Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

by Adam Hochschild

  I spent a day accompanying the guiding spirit of this program, a charismatic, likable, upbeat, bearded economist named T.M. Thomas Isaac, a member of the state planning board, on a visit to a mountain village named Vithura, where doormat-sized sheets of whitish, freshly harvested rubber were hung on roadside fences to dry. Isaac thought Vithura was making particularly good use of these funds and was a model that could inspire other villages. Officials had assembled several hundred people for an afternoon of speechmaking, tree-planting, and ceremonial handing out of some of the fruits of the program to the town’s citizens: envelopes of money for the construction of latrines, packages of vegetable seeds, and a dozen pairs of pickax and hoe blades (you go into the forest to cut your own handle).

  Isaac gave a speech to the open-air crowd, in which he told the story of a smuggler. Each day the smuggler showed up at a border post wheeling a bicycle with a sack of sand on it. Each day the police inspected the sand, poked at it, sifted it, and finally laughed at this fool who thought he could make money by smuggling sand. But, Isaac said, he was not smuggling sand, he was smuggling bicycles! Thus with the new program: the real change is not what the money gets spent on, it’s that this massive transfer of funds will bypass the huge, creaky state bureaucracy, will be less likely to be siphoned off by crooked contractors, and will be spent in a more accountable way. All grants and grant applications must be public and everyone at the village level knows one another. The sand is the money, the bicycle is grassroots democracy.

  I went back to Vithura myself several months later to see how things were going. It was not only members of the ruling party who were enthusiastic about the program but also members of the rival Congress Party on the village council, one of whom accompanied me for much of the day. Was there less corruption at the village level than the state level? I couldn’t tell, although members of both parties claimed this was the case.

  But in talking with them I began to realize that there was a contradiction at the heart of this new program. State government paper-pushers, who will lose control over tens of millions of dollars’ worth of spending, have every reason covertly to oppose it. Yet these are the very people who, through their trade unions, are the core of the ruling party’s political base. And so a deal was cut: the government employee unions are giving their grudging support to the big change, but in return none of their members will lose their jobs. Thus an already bloated bureaucracy lives on, with even less to do than before.

  • • •

  Kerala’s many paradoxes make it hard to view it as the eco-sensitive paradise that so many Western progressives would like to find. Few Keralites themselves view it this way. There is a widespread sense that a genuine idealism of thirty or forty years ago has been lost. The first half of Mukhamukham (Face to Face), a film by the Kerala director Adoor Gopalakrishnan, shows a heroic young labor organizer, Sreedharan, in the early 1950s. An austere, self-denying revolutionary, he puts up a portrait of Lenin, organizes workers to fight miserable conditions at a tile factory, and rejects an attempt by the factory owner to buy him off. Police wreck the union office. Sreedharan is beaten severely. Then the factory owner is murdered and police try to pin the blame on Sreedharan. He vanishes, and his friends assume he is dead. More than a decade later he returns, aged, bent, alcoholic, silent. In trying to get him to speak, his old union comrades reveal the various ways they have changed. One has become a sectarian guerrilla; another has various businesses on the side and tells Sreedharan not to believe all the things he will hear about him. All want Sreedharan to inspire them again, but he cannot. Then he is mysteriously murdered, and only this event once again draws the workers together, to solemnly march under their red flags, chanting “Long Live Comrade Sreedharan!” It has proven much easier to celebrate Sreedharan in death than to live out his ideals in life.

  Someone else who has thought about Kerala’s malaise is Dr. K.A. Kumar, head psychiatrist at Trivandrum’s Medical College. He is concerned by the rapid rise of alcoholism in the state. Sixty percent of Kerala’s road accidents are related to alcohol, he says, as are one third of its industrial accidents and more than 20 percent of male hospital admissions. “When I was a medical student [in the 1960s], when we saw advanced alcoholism with cirrhosis, the age of the patient would be late forties, fifties, or even sixties. Now we find it occurring in the late twenties and thirties.” Another ominous symptom that he sees is suicides: Kerala’s rate, nearly three times India’s national average, is growing fast, and, at 27 per 100,000 people, is matched by few countries anywhere.

