A Land Languishes...

I am a nurturer, a load bearer, a silent spectator and a carrier of scars and memories. I have been a witness for generations of life forms that have blossomed as well as perished on me. I am the land you walk on, the land you worship, the land you curse and the one who silently watches you grow and patiently wait for you to come back to me!

You have named me ‘Gummalapuram’ and have demarcated me to be within the village limits, belonging to Thally taluk and Krishnagiri district of Tamil Nadu state of India. As a contagious portion of land, I also encompass small hamlets like Ganganahalli, G.M Doddi and Gumalla.

Let me begin my story, my version of the events because as the old African proverb goes – ‘Until the Story of the hunt is told by the Lion, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter’.

My timeline is very vast to be easily comprehended by your sense of time. So, I shall restrict my narration to the period of the advent of humans on me. I had always been covered by scrub forests, dominated by bamboo, as the weather I harbour supports mostly scrub vegetation. Though scrub forests are no less interesting than evergreen forests. These forests are home to some beautiful birds like the Paradise Flycatcher, Sirkeer Malkoha and many more mesmerising feathered friends. My forests sheltered some proud cats like the tigers and leopards and have been home to the giants - elephants, for decades now!

Your kind has always lived in harmony with me and my other tenants. Your ancestors revered and worshipped me. Their life revolved around my seasons and they always accepted my givings with gratitude and considered every life around them sacred. They were clever when they took shelter in caves to secure themselves from elephants in the nights. Till date you will find some beautiful caves on me that have the remains of your ancestral bricks and residence proof. Such was the harmony between your ancestors and me that you sit in these caves for a minute; you will know that only harmony with me can give you that quality of peace and calmness! Yet with each passing day, you are undressing me naked and building your beloved cement villas that you covet with such great obsession and pride! But I know the truth that inside those villas you, my children, undergo immense depression, dissatisfaction, sorrows but still put on the most fake smiles I have ever seen in my lifetime (which is so huge that you cannot comprehend!).

Things began to change when two brothers who were kings, dropped on me one fine day! They were hurt and bloodied from a battle and came to my village in search of help. Though I have never understood your concept of ‘caste’, it seemed to matter for your ancestors. One such caste, who was the majority on me, closed their doors to the kings and refused to give them water.  By then, one of the kings ventured off to my forests to seek solace while his brother went to another caste seeking help. While the former walked to the forest, drops of his blood kept dripping on me. And at every drop that fell, a temple arose and thus, the saying that I have 108 temples, 108 caves and 108 lakes! The king who went to the forest died due to his injuries and there lies a temple which is worshipped till date by the villagers. They go in turns, again according to their caste, to offer their prayers to this temple for rains every year. And lo behold, it wasn’t hard for me to guess that the villagers believed that it would rain only when the highest caste would go to pray! Yeah, my rains follow and understand your language of caste! Oh, I have this tendency to go off track when I start narrating my story. Getting back to the brothers - Whereas the brother who died in the village, cursed the folks who had refused to help hurting humans and legend has it that the entire household of those families have perished from this village!

As time progressed, the lives on me became more anthropocene and economical. When your ancestors were dependant on my forests, their life might have been difficult but it was more peaceful and qualitative. Now, the villagers strive hard to feed and clothe themselves. My soil was so red and rich that it attracted brick making industry to my villages. I kept saying no to your extraction but, sadly, you men never understand the term ‘No’ from any female and now, due to your over extraction, my soil is neither red nor rich anymore! The village was dominated by one or two households that were materialistically better off than the others. Rest of the villagers went to their households for work and worked on ‘their’ land. How can I be owned by any, still remains a mystery to me! Because I do not belong to any life form, I have lived before you and I shall live after you. You have arisen from me and you shall come back to me and become a part of me! Then how can you demarcate me and call me your ‘property’. I nurture all the life forms on me, then how can you restrict me on a paper and say I should nurture only certain households while the rest drop their sweat on me and till me! Those were hard times when the villagers started to chop my forests to collect firewood and sell them in the market. They started to clear my forests to make more land for their kind, not realising their folly, that for their kind to survive, they needed my forests. As the proverb goes, they were digging their own grave with no realisation. I had blessed my villagers with everything they needed – fertile land, rains that lasted 9 months in a year, food, forests and peace of mind. I am clueless as to why did they then clear my forests that called the rains for them, degraded the very soil that gave them food to eat, a lifestyle that gave equal measure of leisure and work – only to earn some papered money that would buy them all the things I had arranged for with no price! How can I forget, you call yourselves the most evolved and intelligent creatures on me. Aren’t you now!?

