WORDS LIKE FREEDOM

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Ram Dass and Prayaga Devi

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Words | Like Freedom
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THE MEMOIRS OF AN IMPOVERISHED
INDIAN FAMILY: 1947-97

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Siddharth Dube

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HarperCollins Publishers India

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HarperCollins Publishers India Pvt Ltd
7/16 Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002
‘Siddharth Dube 1998

Published in 1998 by
HarperCollins Publishers India
We gratefully acknowledge Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund
for letting us use the extract on pages 2 and 3,
from An Auiobiogrciphy by Shri Jawaharlal Nehru.
O'ISBN 81-7223-305-1
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This edition is for sale only in the
Indian subcontinent and South Asia.

Typeset in Times New Roman by
Mesatechnics
19A, Ansari Road
New Delhi 110 002
Printed in India by
Gopsons Papers Ltd
A-14, Sector 60
• Noida 201 301
All rights reserved. No part of this publication ^nay be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without prior permission of the publishers.

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To my father,
Basant Kumar Dube,
an incomparably great and good person,
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and to my brother,
Bharat, for so unwaveringly believing in me and in this book.

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Contents

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A cknowledge merits
Introduction: This Naked, Hungry Mass
2.
The Slaves of Slaves
3.
Bombay I: 1949-52
4. Zamindari Abolition: ‘The vision of
a new heaven and a new earth’
5. Bombay II: 1954-62
6.
The 1960s
7.
The Messiah of the Poor: Indira Gandhi
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8. Shrinath
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9. Hansraj
10. Prayaga Devi
11. Puttu
12. Jhoku
13. The Poorest Families
14. The Land Still Belongs to the Richest Families
15. How The Poor are Subjugated, and
How They Fight Back
16. Why Political Democracy has not led to
Economic Democracy
17. Conclusion: The Perpetuation of Mass Poverty
Notes and references
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

xi
1
23
46

56

75
96

108
123

148
160
174
186
192.
212
223

239
255
258
268
270
277

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Acknowledgements

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Many people inspired and supported me - imelleciually, emotionally,
and often in both ways - in the exhausting years I spent researching
and writing. I can only hope that with this book I give to them some
part of what they have given me.
My mother, Savitri, and eldest brother, Pratap, were, as always,
the most admirable, staunch and caring companions I could hope for.
In Baba ka Gaon, Ram Dass, Prayaga DevL Shrinath, Mata Prasad,
Hansraj, Ram Saran and Mata Prasad Maurya, Durbhe and Phoolchand
were by their bravery and goodness constant reminders to me of why
it was essential to vyrite this book.
I owe an enormous debt to Ashis Nandy, Amartya Sen and Scott
Thompson for their eaffy encouragement, without which I would not
have begun this project’
Saleem Kidwai and David Devadas: this book is theirs as much
as mine, for their affection, guidance and help, not least with the
unending translations from Awadhi.
My other dearest friends - Sohaila Abdulali, Tonuca Basu, Sheba
Chacko, Brinda Chugani, Rosemary George, Suzy Goldenberg, Shilpa
Hingorani, Inji Islam, Pichaya Manet, David Morrison, Rosemary
Romano, Sankar Sen, Jai Singh, Sailaja and Tarim Tahiliani, Nilita
Vachani and Kamala Visweswaran - made my life worth living with
their love and generosity. Siddharth Gautam magically appeared joyful and couiageous as always — when 1 desperately missed him,
For their friendship and support, I am indebted to Shoba Aggarwal,
Paul Desruisseaux, Robin Desser, Michael Dwyer, Gautam

•x • Words like

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freedom

Khandelwal, Leena Labroo, Pankaj Mishra, Sanjay Pradlian, Arundhati
Roy, N.C. Saxena, Helen Saxenian, Jeremy Seabrook, Shashi Tharoor,

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Indti Vacham. and Jafar and Rajat Zaheer; and to my editors Renuka

Chatterjee and Robert Molteno.
I am also extremely grateful to the United States Institute of Peace
foi the grant that underwrote much of this research, and to the Centre
for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi for hosting me as a

visiting fellow

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Introduction: This Naked,
Hungry Mass