  Dr. Kumar feels that Kerala “took a wrong turning” in the 1970s. These were the years large numbers of Keralites first began going to the Gulf. It was also when unemployment grew worse and when it became painfully clear that a high school or college degree would not guarantee you a job. Kerala was affected by changes throughout India during this time, when the idealism of the Nehru years had been replaced by deep-seated corruption and the increasing authoritarianism of Indira Gandhi and her 1975 declaration of emergency rule.

  What else lies behind the soaring rates of alcoholism and suicide? My own guess is that Kerala’s near-universal literacy, its extraordinary percentage of people with higher education, its millions of citizens who have worked abroad, and its millions more who live in families with one member overseas have all given its people an unusually wide window onto the outside world. And that world is one where others seem to have much more.

  The men I would see on my morning jog, sitting on the steps of their two-room mud houses reading newspapers, were seeing pages tailored, as everywhere, to the upscale readers advertisers are seeking: articles about vacation travel ideas or tips on “How to Choose Your Child’s First Computer.” Yet Kerala’s economic woes have made it impossible for many people easily to buy even a child’s first bicycle, much less a computer. From that disparity between the dreamed-of world summoned up by the newspaper page, or the TV screen, or the letters of the relative in Chicago and the mud-walled reality arises a kind of despair, a sense of being on the periphery. And it’s no comfort to hear either an Indian Gandhian or an American environmentalist saying that you shouldn’t be coveting material things to begin with.

  Everywhere today, the borders between the global North and South are no longer between continents; they are within countries and cities: the white suburb and black shantytown in South Africa; the beachfront condo and the hillside favela in Rio; the sprawling slum and the fenced, guarded compound for diplomats and other foreigners in Dakar or Nairobi. In Kerala, that border lies everywhere; it even zigzagged between the homes on the streets where I ran each dawn, where vast Gulf houses sat side by side with thatched-roof ones whose residents had to get their water from the roadside tap that flowed only early in the morning, if at all. Goats, cows, and bullocks drawing creaky carts plodded past garages holding shiny new Toyotas. Sometimes the line bisected a home: one Muslim family not far from us had electricity, TV, and a radio but had to walk more than half a mile a day for water.

  Furthermore, in Kerala, the border between worlds does not divide people of different nationalities, religions, languages, or skin colors. A family trapped, economically, in a dirt-floored hut may have greatly better-off neighbors who have an aunt or brother or uncle with a job in London or Dubai who is sending money home. The border between them is of agonizing thinness. Almost all of us define our sense of being rich or poor not by absolute standards but by comparison to people we can see. And if we see them every day that can make envy worse.

  Yet for all its troubles, and in a world where the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are pressing governments to slash social spending, Kerala has managed to provide a basic safety net under everyone: access to education, to medical care, to low-priced staple food, and to a welfare system that works. And it is a society where civic spirit is very much alive. Kerala regularly produces some of India’s highest voter turnouts, ones that far surpass the United States—more than 70 percent in the last
national election. My morning run took me past the Recreation Center for the Handicapped, one of innumerable institutions for the blind, the deaf, and the disabled proclaimed by large signs around town. It took me near the Medical College auditorium where, for a conference that I attended, Dr. Kumar assembled 173 high school teachers from throughout the city for a workshop in how to recognize and help the children of alcoholics. It took me near a medical research institute developing a program on learning disabilities that will be part of retraining for every teacher in the state. Kerala has its problems, but it does not forget the disadvantaged—something that can’t be said for many parts of the world that are far wealthier.

  1999

  * * *

  * As with many Indian cities, in recent years its name has been restored to its original form in the local language, Thiruvananthapuram.

