India

by Patrick French

  We reached the village of Ganjam fairly easily. The road was good because it was home to an important temple, and prosperous families needed to be able to visit. We stopped by the temple entrance, where some people were sitting in a neat line on the ground beside a stall, begging in a formal, ritualized way. Bhanu explained to them that we were looking for a freed quarry worker named Venkatesh. A man looked up at him and said simply: “I am Venkatesh.” It seemed impossible, or an impossible coincidence, and it was only later in the day that it came to seem less extraordinary: in India a man with such a fate was likely to end up begging outside a temple. Venkatesh had dark-brown skin, black, oiled hair and the physique of a boy, but at sixty-five he still looked strong. Gathering up his mat, he asked us to come to his house and speak there.

  When we reached the building, it was clear we were not going inside: it would be too small to accommodate Venkatesh, Bhanu and myself.

  I sat on a stone step in the sun and Venkatesh squatted opposite me, chewing betel. He was wearing a dhoti and a dirty shirt. The government had given him and other quarry workers a row of bad houses when the story of their incarceration came out. Other things, such as a water supply, had been promised but had never materialized. By now it was maybe 40°C, and one of the women who had been begging at the temple crouched behind me holding a large black umbrella. Then plastic chairs were brought and we visitors sat on them while the woman holding the umbrella sat on the step, shielding us from the sun.

  “Swathantra bandaaga naanu innu chikka huduga,” said Venkatesh. “Nehru, Gandhi avarella budhivantharu. Naavu yavagloo Congressige vote hakodu.”

  “Independence came when I was a little boy. Nehru and Gandhi were very intelligent people. We have always voted for the Congress. It was about casting your vote. We don’t have the brains of those leaders: that’s why we crush stones. Indira Gandhi, Raja [Rajiv] Gandhi—didn’t they take bullet wounds and die? I’ve learned more about this since my release. For us it was a struggle for food, for sustenance.” He was one of four children, and had been crushing stones since he could remember. His father, Annamayya, had been a migrant worker from an arid region on the border between Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, the state to the north. When the big Krishnaraja Sagara dam was built on the Cauvery river, he had helped to make it. “When we were children there was a Congress leader, a Muslim, who owned a rice mill and let us have split [rejected] rice at Rs5 a kilo. Now you wouldn’t get it for less than Rs10. We lived with the rest of the Scheduled Castes and Muslims at one end of a village near Srirangapatna. We have a caste name, Voddollu, which we use among ourselves, but here they call us ‘Bovi’—stone crushers. It’s not our own name: Bovi is a Kannada word.”

  Venkatesh and Bhanu then began one of the detailed conversations that happen in India when people from different places are establishing social information about each other. Until now, they had both been speaking in Kannada, the local language, but as it became clear that Venkatesh’s family had migrated originally from further north, they switched to Telugu, which Bhanu happened to speak because his parents came from Andhra Pradesh.

  It was not unusual for an educated person to be able to shift fluently between languages in India, the land of conversation. You had the local language of the street, English and Hindi for general interaction, and your mother tongue as well, usually meaning the language spoken by your father’s family. The ancient Dravidian languages of the south (Telugu, Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam, which are grammatically different from Indo-European languages like Sanskrit, Hindi and English) have phonetic similarity. They are made with the tongue at the front of the mouth and sound to an alien ear like water gurgling in a stream. If you learn the languages from childhood, it is possible to speak them all, minus occasional words of vocabulary. In the case of Bhanu, who spoke perfect English, he could also manage Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Kodava, a dialect spoken by people from Coorg, a lovely hilly area of southern Karnataka where coffee is grown and the elephants eat jackfruit. He had picked up the “extra” languages during his childhood in Bangalore.

  “I made a mistake when I wrote the report about his release last time,” said Bhanu. “He is from a Scheduled Caste, but he is not an untouchable.”

  So the story became more complex: this was not, it seemed, about caste oppression. I wondered where Venkatesh was positioned in the caste hierarchy. He was adamant that as a Bovi, or what his community called a Voddollu, he was distinct from Dalits.

