India (37 page)

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 because 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.

I
NDIA 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:

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 went 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.

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.