What is enough? (Feb 9)

We returned from Bombay to Pune, where things got both busier and somehow less easy to convey. In Pune we spent time visiting with friends, using a range of vehicles from three-wheeled rickshaws (these can be hailed on the street or summoned using Uber), city busses, private cars, and an Uber car. Then we took a bus three hours or so to Satara, where we stayed with village friends living there. Bouncing around these cities, we chatted with drivers and people on busses as well as our friends and the people we met with them. Often conversations begin with questions about what language to use (people often assume that foreigners will be more likely to speak Hindi than Marathi, which we don't), and then where a person is from. Like in the US, there is the choice between naming where you live now versus where where your family roots are likely to be. Adult women have another choice, which is to name their husband's family's place. Lee contributes his knowledge of the region to these conversations by being able to say something about where people are from (oh, yours is the village near such and such river, for example). If people are at ease, another question to ask (delicately) is about their family name, which may or may not indicate caste, and if it seems apropos, to ask about the kuladevi, or the family's tutelary deity, which is another way that family groups can be traced around the region, as their kuladevi tends to remain the same even if they migrate to a different area.

One theme I've been tracing is how people relate to their home villages as transit and travel become more widespread and as more people take positions outside their village. There seems to be a slow generational transition. Earlier generations tend to think of the stint away from the village as temporary; they return "home" often for weddings and festivals or just to visit. On retirement, some move back to the village, but many choose to stay with one of their adult children in town as these start the next generation. If the adult children stay outside the village, then the question is, how long before their children or grandchildren lose any real connection with the ancestral place? We met several of these three-generation families in and around Pune and Satara. The grandparents provide continuity with their villages (and also household support, childcare, etc.). The parents hustle to and from jobs and concern themselves with the education of their children, which in middle class families is a daunting task of getting them into the right schools, overseeing their schoolwork, signing them up for tutoring programs that support the school curriculum, and then additional programs for things like math skills, music, chess and languages. These children only know their village as a place to explore on holidays. I wonder: as they mature, will their connection deepen to include the social relations and family histories that sustain the village? Will they, like their grandparents and their cousins in the village, know who and how each person is related, the history, the local knowledge? Or will the village become a nostalgia trip and little more?

In the middle class sector, these city children and their parents both know that competition for educational spots that feed into desirable careers is extraordinarily intense. I worry about the effect of this struggle on them. When we sit with farmers, they impart their thoughts about changing farming methods, some of which are creative or experimental, and they talk about the variables of weather, government programs and markets, but the overall feeling is of solidity, of confidence in the distinction between what is knowable and what is not knowable, and a quiet feeling, somewhere between satisfaction and pride, that their work is good.

Lee spoke about this attitude using the term swadharma, citing Dnyaneshwar's commentary on the Bhagawad Gita, that each person should walk along their own path and not fret about doing what they are not meant to do. In other words, don’t assume that there is a single scale on which to measure the value of activities. What is good for one person may not fit another. No one should imply that being a professor is better than being a farmer. This advice is given to Arjuna because he does not want to participate in war, but he is told that he should do so because that is his caste's role and thus his swadharma. That last bit rubs me the wrong way. I can't find it right that anyone's swadharma would involve killing, nor that a person's swadharma should be dictated by caste. Leaving those uncomfortable thoughts aside, though, what's clear is that most farmers feel fulfilled by their work. This is also generally true of the men of the older generation who served as military or police, or had government jobs as teachers or bus drivers, all of which are lifelong positions with pensions. Those men retire to the village for the most part with their pensions and the satisfaction of working their land in retirement or sharing it with their children. Again, there is a general feeling of contentment. I like this about them – the sturdy pride – and would not like them to start thinking that their work is lesser than some white-collar profession.

