India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (24 page)

That doesn’t stop her testing him, though. Sometimes she says she’s set up a new account, only to tell him later it was a lie. Their biggest crisis yet was sparked by a secret GTalk chat she had with an old crush. Sunny found out. He felt betrayed. She said it meant nothing. She’d have told him, but she didn’t want him to become jealous. Like he was being now. Sunny had sulked for a while.
Eventually they had talked it out. Sunny has come round to the conclusion that real trust depends on ‘having a heart that is totally clean’. That, for him, is the ‘most modern thing’ when it comes to relationships. Love, indeed, is changing him.

Again, Sunny is breaking the norm. While access to the Net is rapidly growing, bridges across the digital dating divide are yet to be built. Not that the Web isn’t bringing lonely hearts together. Quite the opposite. Cyberspace is full of single Indians on the prowl.

Most of those searching for a soulmate have, at one time or another, passed through the virtual portals of Shaadi.com (‘Shaadi’ meaning ‘marriage’ in Hindi). The site’s owners are explicit about their intentions, and dating is not among them. ‘Redefining the way people meet for marriage’ is what it’s all about.

Here is how it works: India’s single netizens log on, fill in a questionnaire and load up their profile. Applicants can choose any one of twenty-nine languages. Most post a photo of themselves too. Don’t and people will automatically write you off as unattractive. It’s a risk even ugly people can’t take. Enter PhotoShop.

Shaadi.com even provides physical customer-service centres to assist those unfamiliar with the ways of the World Wide Web. Around one hundred are dotted up and down the country. There’s even one in Toronto. The marriage-minded dot.com also has a tie-up with national cable operator Dish TV. Via Shaadi Active, singletons’ profiles are piped directly into households across India. Pressing the red button gets you further details. Inevitably, there is now a game-show version too. Star Vivaah, ‘India’s biggest matrimonial show’, gives the floor to young men and women to flaunt their wares and snare a spouse.

Behind the frills, Shaadi.com essentially serves as an online brokerage service. It and other websites like it mark an e-extension of the matrimonial ads that fill the weekend newspapers. Both formats are themselves replacements for the traditional village matchmaker. What used to be worked out on the hearth of the pandit’s house is now resolved with the click of a mouse and the whirr of a search engine. The company’s database carries
millions of profiles. Thirty per cent belong to Indians living overseas. Payment only starts if you like what you see. Two thousand three hundred rupees will buy you the contact details for thirty people over a three-month period. A little extra will get you their blood type and astrological chart too.

Most suitors begin by getting to know each other online. Shaadi.com has its own chatroom. After a month or so, couples typically take things ‘off line’, as the site’s owners put it. Bolder couples might meet alone in a coffee shop. The majority prefer to invite their parents along with them. In India, finding love is a family affair. In almost one in three cases, it’s close relatives – not the suitor – who provide the original profile and sift through the potential candidates.

Online romance, as practiced by Sunny and as packaged by Shaadi.com, heralds a new dawn for the love-torn. Log on and luck out. When it comes to marriage itself, however, medium and mindset remain miles apart. It may be New India’s hands at the keyboard, but it’s Old India’s finger hovering over the ‘send’ and ‘delete’ buttons.

Shaadi.com’s profiling process proves the point. Should the applicant desire, they can include information about hobbies, preferred foods, likes and dislikes, musical tastes and favourite films. These are designed to give a sense of the person behind the name.

Most don’t bother. When it comes to online matchmaking, personality is mere window-dressing. It is ruthless out there in singleton cyberspace. Those in search of a life companion want to know about your age (above thirty-five sets alarm bells ringing), previous marital status (divorcees need not apply), education (postgraduate, double tick), profession (doctors and engineers win out), employer (all hail the magical ‘MNC’) and background (options being ‘upper-middle’, ‘affluent’, ‘middle-class’). There are more important criteria still. Income bracket, for one. Applicants are invited to place their earnings in one of a range of rupee bandwidths, the highest running into a dizzying number of zeros.

Impressive salary stats wilt before the two dominating factors on every applicant’s list: religion and ‘community’ (the
euphemism for ‘caste’). Even multimillionaires will be screened out if their faith or family doesn’t match up. Brahmins can narrow their search down to sixty-three different sub-categories. Sindhis have ten from which to choose.

For Sunny, the future looks complicated. Storm clouds are brewing. He and his lady-love are talking of marriage. For that to happen, both parents must be on board. Elopement is technically a possibility. They wouldn’t be the first couple to run away together. But neither wants to be ostracised from their families.

