The Age of Kali

by William Dalrymple

  ‘The situation is like this,’ replied Veeru, shrugging his shoulders. ‘What can we do about it?’

  ‘We can’t make peace,’ said Praveen. ‘If we do, they’ll double-cross us.’

  ‘But you’re turning in to goondas,’ I said.

  ‘No: we’re students. We’ve only become goondas because of the situation. If we stop now we’ll be shot dead. We regret that politics is getting more violent and that we have to use guns for self-protection. But the psychology here is such that people without muscle-power can’t do anything. If it’s necessary to use muscle-power, then that is what we will have to do.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Praveen. ‘Right now you can’t fight an election without a pistol. Naturally we are sad. But that is the situation. Whatever the situation is, you must adjust to it.’

  ‘And you think you’ll continue in politics?’

  ‘I’m already in,’ said Veeru. ‘I’m standing as an independent in the next state election. I’ve always wanted to be an MLA.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’d fight for society. At the moment I’m fighting for the students. But I suppose everyone starts like that: idealistic.’

  Veeru giggled innocently: ‘But you know, in the end all our politicians are just the same,’ he said, smiling a sweet smile. ‘They just want more power.’

  The Sad Tale of Bahveri Devi

  BATTERI, JAIPUR, 1994

  Of course, she said, after the politician had sworn to take revenge, had sworn that the vendetta between the two families would last for seven generations, they had expected some sort of trouble.

  Already, when they returned from their fields at the end of the afternoon they had become used to finding that someone had broken down the door of their hut and ransacked their possessions. Perhaps their pots had been broken as they sat drying by the kiln; or maybe their trees had been uprooted and their wattle fences damaged or destroyed. That sort of trouble, that sort of petty harassment, they had learned to cope with. After all, they were poor, and he was a politician, and there was nothing they could do. But, she said, they had not thought that he would dare to risk open violence, not when everyone in the village knew about his vow of revenge and of his intention to destroy the family.

  So, on that evening, they had taken no precautions. One of their buffaloes happened to have died the night before, and as was the custom they had spent the whole day giving the animal the last rites. For that reason the sun was already setting when both of them went out to fetch the fodder from the fields. When they arrived at their land, Bahveri had gone off a short distance to cut grass, while Mohan, her husband, had begun gathering in the animals. It was only on her return that she had heard his cries, and she had run over to find out what was the matter.

  What she saw was this: in the shadows, five men had surrounded her husband, had got him on the ground and were kicking him and viciously beating him with lathis (bamboo rods). She recognised them immediately. Facing her was the politician, Badri Gujjar himself. Three of the other men were members of his family – Badri’s son, nephew and brother-in-law. The fifth man was the Brahmin from the village temple.

  ‘I asked them: “Why are you beating up my husband? It was I who caused the problem for you. He has done nothing.” So Badri came over, grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me and began abusing me. I said: “Don’t shout. I was forced to give your name to the authorities, but I did not send for the police. It was the District Collector; he sent them. Why don’t you go and abuse him instead of us?” But the men did not listen. They repeated over and over again: “It was your fault. It was all your fault. We have been dishonoured and we must have our revenge.” And Badri said: “I will have my revenge now – if I am man enough to take it.” ’

  Two of the men held Mohan down while Badri raped Bahveri Devi. Then two other men – Badri’s son and nephew – raped her too, one after the other. They were all sober at the time, but when they left her lying there in the dust, she remembers that they went away laughing like drunkards. As they disappeared in to the dusk they shouted behind them that what they had just done should teach her a lesson, should teach her that a woman of her caste – a potter, an Untouchable – did not interfere with men of their caste, Gujjars – proud yeoman farmers, cowherds and landowners. What they had done would teach her her place in the village. If she forgot it again, she knew what she could expect.

  That, at any rate, is her version of events.

  Village Batteri is an hour and a half’s drive from Jaipur. You leave the bazaars of the Old City by the Agra Gate, and head off, past the domes and chattris of the Maharajahs’ cremation ground, out in to the plains beyond.

