India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (14 page)

This year, Sathy said, the crowds were thin, and unserious. There were just over a hundred cows, maybe not even a hundred. Kids ran around screaming, playing, popping balloons. Young men, some of them drunk, drove around on motorcycles, crashing into the crowd, honking their horns and making a nuisance of themselves. Sathy said he felt like “bashing them up.”

It was disappointing, Sathy told me, but not really surprising. Agriculture was in decline, and Pongal was losing its meaning. This had been going on for years. He said that Pongal had become just another reason to go shopping—a holiday like Christmas or the New Year. People had forgotten what Pongal was all about; they no longer connected it to the earth, to the farms and the fields and the food they ate. “Who can blame them?” Sathy asked. “Young people don’t care about farming anymore, so why should they even think about what Pongal means?”

He pointed to a large stretch of fallow land that ran by his fields. The property belonged to an agricultural family. Sathy remembered when the whole family—fathers and sons, and sometimes even the women—would gather on the land to farm it. Now
the family had quit farming. Twenty years ago, Sathy said, it would have been impossible to imagine the land fallow.

It was the same story everywhere. Sathy told me about his cousin, a Reddiar from the neighboring village. His family had owned hundreds of acres of land. They had been big farmers, as powerful and wealthy as Sathy’s family. But income from the farm dried up, the family mismanaged their affairs, and they lost everything. Now his cousin was selling tea and packaged snacks out of a small stall by a canal in Pondicherry.

His cousin’s story was a tragedy. And it ate at Sathy to know that it was a tragedy being played out across the country—in villages throughout rural India, where farms were being sold, where indebted farmers were committing suicide, and where traditional agrarian communities were being hollowed out. People talked a lot about how India was changing, Sathy said; they got so excited about all the software and technology companies in the cities. But he had a question. He wanted to know: “If all the farms are gone, then who will feed all these fancy people?”

In the papers, I had been reading about inflation and food riots across the country. Despite all the economic growth since the nation’s reforms, the number of undernourished Indians had actually risen in the first decade of the millennium (after falling during the nineties). The Peterson Institute, a Washington-based think tank, estimated that India’s food production would decline by 30 percent over the first eighty years of the twenty-first century.

“Sometimes when I walk this land, I have a feeling of a village that’s dying,” Sathy said. “What’s all this city, city, city rubbish?
Everyone is so happy that India is becoming modern. But I have a different feeling: I feel like all this modernity is killing people.”

As we walked through the fields, as Sathy bemoaned the challenges
of agriculture and talked about dying villages, we came upon a man wrapped in a blue shawl. He was sitting on an embankment. His name was E. Krishnan. He was fifty-eight years old. Sathy greeted him and said to me: “This fellow will be a millionaire soon. I tell you: he’s on his way up.”

Krishnan’s story was a familiar one. He had been a farmer. His family had cultivated two acres on the outskirts of Molasur. Then farming became tough; Krishnan struggled to earn a living; he quit the profession. He sold his land, and he started attending local markets where cows were traded and sold. Now he had a new profession: he worked as a cow broker, facilitating deals between buyers and sellers.

The cow markets were known as shandies. Krishnan had actually been attending them since he was a boy. He had dabbled in the profession before. But now the village economy was shifting, agriculture was becoming less important, and new jobs (like cow brokering) had become more lucrative. Sathy exaggerated—grossly—when he said Krishnan was on his way to becoming a millionaire, but Krishnan told me that it was true there was more money to be made in cow brokering than ever before.

The change at the shandies was part of a broader transformation; the same forces—of modernization, of urbanization—that were decimating agriculture were lifting the prospects of brokers
like Krishnan. As Indians became more affluent, as they moved to the cities and became increasingly cosmopolitan, they were eating more beef. Between 1990 and the late 2000s, per capita consumption of beef in the country increased by around 60 percent. For many Indians, probably a majority, eating beef was still taboo. But for a growing number, social mores were changing.

The increasing acceptability of beef had lifted demand for cows. In recent years, cow prices at the shandies had more than quadrupled. This added to the woes of farmers. Small farmers, in particular, already unable to afford tractors, now had no way to plow their fields. But development is a process of trade-offs. One profession’s loss was another’s gain—the higher prices were a boon to men like Krishnan, who made an income off commissions.

“If you really want to see how the villages are changing, you should visit a shandy,” Sathy said to me that day on his fields. He asked Krishnan if he’d show me around. Krishnan asked us to come any Wednesday to the nearby village of Brahmadesan, where one of the biggest shandies in the area was held.

When Krishnan left, Sathy shook his head. He said eating beef was a repulsive habit. He described it as a “sin.” Every morning, he told me, his mother performed a
pooja
for the cows in their backyard. She recited prayers, she lit camphor; she fed the cows rice, and a jaggery sweet. No one in Sathy’s family had ever eaten beef.

“Cows are something special for us, something holy,” Sathy said. “We could never imagine slaughtering or eating them.

“Morality is changing, Akash,” he went on. “People don’t care as much about how to behave, they don’t have values anymore. Boozing, womanizing, sex, beef—it’s all okay now. Anything is acceptable.”

