally approve of us. Nowadays, I don’t feel in personal danger from them or from most of the local Naxalites. But dacoits, dacoits posing as Naxalites, and some of the less well disciplined Naxalites – well, there’s no denying they pose a hazard.

But not a huge one. The perilous nature of Indian traffic is pretty certainly a far, far bigger one.

This chap arrived on his bicycle and asked if there were buckets needing mending. Sushila told me that he lives in a village about twelve miles away from Bartola, and that he’d undertake a wide range of light metalwork, but that buckets are his bread and butter.

I suppose you’d call him a tinker. He’s a highly skilled tinker. He’s also a very nice, friendly, straightforward and perceptive chap.

The hole in this bucket wasn’t making it completely useless, but it did mean that you had to transfer the water into some other container as soon as you’d pulled it up out of the well. After he’d repaired it, you could leave a bucketful standing by the side of the well and it would still be there an hour or two later.

While he was mending this bucket, he spotted a couple of brass hand-pump parts lying about, and asked if they were scrap. They weren’t really scrap. They’d been bought to repair a pump that proved to be beyond repair. The new parts were perfectly good; but it wouldn’t have been worth the bus fares to take them back to the place where they’d been bought, and they might not have taken them back anyway.

So he took them away with him, saying he’d make something out of them. He came back a couple of days later with the things he’d made – a display of craftsmanship that he doesn’t get the chance to exhibit every day.

He’d made a couple of rice measuring vessels: one filling of uncooked rice for each person you’re cooking for. He said they’d hold 250g of rice – and they really do. Exactly.

“How did you do it? Who taught you how to do it?”

“I can’t tell you how I did it. God taught me.”

In other words, he invented (some of) his techniques himself, and has developed them over many years.

Watching and listening to Anya haggling with him over the price to pay for those rice measurers was fascinating. Almost embarrassing for someone with pounds in her pocket, but I’ve got used to the fact that I mustn’t distort the local market more than is inevitable. Suffice it to say that she paid well under a pound for the pair. She’d supplied the brass, of course – but he did the work.

They were both very respectful and dignified about the whole procedure, which took about ten minutes.

Civilization is a weasel word – it sneaks an assumption into people’s minds. It comes with two meanings, and consequently people associate the two ideas without thinking about it.

The first meaning is this: a way of organizing society on a large and complex scale, with people over a large area, typically many of them in towns and cities, all part of the same large society – as distinct from tribal society, which is somewhat more simply organized on a smaller scale. The second meaning is this: people being well-behaved towards one another.

The consequence of the association in people’s minds is that people have the idea that people in societies organized on a large scale are well-behaved, and that people in societies organized on a small scale aren’t. This simply isn’t true, but it can be quite hard to dislodge the prejudice from people’s minds.

I’m not saying that all savages are noble, just that they’re as likely to be noble as anyone else – and conversely, civilized people are as likely to be savage as anyone else.

There’s another weasel word: savage. Does it mean violent, or does it mean a person belonging to a less complex society? Neither necessarily implies the other!

Back to the top

On to Greg