Leaving Jagannath to guard the boat we set off across the shingle which was covered with dry, silvery mud, shooing our unwilling little force before us in the direction of the village which was hidden behind a thick bed of reeds and tall grass. After a quarter of a mile we came to an inlet of brackish water full of frog spawn, the bottom of which consisted of thick, glutinous mud into which we sank up to our knees. On the far bank thousands of hairy caterpillars were exercising in the sun. Here a young man and an old woman were making a grass rope, using a flat stone with a hook on it and a piece of bamboo with three holes in it through which the strands passed. The entrance to the village from the river side was by a narrow path that wound through the grass which was very high. From beyond this plantation came the sounds of activity; the clinking of chains and weird snatches of song, and I had a feeling of pleasurable expectation which turned to terror as a horde of savage curs with sharp, brown teeth came pouring down to meet us. There was no question of saying ‘Good dog,’ or extending a friendly hand to beasts like these, and we laid about us with our bamboos with a will until they turned tail and vanished.
The village was in the form of a rough rectangle. It consisted of about forty mud huts with thatched roofs which sagged under the weight of the orange-coloured gourds which grew profusely on them and whose broad-leaved tendrils and yellow flowers seemed to bind them to the earth. In front of each house there was a platform of well-swept dried mud on which the female inhabitants were squatting until the moment when we came into view when they took to their feet and retreated indoors uttering little cries of alarm and mock modesty.
The place was divided down the middle by a straggling path on either side of which emaciated cattle were hobbled in rough pens made from the branches of trees. At the north end was a larger, open-fronted building with a space in front of it, the meeting place of the elders of the village council. It was furnished with a couple of kulphidar, communal pipes with clay bowls and jointed wood stems, which helped them in their deliberations. Everywhere, on the uneven but smooth surfaced ground that had been moulded by the passage of innumerable bare feet, lay the simple machinery of village life: the wooden ploughs which have to be light enough for the cultivator to carry them on his shoulders to the fields; mattocks with iron heads bent at a sharp angle to the hafts; harrows that were nothing more than flattened logs; sowing baskets made of slips of woven bamboo; bigger baskets for feeding cattle; small, wooden-handled reaping sickles; a potter’s wheel and broken potsherds (‘The potter sleeps secure for no one will steal clay,’ Karam Chand said, sententiously); open-ended sieves, that looked like dustpans, made from reeds; a grinding mill, the kind that is worked by two women, one of whom turns the upper stone while the other pours in the grain; a cast-iron chaff-cutting machine with a flywheel; filled water pots sweating moisture; ropes and chains and halters and small children with black-painted eyes; all together in the thin dust. Above the village a solitary great shisham tree that had given shade to the village longer than anyone could remember was dying now. Its branches were filled with vultures. For the most part they remained motionless but from time to time they raised themselves, turning arrogant heads to show off their profiles and flapped their great wings, displaying white back feathers as dingy-looking as an old vest.
Through a gap in what was otherwise an almost continuous wall of houses I could see the fields of wheat and gram that lapped the village on three sides like a sea in which men and women, bent double, were weeding and loosening the soil around the young plants with wooden-handled knives. This was the Rabi, the crop that had been sown in November. All through the winter, from December to February, it would be weeded and watered, and sometimes between the middle of March and the middle of April the harvest would take place. From April to mid-May the villagers would thresh it – first it would be trodden out by six bullocks yoked together moving round and round a central post; then it would be winnowed and a cake of cow dung placed on top of the heaped grain to avert the evil eye. In June or July, after the monsoon rains had begun, the Kharif crop would be sown – rice, maize and millets; and in early October there would be the harvest and then the land would be ploughed and the Rabi would be sown once more. Another important crop, not here but in irrigated land, was sugar cane, now more important than cotton. The land in which it was to be planted might need as many as twenty ploughings before it was ready to receive it, lots of manure and constant weeding. This was the cycle in the State of Uttar Pradesh in the Ganges Plain. Floods, drought, blight, pestilence, the incursion of wild animals into the standing crops, any of these might destroy them and often did. They might fail from lack of fertilisers or the land might fail from excessive cropping; or because the subdivision of the property between all the sons made it impossible to farm it economically. This was the law of inheritance carried to the ultimate limits of absurdity; by it the individual holding might be reduced to the size of the back yard of a slum property. But whatever happened to it this was the cycle and had been for two thousand years.
The other crops were mustard and tobacco. At one time, as the result of the efforts of two British officers, tobacco grown in the forests of Bhogpur, a town somewhere to the south-east, had been so esteemed that, mixed with Latakia and Manila leaf, it had been sold in tins, but this like so many other ventures had eventually come to nothing. In the fields round about the village, stood the machans, rickety constructions in which watchmen sat at night to scare off wild animals, principally wild pig and nilgai that would play havoc with any crop if they succeeded in entering it. Armed with a pot containing a smudge of fire they passed the hours of darkness groaning apprehensively and calling to their neighbours in other machans in order to keep up their spirits.
The Headman, an old-looking man but probably not more than fifty, spoke with nostalgia of the days when the British were still in India.
‘Your honour,’ he said, ‘this village is often flooded and at such times we are in great misery. We have asked the Government to provide us with an embankment. That was more than a year ago and so far nothing has happened. In the time of the Raj such a thing would not have been allowed. A Sahib would have come on his horse and quite soon all would have been well.’
‘I wonder,’ G. said, ‘why they did not ask the Sahib for an embankment when he was coming here on his horse.’
In the circumstances this did not seem to be a good time to produce Mr Nehru’s letter which asked for assistance on our behalf, rather than proffering it. Instead we bought some potatoes and some stunted eggs for the boatmen, and the Headman gave us a bunch of green bananas. This was the extent of our shopping, for this was all they had to offer us. The Headman was genuinely sorry to see us go, as were the other inhabitants and we left watched by the women. They were wraith-like, swaying figures dressed in the lugri, the poor woman’s version of the sari, and wrapped overall in yet another sheet called the chadar. There are some 450,000 villages in India similar to this, all with less than 500 inhabitants, all with similar problems. Who can know what it is like to live one’s life in a village such as this with its 300 inhabitants and its 5,000 bighas13 of land, except those who are born there and live in it all their days? Not even the most assiduous anthropologist or the most devoted social worker. The windowless front that this village presented to the world seemed to be a symbol of the inhabitants: turned in upon themselves by its very layout, as if in a hall of mirrors; still, in spite of legislation, inhibited by consideration of caste; still, in spite of legislation, the victims of moneylenders paying off their never-to-be-discharged debts at an interest of anything up to 25 per cent; desiccated by the summer sun; ploughing through a Passchendaele of mud in the rainy season; creeping into the fields to put out a black pot to ward off the evil eye. Poor ignorant people, living on a knife-edge between survival and disaster.
CHAPTER SIX The way to the Balawali Bridge
The river is not navigable until it reaches the vicinity of Nagal in pargana Najibabad.
District Gazetteer of the United Provinces, Vol. XIV, Bijnor; Allahabad, 1908
Back in the boat I began to feel better. The weather was fine and warm, like a beautiful summer’s day in England; the sort of day