When Rajeev Samant was at the Cathedral School in Bombay in the 1980s, he formed an Ayatollah Khomeini cult. This was not because he was a Shia fundamentalist or indeed a Muslim (although Salman Rushdie was a former Cathedralite) but because he thought it might entertain the other children and annoy the teachers. He also ran a gambling syndicate, betting on cricket matches, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, but managed to fix the odds so he and his friend Cyrus always won. As a student at Stanford he was, in his words, “basically a party guy.” He went on to work in the finance department at Oracle in California before deciding to return to India. Samant was coming home, wanting to do something different in the new economy.
His father had a small-scale plastics manufacturing business and had started a commercial diving company. One day they drove together a few hours out of Bombay to look at a patch of land the family owned near Nashik. It was a dry area on the northern end of the Deccan Plateau, not far from the source of the Godavari river, and close to an important pilgrimage site where Lord Ram was reputed to have bathed. His father was inclined to sell the land, but Samant had an idea: he could grow mangoes on it. He would need permission to pump water from a nearby lake. He employed Dattu Mahadu Vanse, a local labourer, to clear the earth.
Over time, Dattu would lift himself from poverty in a way that would not have been possible in earlier times, and life for him and his extended family would be transformed by India’s economic changes. With Samant, he cut down grass six feet tall and dug up the scrub, avoiding the cobras and leopards. The plan to grow mangoes worked, but there was no commercial market for them. Samant tried growing tomatoes, roses, peanuts. The problem was the same. The land was fertile, but it was nearly impossible to make a business succeed. One day he noticed farmers eating grapes. Nashik’s grapes and raisins were popular. Might it be possible to make wine?
Dattu Mahadu Vanse was a stocky man in jeans, trainers, a shirt and a necklace. He remembered what happened next: “Rajeev sir went back to America for three months. He returned with some vine cuttings and said, ‘It’s a wine grape.’ I said, ‘What is a wine?’ He said it was a product made from grape juice. I had to grow the saplings and to water them.” After growing some grapes successfully, Samant persuaded Kerry Damskey, a Californian winemaker, to come to India and show them how to go about making wine commercially. The climate was deemed to be similar to Brazil’s, between tropical and temperate, although Nashik suffered from a monsoon—which was unheard of in any of the world’s wine regions. During the growing season, the climate was not unlike that in Sonoma County in California or the Barossa Valley in Australia. No bank would lend Samant money for this untested project, and he had to borrow from family and friends before a commercial bank eventually agreed to make a loan. In 1999 they produced their first bottles of Sula Sauvignon Blanc, and a decade later Sula Vineyards was selling 3 million bottles a year and starting to export around the world.
Their principal ambition was to grow a local market for wine (annual per capita consumption in India was less than a tablespoon, against more than 50 litres in Sonia Gandhi’s country of birth) by attracting the new middle and upper classes. Until the late 1960s there had been prohibition in Maharashtra, and drinking alcohol was still seen by many as an improper activity, particularly among women. Samant was astute at marketing the product not as alcohol, but as a way of life. The Sula website said: “Mr. Samant is an avid sportsman and enjoys running, yoga, diving, windsurfing and playing tennis in his playtime. Sula Vineyards is also a leader in sustainable winemaking, and has created direct and indirect employment opportunities for thousands of rural youths.” His first coup was when he convinced Mumbai’s best-known hotel, the Taj, to stock his wines. “I got to see the man at the Taj because we were both old Cathedralites. He said he could get French wine at the same price. I said that’s true, but it’s bad wine. He tasted our Sauvignon Blanc and put it on their list.”39 Samant also persuaded the state authorities to see wine as an area of potential economic growth and not to put an excise duty on it as they did on spirits like rum. There were now more than twenty functioning wineries in Maharashtra.