The first hurdle they face is caste, the indelible black mark of birth. You marry among your own, Sunny’s Bihari father insists. The young couple are both from Brahmin homes, although from different sub-castes: Bhumihar in Sunny’s case, ‘slightly lower’ in hers. ‘Do you know what they say about marrying a lower-caste girl?’ I didn’t. ‘They say if you die or if you can’t satisfy her sexually, a girl from your caste isn’t going to go to another man. In a lower caste, a girl hops from man to man.’ I ask him if he believes that to be true. He’s seen it, he tells me. ‘It’s a fact that exists.’

At least they are not from the same the same ‘gotra’ or clan. The most traditional corners of the Hindu-dominated ‘Cow Belt’ of the north still keeps strict rules against such marriages. In the old days, it made sense. Families were large and villages small. Marry too close to home and the chances of consanguinity were high. Over time, the prohibition became more muted. People moved on and others moved in. Populations grew. The term ‘clan’ became increasingly amorphous. The village roster gradually read more like a jumbled telephone book and less like a family tree.

Today it is improbable that the girl-next-door will turn out to be your second cousin. Yet recent years have seen a return to the medieval kinship norms. The reasons are unclear. One compelling theory is that the knap panchayats – the village-based caste councils who once dominated local affairs and who were responsible for enforcing the ban – are feeling marginalised by the pace of social change. Reinforcing the ban is a way of reasserting their power and influence, it’s said.

Whatever the reasons, young couples from the same ‘clan’ face
increasing hostility, shared DNA or not. At best, their marriage might be terminated. At worst, their lives could be. So-called ‘honour killings’ have become a regular feature of the daily news. Only a few days after meeting Sunny, I read in the
Indian Express
about the brutal murder of a young couple from Karora in Haryana. The village is located less than a day’s bus journey from the national capital.

The article carries a low-resolution photo of Manoj and Bibli. A chain of orange marigolds has been thrown quickly around their necks. Expressions of stoic determination are etched on their young faces. The background reveals nothing, a plain blue wall. I imagine a busy civil servant at the registry office snapping it on a borrowed camera.

A few weeks later, two gunnysacks carrying their battered, putrefying corpses turned up in a canal. The burn of a rope mark was still visible around Manoj’s neck. Bibli’s internal organs, meanwhile, were found to be awash with agricultural pesticide. The newsworthiness of the twin murder (there are over one hundred honour killings a year in Haryana alone) rests on the perpetrators – Babli’s own uncle and brothers – having been brought to book. It is India’s first such conviction for an honour killing. It took fifty hearings and forty-one witnesses to secure the verdict.

The landmark decision is unlikely to bring about an overnight change. Opposition to same-gotra marriages is culturally entrenched and its standard-bearers seemingly indifferent to the wiles of reason or regulation. The Khap Maha Panchayat, an umbrella group for caste councils, is digging in its heels. Far from backing down, they are calling on the government to enforce a statutory ban on intra-clan marriages. ‘This is a sickness, to marry in the same gotra. There is scientific proof to back this,’ Dr Om Prakash Dhankhar, an educated voice in the panchayat echelons, tells the newspaper’s reporter. ‘Look at the English Royal Family.’

The second hurdle Sunny faces centres around how much his future bride is willing to pay. The payment of dowries was
officially banned in India in 1986. Yet the law is porous. What was once called a ‘dowry’ is now described as a ‘voluntary gift’ – a practice permissible under the amended Hindu Marriage Act. His brother, a cadet in the merchant navy, is already receiving offers from prospective parents. One anxious father is promising forty-six lakh rupees, with a Mahindra Scorpio 4×4 jeep thrown in.

Sunny laughs to himself, as if it would be a travesty to pay even half the suggested sum for his brother’s hand. ‘Normally among our people, the most you’ll get is a Bolero.’ He seems unfazed by the treatment of marriage as a tradable commodity. He has lived in its shadow all his life. For that reason, he’s under no illusions about his own value as a journalist. Not much.

Sunny’s situation awakens my sympathies. As with millions of young people his age, he finds himself crushed between two worlds, squashed between orbits that are spinning in opposite directions. It must be disorientating, like returning to work after summer vacation to find your office full of strangers.

Beneath his feet, the landscape is constantly shifting and the signposts that guide his path are ever more dimly lit. The gap between the India of Old and New is widening. Will he one day have to choose? Or can a bridge be built between the two diverging banks?