‘My mental picture of India always contains this naked,
hungry mass. ’
Jawaharlal Nehru
India’s first prime minister

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FROM 1919 to 1921, the central districts of Uttar Pradesh province
were swept by a fierce peasant revolt. At the height of the conflict,
thousands of impoverished peasants and landless labourers battled
with zamindar landlords and the British colonial government, allies
in exploiting the peasantry. The scale and ferocity of the revolt was
such that it captured newspaper headlines in distant Delhi, British
India’s capital. The peasants’ demands were radical. They sought
nothing less than an end to their exploitation and oppression: the
beatings and abuse by the landlords and their agents, forced and
unpaid labour, the extortionate rents and illegal taxes that impover
ished them. The province’s British governor-general, apprehensive,
warned of ‘the beginnings of something like revolution’.

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Though the landlords and the British administration were for a
while in retreat, by mid-1921 they had used the police and army to
crush the ‘revolution’. The scores of thousands of landless labourers
and petty tenants w ho had joined or been inspired by the revolt were
once again condemned to brutal oppression and poverty. Their dreams
of freedom evaporated.
Drawn into the revolt on the peasants’ side was the young
Jawaharlal Nehru, already a leader of the Indian National Congress.
Decades later. Nehru wrote about his experience:

As a result ol the externment order from Mussoorie I spent about
two weeks in Allahabad, and it was during this period.that I got
entangled in the Nisan (peasant) movement. . . Early in June 1920
(so far as 1 can remember) about two hundred kisans marched fifty
miles from the interior of Pratapgarh district to Allahabad city
with the intention of drawing the attention of the prominent
politicians there to their woebegone condition. I learnt that these
kisans were squatting on the river bank, on one of the Jumna
ghats, and, accompanied by some friends, went to see them. They
told us of the crushing exactions of the taluqadars, of inhuman
treatment, and that their condition had become wholly intolerable.
They begged us to accompany them back to make inquiries as
well as to protect them from the vengeance of the taluqadars who
were angry at their having come to Allahabad on this mission.
They would accept no denial and literally clung on us. At last I
promised to visit them two days or so later.
I went there with some colleagues and we spent three days
in the villages far from the railway and even from thepucca road.
That visit was a rex elation to me. We found the whole countryside
afire with enthusiasm and full of a strange excitement. Enormous
gatherings would take place at the briefest notice by word of
mouth. One village would communicate with another, and the
second with the third, and so on, and presently whole villages
would empty out, and all over the fields there would be men and
women and children on the march to the meeting-pl ace . . . They

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Introduction: This naked, hungry mass • 3
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were in miserable rags, men and women, but their faces were full
of excitement and their eyes glistened and seemed to expect
strange happenings which would, as if by a miracle, put an end
to their long misery.
They showered their affection on us and looked on us with
loving and hopeful eyes, as if we were the bearers of good tidings,
the guides who were to lead them to the promised land. Looking
at them and their misery and overflowing gratitude, I was filled
with shame and sorrow, shame at my own easy-going and com
fortable life and our petty politics of the city which ignored this
vast multitude of semi-naked sons and daughters of India, sorrow
at the degradation and overwhelming poverty of India. A new
picture of India seemed to rise before me, naked, starving, crushed,
and utterly miserable. And their faith in us, casual visitors from
the distant city, embarrassed me and filled me with a new respon
sibility that frightened me.
. . . Even before my visit to Pratapgarh in June 1920, 1 had
often passed through villages, stopped there and talked to the
peasants. I had seen them in their scores of thousands on the banks
of the Ganges during the big melas and we had taken our Home
Rule propaganda to them. But somehow I had not fully realized
what they were and what they meant to India. Like most of us.
I took them for granted. This realization came to me during these
Pratapgarh visits and ever since then my mental picture of India
always contains this'naked, hungry mass.
In January 1995, three-quarters of a century after the revolt and
almost half a century since India became independent, I travelled to
the area of the revolt in central Uttar Pradesh (UP) province. My
object was to write a memoir of one of the impoverished families who
had fought in that revolt and of their experience in independent India.
I had dreamt for many years of writing this memoir.
I was baffled by why poverty, hunger, ill health and a myriad
other deprivations were still ubiquitous in India nrany years after
Independence. The scale of poverty - the numbers of the ‘naked,