  Still speaking in Telugu, he told Bhanu: “We are different. We would not enter an untouchable’s house, or intermingle with them. They are lower than us. We are stone crushers. We are invited to interdine with OBCs, but we wouldn’t interdine with untouchables.”

  “Interdine.” It was a word from Gandhi’s time, a word that made sense only in a rural Indian context, where the old caste restrictions were so ingrained.

  “I started working full-time when I was twelve years old, carrying soil away from a canal. My father had me married at eighteen. I worked in different stone quarries, usually breaking granite.” I noticed that Venkatesh had nicks and scars all over his feet and legs, presumably from the flying chips. “My job was to use a sixteen-pound hammer to make stones about this size”—he described a loaf of bread with his hands—“which could be put in a crusher to get jelly stones for reinforced concrete.

  “It would have been in around 1995 that I went to the ‘prison’ quarry, because I had heard you could get food there. I didn’t know the reputation of the owner, Puttaswamy Gowda. He was good at first. I didn’t suspect anything. I asked for an advance of money, and he gave me a loan and said there was no need to repay it. He could be strict. If the stones were the wrong size, he would beat us horribly. He would tie us to a tree and beat us and leave us there for the night. Then, because he paid less than other quarry owners, I decided to leave. That was when the chaining started. My sons Krishna and Siddaraju ran away and were brought back by his men to the quarry, and he chained them.

  “There were seven people, all from my family or community, who between us had borrowed maybe Rs850 [$19]. The owner said we had borrowed more, and that we now owed Rs20,000 [$450]. We were taken by car, one at a time, to a factory where they made metal wardrobes. They wrapped a cloth around my ankles, put on the cuffs, bolted them and welded the bolt. It took about three hours. It wasn’t painful. Nobody said a word. The thing about wearing chained fetters is that you can’t put on underwear or trousers. You can only wear a lungi, and you must take tiny steps. I was in chains for twenty-one months. There must have been a hundred people working in the quarry, and nobody did a thing. Cow-herders and shepherds were outside: they all saw us, but they couldn’t challenge the quarry owner. He was too powerful.”

  I had not thought of this—that if your ankles were chained, you could not put on underwear or trousers. I asked whether he had thought of trying to send out a message to the police. For the first time, Venkatesh and the women around him laughed.

  “The police? The police and the tehsildar [local government official] were in the pay of Puttaswamy Gowda. I never believed I would be freed. I thought I would be there for the rest of my life. When the farming activists came to free me, I was terrified. I only got the courage to speak when I was in the police station. It was my karma. What has to happen, will happen: it was god’s doing.” Venkatesh looked pensive. “I will never know why he decided to tie me up. It’s as if you came here today to visit me, and I just chained you.” Even the possibility of this frightened me.

  By now the sun was overhead and we walked to the other end of the row of houses, where a coconut palm could give a little shade. On the way, we asked some of Venkatesh’s neighbours what they thought about his experience. One woman was unsympathetic: “People kept on running away from the quarry and not doing their work. The owner had no choice but to chain them.” The legal case against Puttaswamy Gowda had not yet come to court, although Venkatesh had been promised protection by the district commissione
r if he would agree to testify. Instead, he told me he had gone back to the quarry in the hope of being paid off. He was given Rs3,000 by Puttaswamy Gowda: that was his price.

  “I have anger against the owner, but what is the point of having anger? He is a rich man, and I have to beg. He can bribe boys who have just grown moustaches and they will testify against me. I can do nothing.”6

  Now the conversation was over, Venkatesh and his wife, Venkatalakshmamma, showed us a photo of their daughter-in-law, who had died of TB, leaving two young children who had been playing near us while we talked. Venkatalakshmamma said she herself was tubercular. There was more tragedy in the background: their son Krishna had been murdered two years ago during an argument, and his killers had been released. It seemed their neighbours had been involved. His brother Siddaraju was working far from home, and returned whenever he could. As we left, I asked Bhanu whether I might give Venkatesh and his family some money.

