India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (6 page)

There was another book that helped him:
Who Moved My Cheese?
by Spencer Johnson. I laughed when he told me that, and he seemed surprised. He told me I should read the book. It would help me accept the fact that nothing stayed the same. He said it would help me understand what was going on around Auroville.

He’d given the book to his son. Darshan had read it several times. “He knows all the characters’ names by heart,” Sathy said. “He knows them even better than I do.”

Sathy’s forest land wasn’t really a forest at all. It was, in fact, quite
barren. Sathy said it had once been covered with mango, neem, and palmyra trees. Now all that remained was a thin line of palmyras, their trunks encased in an ancient carapace of spikes, their leaves rustling in the monsoon wind.

The forest had been cut down, chopped away one branch at a time by villagers foraging for firewood. It had been reduced to a flat—if wild and beautiful—stretch of shrubs and thornbushes. “We lost control of the land,” Sathy said. “Before, no one dared to cut on our property. But when our status went down, I couldn’t manage things as well as my father. I couldn’t stop the villagers around here from killing our forest.”

My legs were tired from the walk. I crouched on the ground, on the slippery gray clay, above a stream. The stream flowed fast and strong. The rains had been heavy; it was a successful monsoon. “Quite a downpour,” I said to Sathy, and he agreed, and said it was good for the farmers. But then he shook his head and said it was nothing compared to some of the rains he remembered.

He remembered standing on this land in the pouring rain, his face flat in the gusting wind, with his father when he was a boy. They had come to inspect a dam. The rains had been ferocious, the strongest Sathy had ever seen. The dam was in danger of breaching. The village could have been flooded. Sathy’s father gathered more than five hundred men. He called, and they came, and they worked in the rain, strengthening the dam with bags of sand and logs from cashew trees. They worked for three
days, under the supervision of Sathy’s father. They saved the village.

Sathy told me that story, and he told me how proud he had felt of his father. “He had so much control, so much charisma,” he said. “Everyone obeyed him. Sometimes I wish I could imitate him. But I don’t have his looks, and I don’t have his charisma. I never had the same control that he had over the village.”

“Do you think that the village would have stayed the same if your father was still alive?” I asked him.

“No, no, I wouldn’t say that,” Sathy said. “That’s going too far. Even my father couldn’t stop modernity. Even he couldn’t block what’s happening in this country now. Sometimes, to tell you the truth, I think it’s good he died. He wouldn’t want to see everything that has happened.”

Sathy told me a story about a meeting that took place in the village near the end of his father’s life. The meeting was held outdoors, under a banyan tree. His father was late; everyone stood up when he arrived. Everyone, except for one man—a Dalit youth named Raju. Raju had spent some time working in the cities. He had fancy, modern ideas; he was defying the Reddiar.

Sathy said his father’s face turned to stone when he saw Raju sitting. He didn’t say anything at the meeting, though, and he didn’t say much the rest of the day. He was silent at dinner. Later, when Sathy was massaging his father’s feet in the bedroom he shared with his parents, his father looked straight at him and said: “I don’t know how you will manage. I don’t know how you will cope.”

Sathy told his father not to worry. He said times were changing, and the family had to change with them. He said he would learn to adjust; they all had to adjust.

Now, Sathy told me, when he visited places like Bangalore and Chennai, when he saw what was going on in the cities, he wondered if maybe his father was right. “Sometimes I think that maybe I goofed up my life,” he said. “Why did I stay a farmer? It’s silly to be a farmer these days. We landlords missed the industrial revolution, and now we’re missing the technology revolution. Sometimes I ask myself why I’m struggling to keep the farm running while so many kids are making millions. Maybe my father had a point—we didn’t know how to cope.”

Sathy didn’t say anything for a while after that. The land, too, was silent. We felt far away from the village, far from the road that was becoming a highway, and farther still from the cities that would be connected by that highway.

Dragonflies hovered above the stream. A group of mynah birds dug at the ground. A kingfisher exploded in a burst of blue.

Sitting there, the stream gurgling below me, the chirp of crickets in the air and a mongoose pawing nervously at a clump of wild berries, searching maybe for prey, I could just about remember the way my rural home had felt so many years ago, when I was a boy. Sathy’s forest land felt untouched. I felt alone, which in India, with its crowds and commotion and constant churning, was something to cherish.

“I love this land,” Sathy said. “It’s that old feeling, something that hasn’t been lost.”

Sathy always talked about how people in Molasur were moving
up in the world. He talked about children of landless laborers who
had moved to the cities, gone to college, gotten jobs in software or technology companies, and sent money home. He talked about men and women whose parents had once worked for his family as agricultural laborers, but who had now gotten rich, bought plots of land.

He was ambivalent and occasionally distressed about his place in the changing social hierarchy. Sometimes, his obvious sense of entitlement, the way he clung to the feudal past, made me cringe a little. But his dismay was always balanced by a broader recognition—and appreciation—of the more general movement toward meritocracy in the nation. I respected Sathy for holding these two competing perspectives together. I saw a kind of poise, even wisdom.

Sathy talked, in particular, about the changing condition of Molasur’s Dalits, the caste formerly known as untouchables. For much of India’s history, Dalits had been at the bottom of the social order. They were condemned to menial positions—toilet cleaners, butchers, garbage collectors, leather workers—that were considered polluting. They were subjugated and cowed, and, for the most part, bore their repression meekly. Now, Sathy said, everything was different. Dalits were staking their claim to the new India. They weren’t afraid to demand rights and privileges for themselves.

