May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (17 page)

Not surprisingly, the women knew almost nothing about the village council, or panchayat, although they generally voted in elections, following their husbands’ instructions. Seven claimed never to have heard of the panchayat. Of those who had, about half said it did some good. The rest complained. “There is no justice,” said Rama Devi, a Harijan woman who served as one of the village midwives. “Only the rich people are given the facilities and we are not.” Although the Uttar Pradesh state government had reserved places on every panchayat for women, the provision was widely ignored. As elsewhere, no woman served in Khajuron, and no women went to the meetings. But the women were clearly aware of where the real power lay in the village. When I asked who was the most powerful person in Khajuron, only one said it was Shri Ram Choudhary, the incumbent pradhan. Almost everyone else said it was Shardul Singh, the largest landlord. When I asked why, the answer was simple. “He has the most money and the most land,” said Vidhya Devi, a thirty-five-year-old field laborer.

A number of women had never heard of Rajiv Gandhi, and of those who had, there was some confusion about who he was. Most identified him not as prime minister but as Indira Gandhi’s son, and most were unable to say whether he was good or bad. Indira Gandhi, however, was widely viewed as good. “She helped the poor people,” several women told me. Some clearly identified with her as a woman and said that being a woman helped her become a good leader.

At the end of each interview, I asked each woman what her biggest problem was. The answers included not having enough money, worries about marrying off a daughter, needing a better house and fears about a husband’s illness. Many women complained that the water from the wells and hand pumps was brackish, which it was, and that they did not have enough land. Only one woman owned land in her own name. The rest did not even own it jointly with their husbands. The pradhan’s daughter-in-law complained that she did not have enough nice saris. Susheela Bajpai, the Brahmin landowner’s wife, wanted better schools for her children. Sudevi, the widow, said she did not have enough money. But by far the most obvious, pressing problem, more than education and medical care, was lack of paid work. The women had no way to earn a living, no skills, no training. At the most, they could find field work only six months of the year. Every single woman I interviewed wanted to be taught a skill, but there was no factory near Khajuron, and no accessible market for goods she might produce in her home.

I also asked each woman this question: “If you could be anyone in
the world you wanted, or have any job that you wanted, what would it be?” This stumped everyone—it was one of those abstractions I had been advised to avoid—but I was curious, and the answers were revealing. The immediate response of almost every woman was, “But I am not educated, so I cannot do anything.” Then I would say, “No, imagine”—and “imagine” was the difficult word—“that anything is possible. What would you be?” It was nearly impossible for the women to make that leap. Finally, after prompting, a woman usually said she would like to be a teacher. It was one job they knew about. Teachers were usually Brahmins, and respected. Susheela Bajpai, the Brahmin landowner’s wife, wanted to be a teacher, and so did Sudevi. Three women wanted to be doctors, and two wanted to do sewing at home. My favorite answer came from Phula, the prosperous Pasi farmer’s wife. She wanted to be the village pradhan, which I took as a sign of great progress.

I often went back to the women who had been the most receptive to me and talked about other things. Susheela, the Brahmin landowner’s wife, always liked to hear the news from Delhi and insisted I sit with her and have tea. Unlike the others, Susheela could talk to me about Indian film stars because she saw three or four movies a year during her trips to Lucknow. Sudevi, the widow, had never seen a movie in her life. When I went to see Sudevi again during Holi, the spring harvest festival in early March, she was in the middle of her hut, up to her knees in mud, at last repairing the crumbling wall of her house. The more exciting news was that her daughter-in-law had given birth to a little boy, who was now four months old. Amazingly, he looked plump and healthy. I asked Sudevi and her daughter-in-law to come outside with the baby, and I took a picture of all three of them in the afternoon light. I promised I would bring them a copy on my next trip.