  “I wouldn’t offer more than Rs500, or it could cause a quarrel. I will say it is for their grandchildren.”

  When I gave Venkatesh the banknote, he bowed down in front of me, cringing. It had been a miserable experience talking to him, most of all because I knew this was the better time of his life. Bhanu and I walked to the temple on the banks of the Cauvery which was dedicated to Lord Shiva’s consort, Parvati, known here as Nimishamba. Stalls sold coconuts and jasmine garlands and bunches of bananas for the pilgrims to take in as offerings. Plenty of people were visiting, in huge family groups. They bathed in the river wearing trunks or salwar kameez. Inside the Nimishamba temple we proceeded barefoot in a slow line, passing the hereditary priests with their naked chests and oiled hair. They made a point of treating pilgrims brusquely, snatching money and offerings and pushing us towards a grille behind which a statue of the goddess could be seen. Further back, coconuts were being broken for her. Snaking again in line, we were wafted with a flickering flame by a priest, smeared between the eyes with red paste and handed a piece of wrapped newspaper containing prasad and flower petals.

  Then we were out on the stone steps, looking over the Cauvery. It was wide and beautiful although, away from the ritual cleanliness near the temple, the banks were strewn with rubbish. As we drove away, Venkatesh and Venkatalakshmamma were back in their position by the entrance to the temple, begging.

  Our day was not over. News travels fast in India even without the Internet or a mobile phone, and our visit to Venkatesh’s house had reached the ears of the campaigner who had secured his release from the quarry. Bhanu thought it would be rude not to visit him, so we arranged to meet by the Sri Bhavan Military Hotel in Srirangapatna. He was a large, fleshy man with a trimmed pepper-and-salt beard and a bottle-green shawl draped over his left shoulder, which indicated he was a farmers’ leader. In his view, it was unlikely the case would ever come to trial since it would be embarrassing for the state government. He said the quarry had operated without a licence, and that the owner got around this by supplying cheap stone to Mysore officials to build their houses. Did he believe other people were still chained in quarries? “But for the chains, all else is still the same.”7

  For reasons that were not clear to me, the interview was taking place in the leader’s stationary car, by the dusty roadside. He sat in front with his driver while Bhanu and I sat in the back. Within minutes, I had no questions left to ask. He offered me a tender coconut: I drank the water. He talked about his campaigns. Only at this point did it become clear that he was hoping to publicize his organization, the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha. I listened while he told us in detail, in the manner of a leader or orator, of the past glories and future triumphs of the KRRS.

  “We are alive, taking up issues of water availability, sugarcane prices and farmers’ rights, seeds are becoming ever more expensive with globalization, pesticides are becoming more expensive with globalization. The KRRS will target McDonald’s and smash Kentucky Fried Chicken again if we have to.”

  Then I remembered—his organization had destroyed a flagship KFC restaurant in Bangalore in the mid-1990s. It was a symbolic moment, a piece of shorthand used by activists at the time. The message was: “India’s poor farmers are so angry about transnational corporations that they have trashed KFC with iron bars. Who will dare to set up shop in India now?” The answer was … just about everybody, including Colonel Sanders, who now had ten or twelve restaurants in Bangalore. The KRRS, meanwhile, was reduced to sitting in a car outside a military hotel in Srirangapatna, pressing for publicity.

  The difficulty with the KRRS was that it spoke not for farm labourers but for farmers, who were often becoming rich. Re-zoned agricultural land on the edge of Bangalore was selling to developers for $80,000 an acre. As Bhanu said on the way back: “The money will melt away and then they will have no land.” We ate an afternoon meal off plantain leaves at a roadside stop: spoons of spiced sprouts, aubergine, dal, curd, pickles and coconut paste, all dolloped on to a washed leaf by brisk servers along with maize rotis, mind-sharpening salted chillis and a cardamom-flavoured milk pudding. It was an elegant, natural, instinctive way to eat. Another day, at a Bangalore coffee house, Bhanu pointed out some newly rich farmers’ sons to me. They looked burly and rustic, with heavy gold on their fingers, resting on the cusp of some new social order.