This satisfaction seems rare in the city, but we did hear it, often from people who did not come from a stable village situation to begin with. In one taxi, our driver described growing up with his widowed mother so poor as to be regularly hungry. He didn't go to school but learned as much as he could working in cheap eating places (called "hotels," such places hire boys for cleaning, washing, errands, etc. in exchange for little more than meals and a place to sleep). His dream was to have a car. Because of his background, he spoke several languages. For that or other reasons, he eventually found a position in an office. He excelled and was promoted to manager, but he didn't enjoy the work and continued to learn as much as he could about cars. Eventually he got a license and left his office job to drive for a car service. Driving is what he likes to do, and his only further dreams involve expanding this work.

More often we heard from young people dissatisfied because they wanted the gold ring, that job in IT or a private corporation. One driver complained that he'd been unable to continue beyond a year or two of college, and had ended up driving for taxi and Uber services, an occupation he did not enjoy or value, because he had wanted a white-collar position. Without that and enough money, he said, he would not be able to find anyone to marry. His family doesn’t have enough land to support him, and even if they did, girls reject farmers as future husbands in favor of men with city jobs. I listened to the frustration in his voice and felt sad that he'd been sucked into an economic system in which nothing is ever enough.

Perhaps this is just a transitional period. We spent one Sunday with a family who has ties to our village. There are two children - the older one around 12 years old - parents and the father’s parents. The mother pursued an education in science, working around pauses for marriage and motherhood, and recently achieved her PhD. She also landed a lecturer position in a prestigious college. For all that, she struggles to balance her academic pursuits with the demands of a multi-generational family. In village families, women often make offerings, pray and fast for their families; I could hazard the hope that this woman’s academic contributions might come around to be understood to be a comparable contribution, replacing some of the other demands. Her husband, though, also has a white collar IT job. Perhaps too, over time, improved transit might make it possible for a woman to marry a farmer and still carry on an academic or other white collar pursuit. At the moment, though, young male farmers have difficulty finding wives, and young men in the city struggle bitterly for the middle class dream.

Yes, I run the risk here of romanticizing village life, and I must hurry also to add that many villages are not as prosperous, safe and clean as the one we know. Many people have no choice but to end up in cities, whether because of agricultural failures or competition for land with siblings, or many other reasons. Still, I feel the constant current of anxiety and striving among villagers in the city, and wonder, is this what they hoped for?

Looking deep

In Satara several times I heard people making simplistic disparaging comments about other groups. Sometimes the comments were overt, such as asserting that x people have a violent, disloyal mindset. More often people used veiled language to allow deniability in case anyone accused them of stirring up trouble between “communities” (a term used for Muslim/Hindu differences or among various castes). I also heard a lot of generalizations about westerners (Americans and Europeans, invariably imagined to be white): they have more discipline and are not lazy, they are more independent, they understand how to make money, and they don’t value family life and essentially abandon their children at age 18. Unspoken but evident everywhere in advertising and media is that whiteness is desirable. All of this challenges me. As I was not reared in an Indian context, I struggle even to discern the differences among communities, and am immune to the communal biases built into most worldviews here; and as for whiteness, although I have my share of bias, my attraction to physical whiteness is not strong. When I see white bodies in India, my first reaction is distaste: a white body here is a big, awkward, lumpy, ungainly, blotchy pink mess. But that’s just my own quirk, and yes, I don’t want to deny that I am seeing the world through my white american lenses.

Luckily, that view gets challenged regularly here. For example, in Satara we were taken to visit a small school where they were trying out a new method to teach English. In conversations about schools, the question of how and when to learn English is huge. Everyone agrees that English is necessary for success. Some support starting children right away in English-medium schools, in which all the subjects are taught in English. I’ve visited one of these in the past, and found that in the lower grades, the teacher presents the lesson in English and then gives “explanation” in Marathi. The children work out the solutions in Marathi and then present them back in English. The obvious drawback to English-medium is that the struggle to learn any subject is multiplied when it has to be filtered through another language. Typical Maharashtrian classroom practices rely much more heavily on memorization than on understanding and interpretation, and I worry that using English as the class language only increases the ratio of recitation to understanding. Marathi-medium schools tend to be shunned by the upwardly mobile because learning English only a few hours a week goes slow, and also because, unfortunately, Marathi-medium is becoming associated with schools for the “backward,” poor or oppressed. Many people opt for something called “semi-semi” that teaches the sciences and math in English (sciences are considered the most important and prestigious subjects) and the rest in Marathi. What gets lost in this debate is any appreciation for the splendor of Marathi language itself. The debate is only about how best to prepare children for a world in which English is the language of power and success. I want to resist this, but here again is the question: who am I, someone who was born with an English language advantage, to discourage someone who wants that power? Who am I to advise people not to admire and want what I have?

