India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (4 page)

Back then, he said, the reservoir was always full. Now it was full only after the rains, when the monsoons brought muddy water from the fields and surrounding hills. But Sathy never went swimming anymore, and he never let his children fish in the reservoir. It was too dirty, he said; villagers used the area as a toilet. They lined up in the mornings, crouched around the reservoir, and used the water to clean themselves.

“It’s disgusting,” Sathy said, and he shook his head and wrinkled his nose. The reservoir had been built a thousand years ago. For a thousand years, it nurtured the village—irrigated the fields, provided bathing and drinking water to homes. People had forgotten all of that, Sathy said; now they defecated in the water.

“People don’t care anymore,” he said. “Before, there was respect, there was decency. Now all that’s gone. Who knows what people believe in anymore?”

He wiped the sweat from his brow. He pressed down on his mustache, flattening it with the sweat off his palms. Sathy had a big mustache. It curled up at the corners. Sometimes, when he pressed on it, settled it down, I thought he was trying to maintain a degree of control.

I met Sathy about a year after returning to India. He was forty
-one years old. We were introduced by a relative of mine who ran an equestrian academy not far from Molasur. Sathy brought his children—his son, Darshan, age eight, and his daughter, Thaniya, age seven—to learn from her. He no longer kept horses in the village, but he wanted his children to know the old ways.

When my relative first told me about Sathy, she said he was a talkative man. She knew I was writing a book. She thought I might find some of his stories interesting.

So we met, one afternoon, in Pondicherry, a former French colony near Auroville, an elegant town of tree-lined streets and high-ceilinged villas by the ocean. We met in the courtyard of a hotel. We had coffee under a mango tree. Sathy talked a lot. He seemed jittery. I thought he was trying to impress me.

He told me all about his family at that first meeting—about their noble background, about the land they had owned, about the way they had dominated Molasur and the roughly seventy-five villages around it. He said they were Reddiars, members of a warrior caste that had migrated from the north some eight centuries ago and become the biggest landowners in the area.

He told me about a childhood of status and privilege. One of his ancestors, he said, was a famous chief minister of Madras Presidency, an amalgamation of South Indian states during colonial rule. He had grown up in the biggest house in Molasur. His family owned the only car in the village. Whenever they
left home, villagers would line the roads and bow their heads in respect.

For centuries, the Reddiars had ruled over the countryside, making a comfortable living off agriculture, extracting labor and taxes from semi-indentured workers. They had proven to be adaptable rulers. Wave after wave of invaders—the great Chola dynasties, who controlled much of South India until the thirteenth century; the Mughals, who swept down from the north around the seventeenth century; and the British—came through. But the Reddiars always managed to hold on to their power.

Sathy talked a lot about his family’s land that afternoon—about the fields and forests that were their main source of wealth, about the hundreds of acres he still cultivated with rice and peanuts. Farming was in his blood, he said, and I could see he was excited, exuberant in a way that was almost childish, when he remembered the times he had spent with his father in the fields, burning under the sun or soaking in the rain, planting and plowing and reaping from their land.

It was harder to make a living off farming now, Sathy said. He leaned forward, as if he was letting me in on a secret. He emptied his third cup of coffee. He said that the land around Molasur was less fertile; it had been poisoned for too long by chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The water table, overextended and overpumped, was in decline.

“Agriculture is a difficult business these days,” Sathy said, and for the first time since we met, his confidence seemed to sag a little. He said it was a challenge to keep the farm running. He hinted that the family’s financial position wasn’t quite what it had once been.

It was just a little crack in the façade. There would be many more. But on that afternoon, Sathy pulled back quickly. He started talking about real estate. He said he’d been thinking about developing his land. There were fortunes to be made.

He’d been considering building some homes, maybe selling them to technology workers from the cities looking for country retreats. Or maybe he’d build a golf resort. He asked if I knew people with money; he invited me to join him in the resort project.

“People in Chennai and Bangalore are big into golf these days,” he said. “It’s the new fashion. I’m sure they’d travel to my village if I had a world-class resort.”

I wasn’t interested in building a golf course with Sathy. But I was
interested in knowing more about his world. Sometimes Sathy seemed excited about the changes in Molasur, all the wealth and opportunities presenting themselves to “my people” (as he always referred to them). Other times he seemed less positive, even downcast. He worried about his loss of status, about the way the social order he had known as a boy was disappearing. He said that villagers were losing their values, succumbing to the temptations of money, turning into liars, cheats, and murderers.

“People are lost,” Sathy said to me one time. “They no longer know who they are. All the money has taken them away from themselves.”