Time further progressed and another land called ‘Bangalore’ grew in proximity to me. This land has her own story to share but I will stick to my own. As she grew closer and closer to me, my villagers morphed. They morphed into economically driven machines that only dreamt of re-locating to Bangalore and make loads of money! They forgot and still tend to live that way, that the very essences of life forms on me are bio-diversity and balance! When monoculture seeps into life, like in education, work fields, lifestyle, agriculture or food – that life form becomes too boring for me to sustain and I decide to slowly wipe that form off my face.

The life forms that I considered my own have tonsured me bald by cutting away all the trees on me and left me so naked that I have stopped feeling ashamed of my nakedness anymore. My rich dressing of red soil is all gone and now I wear tattered rags of yellow, sandy, degraded soil. My other life forms too are shooed and scared away when they come on me in search of food and water. There is no more gratitude or sacredness to life or me! While my trees called the rains, by cutting away the very old trees, no one is left to call the rains to me now. I am blazing with thirst, waiting to quench my parched body and cover myself back with forests. Though few of you folks may argue that you have planted Eucalyptus to cover me up, those trees don’t belong on me, they come from a far off distant land-relative of mine and they do not understand my language. They do not speak the language that would call my rains nor do they build a relation with my soil and other organisms down here. Your ancestors and I communicated with each other and shared our stories and lived peacefully. Now, I try to communicate with you, in the language your ancestors understood but which you have arrogantly refused to learn. I give you signs that if you do not heal me, you shall perish, because your timeline is miniscule when compared to my infinite one!

Until all life forms on me are not treated with love and respect by you, including certain groups of your own species, I shall not be healed. I need my forests to cover me, call my rains; I need my other life forms to maintain balance of life on me; I need you too to enjoy my creation and beauty. There is still time to heal all of us, including you, to come back to being wholesome and blissful again.

I pray to you to stop growing towards the sky, because your roots are in me, you need the warmth I give. Let your sight come back to me again, O human, stop beckoning to reach the sky, and bend down to touch me with reverence again so I can bless you with peace and bliss! 

Yours’ truly,

Gummalapuram

Being the new bride in a village...

Being the youngest amongst my first cousins on both paternal and maternal side, I had seen a lot of marriages – new brides coming into our family and my girl cousins going off as brides to new families. I had seen how difficult a transition period that is for a girl – adjusting to a new family, new culture, new place, new traditions and customs. To add to all this, the whole set of expectations from the bride whereas the bridegroom is free of all expectations!

With all this awareness and witness, I came as a new bride to this village. But the whole village way of welcoming a new bride is so different from the city ways. A bride is an article of intrigue, curiosity, gossip and rebuke. And I have been experiencing all this the past 45 days. All the elder ladies of the village casually walk into the house at any time of the day asking to see the new bride or wife of Mr.M (my husband). Probably it does not occur to them that maybe I am not in a state to entertain guests. At any moment that they walk in I need to go parade myself in front of them for their examination. While some question me on my cooking skills, some ask my mother-in-law if I do the household chores and while some take the extra liberty to reprimand me on my choice of clothes or on my not-wearing-bangles habit or not putting ‘bindi’ on my forehead. To all this I just stand there, smile and nod my head! I find this the best way to reply rather than start an argument on my freedom of choice in clothes or my way of living.

Till date I have not mustered enough courage to walk alone on the village roads. I always ask my husband to accompany me while walking to the fields or just for a walk in the evening. Just once when I made up enough courage to walk with my sister-in-law, I got reproached by some lady I do not even recognise for not wearing bangles. As I was beginning to start an argument with that lady thinking enough is enough, my sister-in-law, who is one sweet, quiet lady, walked me away from the village.          

For all the restrictions we face in the cities, I have been a strong protestor and demand either rational or logic behind certain traditional practises. Having come from this background, every time someone here tells me how important it is to wear the mangalsutra or toe rings, I lose my inner equanimity and rebel against the custom of a girl having to wear all proof of marriage whereas the man walks around with not a little change in his life – be it change in clothes, habit of wearing / not wearing jewellery, change of house, change of family – nothing whatsoever!

For a person who detests attention, this phase of being the new bride in the village is tiring me out and testing all my meditation capacity of remaining calm while my temper is touching newer heights each time. Silently, I pray each day that a new bride arrives in the village soon enough to take away all the attention and intrigue from me!

The V of being a Villager..

In few instances, living in the village seems almost the same as living in the city and in few others, it feels like living in another planet altogether!

I have just started to learn the very basics of living in a village and I call it - learning the V of becoming a Villager.

The two major differences that hit me in my face when I moved into Hoovinahalli were these - Water system and walking into each others' house!