4 • Words like freedom

hungry majs’ — has worsened so much in the past half-century that
in 1997, even by conservative government estimates, the number of
people unable to afford a survival-level diet equals the country’s total

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population in 1947 of about 350 million. This is the largest group of
impoverished people in the world. Even the proportion of desperately
poor people is not substantially lower in the 1990s than half a century
ago: at about 40 per cent of the population today in contrast to 50
pci cent at Independence. And though many of the most dramatic

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manifestations of suffering long associated with India - bonded la

bour, large-scale epidemics, famines - have been largely controlled,
this commendable progress is eclipsed by the failure to ameliorate the
chronic deprivation and everyday hunger suffered by several hundred
million Indians.
Equally puzzling to me was the fact that though the country today

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boasts a huge economy, a major industrial sector, the world’s fourth
largest army and diverse national achievements, India’s record on rais
ing human welfare, ccPmpared to most other developing countries, is
miserable.1 Levels of hunger, illiteracy, excess mortality and other in
dicators of deprivation are today far higher in India than in China, the

Philippines or Indonesia. In 1947 living standards in China were much

the same as in India, but 50 years later were twice that of India’s. And
though 20 years ago severe poverty was as pervasive in Indonesia as in
India, only about 8 percent of the Indonesian population is today abso
lutely pooi, a proportion only one-fifth that of India. India’s scores on

human welfare are worse than every Latin American country but Haiti,
and appear favourable only in comparison to those of the most impov-

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ci ished and strife-torn sub-Saharan African countries.

Why has such acute and pervasive poverty persisted in India

despite decades of fairly rapid economic growth, planned economic

de\ elopment and constitutional commitment to socialism? Did Nehru
betray the impoverished peasants’ faith in him, ‘the new responsibil

ity that seized him during the 1919 revolt? Did the Congress party
abdicate the many promises it made to the poor during the heady days
ol the nationalist mo\ cment ? Why have the sheer numbers of the poor

not ensured that India s parliamentary democracy would work to their

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benefit? Why has the persistence of mass poverty not emerged as a
central political issue?
Thes<? questions were the beginning of my quest. Once embarked.
I decided to frame the book around the true experiences of an
impoverished family. I wanted to know, and to record for others, what
the poor felt, what they thought, how they viewed the world and their
own situation. History has almost always been written from the per
spective of the wealthy and powerful. Thus, though the poor have long
been a majority of India’s population, they are almost entirely absent
from the annals of Indian history, while there are scarcely any au
thentic records of their views and experiences. Y et, by sheer numbers,
the history of India’s poor is the history of India.
Moreover, very soon the generation of Indians who were adult
at the time of the country’s independence will have died. The unique
history of millions of people will vanish with the passing of this
generation of the Indian poor. They have been participants and wit
nesses at one of the modern world’s most extraordinary junctures: the
constitutional pledge by the government of one of the first colonies
to win independence that all its people were assured’democracy and
freedom from want. It is imperative that their history and their ex
periences in independent India be recorded.
What was the best way to truly represent in a book the views
and reality of the poor? To me, there seemed to be only one
satisfactory combination of methods. The first and most crucial step
was to interview at length generations of one family and to reproduce
. verbatim their life stories. The members of this family would tell
their own histories in their own voices. This was the most honest,
exacting and powerful way I could think of to reflect their views.
Because of my twin convictions that the poor or illiterate understand
their circumstances very well and that outsiders — however em
pathetic or skilled in research methods - can never comprehend
realities radically different from their own, 1 rejected outright the
option of placing myself as an observer-cum-narrator, or of writing
their story in the first person or as a novel. These convictions were
strengthened in writing this book. This family’s testimony is ample