  For a while the country is green and fertile. Sometimes you turn a corner and the fields ahead blaze bright yellow with a ripening crop of spring mustard. But the further you drive, the drier and hotter it becomes. Winter wheat gives way to drooping sunflowers; dust-devils circle; melon beds tangle amid the sand-flats of the scrub. Turning right off the tarmac road and across a level crossing, you pass for miles and miles along narrowing dirt tracks. The settlements grow poorer; the camel thorn closes in. The colour drains away, but for the odd flash of red sari as a woman winds her way to a well.

  Batteri clings to the edge of the cultivation, a border fort on the edge of the desert. It is an old village with a scattering of small eighteenth-century havelis, a silent, half-deserted and strangely sinister place. As you drive down the main street, wild-looking men glance up from the hookahs they are smoking on the verandahs of their houses, then spit on the ground in front of them. There are no children playing in the lanes; only the wind rakes down the main street.

  We stopped and asked a cowherd for directions to Bahveri Devi’s hut.

  ‘Tchh! That slut!’ said the man, speaking in a coarse Marwari dialect. ‘What do you want with her?’

  ‘We want to interview her,’ said Sanjeev, a journalist friend from Jaipur who had agreed to come and help translate some of the thicker accents.

  ‘Hasn’t that bitch already brought enough shame to this village?’ replied the man.

  ‘She’s a liar,’ said another man, coming up to the car with his big, leathery water-buffalo. ‘Nobody believes her and her stories. Everyone hates her.’

  ‘Badri Gujjar is a good man,’ said the first cowherd. ‘Everything she says about him is untrue.’

  The men pointed us down a side road and, again warning us not to believe a word that Bahveri Devi said, went on their way.

  We found Bahveri Devi sitting on her verandah, chopping up chillies and onion on a stone. She was small, fragile and grey-haired. Although she was well in to her middle years, she was still beautiful, with fine, well-pronounced cheekbones. She wore an old sari over a torn red choli (bodice); she was barefoot, but around her left ankle was wrapped a single silver torc. Bahveri put down her knife and indicated that we should sit on the charpoy, while calling in to the hut to her daughter to bring us water from the well. Drawing up her feet underneath her, she asked in a soft, surprisingly high-pitched voice, how she could help us.

  ‘Why are the villagers so hostile to you?’ I asked.

  ‘They say I have brought shame to the village,’ said Bahveri. ‘They say that such incidents should be dealt with by the village panchayat [council], not by the police or by any outsiders. They say that by bringing in the authorities I have sullied the name of the village for one thousand years.’

  ‘Do none of your neighbours support you?’

  ‘We have been boycotted,’ said Bahveri. ‘Now no one talks to us or buys our pots or milk or helps us with our animals.’

  ‘Even other kumars [members of Bhaveri’s own potter caste]?’ asked Sanjeev.

  ‘Even other kumars,’ replied Bahveri. ‘Our caste panchayat has declared us outcastes. No one, not even our families, will acknowledge our existence now.’ She sighed. ‘It has become very difficult for us to make ends meet.’ She looked down and continued chopping her onions. In the silen
ce you could hear the cooing of the rock doves on the byre at the back of the hut.

  ‘Can’t you leave this village?’ I asked. ‘If it is so bad here, couldn’t you make a fresh start somewhere else?’

  ‘It is not practical,’ replied Bahveri Devi. ‘But more importantly, I don’t want to give the impression that I am afraid, that I’m giving in and running away.’

  Bahveri’s daughter, a slim girl of thirteen, came back from the well with two steel cups full of water. Sanjeev and I drank. When we had finished, I asked Bahveri to tell me her story, right from the beginning. Pushing her chopping stone away from her, she cleared her throat, rearranged her sari, and began.

