The Age of Kali (16 page)

BATTERI, JAIPUR
,
1994

Of course, she said, after the politician had sworn to take revenge, had sworn that the vendetta between the two families would last for seven generations, they had expected some sort of trouble.

Already, when they returned from their fields at the end of the afternoon they had become used to finding that someone had broken down the door of their hut and ransacked their possessions. Perhaps their pots had been broken as they sat drying by the kiln; or maybe their trees had been uprooted and their wattle fences damaged or destroyed. That sort of trouble, that sort of petty harassment, they had learned to cope with. After all, they were poor, and he was a politician, and there was nothing they could do. But, she said, they had not thought that he would dare to risk open violence, not when everyone in the village knew about his vow of revenge and of his intention to destroy the family.

So, on that evening, they had taken no precautions. One of their buffaloes happened to have died the night before, and as was the custom they had spent the whole day giving the animal the last rites. For that reason the sun was already setting when both of them went out to fetch the fodder from the fields. When they arrived at their land, Bahveri had gone off a short distance to cut grass, while Mohan, her husband, had begun gathering in the animals. It was only on her return that she had heard his cries, and she had run over to find out what was the matter.

What she saw was this: in the shadows, five men had surrounded
her husband, had got him on the ground and were kicking him and viciously beating him with
lathis
(bamboo rods). She recognised them immediately. Facing her was the politician, Badri Gujjar himself. Three of the other men were members of his family – Badri’s son, nephew and brother-in-law. The fifth man was the Brahmin from the village temple.

‘I asked them: “Why are you beating up my husband? It was I who caused the problem for you. He has done nothing.” So Badri came over, grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me and began abusing me. I said: “Don’t shout. I was forced to give your name to the authorities, but I did not send for the police. It was the District Collector; he sent them. Why don’t you go and abuse him instead of us?” But the men did not listen. They repeated over and over again: “It was your fault. It was all your fault. We have been dishonoured and we must have our revenge.” And Badri said: “I will have my revenge now – if I am man enough to take it.” ’

Two of the men held Mohan down while Badri raped Bahveri Devi. Then two other men – Badri’s son and nephew – raped her too, one after the other. They were all sober at the time, but when they left her lying there in the dust, she remembers that they went away laughing like drunkards. As they disappeared in to the dusk they shouted behind them that what they had just done should teach her a lesson, should teach her that a woman of her caste – a potter, an Untouchable – did not interfere with men of their caste, Gujjars – proud yeoman farmers, cowherds and landowners. What they had done would teach her her place in the village. If she forgot it again, she knew what she could expect.

That, at any rate, is her version of events.

Village Batteri is an hour and a half’s drive from Jaipur. You leave the bazaars of the Old City by the Agra Gate, and head off, past the domes and
chattris
of the Maharajahs’ cremation ground, out in to the plains beyond.

For a while the country is green and fertile. Sometimes you turn a corner and the fields ahead blaze bright yellow with a ripening crop of spring mustard. But the further you drive, the drier and hotter it becomes. Winter wheat gives way to drooping sunflowers; dust-devils circle; melon beds tangle amid the sand-flats of the scrub. Turning right off the tarmac road and across a level crossing, you pass for miles and miles along narrowing dirt tracks. The settlements grow poorer; the camel thorn closes in. The colour drains away, but for the odd flash of red sari as a woman winds her way to a well.

Batteri clings to the edge of the cultivation, a border fort on the edge of the desert. It is an old village with a scattering of small eighteenth-century
havelis
, a silent, half-deserted and strangely sinister place. As you drive down the main street, wild-looking men glance up from the
hookahs
they are smoking on the verandahs of their houses, then spit on the ground in front of them. There are no children playing in the lanes; only the wind rakes down the main street.

We stopped and asked a cowherd for directions to Bahveri Devi’s hut.

‘Tchh! That slut!’ said the man, speaking in a coarse Marwari dialect. ‘What do you want with her?’

‘We want to interview her,’ said Sanjeev, a journalist friend from Jaipur who had agreed to come and help translate some of the thicker accents.

‘Hasn’t that bitch already brought enough shame to this village?’ replied the man.

‘She’s a liar,’ said another man, coming up to the car with his big, leathery water-buffalo. ‘Nobody believes her and her stories. Everyone hates her.’

‘Badri Gujjar is a good man,’ said the first cowherd. ‘Everything she says about him is untrue.’

The men pointed us down a side road and, again warning us not to believe a word that Bahveri Devi said, went on their way.

We found Bahveri Devi sitting on her verandah, chopping up chillies and onion on a stone. She was small, fragile and grey-haired. Although she was well in to her middle years, she was still beautiful, with fine, well-pronounced cheekbones. She wore an old sari over a torn red
choli
(bodice); she was barefoot, but around her left ankle was wrapped a single silver torc. Bahveri put down her knife and indicated that we should sit on the
charpoy
, while calling in to the hut to her daughter to bring us water from the well. Drawing up her feet underneath her, she asked in a soft, surprisingly high-pitched voice, how she could help us.

‘Why are the villagers so hostile to you?’ I asked.