In addition to the obvious challenges, there are more subtle ones. I recently listened to an American online offer a very commonly held “just so” story about the origins of implicit bias. Or at least, it’s a view commonly held among Americans. The story goes that long long ago ancient humans felt closeness to their own family groups and aversion to outsiders, and that this aversion was constructed into ideas about those outsiders (they are barbarous, ugly, etc.) that justified treating them as enemies. This social phenomenon, according to the mythology, was somehow (how?) embedded in human brains and remains there despite changing social conditions. In this myth, bias is “deep” and “natural,” and we have to use our conscious minds to overcome it.

I want to challenge this story. There is too much in it that fits too neatly with other western concepts of race, nature/culture, emotion/reason and enlightenment values. I want to try out a different story. Maybe at root we humans feel familiarity with all beings. When a little child hears another child wail, it is likely to crumple into sympathetic tears. Small children giggle when kittens zip about playfully. Some part of us senses immediately when another being, whether human or animal, is in distress. Maybe it is only due to the social conditioning that begins as soon as we are born that we learn to discriminate and fear. Granted, if it is learned pre-linguistically, it will be deeply embedded in our understanding of reality, but still, it need not be understood as inherited from some mythical tribal origins. It is just something that is passed on through subtle behavior from the earliest moments of a person’s life. Maybe shedding the frames and stories that build up our biases is not a matter of schooling or disciplining some “natural” force, but more a matter of allowing ourselves the blessed, painful experience of peeling away the social armor in order to uncover our root longing for oneness. Anyway, that’s my own “just so” story, for what it’s worth.

Meanwhile, back in Satara, I test my own biases. Here I am disposed to look into faces with compassion, searching for connection or sympathy or at least recognition of fellow-being. Usually I’m rewarded with more open warmth than I can experience over weeks in Ann Arbor. Granted, part of that warmth is tied up in my whiteness which makes me a kind of visiting royal or even deity at times. Still, the warmth is there. I experience it in the touch of women who take my hand while we talk or sit together. And I experience it in the looks and glances across bus aisles or on the street, when a woman glances with surprise or doubt at my big pink face and I offer an honest look and a smile. Our eyes touch, we smile, there is warmth and ease.

People do look here with much more directness and intensity than in the US. I also notice that they tend to listen more widely, keeping track of what’s going on in the next room or next house – but that’s a different topic. The looking, which Americans might label as ‘staring,’ takes some adjustment, although it was not one of the more difficult differences for me. I have come to associate it with the concept of darshan.

Eight years ago while in our village, a two-year old in the family we stayed with was introduced to me, and picking up on their slight anxiety over how to deal with my foreignness, he cried and said he was scared. This scary feeling quickly transformed into fascination. Each day he would beg for me to stand by a pass-through hatch cut into the wall between two rooms, and raise the curtain so that he could stare at me while I was safely on the other side of the wall, my face framed by the hatch. His auntie laughed about this need of his to have his daily darshan with me.

On darshan, this story gives one interpretation (I also enjoyed the uncertain English). The more orthodox readings of the concept can be found by tracing some of the references noted here.