He pointed across the fields, in the direction of a group of men at the edge of his land. He said they were bootleggers. They gathered every day outside the village and sold illicit home-brewed liquor. “See that? See that?” he asked. “That’s exactly what I mean.” He waved his bamboo stick at the bootleggers and yelled. “Get out, get out, you lousy dogs!” he shouted.

“It makes me sad sometimes,” he said. “We were all brought up in a very nice way. We all had our drinks under hold, we knew how to control ourselves. But the whole thing is disturbed today. It’s all…It’s not like it was.”

I visited a shandy in Brahmadesan the following week. It was my
first time at a shandy, but not my first time in Brahmadesan. A few years earlier, during the Indian elections of 2004, I had reported a series of articles from the area. The elections were closely fought, and the outcome—a victory for the Congress-led opposition—a surprise. Most opinion polls suggested that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)–led government would return to power. The government had campaigned on the uplifting slogan of “India Shining.” The slogan was designed to appeal to nationalist sentiment, and to pride in the nation’s economic progress.

In the aftermath of the elections, most analysts agreed that the slogan had backfired. While it worked with urban and middle-class populations—the largest beneficiaries of India’s reforms—it spoke little to voters in rural areas, many of whom felt neglected, and even slighted by the slogan’s presumption. In a farming village near Brahmadesan, I had spoken to a group of men outside a tea
shop. One of them said to me: “The government says India’s shining, but that’s a lie. Do we look like we’re shining here?”

A few years on, the area around Brahmadesan had moved up in the world. While it wasn’t exactly shining, there was clear evidence of new prosperity. The main road in the village was freshly tarred. It was bordered by concrete houses that had only recently been thatch huts. The village had a new hospital, and two cell-phone towers. Sathy told me about a power plant that was being planned in the area, and about an industrial zone that the government was talking about establishing up the road.

Like so much of rural India, Brahmadesan’s economy was in transition. Between the early 1990s and the late 2000s, the share of India’s GDP represented by agriculture fell from almost 32 percent to just under 17 percent. This pattern was evident around Brahmadesan, where land prices had risen rapidly, and where many farmers had sold their property and used the proceeds to set up shops or businesses. New jobs, and new types of jobs, were being created. People who had grown up as farmers, whose ancestors had always been farmers, were now working as construction workers, cooks, and drivers.

Sathy said: “These people are not the same way they used to be, Akash. I tell you, the same people who used to beg me for jobs, who were happy to work in my fields for ten rupees—now they refuse to join me even if I pay them ten times that.”

It wasn’t until we turned off the main road and followed a dirt track that led to the shandy that traces of the village’s agricultural heritage were more evident. In a veterinary dispensary at the end of the track, a group of farmers stood around with their cows, and an ungloved doctor shoved his hand into the animals’ vaginas to check
if they were pregnant. If they weren’t, he injected them with semen brought from Bangalore.

An old man, a wrinkled farmer, walked into the dispensary. He held a bleeding goat in his arms. The goat had been bitten on the neck by a dog. The farmer pleaded with the doctor for help. The doctor administered an injection, but he said the goat would die. I heard the old man tell someone that the goat was all he had—no land, no children, no other livestock.

The shandy was behind the dispensary. It was in a clearing set amid a grove of tamarind trees. It was a busy place, with at least a couple hundred people, and maybe three times as many cows and bulls. The cows were tied together with thick ropes. They were dragged around by their owners, their teats and mouths and vaginas examined by potential buyers. At the conclusion of a deal, they were loaded, protesting with loud moos, into trucks.

Sathy had described the shandies to me as agricultural fairs. I had expected something cheerful, maybe with dancing and music. But I saw quickly that there were no festivities at that shandy. The atmosphere was serious, even tense; it reminded me less of a fair than the floor of a stock market. Men hung around with intent looks, carrying or counting bundles of pink thousand-rupee notes. They shouted, and they shoved their way into deals, occasionally getting into heated arguments that hovered at the edge of violence.

Some of the men at the shandy were covered in earth and wore stained loincloths; these were sellers, poor farmers who had come to cash out their last possessions. Many were better dressed. They wore spotless white shirts and pants, and their eyes were hidden behind dark sunglasses. They were surrounded by a retinue of minions. These were buyers, owners or representatives of slaughterhouses.
Sathy said that when he used to attend the shandies as a young man, he never saw these kinds of people; he saw only farmers. He dismissed the well-dressed buyers as “businessmen.”

We met Krishnan at the northern edge of the shandy. He was standing by a market where vendors in makeshift stalls sold ropes, whips, and fried snacks. He greeted us, but he seemed distracted. He had his eyes on a group of cows. He introduced me to a friend. The friend’s name was R. Ramadas. Krishnan said: “This man can tell you whatever you need to know. He’s a legend.” He said that, and then he took off, practically ran into the scrum.

Ramadas was a short, stocky man, with a face darkened over the years by the sun. He was in his mid-fifties; he had a white beard, and restless eyes. He shook my hand, he asked what I was doing at the market—and then, before I could answer, he, too, took off.

The shandy was a place for business. There were deals to be made, money to be earned. There was no time for idle talk.

Sathy said: “I know that Ramadas. He used to hang around Molasur. He’s famous here. Everybody knows Ramadas.”