I thought Sathy was himself a little lost. He seemed disoriented, maybe confused. I knew that his discomfort was in many ways cause for celebration, part of the great emancipatory wave
sweeping across India. The old feudal order was crumbling; as the fortunes of the Reddiars declined, thousands of men and women in and around Molasur were rising.

Still, I couldn’t help feeling a little sympathetic. Molasur was around thirty kilometers from Auroville. My childhood was very different from Sathy’s, but I grew up in the same rural landscape. By the time I met him, it had become apparent to me that the world I had known was also disappearing. The change was overwhelming—and, in many ways, bewildering.

Once, the villages around Auroville had been a jumble of thatch huts, fetid ponds, mud roads, and cashew plantations. Malnourished children, their bellies bloated and their skin pulled tight against their faces, so that they looked like old men, played naked by the side of the road. Few houses had running water or electricity.

Now, a little more than a decade later, the villages were transformed. Mud roads had been tarred, and cashew plantations turned into restaurants, coffee shops, and yoga centers. Streets were jammed with mopeds and motorcycles and even cars. In the evenings, the restaurants were busy, buzzing. The prosperity, the sense of progress, was hard to deny.

But I knew, also, that below the shine of new money, below the easy confidence and optimism, the villages around my home were wounded places. The wealth that had flowed into the area had swept away existing hierarchies and power structures. It had led to new resentments, and new feelings of entitlement. It had demolished a long-standing social structure that held the villages together.

In the years before I returned to India, the villages in my area were wracked by gang warfare. More than ten people were killed. One of them was pulled off his motorcycle and hacked up in broad
daylight. Another was chased through the streets, into a home where he took refuge, and cut into pieces. Someone I knew was kidnapped, bound with his son for several days before ransom was arranged.

Once, the
panchayat
s, traditional assemblies made up of village elders, would have been able to control the violence. They functioned as local courts and law enforcement bodies. But young men in the area, flush with new money and a sense of empowerment, no longer feared their elders. The
panchayat
s still met, under banyan trees and in temple courtyards, but they were mostly toothless. The village elders were intimidated by their youth; they didn’t dare assert their authority.

There was a woman I talked to sometimes from one of the villages. She was in her fifties. She lived a humble life, but it was less humble than it had been. She lived in a single-room house with a concrete roof, running water, and electricity. Her son drove a motorcycle. I spoke to her one day, not too long after a murder, the latest in a series of tit-for-tat killings in her village. There were policemen on the streets. Shops and restaurants were closed, boarded up in anticipation of further violence.

“This is what all the money has brought to us,” the woman said to me. “We were poor, but at least we didn’t need to worry about our lives. I think it was better that way.”

I saw all this happening around me. I watched a great transformation
unfold, unfurl like a heavy, crushing carpet over fragile societies and cultures. I knew that something momentous was
happening, but I didn’t know what to make of it. I was on the outside. I felt I needed Sathy to help me understand it.

Auroville is in rural India. But it is not of rural India. It is an intentional community, with around two thousand members from more than thirty countries. These men and women—dreamers, searchers—had come together in the late sixties and carved out a dry, barren corner of South India to build a new world. They were motivated by a quest for human unity; they were inspired by the idea of a place without hierarchy and class.

What they made was like no other place I know. Auroville isn’t really a town. It is a collection of small communities, spread across hundreds of acres of beautiful land, colored red from the iron oxide in the soil. Growing up, I was surrounded by rural India. But I lived in a world apart: an aspiring utopia of Americans, Germans, Belgians, and Swedes, a unique population of doctors and engineers and teachers and architects.

So Auroville was a good place from which to see South India, watch it evolve. But it wasn’t a place from which to really know it.

In the months after I met Sathy, after that initial encounter under a mango tree in Pondicherry, I found myself increasingly drawn to his life. The stories that had seemed long-winded, a little tiresome, now seemed fascinating; Sathy’s loquaciousness was full of insight.

We would meet for coffee or tea, usually in Pondicherry. Sometimes he would visit me at home. We would have lunch together, in one of the new restaurants or coffee shops that had come up in the area.

I started spending time in Molasur. I would take the forty-minute drive from Auroville, along a bumpy road bordered by
villages and market towns. The road was narrow, badly maintained, but there were rumors that the government was going to widen it, turn it into a national highway, and the real estate activity was already evident.

All along the road, in neat little compounds between rice and sugarcane fields, colleges and shopping centers and gated communities were coming up. Their developers gave them names that captured the spirit of a people who knew their children would have better lives than their own. My favorite, attached to a residential development, was “Rich India Dream City.”