The Beautiful and the Damned (19 page)

From the cities in which I had been spending so much of my time, the Indian countryside felt like an afterthought, the remnant of an ancient rural world finally being absorbed into modernity. It didn’t seem to matter where I was – in Delhi, Calcutta, Bangalore or Hyderabad – everywhere the metropolis was expanding, thrusting out the spokes of its highways and throwing up office parks, apartment complexes and SEZs on what until recently had been wetlands or agricultural plots. In places like Gurgaon, the transformation was complete. In other areas, many of the buildings were still shells, altars being prayed over by vast yellow construction cranes, but the process was nevertheless under way.

The emphasis on such urban expansion conceals what might be happening to Indian farmers, who are utterly absent from mainstream accounts of progress. There are some solitary efforts to write about what is happening to them, as in the work of the journalist P. Sainath – who first documented the devastation of rural India in 1996 in his book
Everybody Loves a Good Drought
and who continues to report on this in the
Hindu
newspaper – or in the bleak roll of names put up by activists on a blog on farmer suicides. The list of names goes on and on, giving a hint of the individual suffering involved in what can otherwise seem like an utterly abstract process. Yet the numbers themselves are significant. From 1995 to 2006, in the very years that the urban economy was expanding, nearly 200,000 farmers
killed themselves in different parts of India. These are official figures, based only on cases accepted by police officials as unambiguous instances of suicide, and depending on the fact that the police count as farmers only male heads of households who have agricultural land registered in their names. The suicide figures do not include women, nor do they include the tens of millions who farm on land owned by other people. Yet even these conservative official figures show something of the distress in rural India, where the most common method of killing oneself is by ingesting pesticide, a substance that is easily available to the farmer even when he or she has nothing else.

This crisis, barely noticed by the promoters of the new India, affects the majority of people in the country. About 400 million people depend on farming for their livelihood, as compared with the approximately one million people employed by the software and outsourcing industry. Many of the farmers, according to surveys conducted by the government and by independent organizations, do not see agriculture as a viable occupation. Even without the debts that force some of them into committing suicide, farmers see no future in what they do, and if they nevertheless continue to work in the fields, it is less because of some apparently traditional inertia and more because the alternative is perhaps worse. It involves joining the growing ranks of migrant workers who shuttle between the countryside and urban areas, working at jobs that pay little, offer no mobility and are usually temporary in nature.

The southern state of Andhra Pradesh is one of the places affected especially badly by the distress of farmers. It is among the top five states in India in the number of farmer suicides, and when one looks at a map of India, it forms a continuous zone with the other four states in that group – Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Taken together, this is a vast area of 942,940 square kilometres, stretching from the west coast of India to the east coast, running from the far south up to the centre of the country, comprising poor states like Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh and those that are considered developed and contain three of the most prosperous urban economies in India, including Mumbai in Maharashtra, Bangalore in Karnataka and Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh.

The overnight train journey I made from Bangalore to Hyderabad in the summer of 2008, travelling nearly 500 kilometres north up the Deccan Plateau, was therefore a journey across two worlds superimposed on one another. The first was from the flat world of Bangalore to the equally flat world of Hyderabad. The city of Hyderabad possesses a large concentration of IT and outsourcing companies, including the behemoth Satyam, most of them located in a north-western strip that has been given the futuristic name of Cyberabad. Like Bangalore, Hyderabad contains an agglomeration of shopping malls, franchise outlets and condominiums as well as a new airport forty kilometres out of the city, in Mahabubnagar district, that is indistinguishable from the new airport in Bangalore. But even as I moved through this flat world, I was traversing a jagged zone where desperate farmers were killing themselves, where millions of men and women were leaving their homes to work as migrant labourers in faraway cities in India or in the Gulf States of the Middle East, and where forest squads of Maoist-inspired guerrillas were busy fighting police forces associated with the oppression of government and big business.