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proof that they comprehend their situation just as clearly as the
educated and the well-off. And I could not have begun to grasp their
view of life had I not relied on interviewing them and reproducing
their testimony.
The second step was to place this family’s experience within an
analysis which explained two things: first, how the millions of other
impoverished Indian families had fared in this half-century; second,
the most important features and determinants of the many changes
that have affected India in these decades, in politics, agriculture, the
caste system and almost every other sphere. The need to locate this
single family’s experience within this broader context is self-evident.
Focusing on the story of one family ensures richness of detail and a
sense of continuity, but the scale and complexity of poverty in India
is sUch that a single family’s experience can never be ‘typical’. Also,
the situation of this family or of the poor overall cannot be understood
without analysing the patterns and determinants of politics, econom
ics and social change. For instance, just the most obvious questions
about this family — Why were they poor in 1947? Why are they poor
today? - require an explication of a huge range of issues. These
include, at the very least, the colonial political and land-ownership
systems, the caste system, the nature of the Congress party and post
Independence development policies, the depth of the independent
Indian state s commitment to equity and social welfare goals, the
nature of subsequent land reform efforts, the pattern of agricultural
and industrial growth, and national and provincial politics. Hence, this
book melds the singular voices of this family with broad analysis of
India’s ‘political economy’.
In some chapters, the family’s testimony is predominant, in others
analysis. Because the memoir is this family’s, I have not edited their
oral testimony beyond changes needed for effective translation or
clarification. Their views and emphases and criticisms are intact and
do not reflect my biases. If readers feel that this book is one-sided
or too harsh - for instance, in the antagonism towards the upper castes,
the landlords and orthodox Hinduism — they should remember that
its purpose is to mirror an impoverished family’s view of life.

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Introduction: This naked, hungry mass • 7

Similarly, in selecting which subjects to emphasize in the analysis,
I have followed the emphasis placed by the members of the family.
For instance, the issues of land reform and of the landlords’ violence
against the poor are persisting themes because this family considers
them to be central to their poverty.
Ram Dass
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At the centre of this chronicle are Ram Dass Pasi and his village of
Baba ka Gaon in the Pratapgarh district of UP province. Ram Dass
was born in the mid-1920s to a destitute untouchable family of landless
labourers, who were bonded to the village landlords. (The term ‘un
touchable’ is used in this book in references before 1949, when the
term and the social restrictions associated with it were declared illegal
under the Indian Constitution. The preferred term now is scheduled
castes, because these castes are enumerated on a government sched
ule.) Pratapgarh - located in the area of central UP known as Awadh
— was the vortex of the, 1919 revolt.
Ram Dass today, aged about 70, is a convivial man, self-assured
and open in demeanor. Apart from his unusual dark grey eyes, in looks
and dress Ram Dass is broadly similar to other poor north Indian
village men of his age - short (about five feet four), slight-framed,
strong-featured, mustachioed (a thick, carefully shaped bow of white
hair), most often wearing a muddied cotton dhoti, brown kurta, short
sleeveless jacket and cracked leather shoes. On special occasions,
particularly in the evenings, he dons either a yellowish or lilac turban.
Ram Dass’s father was from a village some 20 km to the north
of Baba ka Gaon, called Ranipur, in Sultanpur district, which was
part of the wealthy Amethi landlord’s estate. Baba ka Gaon is
Ram Dass’s nanihal - his mother’s village - but it became his fami
ly’s home because his mother moved back to her parents’ home once
her mother-in-law had died and her husband and father-in-law still
stayed away at work in Bombay for long periods. My father used to
go away for two years at a time and so where was my mother to go
for refuge but to her parents? Ram Dass and his elder sister were born