Before the winery opened, Dattu had almost no way to make a living. He came from a tribal group called Mahadev Kolis, known in Maharashtra for following their own customs and for suffering discrimination and poverty. Producing no surplus crops on their scraps of land, they had nothing to sell but their labour. Members of the Mahadev Koli community, who tend to be short and dark, would often fall into debt to farmers, and find that in practice they had become bonded labourers. Dattu had no education at all. He went to a school once, but there was no teacher and he came home again. At the age of twelve he became a fisherman, sitting in an inflated tyre tube and paddling around a sun-splashed lake with a hook and a net. This sounds almost glamorous, like something from Huckleberry Finn, but it was bleak work. I asked Dattu how much he had earned. “That depends if I caught any fish. I sometimes made Rs100 per week. Sometimes Rs200.” Even on a good week, that was a lot less than $1.25 per day, and on a bad week it was about $0.30 per day.
We were sitting in a café above the Sula winery. Rajeev Samant ran the place along Californian lines, with the vineyards open to visitors, a tasting room and two restaurants: Kareem’s and Little Italy. The quality of the wine had improved over the years, as the vines matured. Nearly all of the visitors were Indian. Dattu spoke in Marathi, with his words interpreted by one of his younger colleagues, Santosh.
“My mother and father grew millet and chickpeas, enough for themselves. They were very poor because we are from a backward community. My first job was cutting the wild and thorny trees. Rajeev sir needed reliable people. I grew tomatoes and roses. When they were going to build the winery, I did other things like digging an eight-foot pit for a consultant engineer, and when the construction started I was a supervisor. I cleaned out the big tanks when they came from the manufacturer in Nashik. Mr. Kerry taught me how to clean a stainless-steel tank. It’s very, very difficult to make good wine. You have to be careful. I learned how to operate the press when we were doing the crush. I learned about racking [separating the wine from the lees or sediment]. Mr. Kerry had to explain all of this by sign language. If Rajeev sir was there, he would translate. I learned about the chilling plant, about adding bentonite to remove protein and how to avoid getting crystals in the wine. I understood how the automatic bottling plant would operate. I came to learn all the different parts of the winemaking process, although we did not speak the same language.”
A French wine grower had been with me when I toured the winery and been frankly astonished. As this man, Laurent, said: “In the south of France we cannot afford to employ the human beings. Otherwise, it is exactly the same. I can see the same love, the same passion to make the wine.” In the vineyards, they used the Israeli technology of drip irrigation.
I asked Dattu what his favourite wine was. “Shove you”—Sauvignon. “The first time I tasted liquor was at a post-harvest party when I had some champagne. I found it sour, and I felt a bit sleepy.” Did other members of his community like wine? “My father prefers a local rum made of molasses. The Mahadev Kolis are Adivasis and they normally prefer Chenin Blanc, which is not too expensive, and Madeira because it is sweet.” Santosh said, “Indians like fruity wines. Zinfandel is quite popular. You can see it being loaded there.” Out of the window, beside a stand of motorbikes which belonged to the workers, we could see an army truck being filled with cases of wine. On the way to Nashik I had seen the democratization of wine drinking—a roadside dhaba serving batata vada, potato fritters, with white wine.
Dattu’s talent and hard work had led to him getting a key position in the winery, even as graduates with degrees in subjects like microbiology were brought in by Rajeev Samant to take other posts.
“I am the cellar master. I look after all the cellar operations and have six people with me as a helping hand. We execute any instructions that come from the laboratory. I can’t write up the forms b
ecause I am still illiterate. I have a secretary who writes my report—he is my cousin-brother—detailing all transfers and additions. I know that information in my head, but other people need to have it written down, so they can read it. I know how many bottles are in each place, what date a process took place. We have to check oxygen levels, the torque on the caps, bacteria levels, cork moisture, the taste, the blending.”
This was not the first time I had heard of a clever person who was illiterate having exceptional powers of memory. The act of not writing down forced you to store knowledge in a different way; perhaps writing was a way of removing knowledge from your mind. “My salary is Rs20,000 [$450] per month. I have bought land and invested in life insurance. I grow grapes on my land and sell them to the winery. A lot of relatives come to me and ask to get their children into the business. I try to do my best for them, if they are capable. I don’t want to spoil my name. They have opportunities. I have five daughters and one son. The younger three are getting education. My son goes to an English-medium school and I want him to go to college. I’m not sure what he should study, as I have nobody in my community to guide me. Nobody has ever gone beyond the tenth grade. As he gets older I might seek advice from the Mahadev Kolis who live in the city.”40
Dattu was the world’s only Adivasi cellar master.
