May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (18 page)

For Babu Achal Singh, this was the last straw. He became convinced there was no place for a man like himself in the new India, and three years later, he was dead. His land was left to his two sons, who had recently returned to the village from the nearby city of Allahabad. One of the sons was Amar Singh, and the other was Shardul Singh. It was a terrible time for them. They were young and inexperienced, the price of grain was low, and Prasad taunted them publicly. One day in the village he called them two little chicks, boasting that he would soon pluck all their feathers. In 1959, when the government began consolidating landholdings—through an elaborate system of reassigning land so that a family’s holdings would be in a single block rather than in scattered parcels—Prasad, in the landlords’ view, seized this as an opportunity for more power. The landlords charged that Prasad, in a further attempt to reduce the landlords’ holdings, set up stooges who claimed that a parcel of someone else’s land was theirs.

By 1961, the landlords became convinced that tactics like these were
alienating Prasad from other villagers as well. Tired of feeling powerless, Shardul and Amar Singh put up a washerman and a few others for the 1961 village panchayat elections. Enough of their candidates won to encourage them to challenge Prasad for his seat in the state legislature the following year. They did so by putting up a Pasi, hoping that someone from Prasad’s own caste would cut into his vote base. Then the landlord brothers launched an all-out assault. They ran a bicycle courier service to all parts of the constituency, keeping track of developments in 165 villages. They enlisted seventy volunteers, and Amar Singh campaigned for six days by elephant. Prasad was defeated, and power returned to where it had always been, in the hands of the landlords.

The reestablishment of the landlords did not, however, bring peace. The warring continued and soon deteriorated into violence. First some of the landlords’ men murdered one of Prasad’s supporters, spreading tension in the Pasi community. The next year Shri Ram Choudhary, the middle-caste farmer who was the incumbent pradhan during my year in Khajuron, plotted further revenge with Bhabhiji’s husband and two other men. One night at sunset, they set upon Prasad while he was walking home from his fields and threw him down. Bhabhiji’s husband, Sheo Singh, our host in the village, cut off most of Prasad’s nose with a knife.

In the hospital, Prasad’s nose was reconstructed with plastic surgery, but it never looked right again. It was crooked, and the tip was too bulbous. Shri Ram Choudhary had not wanted to kill Prasad. He just wanted to humiliate him, and that he had done. “They were fed up with my policies, so they attacked me personally,” Prasad told me, with only mild anger, two decades later. The police investigated, but under pressure from the landlords nothing ever came of it. With Prasad defeated, the feud settled down, and in 1973 Shardul Singh was elected as a local district leader, in charge of Khajuron and fifty other villages. From then on, Khajuron was relatively peaceful, although village politics continued to seethe with rivalries and resentments.

Which brings us, finally, to the campaign of July 1988. I had been coming to Khajuron for more than a year, and the race for pradhan fell during my sixth, and final, trip to the village. The leading candidates, once again, were Shri Ram Choudhary, the incumbent, who had the support of the landlords and was fighting to retain his seat, and Arvind Kumar Awasthi, the young Brahmin, who was a strong challenger. The other leading candidate was Rameshwar Prasad, the Pasi
and deposed former pradhan. “I was controlling this village,” Prasad told me, “but my power was distributed hither and thither. Now I am going to collect my power back.”

THE WOMEN ALL POURED OUT OF THEIR HOMES ON ELECTION DAY, A GRAY
and muddy Tuesday, when the rain at last had stopped. I was surprised to realize how many of the women I knew. For a year, I had been sitting in their houses, but since so few of them went out, I had never seen them together as a group. Now here they all were, lined up in front of the schoolhouse to vote, peeking out from the saris covering their heads. They waved to me or said hello. Most actually seemed happy to see me. For the first time in Khajuron I had a small sense of success, or at least of completion. Adding to that was the presence of my father, who had come to India that summer to make one of his travelogues. The film he had taken of the bathing ghats at Benares before I was born had been my first look at India; now I had brought him to Khajuron on this last visit so he could get some footage of an Indian village election. When I looked over at him, he was busy filming close-ups of the chair, tractor, camel and other symbols that appeared on the ballot. The monsoon light was drab, but otherwise it was a good scene for a filmmaker: children darted between the lines of voters, screaming happily, and the voices of the adults buzzed excitedly. Thirteen hundred people were registered to vote, a figure that included the population of the hamlets, and turnout was expected to be 70 percent. Election day was yet another festival in Khajuron, an excuse to take the morning off from the chores and the fields.

The candidates’ campaign workers were clustered in tiny little knots on the sidelines, going over the big books of voting rolls and sending out messengers to get people down to the polls. The only unhappy people were the candidates, who moved nervously through the crowd and then went into huddles with their advisers. Arvind Kumar Awasthi looked the most nervous of all. Not only was it his first election, but he had spent the night before trying to control damaging scuttlebutt that he had been bribing poor people for their votes with the promise of dhotis, the sarong-style cotton garments worn by the men. “This is a rumor,” he said, looking worried. “It is all wrong.”