The eye-to-eye contact with a deity or beloved other is important here in complex ways that I am not knowledgeable enough to spell out, but even without the knowledge, experience itself gives a different kind of understanding. When people stand in worship or prayer before images of deities, even in western churches, I often feel baffled. The images themselves rarely evoke much response in me. Probably that has to do with my own beliefs about reality and unwillingness to project certain kinds of meaning or relation onto non-living objects (after all, deeply rooted in the Judaic traditions is the fundamental injunction against worshiping anything except G-d). And yet, I can feel little shifts now and then. In a town near Pune I was staring at a couple of stones representing Devi (goddess). Someone had called my attention to an unusual tree made up of two entirely different trees, and I was trying to tell if the two trees had actually grown together or were just entwined. As often happens with natural anomalies, two stones were embedded at the base of the tree, and so I looked at the stones. Perhaps, I mused, I have been avoiding the direct look at these things. The stones were greasy with offered butter and oils, respectively garish orange and demon black. Their eyes were bright. I stared into the eyes of one for a long time. Let the aesthetic judgments and thoughts fall away. Don’t bother imagining how other people might experience these stones. I just looked, until distracted by a child calling me to see a squirrel. Something about that mutual stare stays with me. Whatever the scientific findings might be about bias, let’s just have more open looking.

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig

To get from Satara to our village is a trial, because the bus system has not kept up with demand. This trip back was complicated by the fact that a friend in Satara decided that we urgently needed to see an historic site before we left. He hastily arranged a plan involving a school teacher who owns a car and commutes from Satara to a high school far down the highway towards Pune. Originally he had requested that this teacher give us a ride to the bus stand, but on the way there the historic visit was floated, and the teacher was up for it. That meant he had to make a phone call and then circle by a bus stop to let his colleagues know he would not give them a ride as usual to work. They were pleasant about this, which surprised me. Had I been waiting to be picked up only to be told I must take the bus, I would have been less cheerful. This is part of the necessary flexibility people live with here: plans change all the time, guests show up (and guests always take priority), someone gets sick, a vehicle breaks down, the bus is late, and so on. The teachers said, 'oh, guests from abroad! of course you must take them to that site. We'll take the bus. see you later!' So, off we went.

The site is a well, part of an irrigation system, dated to the 17th century. It's near the little village of Limb and is called the Baramotichi Vihir, which translates to the well with twelve 'motes,' which are pulleys with leather bags to pull up the water with bullock power. When we visited, it was a bright, quiet morning. More than anything, I was just glad to be back in fresh rural air. We admired the well, reflected on the political power needed to organize its construction and left just as a busload of Indian tourists visiting heritage sites arrived.

Back on the road, we bounced our way through Limb, discussing the next step. Our teacher was anxious not to be too late back to his school, so it was decided we would proceed to the highway where we could get a bus back to Satara and he could zoom down the highway in the direction of his school. As we zigzagged on the narrow road through the village, we came up behind a State Transit bus. It wasn't going to Satara, though, so we followed it out of the village and at its next stop, squeezed past. Now the teacher was driving as fast as he could on the rough, washed-out road (many roads in Maharashtra were ruined by floods in the fall), when suddenly in front of us...no road. Instead there were deep piles of harshly chopped rock, and men with hoes working to build a new road. For all the modern developments in this area, road-building is still about 50 years behind, using hand-chopped rocks (people escaping drought or other disasters are hired for this work) and tar. The tar cart was also there - a crude vat heated with wood. hmm, now what? There was no way around the work, and the ST bus had meanwhile come up behind us, blocking any option to turn around or back out. There was only the loose rocks in front of us, and a rough track made by motorbikes along the edge.

Risking the tires and underside of his car, the teacher eased the car forward, one wheel on the motorcycle track and one on the rocks. We got hung up and I thought we would have to get out and as a group push or lift the car out of the rock, but he managed to back up a bit and wiggle through. Once more the tire sank a bit into the loose chunks of rock, and once more he eased it out. I was so amazed that we got through, that I barely noticed how we had come nose-to-nose with a school van on the other side blocking our way. Behind it, hemming it in, were a three-wheeler and some motorbikes. A quick negotiation with hand gestures ensued, and the facing vehicles managed to give each other enough room to edge back and allow our car to pass, one wheel perilously close to the deep, axle-breaking gutter. Free! Suddenly the rest of the washed out road seemed easy going.