It didn’t take me long after I arrived in Andhra Pradesh to see how these different aspects overlapped, although the manner in which I acquired the knowledge was strange, more affected by random events than at any other point in my journey through the new India. It was a contingency that affected the entire duration of my stay in Andhra Pradesh, seizing my attempts to depict the life of the farmer and twisting it in different directions, making my narrative more driven by plot than at any other point in this book, transforming my objective of sketching the portrait of an individual farmer into a more collective account. In fact, as I look back at the time chasing this plot not of my own making, it occurs to me that the main character in this chapter may be not a person but a thing, a crop called ‘red sorghum’.

It was the red sorghum that brought me to Armoor. I had taken a bus from Hyderabad early in the morning, watching as the malls and the
condos of the city gave way to clusters of engineering colleges. Then came the countryside, where rows of women harvested green stalks of rice, humped bulls ploughed deep furrows into the land, a borewell gushed water on to a field and a farmer sprayed pesticide from a canister on his back. The rest of the land, uncultivated, was gently undulating, filled with palm trees, cactus plants and rocks all the way to Armoor, in the north-western district of Nizamabad.

The dust lay thick on the flat landscape, coated especially heavily on the two-lane road that was the main street of the town and that created a spine for what was otherwise a shapeless settlement. On the map, Armoor was the navel of India, exactly equidistant from the two coasts and bisected by National Highway 16. When seen from the ground, it was no more than a cluster of ramshackle houses and shops set up on scrubland, appearing at random in the sea of rice and maize of Nizamabad district.

Prabhakar and Devaram had promised to meet me at the bus station, but there was no one there as I got off the bus from Hyderabad. I tried calling Prabhakar a number of times but he refused to answer, and when I finally got through to Devaram, he sounded distracted and irritated. ‘Come to the municipal office,’ he said and hung up. I found my way to the municipal office, a concrete building sitting in a field of dust just behind the highway. Devaram was busy inside, sitting at a table where government officials were gathered around thick ledgers, writing out cheques for farmers. I sat on a plastic chair on the verandah, waiting for Devaram to finish and feeling anxious. I had come to Armoor to capture something of the travails of Indian farmers, but the men I saw converging towards the municipal office seemed utterly alien to me.

They were dark and wiry, with greying hair and wrinkled skin, dressed in dhotis, their feet bare. One man limped up to the verandah with a stick. His right leg was shorter than the left, and he hopped past me along the uneven stone floor, past the pockmarked walls, ducking when he came to a stretch where the ceiling had been festooned with paper flags of India. Finally, when I spotted two men who looked younger and more modern than the rest because they were wearing trousers and carrying mobile phones, I tried to talk to
them. But neither of them spoke Hindi, and nor did any of the other men gathered around the municipal office. I hadn’t expected to run into such a problem. Although Telugu is the main language in Andhra Pradesh, I had been told that most people in Nizamabad spoke some Hindi. I looked to Devaram for help, but he seemed too busy.

After two hours, I gave up and walked out. Dripping with sweat in the August heat, I wandered down the main street of Armoor, past shops selling agricultural implements, fertilizer, buckets and motor parts. I kept trying to contact Prabhakar and, when I failed to reach him, I called every single friend I could think of in Hyderabad who might know someone in the Armoor area. It was around one, and there were few people other than me wandering around the streets. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky and almost everyone was trying to stay indoors.

Eventually, desperate to be out of the sun and to find a place where I could sit and think, I made my way to Mamatha Lodge, the only hotel in town. It was squeezed in between two restaurants, down a long alleyway where a group of three ranged around a tiny desk heard my request for a room. They represented the three ages of man: a young boy in shorts, a man with thick wavy hair and big moustache who swivelled his ledger around to face me, and an old man in a red tunic like a railway porter’s. I filled out the ledger, the frequent appearance of ‘Mr and Mrs’ on its pages indicating that Mamatha Lodge served as a love hotel of sorts. The young boy was deputed to lead me to my room, but as we left, the old man winked at me, moving his shrivelled hand up towards a toothless mouth, indicating that he would appreciate a tip. The gesture – so servile and so unselfconscious, without the theatricality that accompanies an urban beggar making a similar motion – took me aback. It was a reminder of what I had thought of the old India, where desperation was displayed openly rather than hidden, and it was one more indication of how different Armoor was from the big cities.