For the moment, Sunny hopes to straddle the divide. He and his girlfriend have resolved to hold off marriage for a couple of years, until both of them are earning. Then they’ll present their mutual desire to marry to their respective sets of parents. Not as a love marriage, he insists. They know that won’t wash. ‘What we’ll do is talk to both our parents and have it appear like the marriage is something they have arranged themselves.’

A love marriage in arranged clothing. It is certainly a clever compromise. Perhaps Sunny won’t have to decide after all? Maybe he can reverse the revolving orbits and have them turn together in concert? I don’t know. Nor, I suspect, does he.

I wish him and his love affair well, and leave Manipal on the afternoon bus.

Change can cut like a scythe. For Mrs Gutgutia and Sunny, it’s their personal lives that are feeling the force of its cleaving blade. For India’s ancient tribes, the wound runs deeper. Change is slashing and cutting at every aspect of their lives, threatening to sever their moorings and cast them loose.

Jeevan scratches his head. I remain a puzzle to him. Sitting under the black tarpaulin roof of the village temple, he eyes me with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity.

His reaction is only natural. The village of Chavela receives few visitors and we have arrived unannounced. My sole point of contact is a young Communist Party delegate called Amol. Tall and lanky, with a downy growth of hair on his top lip, Amol has visited the backwoods settlement once before. Regrettably, no one seems to recognise him.

I turn for help to Nandeep, Amol’s friend. An amiable maths graduate with an angular face and two-day stubble, he’s been persuaded to join us on the bumpy motorbike ride out to Chavela. Nandeep speaks ‘pretty good’ Gondi, according to Amol.

‘Journalist,’ Nandeep says, jabbing a finger at me. ‘From England.’ Amol smiles. Jeevan continues scratching.

The Gonds, to whom the ancient Dravidian language of Gondi belongs, are one of the largest of India’s tribal groups. Renowned for their historic warrior ways, they number around four million in total. Most are clustered in the remote corners of the country’s central states. About half still speak their mother tongue. The Gonds, together with India’s other adivasi or indigenous
communities, feature among the country’s most ancient people groups. They are also among its most neglected.

‘Can you tell me something about yourself? How old you are? What you do?’ I ask, entreaty in my voice. I look to Nandeep, who does his best to translate the request. Jeevan stops scratching and stares.

There are two others in our party. More of Amol’s pals. Both grin continually, but remain conscientiously silent. I sense their Gondi is no better than mine.

Jeevan had been standing alone by the hand pump of Chavela’s central well when we arrived. It had been just after noon. The mud streets of the village were otherwise empty, except for a few stray chickens and a morose cow tied to a bamboo post. The tethered beast lowed sadly and swished its tail at the flies.

Most of the villagers were inside, resting their limbs from a long morning in the paddy fields and awaiting lunch. The hum of our motorbikes had announced our arrival. It wasn’t long before a cluster of men gathered around us. They approached drowsily, their limbs heavy with sleep and heat-induced fatigue. Still in that somewhere space between rest and wakefulness, they had walked over and now sit with us on the flattened earth outside the mud-brick temple.

All are dark-skinned, bare-footed and dressed in threadbare shirts and colourless cotton lungis. They too are inquisitive, their tone curious rather than aggressive. ‘Who are we?’ ‘What do we want?’ Nandeep does his best to explain.

Jeevan gradually relaxes. He utters something to Nandeep. His voice is soft and low, like the plod of footsteps in heavy snow.

‘He’s twenty-four,’ Nandeep translates.

I would have put Jeevan at a few years younger. In his teens, even. His face is smooth and childlike, set by a geometrical jaw and topped with an unruly clump of jet-black hair. His clothes are those of a youngster too. His shirt has thick green stripes running downwards and a ‘Due South’ tab sewn onto the front pocket. It differs from those of the other villagers in being dual-coloured, multi-fibred and mass-produced. His trousers, meanwhile, are
rolled up to the calf. The whole ensemble is several sizes too small for him, as if he’d had a growth spurt during the night. Only his eyes suggest his years. Two rounded lumps of charcoal, difficult to read; eyes that seem to have seen much and travelled far.

He mumbles something else. Nandeep passes it on, evidently more at ease working from Gondi into English rather than the reverse. ‘He works in the fields with his father and brothers.’