  THIRTEEN

  The Brick Master

  THE FIRST THING THAT INTERESTED me in the bold and unconventional architect Laurie Baker was my roof. During the five months my wife and I spent living in Trivandrum, the sweltering, leafy capital of the south Indian state of Kerala, the house we rented, like thousands of others in the city, was built largely of concrete. It would have looked at home as a row house in California. A flat roof lay directly above our kitchen, bedroom, and living room, and it was rain-proofed with tar.

  Trivandrum is almost at the bottom tip of India, an hour’s flying time from the equator. After a few minutes’ walk in midday, you were drenched in sweat. Even people who had lived in Trivandrum all their lives complained about the heat. We were not the first visitors to India overwhelmed by this; one nineteenth-century British governor-general felt “as though one were passing through the mouth of a foundry.” But with this lunatic black roof soaking up the blaze of the tropical sun and then radiating it down at us like a broiler for twenty-four hours a day, it seemed as if we had gone from the foundry’s mouth into its flaming innards. Because of the roof, at almost any time of day or night, it felt cooler in the shade outside our house than inside.

  We soon noticed that it was also much cooler whenever we visited friends living in the attractive brick homes designed by Laurie Baker, who although British-born has lived in India for more than fifty years. None had air conditioning, but some Baker houses had strange, irregular, pyramid-like structures on their roofs, with one side left open and tilting into the wind, to funnel it into the house. These seemed inspired by the air intakes on early steamships’ decks that funneled cool air below; I had never seen an architect do something like that on land. And unlike our rental house, Baker’s homes invariably had sloping roofs in traditional Indian style, with gables and vents where rising hot air could escape.

  Gradually, I realized that the flat, black California-style roof on our house was not an isolated piece of insanity but a small example of a much larger pattern. In architecture, as in so much else, Indians want to be like us. But Baker’s work, most unusually, combined Western and traditional Indian ways. Furthermore, his great passion in life was not building the grand museums or concert halls by which architects usually make their mark but low-cost housing for the untold number of Indians who, quite literally, do not have a real roof over their heads. And on a subcontinent whose educated classes have by the millions emigrated to Europe or North America, Baker was that great rarity: a Westerner who had chosen to spend his life living and working in India. I was curious to meet him.

  Long before I did so, I got a taste of life in Baker buildings at Trivandrum’s Centre for Development Studies, a research institute and graduate school where Arlie and I were Fulbright lecturers. The ten-acre campus, stretching across a hillside heavily wooded with coconut palms, is Baker’s masterpiece. The offices, classroom clusters, and dormitories are all brick, with seldom a straight line; each structure curls in loops and waves and intersecting semicircles. Almost all staircases are circular as well. The trees and folds of the hillside hide the Centre’s buildings from each other; I was never able to find a spot from which you could see all or even most of them. The main building has a majestic entrance thirty or forty feet wide, whose ceiling rolls out and up toward the sky and whose sides roll outward onto an even wider set of steps. But, symbolic of an institution whose aim is to apply economics to helping the poor, the building has, amazingly, no front door. Anyone can walk up the steps and through the wide entrance and down the corridors at any hour of the day or night. If you want to lock your office door, that’s up to you. But you can’t lock the front door, because there isn’t one.

  Not only is this campus one of the country’s most beautiful, but Baker built it for roughly half the normal cost per square foot of Indian university buildings. And the Centre’s buildings were oases of coolness on even the most ferociously hot days. Some of that was due to the breezes blowing through the jalis that fill many outside walls. A Baker jali is a brick version of traditional south Indian patterned wooden grillwork: Gaps between bricks let air and daylight through a wall, while diffusing the glare of direct sunlight. Some of the Centre’s coolness also came from open breezeways and some from tiny courtyards around pools whose evaporation helped fight the heat. And some came from the shade of the many palms overhead: Baker designed the campus so he would have to cut down as few trees as possible, curving some buildings around the trees. And with only one or two exceptions, such as the campus computer center, none of the Centre’s offices have the Indian bureaucrat’s normal status symbol, an air conditioner. In a world whose warming is speeded by electricity generation, Baker was intent on creating buildings whose construction and use required as little energy as possible.