‘They say I have brought shame to the village,’ said Bahveri. ‘They say that such incidents should be dealt with by the village
panchayat
[council], not by the police or by any outsiders. They say that by bringing in the authorities I have sullied the name of the village for one thousand years.’

‘Do none of your neighbours support you?’

‘We have been boycotted,’ said Bahveri. ‘Now no one talks to us or buys our pots or milk or helps us with our animals.’

‘Even other
kumars
[members of Bhaveri’s own potter caste]?’ asked Sanjeev.

‘Even other
kumars
,’ replied Bahveri. ‘Our caste
panchayat
has declared us outcastes. No one, not even our families, will acknowledge our existence now.’ She sighed. ‘It has become very difficult for us to make ends meet.’ She looked down and continued chopping her onions. In the silence you could hear the cooing of the rock doves on the byre at the back of the hut.

‘Can’t you leave this village?’ I asked. ‘If it is so bad here, couldn’t you make a fresh start somewhere else?’

‘It is not practical,’ replied Bahveri Devi. ‘But more importantly, I don’t want to give the impression that I am afraid, that I’m giving in and running away.’

Bahveri’s daughter, a slim girl of thirteen, came back from the
well with two steel cups full of water. Sanjeev and I drank. When we had finished, I asked Bahveri to tell me her story, right from the beginning. Pushing her chopping stone away from her, she cleared her throat, rearranged her sari, and began.

It was five years, she said, since she took on the job as Village Batteri’s
sathin. Sathin
is a Hindu word meaning friend, and a
sathin
’s job is to act as an informal social worker among the women of the village in which she lives. In most parts of India,
sathins
teach the other village women about health, hygiene, the mysteries of family planning and the benefits of sending their children to school. But in conservative and backward Rajasthan, where the literacy rate is one of the lowest in Asia (38 per cent, although among rural woman the rate is as low as 11 per cent),
sathins
have had to concentrate on even more basic matters: discouraging female infanticide and child-marriages, both of which are alarmingly common in the more remote areas of the state. By covertly murdering baby girls at birth, or by marrying all of their young daughters off together in a single ceremony, villagers can drastically cut the prohibitive cost of dowries and marriage ceremonies, either of which can eat up whole decades of earnings for a poor family.

In rural India, women have little say in the running of village affairs, and lower-caste women have virtually none. But over time the
sathins
have proved that by working quietly among a village’s women, and by rallying them together in a cause, it is possible to encourage slow social change. Thanks to the patient work of the
sathins
, fewer and fewer female babies have been drowned, while the financial benefits of sending children to school, rather than marrying them off in a job-lot, have been slowly but successfully demonstrated.

In 1992, however, official figures published in Delhi showed that child-marriage was still more prevalent in Rajasthan than anywhere else in India. Embarrassed by these statistics, the Rajasthan government ruined years of gradual progress by overreacting and ordering
sathins
to act as informers on any family planning a child-marriage. The police would then be sent in and the marriage stopped by force. In several cases the parents were arrested and sent to jail. Overnight, the
sathins
changed from respected figures in the villages to being perceived as interfering spies capable of bringing great shame and humiliation to a family at their most important and public ceremony.

Bahveri Devi was caught in this dilemma in the summer of 1992. She protested to the authorities, warning that only quiet persuasion would eradicate child-marriages in the long term; but as a poor woman reliant on the government for her salary, she eventually had no choice but to cooperate. In the end she provided the District Collector with a list of the names of seventeen families planning such ceremonies. Four of the families went ahead with the weddings despite warnings, and these ceremonies were all forcibly stopped by the police.

One of them was the marriage of the two young granddaughters of Badri Gujjar, the local
sarpanch
(village headman) and the political leader of the district’s dominant caste, the Gujjars.

‘Twice I went to Badri’s house and pleaded with him,’ Bahveri Devi told me. ‘I said: “Go ahead and marry your fourteen-year-old granddaughter, but why marry your one-year-old too? With the money you save on her dowry you could send her to school; in due course she will get a good job in Jaipur and earn much money herself.” Badri would nod, but said nothing and kept going on with the arrangements. So a third time I went and talked to him. I got the one-year-old from out of the house and held her in my arms, showing her to Badri, saying: “Look! See how young she is!” But he just replied: “Everything is fixed. It will not be stopped now: it is too late. Now it is a matter of my family’s prestige.” Finally my Project Director came from Jaipur to talk to him, but when he
persisted we had no option but to tell the Collector. On the day, two old policemen did turn up, but they were Gujjars, Badri’s caste-men, so all they did was join in the wedding celebrations and eat their fill of the wedding sweets.’

The wedding went ahead, but the damage had been done. Badri had been humiliated at his granddaughters’ wedding, and he publicly vowed to avenge himself for this dent to his prestige in the village. According to Bahveri Devi, Badri and his friends came for her on 22 September 1992. The day after the rape, she rose at dawn and took the early-morning bus to Jaipur to tell her Project Director. By the time she arrived, the Project Director was out, and he did not return until late that night. It was thus not until the morning of the twenty-fourth that Bahveri was persuaded to go to a police station and actually report the rape.