  It was five years, she said, since she took on the job as Village Batteri’s sathin. Sathin is a Hindu word meaning friend, and a sathin’s job is to act as an informal social worker among the women of the village in which she lives. In most parts of India, sathins teach the other village women about health, hygiene, the mysteries of family planning and the benefits of sending their children to school. But in conservative and backward Rajasthan, where the literacy rate is one of the lowest in Asia (38 per cent, although among rural woman the rate is as low as 11 per cent), sathins have had to concentrate on even more basic matters: discouraging female infanticide and child-marriages, both of which are alarmingly common in the more remote areas of the state. By covertly murdering baby girls at birth, or by marrying all of their young daughters off together in a single ceremony, villagers can drastically cut the prohibitive cost of dowries and marriage ceremonies, either of which can eat up whole decades of earnings for a poor family.

  In rural India, women have little say in the running of village affairs, and lower-caste women have virtually none. But over time the sathins have proved that by working quietly among a village’s women, and by rallying them together in a cause, it is possible to encourage slow social change. Thanks to the patient work of the sathins, fewer and fewer female babies have been drowned, while the financial benefits of sending children to school, rather than marrying them off in a job-lot, have been slowly but successfully demonstrated.

  In 1992, however, official figures published in Delhi showed that child-marriage was still more prevalent in Rajasthan than anywhere else in India. Embarrassed by these statistics, the Rajasthan government ruined years of gradual progress by overreacting and ordering sathins to act as informers on any family planning a child-marriage. The police would then be sent in and the marriage stopped by force. In several cases the parents were arrested and sent to jail. Overnight, the sathins changed from respected figures in the villages to being perceived as interfering spies capable of bringing great shame and humiliation to a family at their most important and public ceremony.

  Bahveri Devi was caught in this dilemma in the summer of 1992. She protested to the authorities, warning that only quiet persuasion would eradicate child-marriages in the long term; but as a poor woman reliant on the government for her salary, she eventually had no choice but to cooperate. In the end she provided the District Collector with a list of the names of seventeen families planning such ceremonies. Four of the families went ahead with the weddings despite warnings, and these ceremonies were all forcibly stopped by the police.

  One of them was the marriage of the two young granddaughters of Badri Gujjar, the local sarpanch (village headman) and the political leader of the district’s dominant caste, the Gujjars.

  ‘Twice I went to Badri’s house and pleaded with him,’ Bahveri Devi told me. ‘I said: “Go ahead and marry your fourteen-year-old granddaughter, but why marry your one-year-old too? With the money you save on her dowry you could send her to school; in due course she will get a good job in Jaipur and earn much money herself.” Badri would nod, but said nothing and kept going on with the arrangements. So a third time I went and talked to him. I got the one-year-old from out of the house and held her in my arms, showing her to Badri, saying: “Look! See how young she is!” But he just replied: “Everything is fixed. It will not be stopped now: it is too late. Now it is a matter of my family’s prestige.” Finally my Project Director came from Jaipur to talk to him, but when he persisted we had no option but to tell the Collector. On the day, two old policemen did turn up, but they were Gujjars, Badri’s caste-men, so all they did was join in the wedding celebrations and eat their fill of the wedding sweets.’

  The wedding went ahead, but the damage had been done. Badri had been humiliated at his granddaughters’ wedding, and he publicly vowed to avenge himself for this dent to his prestige in the village. According to Bahveri Devi, Badri and his friends came for her on 22 September 1992. The day after the rape, she rose at dawn and took the early-morning bus to Jaipur to tell her Project Director. By the time she arrived, the Project Director was out, and he did not return until late that night. It was thus not until the morning of the twenty-fourth that Bahveri was persuaded to go to a police station and actually report the rape.

  Bahveri felt that reporting the incident would help no one and only cause further trouble; she also correctly suspected that the police would be completely unsympathetic to a lower-caste woman lodging a complaint against a prominent local figure. Yet even she was surprised at the degree of hostility she encountered. The Jaipur police said that the matter was of no concern to them, and that she should report it to the police headquarters in Bassi, the district in which the rape actually took place. Once she had got to Bassi, four hours’ bus ride away, the police there made it clear from the start that they disbelieved her story, treating her, she says, ‘as if I were a prostitute’ and keeping her waiting in the station for three days before getting around to giving her even the most basic medical examination.