  The migration from the countryside to the city is the seminal point in the life of anyone who comes from a traditional society. Forms of behaviour that have been honed over centuries can evaporate in a moment. A local writer, Tukaram S., has a touching short story, written in what the translator, Sugata Srinivasaraju, calls “an acrid dialect of Kannada, specific to the Mysore–Mandya region,” about a man from a remote village who goes to the big city when a new bus service is introduced. People like this man can all of a sudden make money as domestic servants, security guards or construction workers. He proselytizes to the other villagers about the glamour of going off to Mysore: “That city is facing the skies and growing like mad. You should see the roads there; each one is as smooth and washed as well-laid charcoal. Buses and cars fly like crows and leap like frogs … Each road has rows of cloth shops. Ask for whatever colour and whichever size and for whoever—men, women, aged, fat or thin, you’ll get it in an instant. You can actually take off your old clothes, then and there, and walk out with a new pair.”

  The man takes a loan to build a house but defaults on the payments, and representatives of a bank arrive in his village to begin repossession. His brush with globalization has left him homeless, but rather than being humiliated, he uses his recently acquired knowledge of the outside world to excuse himself from blame: “It seems banks have been emptied of their money in America and other countries. They are apparently closing down banks everywhere. This is the reason why banks here too want to collect their money back … Don’t get panicky guys. The news has come that everything is getting all right. A blessed soul called Obama has become America’s president and he is about to set things right. There are too many machines called computers and all the money is apparently stuck in them. Besides, some people took away lakhs and lakhs as salary every month.”8

  Bangalore had everything: fair male strippers for hen nights, shopping arcades with Hugo Boss and Montblanc, apartments that were rising at a ferocious rate. In the heart of the city, I noticed a large area of land had been fenced off for a development calling itself “Brigade Gateway—Bangalore’s first lifestyle enclave.” The perimeter road was surrounded by billboards promising a future paradise on earth, where every need would be met. Once complete, the lifestyle enclave would have private security, a hospital, its own school, an eleven-screen multiplex, a health spa, a hotel, a food court and restaurants, all sealed from the masses. One billboard showed a man in blue jeans walking his dog beside a lake in what looked like North America, with the caption first in English and then in the bouncy Kannada script: “Stroll alongside a serene lake.” Adverts promised a helipad, sculpture courts, a bamboo grove, air-conditioning, patrolled private roads, wa
ter fountains and “a better quality of life.” You could buy a luxury four-bedroom apartment in Brigade Gateway with a fitted German kitchen. “Each apartment wing will have two high-speed passenger lifts. Uninterrupted power supply (we have back-up generators to generators!) will ensure that you need to take the stairs only if you want the exercise.” The wisdom of the Finnish modernist architect Alvar Aalto was quoted in evidence: “True architecture exists only where man stands in the centre.”

  It was quite a promise. I wondered how it was being put into effect, the philosophical idea of putting man in the centre, and joined a line of labourers as they advanced glumly into the forty-acre site for the morning shift. From their appearance, they were from north India. They carried or wore yellow hard hats, and some carried tiffin boxes. Although there were bright signs promoting the need to have boots with metal toe-caps, most of the men were wearing plastic sandals or chappals, and jerseys and mufflers. The place was a mess of grey mud and gravel. The labourers had to work on buildings that rose up to thirty storeys high, and safety nets had been slung around the higher reaches of the towers, though in a random way that offered no anticipation of capture if the men fell. I asked a security guard from Madhya Pradesh—we can call him Dhruv—how many people had died there that year (this was in October 2008). His answer was seven or eight.9 He stressed he was only talking about his own section of the site, since he did not know what had happened elsewhere. He was unsure how many people had been injured, although he said the injured were usually sent straight back to their home villages.