I ask how an average day pans out in the village. It starts early, ‘Up for the sun.’ The able-bodied adults leave for the fields shortly afterwards and work the whole morning. Breakfast is a mug of tea. Lunch, rice and vegetable puri. Sometimes chapattis. Afternoons are spent collecting water or firewood. In the evenings, the older men might drink. Alternatively, they watch television. There are two TV sets in Chavela, one of which Jeevan’s family owns. It tunes into only one setting, the government-run Doordarshan channel. The electricity often cuts out.

The noise of young children playing in a nearby hut interrupts us. ‘The primary school,’ Jeevan explains. The teacher is absent, which, technically speaking, is one up on Jeevan’s childhood, when there was no teacher at all. In terms of other basic amenities, Chavela has no health centre of its own, relying instead on a weekly visit by two nurses from Marda, a larger village some distance away. ‘They help with coughs, colds . . . typhoid, malaria.’ He seems not to differentiate between the relative seriousness of the conditions. Malnutrition is commonplace too, he says. ‘Water is so much less now.’ As the rains have dwindled, so too has the forest’s bounty. For most of their vegetables, they must travel to the market in the local town. To worsen matters, the Forest Act restricts their ability to hunt for game, a traditional source of sustenance for India’s forest-dwelling ‘tribals’ (as the
adivasi
are commonly referred to in India).

It took us an hour and a half to travel the thirty-five kilometres from Armori. A non-descript, pit-stop kind of place along the main highway to Nagpur, it’s the closest Jeevan and his fellow villagers have to a town. No one in Chavela has motorised transport. People rely on bullock carts and bicycles. To get to town,
they hitch. The village of Delanwadi is closer. A larger version of Chavela, it has an asphalt road. Jeevan bought his watch there, he tells me, turning his wrist to show me the fake gold timepiece.

Armori marks the limits of Jeevan’s first-hand experience of India. His lack of knowledge about his homeland goes beyond the mere geographic. I ask him if he can name the Prime Minister. He can’t. The state’s chief minister – arguably a much more immediate force on Chavela’s fortunes – also eludes him. As for the wider world, he has never spoken to a foreigner before. Never seen one, in fact. He has heard of Britain, though. ‘It once ruled India, right?’ He’s heard of a place called Germany too. He cannot find either on a map. But then Chavela has no atlases. In fact, books of any kind are hard to find in this predominantly illiterate village.

New India, with its bright lights and global aspirations, might as well occupy another planet.

Jeevan points the finger of blame for Chavela’s problems at the Indian government. The national Constitution identifies almost six hundred and fifty indigenous groups. These it categorises as ‘Scheduled Tribes’. The ‘tribals’ number around eighty-five million in total. Politicians have tried to build careers out of defending their rights. Rafts of official affirmative-action measures and development programmes have been rolled out. Most, as the conditions in Chavela show, have rolled away just as fast.

Not all see the wretched state of India’s tribal groups as the government’s fault. Some blame the country’s indigenous groups themselves for their ‘backwardness’, as if poverty and exclusion were products of their own volition. India’s tribes prefer primitivism to modernity, the argument runs. They’d rather see their culture conserved than their communities developed.

India is changing fast. Are the citizens of Chavela happy to be bystanders, to watch the country speed forward as they stand still? I wonder what Jeevan thinks.

As a way of gauging his opinion, I ask about his views on Armori. His answers do not suggest a mindset closed to the prospect of advancement. In fact, city life positively appeals to him. He
likes the way people dress, he says. And the festivals. And the girls. The last comment elicits a ripple of laughter from the group of villagers. Would he prefer to live there? He would. Only, there’s no employment. No one in the history of Chavela, according to Jeevan, has ever obtained a job in Armori.

Lack of education is partly the reason for such dismal success in the job market. So too is lack of cash. The Constitution requires the government to earmark a quota of public-sector posts specifically for Scheduled Tribes. These, however, don’t come free. Appointments are made via officials, and officials want bribes, Jeevan says. According to his reckoning, fifteen lakh rupees will secure you a teaching post. Three lakh for a clerical position. ‘I’ve not got enough money to get a job in government service.’ He doesn’t seem overly put out. That’s just how it is. How it’s always been.

Something Jeevan says appears to upset one of the older men present. He scrunches up his pinched face and launches into a short, angry speech from beneath a bushy greying beard. The remonstration is directed towards me.

‘In the village, they are used to going to the toilet in a free place. In the city, there is no space for going for toilet . . .’

Nandeep loses the thread of his argument and asks him to start again. The garrulous villager spells out his opinion in deliberate tones.

‘In the city, life is always a struggle. Here, they have the peaceful life. From childhood, he has lived in a village. That is why he prefers it to the town.’