  • • •

  Although largely unknown outside India, Baker is a legendary figure in Kerala. One influential admirer was the late C. Achutha Menon, communist former chief minister of the state, who hired Baker to design public housing for the poor. Another enthusiast is the decidedly noncommunist maharaja of Travancore, who has no more political power these days, but who told me that he greatly respected Baker’s work, because “he’s very practical, down to earth, and I think he’s quite right: You need not build a house that’s a copy of one in Manhattan. It doesn’t suit.”

  A droll, unassuming man with a handsome gray beard, Baker has the manner of an avuncular, absent-minded professor. His conversation rambles as if he hadn’t a care in the world, and he wears no watch or socks—no one with any sense wears socks in south India. His voice is hearty, and he speaks slowly, always in complete sentences. A five-year-old granddaughter played quietly at his feet while we talked. He is still working at the age of eighty-three, and his most recent writings—two fifty-page pamphlets profusely illustrated with his own drawings—were published on his eightieth birthday. Although he has also written articles aimed at his fellow architects, most of Baker’s writing is, like these pamphlets, aimed at a wider audience. Some have been translated into the local language, Malayalam. His key message is that building homes, schools, and community centers is too important, and too simple, to leave to architects and masons alone. Everyone can do it—and, indeed, almost everyone in rural India used to build their own homes. In one article Baker calls for “honest” building. He has a particular meaning in mind: the avoidance of “unnecessary architectural fashions, frills & finishes.” But the word carries an echo of another part of his life as well, for he is a longtime Quaker, and the Quaker tradition of plain living helped lead him to the southern tip of India.

  Baker grew up and studied architecture in the British industrial city of Birmingham. A conscientious objector, he joined an ambulance unit at the start of the Second World War, took care of bombing victims in London, then spent most of the conflict as a health care worker at a leper colony in China. On his way home, space for passengers in ships was hard to come by and he was stranded for several months in Bombay where, through Quaker friends, he came to know Mohandas Gandhi.

  The Mahatma, it turned out, had a great interest in architecture. “He said, ‘Please don’t take
any notice of this terrible stuff around us’—the four-, five-, and six-story buildings going up. There was a new telephone exchange, seven or eight stories high and covered all over with sheets of marble, stuck on, which he thought was terrible, gilding the lily.” Gandhi sent Baker to see what he termed the “concrete slums”—the tenements for Bombay’s workers, and then asked him, “What is the alternative? What can we do about it? We need people like you here.”

  Deeply inspired, Baker soon came back to India as an architect and began to build treatment centers for lepers. The British were still ruling, and he was horrified to find that he was assigned a bungalow with servants and was expected to dress for dinner and to ride a horse but not a bicycle. He promptly bicycled off to share quarters with an Indian staff member at one of the leper colonies. A few years later he married an Indian doctor, “and to begin with I was the rest of the hospital staff.” Until 1962, they worked in a remote Himalayan region, then moved south to his wife’s native state of Kerala. There they have lived ever since, with three adopted children, most recently in an eccentric hillside house of Baker’s design, with no locks or burglar bars, protected only by a wall and a doghouse that sits atop the gateway. He did much of the construction himself, some of it using stone found on the site. Window grills in the house make use of scrap metal: parts of a bicycle wheel and a clutch plate from an old car. Baker also makes his own scratch pads of the backs of discarded envelopes, bills, and wedding invitations.

  It was in the Himalayan foothills that Baker first saw how traditional Indian architecture reflects thousands of years of trial-and-error research in energy efficiency. “The rock they quarried for building the foundation and basement walls was . . . from the same bedrock on which they would build,” he has written, noting that timber “was always found within a few hundred yards, or at most a mile or two, of the house being constructed.” Seeing this reminded him of one of Gandhi’s beliefs—that all buildings should be made of materials found within a five-mile radius.