Special
'Gandhi has always been little short of God to me'
Veteran Journalist Mark Tully once again draws on 30 years of
reporting on India to pen Non Stop India. He crisscrosses the country
in search of answers where he encounters interesting human stories;
tales that might jolt contemporary, urban India. Excerpts from the
book...
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Posted On Saturday, October 29, 2011 at 07:43:15 PM
The third village we visited was Isanpur. It was shared by Dalits and
upper caste Thakurs or Rajputs, traditionally landlords. We found the
Dalits as usual living in a separate part of the village. They were
less upbeat and more angry than the Dalits living in their own
villages. One of the older villagers, Harkesh, did say that there had
been changes, "We now sit on the same level. They respect me," he
explained and went on, "Before, if they were sitting down to eat they
would tell us to eat separately. If we went to meet them we had to sit
on the earth, not on the carpet."
But Battan, an angry, elderly villager with a long, lugubrious face,
contested this view hotly, "These are small matters.
There's been no change in their hearts. We still cannot offer water in
their Shiva temple. I am sixty-two years old, and what I saw in my
father's day I see today."
Some of the villagers tried to interrupt but Battan wasn't going to be
stopped: "They still hate everything I touch. I cannot sit with them
on a charpoy. When everyone has eaten then they feed us. I haven't
been to any function for twenty-five years but my family tells me what
happens. Yes, some things have changed. Before, we lived in huts, now
we have a house but that has made them angry. They are jealous that we
wear decent clothes but they can't say it out loud."
Battan paused for a moment and then added, "Before, if we were talking
to a Thakur we had to stand downwind of him. They can't insist on that
now."
This group of Dalits didn't think their economic circumstances had
improved. There was less work on the land because there were no
bullocks, and so no ploughing. They did get work at harvest times and
got paid in grain. None of them had land of their own.
As there was no ploughing and there were no bullocks I assumed that
the halwaha system had died out. But when I asked whether that was so,
the villagers shouted, "Bhura – he is a halwaha." However, Bhura, an
elderly man wearing a vest, which seemed to be the standard dress for
the Dalits of this village, said, "That's not exactly so. Yes, I work
every day for a farmer but I am not bonded. I have worked for the same
farm from the beginning to now and, see, I'm in my old age, but that
doesn't mean I am bonded. He pays me one hundred rupees every day."
"What do you mean beginning?" someone asked.
Bhura pointed to a young teenager and said, "A little smaller than
him. About twelve, I suppose."
When I asked what change he'd seen in his long working life he
replied: "There have been improvements in the last twenty years. They
don't swear at us and curse us any longer. My employers' family is not
rude to me. But I can't sit on a charpoy with them, or eat from their
dishes. I keep my own dishes there because they give me one meal a
day."
…….When I asked about education I was told there were no graduates in
the Dalit community of Isanpur. But then someone pointed to a young
woman and said, "She's a graduate." The woman muttered, "I'm
high-school failed."
As we drove back to Khurja I thought of that statue of Ambedkar with
his thick glasses and the villager who said to me, "He
is god." Gandhi has always been little short of God to me, although he
would be appalled to hear that as he always resisted any attempt to
sanctify him, let alone treat him as divine. I have seen countless
similar statues of Ambedkar in different parts of India but for the
first time a statue made me wonder whether in my admiration for Gandhi
I had paid insufficient attention to Ambedkar. I had often written of
Gandhi's movement to eradicate untouchability and ensure the Dalits
were honoured, of his calling them Harijans, or Children of God. But
that was perhaps romantic or at least unrealistic, whereas Ambedkar
had been thoroughly realistic in calling those who belonged to his and
other untouchable castes Dalits, or the oppressed.
In the late thirties the Mahatma devoted himself to dealing with the
problems of villages and villagers. The problems he addressed were
lack of sanitation, deficient diet, and inertia. Ambedkar on the other
hand saw the problem as cultural. He once asked, "What is a village
but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and
communalism?"
Although Ambedkar's words are very harsh I can now understand why he
passed that judgement on village India.
.......If he were alive now how would he judge village India after
nearly sixty-five years of Independence?
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