8
A QUARRY NEAR MYSORE
INDIA IS NEVER SHORT of horror stories. A bride was burned to death in Jodhpur on the orders of her mother-in-law because her family had not delivered a dowry. In Imphal, an unarmed young man was shot by police commandos, execution-style, only paces from the state assembly. A widely syndicated newspaper photograph showed a mentally ill girl tied to a post on a grimy city street while her mother went to work each day. A journalist reported from Patna that children had replaced oxen on the farmland of Raghubansh Prasad Singh, the rural development minister: in an accompanying photo, little boys dragged a heavy plough across a sodden field. The father of a boy was quoted: “Yahan par tractor nahi chal sakta hai, aur bail nahi jot sakta hai. Issliye bacha log hi jotega”—“A tractor or oxen cannot be used in this field and so that’s why children have to plough the land.” The minister laughed it off when confronted by a reporter: “They are just doing some small work in the field and it is just being blown out of proportion.”1 In Rajasthan, girls were injected with a cattle hormone to bring on puberty prematurely, so they could be sold to brothels in the United Arab Emirates.2 Dozens of handicapped children in Gulbarga were temporarily buried up to their necks in a garbage dump during a solar eclipse in the hope their disabilities might miraculously disappear. Several families in a village in eastern Uttar Pradesh were massacred because they came from the wrong caste.
Foreign correspondents, or Indian writers seeking a docile foreign audience, can make a living by reporting ceaseless tales of woe. Deracinated and placed in an alien context, they become India’s only story. Such accounts seem, in their enormity, to emerge from a distant or eternal past, and to offer evidence of the impossibility of progress. For outsiders who have not visited India, they reinforce long-standing prejudices and underline the subcontinent’s brutal, shocking and alien nature. For Westerners, poverty can be a source of entertainment: if the BBC wants a television show about child-trafficking in India, they send Lindsay Lohan from Mean Girls to West Bengal. Lohan helped the process along on Twitter: “Over 40 children saved so far … Doing THIS is a life worth living!!! Focusing on celebrities and lies is so disconcerting, when we can be changing the world one child at a time … hope everyone can see that … never too late to start helping others, however u can.”3
This is presumed to be the only explicable way to deal with India; a celebrity, or a second-generation South Asian with passing knowledge of the subcontinent, visits with a view to saving something—the tiger, the destitute, the elephant, him- or herself. India is made frightening. Take this representative opening paragraph, from a first-time traveller writing in the New York Post:
Let’s face it. India is really intimidating. The heartbreaking poverty, the heat, the crazy traffic, the begging. It’s an unpredictable place, in fact, there are few things you can count on when visiting—except, perhaps, a week-long bout of Delhi Belly. Of course, for every reason to stay home, there’s at least one to go. The food—you haven’t lived until you’ve eaten the real-deal curry slathered in homemade lime pickle; the history, from maharajahs to the British Raj; the swoony neon colors. (Legendary fashionista Diana Vreeland once noted that “Pink is the navy blue of India.”)4
Here, the heartbreaking poverty, begging and putative stomach trouble are linked to the swoony colours and slathered food, so that India becomes above all a surfeit, a place where a visitor’s sensory experiences are sure to be intense.
For several decades after independence, the stock Indian response to reports of extreme human suffering was to pretend it had not happened, or had been misunderstood, or was being exaggerated for political reasons by a combination of anti-national forces and the menacing foreign hand. As sections of the country have become prosperous, patriots have started to admit or acknowledge the horror of many Indian lives. Although the Oscar-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire received a tepid reception in India for being implausible and miscast (apart from Azharuddin Ismail and Rubina Ali, most of the supposed children of the slums spoke in upper-class accents), few of its detractors tried to pretend life in Mumbai’s heart was anything other than degraded. Vikas Swarup, the author of the book on which Slumdog Millionaire was based, was a senior Indian diplomat; in earlier decades, an overlap between shocking social commentary and diplomacy would have been impossible.