Water System
So, the entire village has no concept of overhead water tanks and none of the houses inside the village have pipe systems. Basically, we have no taps!😨 The village has few tanks placed in common spaces and that gets filled from a bore-well near the village lake. There is a water-man from the Village Panchayat whose job it is to fill the tanks everyday. The ladies of the house take vessels ('kodpaanas') from their houses and carry them back to the houses for water consumption. Are you wondering how many would we need everyday? I seem to have been a little lucky in this matter as the tank is very close to our house and depending on the crowd at the tank, we connect a really long pipe to the tank and fill all the big barrels at our place. So, we do this filling up activity every alternate day and it suffices us for all our activities - toilets, bathing, drinking, washing utensils and cleaning the house. Though the other ladies who come by when we have connected the pipe, remove the pipe to fill their utensils. We need to wait by and plead them to put the pipe back once they are done filling water.
This water filling activity is a very social one in the village. The ladies use this activity to chit-chat, gossip and also, fight at times! I am a little shy of people and have been avoiding this activity since the month I got here. I have been coaxing my mother-in-law and husband to do this activity. I dread the day I may have to forcibly do it. Because since the day I got here I have kind of been the intriguing creature for all the folks of the village. Every time I step out I get stared at by the ladies and since I do not talk with any of the ladies, my poor dear mother-in-law bears the brunt of all the gossip!!

Walking into each others' house
The doors in the village are never locked except when we sleep. The feeling of community is so strong here that they keep walking into each others' house at anytime of the day. And since I am the new one in the village, ladies just walk into our house saying they came to see the new daughter-in-law. In such situations, I am so confused as to what am I supposed to do - stand like a doll for them to see!?😕 There was this one particular morning when my mother-in-law and I were making breakfast, when this neighbor of ours, who is quite aged, walks into our kitchen and makes herself comfortable on the floor and starts gossiping at 9 in the morning! And this is not the norm only with the ladies but also with the men. My husband's friends walk into the house in the morning and sit in the verandah and chit-chat away to glory for an hour or so. Having been in Bangalore for a long time, I would never have imagined chit-chatting with my neighbor at 9 in the morning, that would be the time I would be cursing away in a road jam!

Though I am uncomfortable right now with this whole new way of walking into each others' house, it is at these times that I remember Gandhiji who emphasized that we work hard for few hours in a day and the rest we spend singing, dancing and being a part of the commune.

When compared to my life in Bangalore, I just remember rushing to work, rushing to finish a project at work, rushing back home, rushing to eat and rushing to sleep.

Though the true spirit of community is reducing each day in the village, there is still some left!

Moving from U to V

What is the U and the V in the title!?

Moving from being a Urbaner to a Villager... In the alphabetic order, it is very simple and easy to jump from U to V. But my moving from U to V is an adventure of its own and has become my present life story! 😉

I had read and seen a lot of stories about folks who grew up in cities, quit their urban lives and buy land in some village and settle down there. These stories did not intrigue me much because of all the stories that I read, somewhere I felt the story was incomplete as they did not become a part of the village but rather maintained their ‘urban’ essence very much alive in them. After entering the world of alternatives and sustainability and reading Gandhiji’s Swaraj, I had this innate desire in me to be a part of a village. I was not aware that fate had already kept exactly that in store for me – I fell in love with a farmer! I got married and moved into his village – Hoovinahalli, Hassan.

It has been almost a month since I moved to the village as the daughter-in-law of this house. This is a small hamlet with hardly 50 houses and is quite interior. Compared to other villages that I have visited and worked in, this village has lesser city influence and still has the village spirit.

The House

I moved into a house that was built almost a hundred years back and has no recent luxuries. It was built in the era when family members had no private rooms and a house was meant to serve as a shelter and nothing more. The original structure is built completely with mud and has one hall, a very basic kitchen, a store-cum-pooja room and a bathroom. My father-in-law made his own additions to the house and we now have two tiny rooms and a toilet at the back. All the additions were built by mud bricks.  We have tiled roof and wooden planks below the tiles that serve as the attic as well. We have a small sitting area around the house which is used by all the villagers to come and chit chat by whenever they are passing our house. The concept of safety is very weak here and the house front door is hardly ever locked and can be unlatched by just squeezing your hand through the window next to the door. The windows in the front have no glass and the entire verandah is open to scrutiny by the village. The kitchen is built for squatting and cooking style. There is also a facility for firewood cooking too. This house has no concept of privacy and anything we speak in any corner can be heard across the entire structure! 

My next post will be about the villagers and their way of living!

Chaotic Land of Faith

The holiest river of India, Ganga, flourishes this land with fertility and at every source where she springs, a temple is bound to be seen! Faith seems to be in abundance here – the number of holy places and also the devotion the people of this land still carry.

