India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (27 page)

The blueness derived from somewhere else, though. Perhaps it was the sheer extent of the mess in Gadchiroli that had dampened my spirits? The forgotten tribals, the duplicitous administrators, the aggressive police, the outcast guerrillas. The district seemed stuck in a never-ending mire of poverty and recrimination.
Elsewhere there had always been hope, a chance to leap the fence. The problems here seemed not only widespread, but intractable too.

As I lay awake, I’d tried telling myself that the development quagmire of this little-visited corner of Eastern Maharashtra should come as no surprise. Sucking in resources, seeing them disappear without trace. It was frustrating to watch, but hardly a novelty. Old India had been at it for decades. Did I really expect it to loosen its grip so easily? Only fools – and some quarters of the foreign press – still bought the ‘Shining India’ story. Everyone accepted it was mostly myth and marketing, and only a small part truth.

India is a nation on the up. Until now, this sense of transition, of a country on the move, had given me a degree of assurance. The theory had served me well. As much a defence mechanism as an explanation, it provided a way of comprehending the contradictions hurled at me, a means of stopping India’s daily discrepancies from overwhelming and consuming me.

I hold to it still. As I do to its corollary – the idea of India having yet to arrive. That much seems indisputable. The uneven pace of change announces itself at almost every turn. The nation is cluttered with pillars of progress and signs of stasis. Nor, I’d wager, will the country arrive together. India is travelling at multiple speeds and, as often as not, in multiple directions. New India is a story of fits and starts, not linear progression.

This and more I’d repeated to myself. But unlike before, the reasoning provided little succour. Sleep stubbornly refused to come.

As I waited for dawn, listening to the scratching of mice in the darkness, I’d had to concede that life in this blighted corner of Central India had caught me off-guard.

Maybe it was partly my fault, this cultural blindsiding? In coming here, I had broken with routine. Usually, I travel by land wherever practical. In India, that invariably means the train. I like its steady, predictable pace. I enjoy the reassuring sound of its wheels rattling along the tracks. Land travel helps me adjust too, allowing me to gradually sink into whatever waits ahead as the world slips by outside the window.

On this occasion, however, for reasons of time and logistics, I’d flown. Catching a morning shuttle from Delhi to Nagpur, I’d plopped in from the sky. The experience proved disorientating. Physically, I arrived with my baggage, but my thoughts and tempo remained in the country’s energetic, non-stop capital.

Tuned to a faster frequency, my antenna for the New had instinctively begun twitching as soon as we touched down. It honed in on the chrome trusses of the airport arrivals hall. It drew my eye to the widely publicised slogans of a local conglomerate: ‘Vision Unlimited. Growth Infinite’ (beside a picture of electric pylons), ‘Illuminating Lives’ (alongside a power plant), ‘Strengthening the Nation (beside a steel plant). Three days in Gadchiroli district and my mind had finally caught up with me. It had brought with it a restless night and a suitcase of questions.

Dislocation explained much of my mood, but not all of it. A sense of ill ease lay at its fringe, a circle of what I could only describe as foreboding. The first trickle of morning light brought with it a possible source. It came as a revelation. No, more of a warning sign. I was in danger, I realised. In danger of pushing India further than it wanted to go.

It was my old mistake. As a starry-eyed backpacker, I’d longed for this land – so exotic, so far from home – to romance and entice me. It hadn’t always, of course. But like an obdurate lover, blind to his partner’s spurning, I’d ignored all hints of disaffection. Now I found myself beginning to desire something from India once again. Not to embrace me, this time. I was seeking something else. I was seeking it to dazzle me. I wanted it to regale me with its new wardrobe of glittering modernity, and prove to me just how snugly the costume fitted.

On leaving that morning, a sign at the door of the government hostel had temporarily lifted my spirits. It detailed ‘six impressive words’ in bold print. The list was devoted to common courtesies, such as ‘I made a mistake’ and ‘If you please’. Their ‘unimpressive’ antonym was tacked onto the bottom, the ‘ego-cage’ of which
the Bhagavad Gita speaks, the one-letter word ‘I’. The sign’s intent seemed so far from common practice that it made me chuckle. But it was a sardonic kind of pleasure that passed as soon as it arrived.