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in Ranipur, the rest of his siblings in Baba ka Gaon. In Bombay, Ram
Dass’s father worked as a labourer at the Khiljee Mills, a cotton
milling factory. He left Bombay in the early 1940s to return to Baba
ka Gaon. He died in 1973, Ram Dass’s mother in 1983.
Ram Dass was the second of five children. Only his youngest
sister, aged about 50, survives. Puttu is married and lives in Dehra
Dun, a prosperous UP town some 700 km north-west. She works as
a labourer in a tea plantation. She is childless.
Ram Dass’s elder sister, Prabha, died at the age of 40. Her
husband and three children live in a village in Sultanpur district. Ram
Dass says she died of some kind of paralysis. We had no money, so
where could we take her for treatment? So it was inevitable that she
would die. There was a doctor in Gauriganj, where she lived, and he
treated her, but these village doctors, what do they know about long,
lasting diseases. At that time no one used to do doctori dawai [West
ern, allopathic medicine].
Another younger sister, Bonda, died at the age of 25. She and her
husband lived in a village adjacent to Baba ka Gaon. She had two
daughters and a son.
Ram Dass’s only brother, Ram Tehel, died of tuberculosis at the
age of 22. When he fell sick, he was in Bombay with Ram Dass,
working as a daily-wage labourer in small factories. Because he was
ill I told him to go back home to the village. I bought him as much
medicine as we could buy. But he just withered away. Only one of
Ram Tehel’s children survived, and on his father’s death this son was
brought up by Ram Dass and his wife. Ka'alu, the son, now about 40,
works in a welding shop in Faridabad, a large industrial town on the
outskirts of Delhi. Kaalu has three daughters and a son, who live in
Baba ka Gaon with his wife.
There are 18 people in Ram Dass’s immediate family today,
including his wife, two sons and their wives, eight grandchildren and
four great-grandchildren. Ram Dass’s wife, Prayaga Devi, is a few
years younger than him. His sons, Shrinath and Jhoku, are aged,
respectively, about 45 and 35. The entire family lives in Baba ka
Gaon, apart from Jhoku, who works in Dehra Dun.
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Ram Dass says: My first child was Shrinath. I had 12 children
altogether, 1 girl and 11 boys. Apart from Shrinath and Jhoku, they
all died after reaching 4 or 5 years of age. The child in Dehra Dun,
Jhoku, is about number 8. The last two died at about the age of 7.
They died ofsmall-pox. They didn 7 survive even though we gave them
a lot of medicines. The earlier ones - I’m not a doctor, so how can
I tell what they died of? It was just not in my destiny that they live.
The history of Ram Dass’s family is inextricably tied to the
village of Baba ka Gaon — current population 500 — in the north-west
corner of Pratapgarh district. This is the heart of the vast Gangetic
plain, and at one of its meandering loops the Ganga passes just 60
km from the village. Baba ka Gaon is marked only on detailed maps
of Pratapgaih district, but is located nearly equidistant between
Lucknow, UP’s capital, and Varanasi, both about 150 km distant.
From eithei city, it today takes about five hours by bus to reach the
iiitted dirt track that leads to the village. Pratapgarh’ the district
capital, is two hours away. More convenient are the railway stops at
Amethi or Gauriganj, market towns in Sultanpur district, both about
an hour distant by jeep or horse-drawn cart.
Baba ka Gaon is about 4 km from the tarmac road that runs to
Pratapgarh town from Ateha, the closest market to Baba ka Gaon. To
get to Baba ka Gaon from this road, one must .turn left at the large
peepul tiee j km from Ateha. The peepul tree, towering, ancient, waxy
leaves glistening in the sunlight, has a broad cement base around its
circumference on which a simple Hindu shrine with a vermilioned
statue of the goddess Kali has been built of mud. A dirt track begins
here, cratered with potholes and ditches, running past small ponds,
airy groven of mahua and mango trees, and several small hamlets.
Everywhere there are young children - their ragged clothes and thin
bodies so brown with dust that they appear to have sprung straight
from the soil - herding cattle or goats, playing and screaming amongst
the groves, collecting sticks for firewood
--J, or dribbling back in twos
and threes from school.
The track climbs imperceptibly on the way to Baba ka Gaon,
entering the village at its eastern end. Baba ka Gaon is today shaped

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The Big Four - Ram Dass, Prayaga Devi, Shrinath, Hansraj

