India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (31 page)

The resulting resentments—the sense of enmity and conflict—were powerful, like a riptide running below the surface of
long-established village hierarchies. Sathy said some people were greedy, some had a lot to prove, and some were just too proud: they couldn’t accept their changed status. He reflected on his own situation. He knew things had changed. He attributed his relative equanimity to his education. But most people in the village weren’t as well educated.

Much of the violence was opportunistic; people were tempted to bend the general lawlessness to their own profit. Sathy told me about a battle he’d been waging over his family’s land. The value of the land had soared in recent years. He said there had been a time, not so long ago, when he went around begging people to buy it; now he was fending off ten buyers a day. But it wasn’t easy overseeing two hundred acres. Sathy spent a lot of time dealing with squatters and crooks.

One man from a neighboring village, someone Sathy had known almost his whole life, had forged his ownership to an acre of Sathy’s land. He’d sold it to a local bootlegger. It was prime land, right along the new highway coming up by Molasur. Sathy heard about it and confronted the man. The man came to Sathy’s house and threw himself at Sathy’s mother’s feet. He begged for forgiveness. He said: “We are poor people, we didn’t know better. You’re a big zamindar, you have so much. Forgive us. Let it be.”

Sathy threw him out of his house; he took the issue to court. He argued his own case. He told me he argued it “beautifully”; he wished I had been there to see. The judge upheld Sathy’s rights; he declared the transaction invalid. “Now I can sit on my land, peacefully, quietly, and do whatever I want,” Sathy said. “It’s my land, no one can question that.”

But Sathy was wrong: he couldn’t relax. The bootlegger who
had bought the land was a local tough; he had his gang of
goonda
s. He sent one of them to warn Sathy that if he didn’t back off, they’d deal with him. They said they knew where Sathy lived; they would come at night and finish him off.

Sathy sent a message back: “Try killing me. I’m not scared. You know where I am. I go every night to my forest land for a walk alone, at eight-thirty. Come and find me there.”

I asked Sathy if he really hadn’t been scared. “I’ve dealt with much worse, it didn’t bother me at all,” he said. “I’ve learned one thing over the years: people who warn you rarely actually do it. It’s the ones who come silently at night, without warning, that you have to be careful of. Those are the dangerous ones.

“Of course,” he went on, “I did take a big stick with me every night when I went walking, and I would say a deep prayer. I would recite my
shloka
s. I do that all the time when there’s any danger. Because even if I’m very confident, there’s always some fear. The fear is always there.”

Some of the violence was opportunistic, and some of it was just
senseless, a product of general chaos. But there was, too, an emancipatory element to much of it. The money pouring into the villages created new opportunities. Sometimes people had to fight to seize those opportunities. The old elite resisted, they tried to keep things in place. But the poor were no longer so meek; they stood up for themselves.

Sathy complained about “a climate of fear” that had enveloped Molasur. He talked about some of the real estate development
going on in the village. He talked about young men who had worked all their lives as manual laborers, who were illiterate and who had been born into poverty. Now these men had connected with developers from the cities. They went around buying up acre after acre of farmland. Sathy said they threatened and intimidated reluctant sellers.

The men could be uncouth; they reeked of violence, a certain ruthlessness. They would sit in big groups on land they were developing—or wanted to develop—and get drunk. They’d toss their drinks when they were done, littering the fields with bottles and plastic cups and bags. Sometimes, Sathy said, he’d drive past a project, see men digging up or marking good fertile soil, and it tore at him. He felt that real estate development was killing the village.

Many farmers, Sathy said, felt the same way. The land had been in their families for generations. They didn’t want to sell, but they were powerless when pressured by aggressive developers. If a farmer held out, the developers would buy all the land around him and close off his access. Sometimes, they’d bring a gang of men and threaten to attack a farmer when he came to plow his fields. The threats were usually effective; eventually, most farmers gave in.

Sathy told me about a young man who had come to him, complaining that some developers were putting pressure on him to sell. He said they had tricked his father into signing a document; he was refusing. The next day, Sathy found out, the developers shoved the young man into an autorickshaw, roughed him up, dragged him to the government land office, and forced him to sign away.

Another man, who had already put down some money as an
advance payment on a piece of land, was approached by developers who wanted the same land. When he resisted giving up his claim, they warned him: Take back your money, let us buy the land, or we’ll take care of you. If we see you around the village, we’ll finish you off.

This kind of intimidation had been going on for a couple years now. Sathy said it created a tense atmosphere in the village; people were unhappy and uneasy. He tried to talk to some of the developers. He told them that what they were doing wasn’t right. He said that God would punish them for forcing farmers to sell their fields, for taking good agricultural land and turning it into plots. He talked to them about the crisis in agriculture, he said they were contributing to the problem of rising food prices. He warned them that if agriculture died, their families would also suffer.

In truth, though, the developers didn’t seem to have suffered at all. Many of them seemed to have done quite well. Driving through the villages around Molasur, you could always tell who the local real estate magnates were. They were the ones with new, polished cars, with the expansive houses equipped with air conditioners and washing machines.