At the end of each day in the village, just as it was getting dark, I would walk back to Bhabhiji’s house, completely exhausted. Bhabhiji always gave me a cup of her sweet, milky tea and invited me to relax on the charpoy near her mud stove. So much smoke came out of it that I found it difficult to breathe—I suppose Bhabhiji, in all her years of cooking, had somehow become used to it—but I would sit there anyway, watching as she chopped onions for dinner on a small wooden board on the floor. As the guest, I was never allowed to help, but Bhabhiji was always interested to hear about my day. So I told her, and related just a little of what the women had said. I think she found
my compilation of the obvious details of the women’s lives quite odd; she must have wondered what possible use it was for me to know that Phula had spent several hours collecting fodder for her cows that morning. I imagined reversing the situation: Bhabhiji’s daughter (her only child, who was married and living in another village) turning up at my mother’s house in Cincinnati and interviewing my mother’s friends about how long it took each of them to drive to the supermarket.

As Bhabhiji and I talked, her husband was outside supervising either the slaughter of the chickens or the plucking of the waterfowl that had been shot in a nearby marshland that afternoon. I never learned what kind of birds they were. Every time I asked, I was told they were “local birds,” and from what I could see, they looked to be about the size of pigeons. Bhabhiji’s husband brought them in, their bright red flesh all cut up, and Bhabhiji put them in a brass pot of onions, mustard oil and spices simmering on the stove. The spices—cinnamon, coriander, red chilies, bay leaf, cloves and cardamom—had been ground by one of her servants that afternoon. Because she was the wife of Khajuron’s second-largest landowner, Bhabhiji had two or three servants who turned up a few hours each day to help her wash clothes, clean pots and, in this case, grind spices by crushing them with a cylinder-shaped stone used like a rolling pin over a flat slab of rock. It was miserable work, and Bhabhiji rarely did it herself. She made certain, however, to select the combination of spices for each meal herself.

While Bhabhiji cooked, the men gathered under the neem tree for the evening’s conversation. Steve and Dr. Singh were usually back by this time, exhausted, too. Dr. Singh would go into the house to get a cup of tea from his sister-in-law, and Steve and I would go into the shed to compare notes on the day. Often we were overcome with frustration. “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Steve said every evening. He was collecting, at what seemed to him a glacial pace, material for what eventually became a five-part series on caste, village politics, family planning, religion and the pressures of change in Gurha. I usually complained that I had just spent six hours in three interviews and had uncovered nothing more startling than the fact that my subjects had all eaten chapaties for lunch. On other days, Steve and I could only marvel at the elliptical evasions of the villagers. In one typical exchange, a man told Steve and Dr. Singh that he had no wife and children, but then excused himself a short time later because he said his wife and children were waiting for him at home. Steve pointed
out the discrepancy in English to Dr. Singh. “Yes, first he was saying one thing,” Dr. Singh said diplomatically, “and now he is saying this thing.” That ended the discussion. Dr. Singh was above all an eternally polite man, who in any case had learned that there were some things in villages that took too much effort to understand.

By twilight the men had built the fire under the neem tree. It was by far the most pleasant time of day. Sometimes, when we sat around the fire, Dr. Singh would tell us a little about his childhood growing up in the village, including the story, my favorite, about the monkey that kidnapped him. When he first told us, we laughed, but Dr. Singh swore it was true. When he was a baby, he said, a female monkey had grabbed him from the house and escaped all the way up to the top of the neem tree with him in her arms. The family was beside itself. “They called to the monkey but she would not come down,” Dr. Singh said. “Fruits and allurements were given, but still she remained in the tree.” Finally, after some time, the monkey relinquished the baby, returning him safe and sound on her own. “Yes,” said Dr. Singh, pleased and amused, “she loved me.” On other nights, the village pradhan from Gurha turned up, full of questions about the United States. “Are widows allowed to remarry in your country?” he once wanted to know. “Do villages in America have electricity? Do the rich people exploit the poor?” Dr. Singh had some questions of his own. “In America,” he asked, “if a person is a cobbler”—cobblers in India were Harijans—“and he makes a lot of money, is he respected, despite his profession?”

