I and the Village

I spent the last 3 days of Navratra, the spring cycle of worshiping Maha Dev, the Great Goddess, about 90 km south of Banaras in the Kaimur village district of the stateof Bihar. Seema, my hostess studies village rituals in this area by comparing Kurmi rituals in the plains to those of the Kharwar tribe in the highlands, which is considered a Naxalite area. She and her husband are landlords in the village and owners of a farm that produces cereal crops and vegetables for market.

I attended a shamanistic exorcism ritual, a community blood sacrifice of goats (251altogther—folks were assigned a number, just like at Baskin-Robbins), and a non-violent sacrifice in which thrashing goats offered to the Goddess were made through her powers to lie inexpliably still while the priests offered prayers. I also trooped up a mountaintop at night to a 2000 year old living temple, the oldest in all Bihar and perhaps India itself, with only the garbha griyha standing following a large earthquake, or several, that leveled what was likely a large temple complex whose ancient pieces are strewn around the site.

This was all fascinating and exhausting, as the hot, dusty summer winds, the loo, are beginning to blow in from the western deserts of Rajasthan. The temperature in Varanasi today is about 108 F. (the heat, everyone says, is several weeks early) and will rise until the monsoon comes in June to punctuate it with violent rainstorms, the roads a running flood, as temperatures begin to abate in a process that takes until Otober to be truly comfortable. The dry heat is on the prowl to grab moisture away from puny little water-based beings. I drank 3 liters a day and wanted more. In this area the first gesture to a guest is a drink of well water, which I gratefully accepted while moving from house to house in Seema’s extended kin network.

One out of 10 people in the world live in the Gangetic plain, participants in an ancient cycle based on monsoon replenishment of the land and Himalayan meltwater replenishment of Ganga-ji. Most of the population in the area I was in are Dalits, and though caste discrimination is illegal, traditional hierarchies persist. The income of the poor is small, irregular and unreliable. In these parts many do not eat, in government parlance, one square meal a day, two squares being the government standard for poverty.

Land redistribution is the Naxalite solution (its goal unachieved, its means spectacular--of late blowing up railway tracks and road bridges). Friends argue that redistribution would create holdings too small to support large Indian families. Small plots also tie families to the land—even a single cow has to be fed and managed every day. For some members of the family to go to school or travel at all, a holding must support either a family large family to provide workers or be profitable enough for the hire of auxiliary workers. And whatever land a household acquires will be subdivided among the surviving sons when the father dies, making them less profitable still.

Add water table stress from irrigation of rice and wheat, water intensive crops to which much of this area is devoted, as opposed to gram and lentils whch drink much less water, against a background of reduced Gangetic flooding. For the past two years late and scanty monsoons and early heat have disrupted planting and harvesting, with significant crop loss. Food prices have risen alarmingly (18% since September), though not especially as returns for the farmer. Though the government pledges to buy crops at a guaranteed support price, it doesn’t always, which forces the sale of perishable crop at unfavorable prices for the farmers, who are not organized. My friends report near famine in the villages here during the last two years.

What happens if the crops fail? The state has reserve stocks—maybe enough, maybe not. A significant percentage is said to have been lost to mice, insects and water. Non-literate peasants forced off the land and migrating to the cities increases the surplus of uneducated urban labor and leaves the land to industrial interests that want to mechanize it on a large scale with destructive indifference to generations of social fabric for those who remain.

The political parties—the presumed alternative to Naxalism—have responded with high dramas swirling around claimed cultural and religious threats to distract from the unaddressed problems at issue. My friends think literacy is the best hope to counter the isolation and poverty of agricultural communities. Illiteracy is high even among the landed classes, who imagine that mere possession of land will see them through all futures. What education is available to boy is less available to girls, in whom families invest less resources because they will live most of their lives as wives in other families. There are programs that target girls for education and nutrition, and programs for food subsidy and distribution and microfinancing. How they work at bedrock is hard to know.

It’s not clear what would immediately change with literacy alone. Folks could farm smarter, perhaps the main point, might be cheated less often (or not), or make better choices for their children. But it’s not as though there are jobs in the village crying out for literate workers, and in Varanasi the unemployment rate is above 70 per cent, affecting both the college educated and the underclass. Perhaps the point is to set literacy in generational motion, both for its immediate pleasures (I saw newspapers and at the mela around the temple were displays on small paperbacks that looked like romance novels—also-----bicycles carrying folk-art decorated coolers of ice cream with cones strapped to the basket!) and long term gains.

Three days did away with whatever romantic views of village life I might have entertained. Settlements are dusty, hot and far apart, organized as clusters of small dwellings. Life expectancy in this area is about 60 years. Roads are narrow, mostly unpaved and difficult to traverse, not wide enough for two approaching vehicles to pass without backing up and going forward again, carefully. (The roads are built up from the fields to resist washing out. We rode in a well-traveled jeep (luxury mode both for the four wheel drive and the roof against the sun) piloted by an unbelievably skilled driver and accompanied by relatives and a young goat for the bloodless sacrifice—the fulfillment by my friend of a promise, a menotti, made on her behalf by a maternal aunt in the event my friend had a son, which she did five years ago. We had to leave the road and light out across the fields when roads were closed for repair or accident.

Most villagers move on bicycles (neither road nor bicycle lit at night except by moonlight) in wagons drawn by human and animal power, and the occasional motorcycle. Though settlements are scattered, everyone is connected to everyone else by one or two, not six degrees of separation. Against the sun, small dwellings of rammed earth with roofs of curved ceramic tile are constructed as much like dark, cool caves (no windows) as this dry hot climate permits. For the more prosperous who live in concrete and brick family compounds, electricity is simply unavailable most of the day, and expensive so that families with it live without it as much as possible (no light for curling up with a paperback or textbook). Prosperous landholders have hand pumps; wells near crossroads serve others.

Tradition—the whole fabric of festival, ritual, kin relations and the daily round of community life--is the major source of cultural cohesiveness and sociability and knowledge of the skills of survival here, though said to be weakening. How it will survive television and eduction, those powerful bringers of desire for what is beyond—both spottily availalble, one perhaps too powerful, the other perhaps not powerful enough--is a question for which there are no easy answers and much suffering to come in one form or another. Indian television has many channels devoted to puja (worship) and darshan (a ritual practice of gazing on the god). One ‘effect’ of television is to show village tribals and lowlanders that their distinctive rituals differ from those in the ‘next country’ (the term for the world beyond the villages, includin adjacent villages). They believe those rituals must be better or truer than their own and are constantly asking Seema hto show them these rituals they imagine to be so much better than their own.

There is a well known claim by Amartya Sen that democracies have avoided famine because the press is able to inform citizens of approaching food crises that generate political pressure to address the situation and get resources to those in danger. I’d say the increasing threat of famine in India, where Parliament has failed to address the substantive needs of the people for infrastructure and a sustainable agricultural policy, will be a strong test of that hypothesis.

I know; you wanted to hear about the possession ritual. Stay tuned.