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12 • Words like freedom

like a long, untidy oval. There are large trees and thickets of bamboo
everywhere. Seen from a distance, they form a copse of variegated
greens, making the village an oasis in the dusty summer months.
Outside, a patchwork of fields, broken by mud borders a foot high
and interspersed with clumps and groves of ancient trees, stretches
into the expanse of the Gangetic plain.
On entering the village, the track breaks into two, the one to the
right broad and sweeping, the other little more than a broken mud rut.
The broader track goes to the area that has always been the preserve
of the Brahmins and Thakurs, the upper castes. (The latter term is also
commonly used in UP to refer to the men of the Kshatriya caste.) The
houses on this side of the village are large — the size of colonial
bungalows - built of fired bricks, with tiled roofs. Their high walls
enclose courtyards and spacious rooms. Most have large amounts of
open space around them, where ancient trees grow. Ram Dass com
ments: The Thakurs each have half or one acre of land for their
houses. But people in my area don't even have space for a bed! The
buffaloes and bullocks tied in the courtyards are well fed. Outside a

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Introduction: This naked, hungry mass • 13

particularly large home are parked a jeep and a tractor; another tractor
is in a shed near another large home.
Of the 100-odd families today in Baba ka Gaon, j:he upper castes
comprise 20 Thakurs and 3 Brahmins. All buFtwo of these families
live on this side of the village. Lower-caste people rarely venture here.
There are numerous'temples in this section of the village, most in
disrepair. Local legend maintains that there were once 52 temples in
Baba ka Gaon, all in the upper-caste area. Ofthe older temples there are
just eight left. The most important and best preserved is a simple ten- ■
feet-high structure, built of mud, open on all sides and painted white,
which sits under a magnificent peepul tree, virtually in the centre ofthe
village; this is the Baba ka Mandir, a shrine for an ascetic who made this
village his home many centuries ago.

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A world apart from the upper-caste area is the side of the village
reached by the rutted, narrow track. This poorer section is today
home to both the middle castes and the scheduled castes, as huts
have sprung up on the land that earlier divided the middle-caste area
from that of the former untouchables, who were forced to live at
some distance. Where the middle-castes houses are it was all jungle
till five or six years ago. Then during the land reform people began
to make houses there.
There are currently 41 families from the various middle castes.2
The scheduled castes total 35 families. This side is also home to 7
scheduled tribe families. (India’s indigenous communities are given
protective discrimination benefits similar to that accorded to the former
untouchables.) Two Thakur families moved to this area a decade ago,
as they owned large plots of land here.
The majority of homes on this side are small huts, cramped close
to each other, 50 of which would fit into the larger of the upper-caste
mansions. Generally, the homes of the middle castes are better than
those of the scheduled castes and the scheduled tribes. There are a

handful of larger houses made of brick and whitewashed. The best
homes belong to the two Thakur families; they are capacious, solid
and double-storeyed. The two Thakurs who you now see near my
house have movedfrom the upper-caste area because they owned land

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14 • Words like freedom
here. They moved only 12 years ago or so. They have also been
encroaching on other people's land.
The huts are poorest towards the very southern end of the village,
where untouchable families like Ram Dass s were once segregated.
Most of these huts have just one or two tiny rooms. The walls are
of brown mud and the roofs of thatch. Buffaloes and cows are tied
close to the huts or in the open courtyards of the bigger houses. Mangy
dogs and goats roam freely. But the huts and the small patches of land •
in front of them are spotlessly clean.
The men and women at this end of the village are visibly poorer,
thinner and shorter than on the upper-caste side. These are the tiny
but sinewy people who for a pittance load trucks, pull rickshaws and
work on construction sites in India’s cities and towns. In the village
they are dressed poorly in faded clothes; the older men in dhoti-kurtas
and the younger men in trousers and T-shirts, the women in sarees.
Their huts have few possessions - generally, a bicycle, a few utensils,
a charpai or two. a few religious posters and calendars, and sometimes
a radio. Their children are with few exceptions bone-thin and stunted.