If the conversation lagged, or bogged down too heavily in Gurha politics, I would go into the house to see how Bhabhiji was doing with dinner. One of Dr. Singh’s daughters was always helping her, usually by rolling out the chapati dough. About nine or ten, we were called in to eat. Dr. Singh, Steve and I sat cross-legged on a grass mat in the middle of the courtyard while Bhabhiji and Sheo Singh served us bird, chicken or goat in little bowls. There were steaming chapaties to scoop up the sauce, and rice on the side. It was hot, spicy and utterly delicious.

KHAJURON COULD HAVE BEEN MISTAKEN AT FIRST AS A VILLAGE WHERE
people led troubled but essentially simple lives away from the complications of the modern world. It turned out, of course, that the people in Khajuron were like people anywhere else—they resented rich landlords, fought with their neighbors, channeled their ambitions
into their children, looked down on those they considered beneath them and had emotional problems they were unable to solve on their own. For such anxieties they needed Phula’s husband, who moonlighted as the village sorcerer. People came to him, about ten to twenty per month, when they were ill or felt they had been possessed by evil spirits. Ramjiai, a twenty-five-year-old vegetable picker and mother of two, went to him one day with a stomachache, which she was sure she had picked up from the evil spirits in the fields. Phula’s husband held a clove in his hand, recited to himself a special mantra he had learned from his guru, then blew away the clove. Two hours later, Ramjiai’s stomachache was gone. “And yet there are no evil spirits,” Phula’s husband explained to me. “There is only disease. But people think there are evil spirits, so when I say the mantra, people think the evil spirit is gone. They believe they are cured—and they become cured.” Phula’s husband reported a 90 percent success rate.

The more serious conflicts in the village centered on the violent feuding that had split the landlords and the Harijans over several generations. It was an epic drama, with roots in ancient history, but forever altered by Indian independence and the upheavals of modern land reform. Decades after these events, it was still affecting the election for village pradhan.

The land on which Khajuron had been built lay in the great cradle of Hindu civilization. In the
Ramayana
, the hero-god Rama ruled these plains from nearby Ayodhya, one of India’s seven sacred cities. All of the farmers in Khajuron felt a certain pride in cultivating “Ram’s land,” as they put it, and it was no surprise to me to see how crowded Susheela Bajpai’s house was every Sunday for the
Ramayana
television series.

But in truth, during the last few hundred years, the real rulers of the land had been the zamindars, or landlords, who had grown rich under the system of sharecropping, in which peasants cultivated the landlords’ land but were permitted to keep only a small portion of the grain for themselves. The landlords built spacious houses and lived on the scale of small-time kings. It was not until 1952, five years after India’s independence, that the new government abolished the zamindari, the landlord system, forcing the landlords to give up most of their huge holdings. It was the end of a feudal order and the beginning, or so it was hoped, of modern times.

One of those suddenly forced to live in the new world was Babu Achal Singh, a Kshatriya, who was the largest landlord in Khajuron
at the time. Once Babu Achal Singh’s estate had stretched for two miles in one direction and three miles in the other, taking in sixteen villages and earning him enough to keep twenty servants in his sprawling brick house overlooking the fields. After land reform, his holdings were reduced to sixty acres, which in itself was bad enough for him. Much worse was the ascendancy of Rameshwar Prasad.

Prasad was a low-caste Pasi, born and raised in Pasitolla, with a high school education, political ambitions and a lifelong hatred of the landlords. They had exploited his people for too many years, and now, with independence and the coming of land reform, he was at last in a position to do something about it. In 1948, he reported Babu Achal Singh to the local authorities for allegedly celebrating the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, who had championed the rights of the lower castes no less than the cause of independence. Singh said he was just handing out sweets to celebrate the installation of a village sugarcane press, but he wound up spending fifteen days in jail. Prasad’s real rise began the following year, when the predominant lower castes elected him as the pradhan of Khajuron in the first village elections held in independent India. For the Harijans of Khajuron, this was an astonishing turning point. After centuries of degradation, one of their number now had political power, and perhaps their lives might finally change. Prasad quickly consolidated their support. In 1952, the year the zamindari was abolished, he was elected to the state legislature on a Congress party ticket.