Any residue of good humour had been wiped clean by my visit to Gadchiroli hospital. In a whitewashed ward illuminated by crude striplights and smelling of disinfectant and sadness lay four survivors from the grenade attack. Their wounds were cosseted beneath bandages. Their faces, blank and unresponsive. They had no idea who was responsible for the attack. Only that five of their classmates were now dead. I left, glummer than ever.

So, sat in Mendha Lenka’s IT centre, watching twenty-seven-year-old Charandas tap away at a computer keyboard, it took me a while to plug in to what he was saying.

The son of one of the community’s leaders, Charandas follows Jeevan in looking much younger than his years. Dressed in grey cotton trousers and a green T-shirt, he is wearing a scarf despite the heat. ‘Love Rd’, his T-shirt reads. ‘One Way: Do Not Enter.’

‘People outside think of us as backward,’ he remarks, swivelling his chair away from the computer screen and addressing me directly.

I’m sat on the floor. There’s that word again, ‘backward’. Its mention pulls me back to the present. I ask if he agrees.

‘They think we can’t be like them,’ he says. ‘But we can.’

Charandas has just completed a six-month computer repair course at the Oxford Institute in Gadchiroli, thirty kilometres away. As with Chavela, Mendha Lenka is a tribal village. No one owns a car, so to get to class he’d walk to the nearby highway and catch the bus.

‘The backward people are coming to the front right now. And our people don’t come in front just so we can improve agriculture. Here, look at this.’

He turns back to the computer, clicks the mouse and brings up a short video. The film is bucolic, scene after scene of rural harmony and Gandhian simplicity: women drawing water from wells, a herd of healthy-looking heifers (out of respect for mother and calf, the adivasi don’t milk their cattle), children in blue
uniforms hopping to school, oxen pulling carts of hay, villagers threshing rice, a community meeting in the village square. All the while, a simple folk song is playing out in the background. For the final frame, the camera closes in on a message carved onto a board just outside the IT centre. ‘We have our government in Mumbai and Delhi,’ it proclaims. ‘But in our village, we ourselves are the government.’

Mendha Lekha is no ordinary adivasi village. Under the decades-long tutelage of Baba Ante, a recently deceased community activist, it has become a model for self-empowerment. Charandas’s father, the serious and bespectacled Devaji, had earlier taken me through the village’s guiding philosophy.

Sitting in the community hall, a fan keeping us cool, he’d talked me through the battle to reassert their traditional rights and livelihoods. He’d spoken of how they’d blocked a large paper mill from extracting bamboo at penurious rates, how they’d rebuilt the road from the highway, how they were harvesting forest fruits and how they were generating cash from bottling purified honey and making soap. The village is currently embarking on a plan to make electricity from biomass. It’s also launching a line in bamboo furniture and other forest-based handicrafts.

There were two achievements of which Devaji was particularly proud. The first occurred the previous year. After much agitation, Mendha Lekha finally won the right to manage its traditional forest lands. Other villages would follow, but for once Gadchiroli district could claim to be leading the way. The governor himself had come in person to preside over the transfer. The landmark event made the front page of the
Times of India
.

By way of background, Devaji had handed me a booklet describing the fight. It was, it would appear, a long one, dating back to the ‘period of slavery’ under the British and the ‘encroachment [on] natural and traditional rights’. The document went on to describe how, after Independence, the country’s forests had fallen entirely under government control. Adivasi like Devaji saw this as a calumny. From one moment to the next, a tribesperson became a criminal for collecting wood. ‘Indians became free,’ he’d
continued, talking of the onset of democratic rule. ‘The tribals, though, we became slaves.’ A legal amendment in favour of community-managed forests is at last reversing that injustice.

Devaji had given me another booklet too. It was entitled ‘Consensus Decision Making’ and it constituted Mendha Lekha’s second accomplishment of note. ‘Everyone makes the decision for everyone. That is the option that this village had opted for,’ he’d explained. Wasn’t that a touch utopian, I’d asked? That has been the view of many in the past, he’d admitted. The booklet contained thirty-seven pages, each one of them a guide to how such an approach could be achieved. He and his fellow villagers were proving its effectiveness page by page. Could he give me some examples? ‘Everything,’ he’d said. He wasn’t lying. From banning alcohol in the village right down to the brand name for the handicraft business (‘Bamboo Vishwa’, or ‘Bamboo World’), every decision had passed through a public vote.