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Most are dressed in mud-covered odds and ends. Many of them are
visibly sick, with running eye infections, sores and boils. Flies settle
thickly along the eyes of the infants.
At this end of Baba ka Gaon is a large pond flanked by trees and
marshy land. The pond doubles in size during the monsoon, creating
a pretty island out of the low-lying land on one end. It brims with
a bewildering variety of water-fowl and wading birds — brown ducks,
white cattle egrets, grey herons, dabchicks, and more — who call
loudly, fly here and there, or poke diligently for food around the
marshy shore. Especially in winter, when migrating birds come from
distant northern lands, there is an air of excitement all day at the pond.
The birds are virtually unafraid of humans, as Baba ka Gaon’s vil
lagers have for several decades prohibited killing them.
Ram Dass’s family hut is amongst the last homes in this side of
the village. We built this hut in 1965. Earlier, it was a hovel. There
were two rooms. We all lived in one room. And in the other room we
used to keep the bullocks. The new hut stands on the site of the old

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one. Built of mud and with a thatched roof of dried straw, it is
indistinguishable from the other small huts which crowd around it.
The path between the huts is narrow, just about broad enough to allow
a couple of people tolpass. At the edge of the path is a hand-pump.
A small verandah runs across the front0 of the house. Perhaps
20 feet long, the verandah is divided into two by a short wall. On
one side are housed the family’s two large, snowy-white bullocks;
on the other side is a single charpai. The eaves of the roof come
down very low, so that adults have to stoop sharply to enter the
verandah; the low caves keep out the rain and direct sun. Inside is
a small room, little more than a corridor, which leads to a tiny
courtyard, perhaps 12 feet long and 5 wide. The walls inside are
far higher than the low-slung eaves would suggest, perhaps as high
as 9 feet. There are three tiny rooms around the courtyard, each large
enough to hold only the equivalent of two charpais. One room is
a store, while the other rooms were built for Shrinath and Jhoku
when they got married. (Following village tradition, on the marriage
of their children Ram Dass and his wife began to sleep in the
verandah so that the couples would have privacy.) A kitchen, whose
entrance is raised about a foot higher than the courtyard, is where
Ram Dass’s wife sits and cooks and also serves food. Part of the
wall facing the courtyard has a brick filigree to let the smoke out;
this and the walls inside the kitchen are blackened with smoke.
As in much of rural India, there is an air of immutability about
Baba ka Gaon. Most sights seem to date back centuries. The mud huts,
rudimentary ploughs, the thick wooden wheels on the bullock carts,
barefoot old men in muddy dhotis, women with their sarees pulled
over their faces, dusty children herding goats - all these say that time has stood still, that nothing has changed.
But Baba ka Gaon has changed substantially. Ram Dass says: If
you had come 50 years ago you would have found the village very
different. The village was half the size then. There are about 100
houses now in the village. There were far fewer then, about 60. Every
family has split into several families. As the families increase the
number of houses grow.

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16 • Words like freedom

The road to Baba ka Gaon was earl ier along the same route, but then
it was a little path as broad as two poles. The bullock carts would have
to go through thefruit tree groves. There weren ’(goodroads but at least
they could be used all the time apart from the monsoons. The Thakurs
would ride horses and their women would be carried in palanquins.
The village could not be reached during the monsoon till about
four or five years ago because the path would be washed away. There
would be waist-deep water in many parts! For weeks we couldn ’t even
get to the closest markets. Because of the new, higher road at least
the bullock carts and jeeps can always get within 3 km of the village.
There were no water taps 50 years ago, nor were there any hand
pumps. There were only three wells that we scheduled castes could
use. The upper castes each had their own wells next to their houses.
If the water in our wells finished, we could take waterfrom the wells
that were owned by some of the middle castes.
There are today many bicycles in the village, almost one in each
home. I had seen cycles as a child when going to Pratapgarh orAmethi.
I bought an old bicycle for Rs 30 when I came back from Bombay in
1962. Then in about 1975 I bought Shrinath, my eldest son, a cycle so
that he could use it to go and study. I bought that onefor Rs 105 as it was
second-hand. New ones used to cost about Rs 150 then. Now they cost
Rs 1200. The cycles used to be very strong then, like everything else.
I’ve never bought a radio. I’ve never been rich enough to buy a
radio. Shrinath has never bought one either. But now he has a small
one, which his brother Jhoku bought him from Dehra Dun. About half
the families in the village now have radios.
But I listen to Shrinath's radio or to someone else’s. I get all my
information from the radio or from talking to others! I’m an unedu
cated man.
According to official records, electricity has been supplied to
Baba ka Gaon since 1993. But the reality is that because the villagers
refused to pay the large bribe of about Rs 3,000 demanded by the
linesmen, only ten families in Baba ka Gaon have electricity connec
tions. Hence, though the village and the adjoining fields sport electric
poles and wires the village is still not electrified.