The only person I didn’t see was Sudevi, the widow, even though I had been looking for her all morning. I wanted to say good-bye, and also to give her the photograph of her grandson that I had taken in
March. It was a nice picture: Sudevi was on the right, peering shyly out from her sari, while her daughter-in-law stood on the left, proudly holding her firstborn on her hip. In the photograph the baby looked pudgy and healthy, a four-month-old in a pink-and-green wool sweater and a little cotton hood. Under his eyes were dark smudges of kohl, a black powder that Hindus believe wards off evil spirits. I scanned the crowd for Sudevi once again. At last I saw her, standing in one of the long lines of women waiting to vote. I waved to her, and she waved back. I hurried over to give her the picture.

She took it in her hand and looked at it for a long time. Finally she sighed.

“The baby died at the end of March,” she said quietly. There was no shock in her voice, just sad resignation. Babies died all the time in Khajuron. “For four or five days he had fever,” she said. She and her daughter-in-law took the baby twice to see Dr. Kamlesh in Gurha, who gave him medication for double pneumonia. They thought the baby was getting better, but one day, suddenly, he died. “We were not thinking that the boy would die of fever,” Sudevi said. She had buried her grandson in the fields. Hindu custom calls for young children to be buried, not cremated.

The day after the election, Arvind Kumar Awasthi, the Brahmin challenger, was declared the new pradhan. He won with 389 votes, compared with 278 for Prasad and 254 for Shri Ram Choudhary. Though the landlord-backed incumbent had been defeated, it was not really a surprise. No pradhan in the history of Khajuron had ever been reelected. Arvind Kumar Awasthi had won with the support of Khajuron’s large Brahmin community, as well as some middle-caste voters and a few Kshatriyas who had split with the other landlords. Although I never learned if the charges of vote-buying were true, Awasthi was clearly a young man in a hurry who had run an energetic campaign.

But when I asked him what he intended to do for the women, his answer was hardly the voice of a new generation. “The ladies in this village don’t want to do anything,” he informed me. “Even if an effort is made, they still won’t do anything. They are very traditional in their attitudes.”

I don’t suppose it would have mattered, though, if the new pradhan had by some miracle been enlightened regarding women. As it was, a village election like this barely touched the lives of the women. They heard some news from their neighbors, but they did not participate in the campaign and always voted as their husbands did. The women were
like shadows, irrelevant to village debate and the shaping, such as it was, of the future. Their lives, as Simone de Beauvoir wrote in
The Second Sex
, were concerned not with the transcendence of existence, but with the repetition of life—with babies born, and babies who died, and babies who grew up and married to begin the cycle anew. The labor they performed in this pursuit was essential to life itself but was largely invisible. All of them accepted this; only one woman I spoke to came anywhere close to seeing it as unfair. “Men are not smarter,” said Sheela, the silversmith’s wife. “But they have been educated and go outside. Women stay in the house.”

As I left the village for the last time on election day, I had the feeling that I had just begun. It was as if I had peeled off one and a half layers of fifty, and what I had learned was only an early glimmering of truth. After all, it was not until the last time I had tea with Susheela Bajpai, the day before the election, that she finally admitted what had been apparent all along, despite her earlier denials: she did not like purdah. “I would like to go out and meet people,” she said. “But I can’t. People will talk, and say, ‘Why are you starting this thing?’ ”

More than anything else, my experience in the village taught me firsthand about the most fundamental centuries-old problems of women in India. I left Khajuron wondering if change would ever come, and if it was even possible for the government or a feminist movement to significantly affect their lives. I also left in awe at the women’s resilience and strength. Without them, and especially without Bhabhiji, who taught me the most, I would have missed the most troubling, and inspiring, part of my journey in India.

IF YOU GAZE DOWN AT THE VILLAGE OF BELUKKURICHI FROM THE ONE
-thousand-year-old Hindu temple that sits on one of the higher surrounding hills, the valley below takes on the lush, whimsical character of an illustration from a book of fairy tales. Clusters of coconut palms sprout up from the land, and little cars motor purposefully along roads that bisect the radiant green fields of cassava and sugarcane. Belukkurichi lies deep in the interior of the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, far from the plains of Khajuron, and the moist landscape seems to have given the village a softness around its edges. At this distance, the scene appears serene, and the life within it benevolent. If you come down from the temple, what you see at first does not entirely change that impression. Although the drab little mud huts are clustered on reddish dirt lanes strewn with garbage, most have electricity and two dozen of them have television sets. Many of Belukkurichi’s three thousand villagers appear almost plump, and you understand why when you see them eat with great enthusiasm the mounds of rice that they mix with
cool yogurt. Even the Harijans seem reasonably well fed and do not have the sunken, defeated look of those in the north.

As you approach the town, you soon come upon the signs of a healthy village commerce: bicycle-repair shops, sweet crackers for sale in glass jars, pigs rooting through fruit peelings, clumps of red bananas hanging from tea stalls. The village even has a small library, a primary school and an old movie theater. As you walk through, your ears are filled with the usual film music blaring from unseen radios. The literacy rate of the women who come to shop here is higher than the national average, and they do not veil their faces with fear and embarrassment before strangers. Both young girls and grown women pin strands of cream-colored jasmine blossoms in their hair.