Up the stairs we went, through a dark hallway where a group of men crouched, furiously beating at a pile of old, stained mattresses. Room 202 was tiny, with a single bed and a portable television placed on a corner stand. The squat toilet in the bathroom was badly stained
with shit and when I took a bath, the water ran under the bathroom door, across the length of the room and into the corridor towards the pile of mattresses. There was a mirror on the wall, broken. I could only see half of my reflection, my face cut off at the top, and it seemed to depict accurately how I felt, and how uncertain I was of what I was doing in Armoor. There was a rooftop of corrugated tin sheets visible through the single window in the room. The sheets had been arranged so as to leave a large gap at one spot, and I could see down through the hole into the kitchen of the Geeta Udipi Vegetarian Restaurant, where bare-torsoed men displaying rolls of fat were stirring large vats and pans, sending smoke up through the gap. I looked at this for a while and then went out again, past the men beating the mattresses and the old man repeating his servile gesture, to choose my lunch option from ‘Geeta Udipi Restaurant’, ‘Captain’s Biryani Hotel’ and ‘House Restaurant Veg and Nonveg’.

After lunch, I walked down the main street, a solitary pedestrian among the men on two-wheelers and villagers crammed into auto-rickshaws. I hadn’t gone far from the restaurant when I came across the skeleton of a jeep, stripped down to its metal chassis and sinking into the ground. There were two other such jeeps further down the road, on the other side, and Devaram caught up with me as I was looking at them. He wore thick glasses and a big, unkempt beard, and his face glistened with sweat from the midday heat. He was a small but aggressive man, abrasive in a manner that at first struck me as off-putting but that made more sense as he told me about his life.

Devaram had grown up in a nearby village. He was a Dalit, or an ‘untouchable’ in the taxonomy of the caste system. He remembered his childhood as a time of deprivation and humiliation, of not having a pair of slippers and being banned from drinking tea from the regular glasses at the village stall. Then, as a ten-year-old, in the early seventies, he had gone to a meeting held by an organizer from the Andhra Pradesh Revolutionary Communist Party. By this time, he had already dropped out of school and started working in the fields as a labourer. He became a dedicated member of the party. He and the other labourers were made to work from four in the morning till ten at night in the fields, their wages amounting to 1,000 rupees in a
year. Devaram and other workers from the party went on strike for fifteen days, their agitation spreading to nearly fifty villages. Their pay was increased and they were given, for the first time in their lives, lunch, a torch for working at night and a pair of rubber slippers.

In the mid-seventies, Devaram left for Hyderabad when the police started going after party members. People got ‘encountered’, Devaram said, shaping his right hand into an imaginary pistol and shooting me in the chest to illustrate the process. Sometime in the eighties, he migrated to Abu Dhabi to work as a construction labourer. ‘I caused trouble there too,’ he said, chuckling. ‘They treated us like animals and so I organized a strike. They deported me when I did that.’

As we walked around the town, Devaram told me the story of the red sorghum and the turmoil it had caused in Armoor. The farmers in the area, he said, depended heavily on middlemen known as seed dealers. The dealers bought produce from the farmers and sold it to buyers from other parts of India, determining what crops farmers should grow in a particular season. The process of agriculture was therefore decided in reverse, beginning with the demand for particular crops from distant buyers, a demand that was then communicated, through the seed dealers, to the farmers. The dealers had also replaced functions carried out in the past by state agencies, giving out seeds, fertilizers and even cash loans to farmers as advances against payment for the final produce.