In 2003 I met a magazine editor in Cochin, or Kochi, who gave me an article he had published in his magazine, The Week, some years earlier. More than any Indian horror story I had read, it lodged in my mind. The report, titled “Life in Chains,” was simple. A man, a Dalit who worked in a quarry in nearby Karnataka, took a loan from his boss and found himself under the yoke of an implausible debt. To make sure he and his family members kept working, the man was taken by the boss’s goons to a welder in Mysore, who fitted him with a pair of fetters linked by a bulky metal chain. The bolts were welded over, to ensure they could never be undone. The cost of the fetters and the welding was added to the man’s burden of debt. There he remained for years, cracking stones, until a group of farming activists chanced upon him during an election campaign and secured his release. The report compared the liberated quarry worker’s tentative steps to those of a little child learning to walk, while the man himself, Venkatesh, said he felt unbearably light: “It is a strange feeling. It is like coming out of water.”5
It was a very Indian story, and one that had emerged from a prevailing social order. More extreme human rights abuses happen in neighbouring countries, but the absolute indifference shown to Venkatesh was an unexceptional Indian response to another human being’s suffering. Many people, including the local police, would have known the quarry contained chained labourers, but nobody had bothered to do anything about it. It was the same indifference that allowed modern India to ignore the plight of Adivasis and let “Maoists” become their spokespeople, and in turn allowed the Maoist leadership to slaughter police jawans because they were “class enemies.” Compassion (in the original sense of “suffering with,” which implies a commonality) is not a Hindu concept, except where it involves ritual donation in pursuit of a religious obligation. Loyalty is shown to the family or to your particular community, rather than to people in general. The idea that all are equal in the sight of God is Islamic, while “Do as you would be done by” is a Christian concept. In this case, Venkatesh was not seen as a fellow human to whom care might be extended; he was nobody, nothing. His incarceration, or slavery, happened in a country with democratic rights and genuine constitutional safeguards, less than a hundred miles from one of the nation’s most prosperous cities.
I was left wondering about the real story behind the story, and finally wen
t in search of Venkatesh. How did this tragedy happen? What did Venkatesh himself think about it? By luck, the journalist who had written the original report in The Week was able to accompany me. He had published the story under a pseudonym, because he was doing another job at the time; his real name was Bhanu.
We set off in the morning half-light from Bangalore, or Bengaluru, passing large construction projects and roadside hoardings where white models advertised lingerie. Around nine o’clock, we stopped for a breakfast of vada and coconut chutney at a hotel, New Maddur Tiffanys (Maddur Tiffanys faced us on the opposite side of the road). Here, a hotel meant a restaurant, set up when people were starting to travel for the first time. “Before 1900 or 1920,” Bhanu said, “nobody in the Mysore area would have eaten food cooked outside the home. They were worried the wrong caste might be doing the cooking. In Mysore and Bangalore, you can still see places called Brahmin Hotel.” The atmosphere here was different from Delhi, where I had come from—more restrained, less fashionable, more respectful. As we drove along the road, I noticed Hindu Military Hotel—“military” meant they served chicken and mutton. These restaurants would have been opened for the meat-eating north Indian soldiers who were posted among the vegetarians of the south, surely feeling less than at ease in a faraway culture.
The day grew much hotter as we drove through the lush, sensuous, green landscape of paddy and coconut groves, spotted with many temples, towards the village where Venkatesh was believed to be living. We were near to Srirangapatna, which the British called Seringapatam, and I was queasily conscious of our proximity to a colonial horror story. In 1780 the Muslim ruler of the predominantly Hindu kingdom of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, inflicted an important and bloody victory over the British, checking their expansion in the south. In response, an East India Company army besieged Seringapatam, only to be greeted with rockets packed in iron tubes, a major advance in artillery, which was recorded by artists of the period. When Seringapatam was finally stormed, the British troops slaughtered Tipu Sultan and several thousand Mysore people. So the beauty of the land was drenched in cruelty, in the horror of past wars and in the indifference that had led to Venkatesh’s slavery.
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