  Bahveri Devi now believes that the delay was deliberate, as according to many authorities, sperm tests are no longer valid or accurate three days after intercourse. Moreover, despite a 1982 amendment to the Indian penal code which provides that the police should take it as a premise that a rape victim is telling the truth, and take the suspect in to custody as soon as the crime is reported, no attempt was made to arrest Badri Gujjar. Indeed, ten days passed before he was even questioned.

  Badri Gujjar’s family have a very different version of the events of 22 September. According to the Gujjars an incident did take place on that day, but it was only a fight between the priest from the village temple and Bahveri Devi’s husband Mohan, over a cow which both claimed as their own. Mohan was getting the better of the priest when Badri’s nephew and brother-in-law passed by and intervened ‘because we could not bear to see a Brahmin being beaten up by Mohan, a kumar’. By the time they had finished with him, Mohan had been badly mauled.

  I had gone over to Badri Gujjar’s house as soon as we left Bahveri Devi. It was a much bigger affair than Bahveri’s hut, made of cut stone rather than mud, with a shady verandah decorated with carved stone pillars. Outside, some twenty water-buffaloes were lined up by a byre; one of them was being milked by a servant girl. Most of the Gujjar menfolk were away, but Ram Sukhar, Badri’s nephew, was there, a lean, muscular farmer with a thick moustache, smoking his hookah on the verandah.

  ‘Badri wasn’t even here that day,’ said Ram Sukhar. ‘Nor was his son. They had both gone to Dosa on their tractor. Yes, I certainly helped protect our Pundit from Mohan, but Bahveri, she was nowhere to be seen. The first we heard about any rape was when the police came around and questioned us.’

  ‘But it is true that you were angry with her for interfering in your marriage ceremony?’

  ‘Certainly,’ he replied. ‘We all agree that a child-marriage is not proper, not ideal, but it saves us so much money if we marry all the girls at the same time. If not, we have to bear the expense of four separate marriage parties, and we cannot afford that – we are only a poor family. Bahveri Devi should have understood that. But these sathins are very bad women. They are very bossy. Everything they say is wrong. Bahveri Devi had no business to send the police around at such a time. We had a reputation in this village. She ha
s ruined that now.’

  ‘So did you try to seek revenge?’

  ‘No. But we did stop talking to her family. So did the other villagers. They said: “You have sullied the reputation of a good family.” It was because of that boycott that she made this accusation. She wanted to punish us for isolating her.’

  ‘But why would she make up a rape? It is the most humiliating thing a woman can admit to.’

  ‘What is Bahveri Devi’s reputation? What is her prestige? She is a kumar. And a whore. No one respects her. She has nothing to lose.’

  ‘And the village still supports you?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Ram Sukhar. ‘No one in the village believes Bahveri Devi’s lies. Not one person. When the police saw this, they agreed with us that she had made up the whole incident.’

  The following day in Jaipur I talked to Pratab Singh Rathore, the Inspector General of Crime in the Jaipur police. He confirmed what Ram Sukhar had said.

  ‘Frankly we are 99.999 per cent certain that Bahveri Devi was not raped by these persons,’ he said, twirling a pencil in his fingers. ‘We have questioned everybody and made sperm tests, and on the basis of that evidence have dropped the case. There were traces of several different semen types in her sample, but none of these belonged to the accused. Nor, incidentally, did the sperm match with that of her husband.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I don’t think I have to spell it out,’ replied the Inspector General. ‘Ask anyone in the village about that woman’s reputation.’

  ‘So are you trying to imply that Bahveri Devi is not only a liar, she is also a slut?’

  ‘Those are your words,’ said the Inspector General. ‘Not mine.’

  I had planned to write about Bahveri Devi in January 1993, when I first heard about the case and went over to Jaipur to investigate. But faced with the Inspector General’s claim to have scientific evidence that Badri Gujjar could not possibly have raped her, I dropped the story and put my notebooks in a bottom drawer. Initially there had been a wave of support for Bahveri Devi among Indian women’s groups, but following the publication of the Jaipur police report, the marches, the lobbying of MPs and the campaign all dried up.