Still, Sathy was confident these people wouldn’t get away with it. He said: “Till now, God has left them unpunished, but let’s see what happens. Let’s see, let’s see. God doesn’t punish immediately. He takes his own time. I’ll just wait and watch. I don’t think they can escape the laws of nature.”

“Why don’t you step in and do something about it?” I asked him. “Shouldn’t you help protect the village?”

“It’s too complicated,” he said. “Too messy.”

“Are you scared of them?”

He bristled; he laughed. He said he had nothing to fear from a couple of young rowdies. Then, when I pressed him, he acknowledged that they could “cause some damage.” He said none of the young developers would dare confront him directly; they knew who he was. But they could do things like destroy his underground irrigation pipes. I had a feeling he knew they could do worse.

“It’s a kind of revolution,” he said. “Some of these people, they’ve never tasted power like this before. They’ve never had so much. No one can do anything about it. People who were down for so long dominate now.”

One of the people from Molasur who was involved in real estate
development was Das, the Dalit whose house Sathy had taken me to. Das had tied up with a couple partners to develop around fifty acres at the edge of Molasur. They called their development Kingmaker City. They divided the fifty acres into 1,700 plots. They marketed the plots with the assistance of some businessmen from Chennai. The project had been a big success: they’d managed to sell all 1,700 plots in just four months.

I asked Sathy to take me to Kingmaker City. He resisted. The development had taken place more than a year before, but Sathy said going there was still like “torture” for him. He could remember when the fifty acres were planted with rice and peanuts. It caused him “too much mental tension” now to see the land fallow, to see how the fields had been flattened into roads and cut up into individual plots.

Sathy was sure that projects like Kingmaker City would ruin
Molasur. He felt that when city people came in and built country homes, they’d bring city values with them. They would do “cinema stuff” in the village, by which he meant that they would come with women, girlfriends or prostitutes.

He worried, too, that the project would further erode his position. “Wherever I walk now, even nine kilometers from my home, people know me, they respect me,” he said. “I enjoy that. But these city guys will come in and they’ll ask my people, ‘Why do you salute him?’ and gradually the respect will fade. They’ll put jealousy in my people; city people don’t understand this concept of respect. It’s a village thing.”

Still, I persisted, and finally one afternoon we made a plan to meet Das at Kingmaker City. Sathy and I walked there from his house in Molasur. We walked across his fields, and then we walked through his forest land. It had been raining recently. The earth was soft. I saw paw prints in the soil and I asked Sathy about them. He said they were from jackals.

You had to watch out for jackals around there, he said. They could be aggressive. One time, an old man had fallen and hit his head on the forest land. He passed out, and the jackals ate him. Sathy said that was very rare.

We emerged onto a stretch of open fields. The property directly in front of us was green, sown with crops, but beyond that I could see an empty, uncultivated stretch, marked with red and green flags, and yellow stones that demarcated plots. That was Kingmaker City.

As we walked toward Kingmaker City, a white Ambassador car made its way up a tarred country road. It turned onto a dirt path that led through the plots, kicking up a cloud of dust. The car
stopped and a window rolled down; somebody threw an empty mineral water bottle onto the road.

“Bloody Chennai people,” Sathy said. “Every day, twenty cars come here. Look how they litter, look how they treat this place. No respect for the land.

“It’s my fault,” he said, and he put his hand on his forehead. “I’m the greatest fool. This was all my land. My father gave it to the villagers. I should have just taken it back, but I wanted to honor my father’s memory. I let it be, and now look what’s happened.”

We met Das. We shook hands. I hadn’t seen him in a while. I thought he looked older. He had circles under his eyes, and black marks on his forehead and cheeks. He was dressed casually, in a hanging blue-striped
lungi
and an untucked red shirt.

We searched for a shady place to talk. We found a mango tree, near a well filled with murky green water, and sat on the ground. Das said he hadn’t been to Kingmaker City in a while; being there now brought back memories.

“It’s a useless place,” Sathy said. “Lousy dry land.”

“What do you mean, dry land?” Das asked. “In winter, this is the most fertile land. It gets wet and green.”

“Yes, but you killed the fields, didn’t you?” Sathy said. “Nothing grows here anymore. What does it matter if it’s fertile or not?”

Das told us about how he’d built Kingmaker City—how he’d joined forces with his local partners, how they’d tied up with businessmen from Chennai, and how they’d convinced farmers to sell their land. He laughed when he remembered some of those stories. He told me about a teacher who had refused to sell; they got a group of men together and chased his tractor across the fields. He told me about a man who had been rude to them, who said that
he wouldn’t even sell them garbage. They’d closed off his access; they refused to let him set foot in his fields. Like all the others, he ended up selling.

Das said that most people sold willingly; he wanted me to know that he and his partners always paid a fair price. What they did wasn’t cheating. But it was true that in some cases, if people were unwilling to sell even when the price was right, they’d been forced to apply a little pressure.

I asked Das if he ever felt bad about the way he had muscled people out of their land. He said again that many people had sold willingly; it was only a few people who held out. Still, he acknowledged that he did sometimes feel bad. He said that when he sat there with us now, under that tree, remembering how green this land once was, seeing how dry it had become, he felt a little guilty.