I turn back to Jeevan, who looks chastened by the older man’s intervention. In an attempt at conciliation, I return to his earlier criticism of the government. ‘Does it anger you, the government’s lack of help?’

He nods vigorously, contented to be back on a theme with which there is broad consensus in the village. Government agents never come, he says. As for politicians, they only appear before elections. Nor do official funds arrive as they should. What they want most of all is paid employment. Under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the government promises one hundred days’ work a year. In return for a minimal wage, the programme pays the poor to help build roads and generally lend their muscle to civil works. In Chavela, each adult is lucky to get fifteen days at most.

The same is true for house-building. The government promises one lakh rupees to build a hut. It’s not enough, Jeevan maintains. He points towards a crumbling adobe house along one of the four tributary paths leading off from the temple. One of the building’s external walls has collapsed entirely. The remaining three are sagging like dampened cardboard and look set to follow shortly. ‘Even if it was enough, we don’t receive all the money anyway.’

The Gram Panchayat, or coordinating village council, admits as much. We’d stop at their office in Delanwadi on the return to Armori. The main meeting room contained a large blackboard with close to two hundred names, all carefully chalked in five straight columns. Each entry corresponded to a construction order. The Gram Panchayat hoped to complete the list within five years, the duty official told us. He couldn’t be certain, though. They were being short-changed as well, he’d claim. The bureaucrats above, they were simply skimming off too much for themselves.

I imagine the same line repeated by every official in turn, from the National Treasury downward. The result: more bureaucrats with bulging pockets, and a wall with little hope of ever getting rebuilt.

Jeevan, I suspect, could continue at length on the theme of government neglect. I try to shift the conversation on to a more forward-looking path. If a politician were to come here, what would you ask for? A lake tops his list. The village has three wells, all built more than three decades ago. It also has a pond. The latter is located behind the temple, its stagnant water insulated beneath a cap of green, luminescent algae.

He’d like a road as well. This second request brings me up short. A health centre, a properly staffed school, a mobile-phone mast: these would have made sense. But a road? Everything I’ve ever heard from indigenous-rights groups suggests that roads only
bring trouble. It’s a downhill spiral as far as they are concerned. Roads attract outsiders, who introduce external influences, which upsets the social fabric, which ultimately leads to a dilution of tribal culture.

‘The village needs to travel to the market,’ says Jeevan, his expression deadpan.

‘But aren’t you worried a road will bring more people to the village?’

Jeevan looks at me quizzically. ‘We want people to come.’

The wizened old man responsible for the previous outburst shuffles noisily. Jeevan moves quickly to mollify him. ‘Being adivasi means tradition to us,’ the younger man qualifies. What traditions specifically, I ask. Worshipping the gods, he responds. Conscious that we’re sat on sanctified ground, I push the point no further.

‘Are you happy?’ I ask instead. I meant the question collectively, rather than just Jeevan himself.

He smiles a forced smile. The older man is still listening. When Jeevan speaks again, his words are more measured and his posture more guarded. ‘Yes,’ he says, but with little conviction. ‘This is a problem-less village.’

Amol is keen to be off. Rising from the floor, he taps his watch and motions that our visit is over. I thank Jeevan and climb back aboard Amol’s motorbike. I turn to wave goodbye. Jeevan is standing alone again, back by the well, scratching his head.

‘Hold tight, comrade,’ Amol warns. The motorbike’s wheels jar violently against the seared grooves of bullock carts as we navigate back through the woods. Created in the squelch of monsoon, the muddy rivulets have dried crisp in the sun. ‘The path is not good,’ he adds. The fact is self-evident. As is Jeevan’s suggestion for a proper road.

Once we hit the tarmac, the journey back transforms itself into a magical ride. The sun sits high in the sky and a warm breeze rustles the crops. Wheat fields spread out towards the horizon in blankets of buttery gold. Beside them stretch acres of lush green paddy and groves of stubby mango trees with fruit so ripe their
drooping branches nearly touch the floor. The bicycles of farmhands lie in abandoned clusters by the roadside. The two-wheelers rest in the shade, their frames perched on the rubbery elbows of a handlebar like picnickers in the park.

Yet all is far from idyllic. Close to the border with Chhattisgarh, this remote district of eastern Maharashtra plays home to the most significant blot on the ‘India Shining’ story: the Naxals or Naxalites. A disparate group of armed rebels, they first emerged in the late 1960s. Their fortunes have ebbed and flowed ever since.