Back in the IT centre, I ask Charandas about city life. What does he think of it? Would he like to live there? As with Jeevan, I’m keen to know how he compares the supposedly ‘developed’ world to his rural reality.

He had once been to Delhi to attend a workshop. He tells me about the experience. Much of what he saw was new to him. He went by train, a means of transport he’d only previously seen on television. ‘I didn’t know how fast it goes. I didn’t know, for example, how to buy a ticket. I didn’t know how the bathrooms would be. All these things I learned.’

Delhi left him with other lessons too: the fact that Indian women could smoke (in Mendha Lekha, such a practice is frowned upon), that the only potable water comes from a plastic bottle, and that too much traffic makes the sky turn grey.

Charandas came back unimpressed. He saw nothing in the national capital that he would like for his village. Everything there is dirty and dangerous. ‘If we made houses like they have in Delhi, we would have a water problem. And it wouldn’t be good to dress here as the people do in Delhi.’

I’m not sure quite whether to believe him, and ask if there really
is nothing that he saw that would improve life in the village. He thinks for a while. Some more computer hardware wouldn’t go a miss, he admits. Especially a fax machine and Internet. ‘This would facilitate communication with others.’ It’s the same desire to reach out that Jeevan had expressed in his longing for a road.

The two men have other views in common. Charandas also identifies lack of employment opportunities as a burden on his village. ‘Our lives can change only once our economic status changes,’ he says. He repeats Jeevan’s scepticism about government programmes too. Right now, development schemes are dreamt up by people in Delhi and Mumbai, he complains. ‘What do they know about the situation in the villages?’ If Charandas could have things his way, he’d have all public funding given directly to the villages themselves. Not even the Gram Panchayat should get their hands on it. ‘This would help avoid corruption,’ he insists. ‘People get elected, then all they care about is their own needs.’

Despite their commonalities, the two young men are actually cut from very different cloth. Brought up on a diet of political theory and self-empowerment workshops, Devaji’s son is as confident as Jeevan is diffident. The computer technician doesn’t reject ‘developed’ India because it has no space or jobs for him. He rejects it because he and his fellow villagers are creating their own version of the future. That is why he has no time for the Naxals either. Their goals (‘people’s progress’) are the same, he states, but their methods are different. Whereas the Naxals believe in change through violence, the residents of Mendha Lekha advocate dialogue. ‘Discussion takes time. But a gun takes just five minutes.’

He laughs, and I laugh with him.

Listening to Charandas is lightening my mood, I realise. It’s partly what he says. His thinking is undeniably cogent and progressive. To cite just one example: the villagers drink from the village well every day, yet when the water goes bad or dries up, they never think to resolve the problem themselves. Why? Because it was the government who built it and therefore it’s the government’s job to fix it. ‘Development can’t come from the government, it has to come from us,’ he tells me.

Policies for the people by the people. Taking responsibility. Governing for themselves. Creating a sense of ownership. It’s all inspiring stuff. He is indeed his father’s son.

Yet, it’s how he speaks, that slowly rekindles my confidence in the Newness of India. Every word arrives primed with self-belief and optimism, a sucker punch of hope. He’s not bowed by the breadth and depth of the problems facing him and his community. Nor does he waste his energies in blame games and criticism. Everything is poured into bringing about change to the realities around him – thinking of it, planning it, effecting it.

He clicks back to a computerised catalogue for Bamboo World and enthusiastically takes me through the pictures. Product after product flashes up: chairs, soap holders, spoons, lampshades, fruit bowls, ornaments, place mats, jewellery, beds, cupboards, garden chairs, even a bar counter. The village has just struck a deal with a local exporter, he tells me.

As Charandas finishes and closes the computer, my attention drifts off to the noises outside. With most out at work in the fields, the village is left to the animals. Nearby a goat is bleating. Two dogs bark at each other, one gruff, the other screechy. Behind us, far off, a cockerel lets out a shrill, distant crow. I realise with shame that the only alien noise is the tinny sound of the radio in my taxi driver’s car.