“Dalits are no longer so timid,” he said to me once. “They stand up for themselves. We used to dominate them, but now they dominate us. No one dares challenge them anymore.”

I was a little skeptical. For all India’s progress, for all the government’s very real efforts since independence to erase the stigma of caste, I knew that caste discrimination was still rampant. In the media, I saw stories about tea shops that refused to serve Dalits
from the same cups as other castes, and about so-called honor killings in which families murdered Dalits (and sometimes their own children) for daring to elope across caste lines.

When Sathy told me that the Dalits of Molasur were no longer oppressed, I suspected a bit of landlord bias. I thought Sathy was painting something of a rosy picture.

Sathy told me that if I didn’t believe him, I should come see for myself. He said he would introduce me to a Dalit man named M. Das. Das had been born into poverty; no one would have bet on his future. Now, Sathy said, I should come and see what he had made of his life.

I met Das on a wet January afternoon. He was forty-two years old. He was standing outside Sathy’s house, in the rain. His shirt was drenched. Sathy was inside, and when he came out to introduce us, I asked Das why he hadn’t gone in. He looked at Sathy, questioningly. “Speak, speak freely,” Sathy said. “Be honest with him. Tell him everything.”

Das said he was standing outside out of respect for the elder members of Sathy’s family. They were from a different generation. They might not be comfortable with the idea of a Dalit in their house. I asked Das how he felt about that, and he laughed, but without bitterness. He said: “How do you think it makes me feel? Still, they are old, and I have to respect their feelings.”

“Come on, come on, show him your house,” Sathy said, and he pulled Das by the arm. He opened an umbrella. He gave Das and me shelter. He led us through the village.

Like most villages in the state of Tamil Nadu, Molasur’s geography was historically delineated by caste. The village was traditionally divided in two—the
ur
, where upper castes lived, and the
colony, where Dalits lived. Now, Sathy told me, these distinctions were breaking down. Dalits were moving out of the colony, into parts of the
ur
. Even on his street, traditionally reserved for Reddiars, the highest caste in the village, there was talk of a Dalit moving in. The old geography was blurring.

“It’s true,” Das said to me, in Tamil. “When I was a boy, I could never be on this street. I had to push my cycle around the village to avoid the
ur
. We took back roads. We were terrified. Our parents told us we would be punished if we stepped in here.”

We walked through the
ur
, past the houses that had traditionally been occupied by upper castes, past the concrete structures and tile roofs that suggested relative wealth. I tried to imagine Das scared to walk these streets. It all felt so natural now.

At the edge of the
ur
, beyond the last tile-roofed house, we entered an open field. It was like a no-man’s-land, extending about two hundred meters between the
ur
and the colony. The road that led into the colony was muddy. The mud was mixed with human feces. It was hard to tell mud from shit.

Houses in the colony were smaller, less solid, than in the
ur.
Signs of poverty were evident: more malnourished-looking children, fewer motorcycles and satellite dishes, and a general air of dilapidation, exacerbated by the recent rains.

But as we walked around, got deeper into the colony, Das pointed out several new constructions, concrete blocks, many in bright colors, some rising two stories. “These people have sons and brothers and cousins working in the cities,” Das said, running his hand along a street that was almost all concrete buildings. “Many of them are educated, or their children are. It doesn’t look at all like it did when I was growing up here.”

Das himself had a degree in history, from a college in Chennai. He had moved there at the age of eighteen, and studied for a three-year undergraduate degree. While he was in college, he started thinking about the plight of Dalits in Molasur. On his visits home, he would be reminded of the insults he had taken for granted as a child—the way Dalits were refused entry to temples, the way they had to cross the road when a higher caste walked toward them. At his school, Dalit children weren’t allowed to drink water from cups; the teachers would pour water into their hands. Dalits weren’t even allowed to touch the vessels used to pour water, for fear of contamination.

Chennai was very different. There, in the cauldron of urban anonymity, caste didn’t play such a big role. No one knew about Das’s background; they didn’t know who his parents were or where he lived. In college, Das was astonished to find himself friends with members of higher castes. His best friend was an Ayar, a member of the Brahmin caste. He and his friends would sit around for hours, talking, eating together, sharing bottles and utensils—activities that would have been unimaginable in Molasur.

Das remembered standing outside a temple on one of his visits home. While the higher castes streamed in, offering flowers and sweets to the deity, Dalits had to pray from outside. Das was hit by the injustice of it all. “Let people do whatever they want in their homes,” he told me, years later. “But a temple is run by a government trust—it’s a public space. Before moving to Chennai, I didn’t understand that. But now, after my education, I understood enough to question that—how could we be restricted from public spaces?”

When Das returned to Molasur, he moved in with his family, into the thatch hut where he had grown up. It was a single-room
hut, without electricity or running water. Twelve people lived in it—Das’s parents, Das and his wife and their three children, and his brother and wife and their three children. Das was determined to do something about the condition of his people. He and some of his Dalit friends, many of whom had also spent time in the city, demanded change. They started standing up for themselves, coming together as a group and retaliating against other castes when they felt insulted.