I catch a bus twice a year, from Chennai,
and go towards Tiruvannamalai. Sometimes, I stop to see my father’s sister in
Vellore. There is always a water crises in the summer, and the CMC (Christian
Medical College) buys its water from Andhra villages, which send the water for
the residences in trucks. The land so arid and deforested, begins to change, as
one moves towards Tiruvannamalai, and one passes Arni, where agriculture
becomes vivid, changing the landscape
by the season according to harvests and seasons. The rail track is sometimes
bedecked with seasonal flowers growing at the edges, including lilies during
Easter week, growing wild. In the bus, sometimes, patients with leprosy get on,
with their kin, and there is a sense that the Vellore hospital provides succour
to many of these peasants, who have an unerring sense of their own self worth.
The bus is often packed with others who are heading to Tiruvannamalai for
festivals or are devotees at the 1000 year old temple, and pilgrimage is a
constant occupational source for flower sellers and leafplate vendors and
vegetable gardeners. Some villages on the route are so poor, that they thresh
ragi by leaving it on the road, and allowing the trucks and buses and cars to
ride over it. In hot summer, at Dharmagiri, the peasants bring perfect mangoes
from their small plots to sell to the bus riders, and in other seasons, it
would be grapes, bannanas of various shapes and sizes and colours, and
cucumbers, kakdis, gourds, peanuts soaked in
water and salt, while still in their shells and ofcourse the ubiquitous
fried snacks the tamils so love, using local grams, sesame and rice. In Gingee,
the forts of the 13th century Nayaka kings rise above the
agricultural fields, on rocky hilltops from where they once, as Telugu kings
and overlords in Tamil country viewed their subjects. The work of intellectuals
from rural communities who return to their roots, and provide new learning
avenues is now well established in this belt, where alternative pedagogies have
found immense popularity among the local people. Pondicherry, Tiruvannamalai
and Vellore are the new hubs for the networks which orient others working in
more distant fields and forests with tribal and dalit children.
Landless labour makes a living in the city,
the women as domestic servants, and the men as carpenters, masons, cycle
mechanics and white washers. That they go out as anonymous sandal wood
smugglers is something that their families don’t know about. The twenty
labourers who were killed by the Andhra police without any compunction, avoiding the legal process is something which shocks the nation. In a country which
is rocked by suicide, murder and rape on a continuous basis, we still pride
ourselves that we are a democracy, and that our courts both local and Supreme
are respected.
Tensions between the States, in a Federation
of States is something that is endemic, particularly with regard to water and
forests. When Veerappen, the sandal wood smuggler evaded the police in
Karnataka, it was certainly because the local communities provided him with
support. He hid in the forests, and his reach went as far as Kerala. A police
officer, who visited the Dalai Lama, and spoke about his inability to shoot
Veerappen on sight, as might be expected of him, was told calmly, by the Nobel Prize winner and commonly
acknowledged saint, “For the greater good.” A decade ago, police officers did
feel that their call to duty was a moral code, with its repercussions for their
own sense of work and vocation.
Now,
we know that encounter deaths receive no signature of legal vindication, unless
it is politically motivated. Those twenty lives are gone, like many others lost in encounter killings, but
how do we make sure that these needless killings by State machinery is not
reduplicated?
If there is no respect for courts of law, fascism rises, in its notation
of predatory crimes, as “normal”. However, the poor do have their rights, and
this is to survive in conditions which are so hostile, that we cannot even
imagine them, as we eat our toast,eggs and
hill produce jam, or our paranthas and potato curry, or our idli and
sambar, and read the endlessly horrible news in morning papers. Yet, the poor
too celebrate their lives, and any bystander can see that in the daily chores
there is so much love and laughter. The bourgeoisie
often feels humiliated by their joi de vivre. But, “Seeing is Not Believing”,
as Sociologists are taught very early in their careers by their teachers.
The statistics for child infanticide in
Dharmapuri were so high, that Jayalalitha had to set up child adoption centres,
and so also the statistics for rape, suicide and murder are alarming. V.Sujatha, in personal
communication, informs me that body weight says nothing about the presence of
anaemia, so the fact that the fields are green, agriculture successful, market
gardens plentiful, the children sturdy and school going, and mid day meals compulsory, says nothing about the real condition of
the populace. Subsistence societies are essentially food producing and food
consuming. Their nutritional needs are met on hand by whatever is available. In
a weaving village near Madurai, the people received their cotton thread from Co-optex,
wove the sarees on the streets, on simple wooden looms, and ate the produce of
their gardens. There was nothing available in their shops by way of vegetables
or fruit, which they could neither afford, nor were in the habit of eating.
Plantains, gourds, rice was sufficient for their daily intake, and there was no
other world that impinged on this every day reality. The Ministry of Skills which now engages with employment-feasible
learning has to take into account weaving and fishing communities where artisanal
communities have to be reintegrated into new ways of making a livelihood which
is locally pertinent, instead of forcing them all into smart city construction
as manual labourers or cyber coolies. Agriculture, Fishing, Forestry and Pastoralism
and Craft Production grow together, With
climate change, the equibilibrium has to be restored in terms of contextual
learning, where cotton, sea shell, wood, lac, bamboo and metals all provide
livelihood options when worked with, for urban consumer culture, without
damaging the environment. This means new learning patterns, which are not only
oriented to clericalisation of the masses. Its seriously cheaper for the State to support Agriculture than plan a mission to mars for purposes of habitation.