Bihar – the place I like to call “Chaotic Land of Faith” was world famous as Pataliputra since time unknown!  One week stay in this state has left a crater-size impact in my head. Landing in the Patna airport – Lok Nayak  Jayaprakash International Airport is in total contrary to Bengalooru or Kolkata International airports that we are used to seeing. This airport gives you the feeling of India, a feeling of home. It is small when compared to the other airports and it is not a structure of glasses like the million others. I was welcomed with a bang of heat wave as soon as I stepped onto the land. I stayed over at a relative’s place in Patna, a big Indian joint family. Being a South Indian and having stayed in Mysore for the majority of my life, I am used to wide empty roads. Patna came as a shocker to me. The inner roads are narrower than we can imagine, but SUVs like Scorpio, Fortuner still manage to ply on them, with cars parked on one side of the road. If SUVs represent the modernity being ushered into Bihar, man pulled rickshaws plying with two passengers remind us of the past of this land which manages to squeeze and remain in the present.

My first visit was to Patan Devi’s temple in the inner roads of Patna. People of this city believe and worship this Goddess very strongly. Although, I did not find much peace here due to loud music of ‘Chikni Chameli’, a popular bollywood tune being played right next to the temple and thousands of flies swarming the place. This was followed by a visit to Patna Sahib, a beautiful marble Gurudwar in the midst of the city. This was the place where Guru Gobind Singh was born. The British rule gifted India with priceless monuments and one of it being Gol Ghar – a grain storage monument. The heat tires you out very soon and it was time to say ‘pack up’ for the day.

The next morning we left early to see places near Rajgirh. We had amazing litti with channa by the roadside hawkers. Then we had amazing undiluted sugarcane juice with a pinch of salt. We reached the ruins of Nalanda University and I remained spell bound for the next two hours. I am proud to say I am from a country which respects knowledge from time immemorial. The excavated ruins are just 10% of the actual University which supported more than thousands of students, providing them with accommodation, food and education. Even though the temperature was soaring above 40®C, I felt very peaceful in these ruins. I wished I could travel back in time and experience this place when it was blossoming at its peak where Buddhist monks gained immense knowledge to become scholars in the kings’ hall. Sadly, all the resources were burnt by the invaders and it’s only the ruins that remain. After this we visited the museum right opposite the ruins, which houses the articles excavated in the university premises.

Rajgir, the erstwhile capital of the Magadha kingdom now houses a beautiful Shanthi Stupa on the hill top. The Stupa gives you a feeling of peace even when you visit it in the noon while the sun burns at its highest. It can be reached by taking the steps or using the ropeway. The ropeway journey is unique and lets you calm your nerves while you travel amidst breath taking view of the greenery all around.

In Rajgir, we also have the hot water spring which has a high level of sulphur. Numerous people come here to take a long bath in the “kund” which miraculously rids them of all skin irritants and bruises. The sulphur in the water is what does the trick!

Next stop was Paawapuri and its impressive Jal Mandir. Nowhere else in India would anyone find the National flower in this abundance! Amidst the grandeur of lotuses lies a soothing white floating-like structure – the Jal Mandir, a holy place of the Jains.

On the way back home in Patna, we stopped to see the very famous ‘Agam Kuan’. India has plenty of stories of fratricide for the coveted throne. Agam Kuan is the place where Ashoka disposed his brothers’ corpses to become the king of the Mauryan Empire.  The well is said to be so deep that the government has not been able to measure its depth even after using the modern equipments to pump out the water. It is also said that this place was part of Ashoka’s hell, a disguised torture chamber. Only the Agam Kuan remains today!

One cannot visit the state of Bihar and not see Bodhgaya. The place where Buddha attained enlightenment is now the place of monasteries from all the Buddhist countries. Each nation has a monastery of its own in its unique style and décor. The Thailand monastery glitters when the sun rays fall on its glassed roof. Japanese monastery is so silent and peaceful, that I could hear silence whisper in my ears. Buddha’s reminiscence is felt all around you in Bodhgaya, even though the place is brimming with commercialization and looks at economizing by the tourist inflow into this place.

Gaya is hardly 6-7kms from Bodhgaya and is famous for its temples. River Phalgun flows underground here and the Hindus burn the bodies of their dear ones on the rivers’ shore and also perform ‘pind dhaan’. The story behind the river being underground is that Sita cursed the river that the river will never show her face on the earth again. Hence, Phalgun flows underground at just 2ft below the surface.  

There are numerous folklore and mythical stories in Bihar and interacting with the locals gives you the best opportunity to know the history of the place/ river/ monument in the state. The locals still refer to Ashoka as ‘Samrat Ashoka’ which shows the reverence an emperor of his stature still commands even centuries after his reign. Every time I think of the ruins of Nalanda, the temple in Bodhgaya, the stupas in Rajgir I wish I could travel back in time to experience India when Bihar was world famous as Pataliputra.

For the abundance of faith that we see in the countless temples, stupas and the gurudwar, Bihar is reeling in chaos due to globalization and when you view the city atop Gol Ghar, all you can imagine is Ashoka ruling his empire from Pataliputra with all its grandeur and splendor!