We reached the highway and there was a Satara ST bus, so the men jumped out to stop it, but it was, as we feared, packed full. Meanwhile, the car I was still sitting in started rolling back. Luckily, handbrakes work the same anywhere, so I grabbed that from the back seat and gave it a good pull. I wonder, though, what would have happened if I had been a village woman who did not know how to drive. All back in the car, we went down an access road for a bit and turned on to the highway, debating our next step. We came up to one of the toll stations along the road, and spied another Satara-bound ST. There were seats. The three of us piled in, our teacher rushed to move his car where he had illegally stopped it, and finally we were all heading the right direction. Except...our bus didn't move. People started grumbling, and eventually the driver climbed down from his high perch (ST busses are built on big truck frames) and walked forward to the toll booth where some loud conversation took place. Seems the water tanker in front of us was having a difficulty with the toll. Eventually it pulled ahead to let us through. Yes! this time we continued directly to the Satara bus stand.

Back at the bus stand, we now faced the problem of getting a bus to Rahimatpur all over again. This was the reason we'd wanted to leave early and had been less than happy to be diverted to the well to begin with. Some bus was scheduled to leave at some point in the next couple of hours, so despite our fear that it would be impossibly full, we waited. We were seated under the stand's shelter, at least, so it wasn't impossibly hot. Lee bought some packets of roasted peanuts, and I shared mine with a couple of children next to me who kept staring and grinning in fascination. It was announced that our bus was cancelled today. There's really no other way out of Satara, since Uber and Olla don't operate there, and the private jeep taxis that used to run are now all hired to move college students around. Busses kept wheeling into the stand, unloading, loading up and leaving again. One convenient practice of the bus stands here is that the busses pull in to different locations depending on their destination. The northbound ones pull in to the north side, southbound to the south, etc. Lee saw a bus pull in to the area heading Rahimatpur direction. It wasn't announced on the loudspeaker (not that I could understand that terrible wah-wah noise anyway) so he went to investigate and then vigorously gestured: come quick! Dragging roller bags, our friend and I ran for it and stuffed ourselves in. It was going through Rahimatpur, some off-schedule bus just added in there to cover for some of the other schedule gaps. There was room to stand in the aisle near a woman who had simply sat herself down amidst the litter. After a while a person took pity on me and squeezed over to give me one buttock's worth of seat. This may have been worse than standing because the bus banged around so much on the flood-damaged road that I was airborne several times and had difficulty bracing myself. Some 20 minutes or so into the trip finally some college girls got down and finally all three of us could sit. A bus bench has rarely felt so comfortable. The rest of the ride I occupied myself staring out the window at all the huge British-era banyan trees lining the road that were being chopped down for road widening. The work seemed most violent because the workers had only crude axes and saws to chop and hack at the huge trunks. Sorry, trees.

By the time we reached Rahimatpur I was so hot and tired that the easiest solution for the last ~5k seemed to me just to walk. But the men organized a three-wheeler. This cost 10 times the bus, had there been a bus, but in the strange economic scale here, the charge in US$ was about 1.50 for the trip. In the city it would have been close to 10 times that again (taking into account an extra baggage charge). I guess I haven't mentioned economy yet: the short version is that in rural areas a cup of tea costs 5 to 10 Rupees, and in the cities you can get fancy tea in a cafe that costs 250 Rupees. Busses, run by the government, have very low, village-scale fares. For villagers, the difference between 10 rupees and 100 rupees might be significant, but for us, it's the difference between a few pennies and a few dimes. At any scale, being greeted by the dog Tippo and sitting quietly as evening falls is priceless.

next page