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Eight of the houses with electricity also have black-and-white
televisions. Three of the Thakurs and one Brahmin have televisions;
the rest belong to middle-caste families. The two tractors and single
jeep in the village belong to the Thakurs. So do three of the four tube
wells for irrigation; the fourth belongs to a middle-caste family.
If Baba ka Gaon has changed substantially in the past half-cen
tury, the area and towns surrounding it have been transformed. The
roads to the towns were earthen. They had holes in them, and water
would collect after even a small rainfall. If it rained hard the roads
would be unusable. There were no cars. There has been a government
bus line since the 1950s. As the road became better there were more
buses. The proper road - levelled with small stones but not tarred
- didn 't come this side of the river. So we would walk to Gushannath,

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cross the Sai river by boat, and then catch the bus to Pratapgarh. It

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would take over three hours, but even today it takes nearly as long
because the buses keep stoppingfor passengers! The tarmac road has
been 20 years in some places, 10 in others. Now even the villages are
being linked by road!
In the past, wealthy landlords would use horses, palanquins or
bullock-drawn carriages. The poor would walk or go bn crude bul
lock-carts. The 20-km journey to Amethi, a nearby market-town and
the seat of the landlord’s estate in which Ram Dass’s father was born,
would take over two hours on foot, slightly more by bullock-cart. The
pony-carts of today didn’t ply then because the rutted dirt road could
only be managed by bullocks.
Today, the bicycles and bullock- and pony-carts mingle with the
rare government and private bus, the occasional jeep-taxi, and some
times with tractor-drawn buggies. Most of the roads are cratered with
deep potholes.
Pratapgarh used to look like what Gauriganj is today. In Ateha,
there was only one brick house — that of Noor Khan — the one on the
corner, which now has the post office. The rest of the houses were
mud and thatch hovels, like those of us poor people.
Because there were so few people, the bazaars were also little.
There were just a few mud huts and a small weekly bazaar. They just
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18 • Words like freedom

used to sell local produce, clothes, and utensils. What else was needed?
At that time no one had money to buy cement or bricks to make houses;
it’s not like today where everything is available.
Pratapgarh, the district capital and formerly the seat of a large
zamindari estate, some 50 km away, is now a typical north Indian
town: dirty, congested with all manner of traffic, lacking the most
basic municipal services. Any charm that it might once have pos
sessed is now obliterated. There are innumerable shops, catering to
almost any modern demand, be it photocopies, car repairs or video
movies. Outside the town is the grand mansion of the Pratapgarh
rajas, surrounded by mango orchards. Pratapgarh’s population today
is about 30,000.
Gauriganj, the jumped-up village that Ram Dass compares to
Pratapgarh of half a century ago, is in neighbouring Sultanpur district,
but only 20 km<away from Baba ka Gaon, making it the closest large
market. Gauriganj is still little more than a village today, boasting
just one long road of shops and another shorter one with a hawker’s
market. There is a tiny railway station. The open sewers are choked
with excreta and plastic bags. People defecate and urinate wherever
privacy permits, the men most often along any convenient wall. A
single fall of rain turns the roadsides and open markets into a
quagmire of filth.
Ateha is the closest large village to Baba ka Gaon, about 5 km
away. It is built at the junction of several roads. Centuries ago, Ateha
was reputed to have been a fortified town, but there is nothing to show
this today. There are some fine large houses, and an attractive mosque
as well because of the large number of Muslims living here. The roads
are potholed and cut by streams of blue-green sewage.
Amethi was better than Gauriganj. People there looked richer.
The traders were more reputed for their wealth. But even so, there
was nothing in Amethi then; now it is a big town. It was totally barren
and now look at all the shops. Amethi, some 20 km from Baba ka
Gaon, became a household name across India when it became the
pocket borough of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. The town
itself is no different to Pratapgarh — just smaller and, if possible, even

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messier and more choked with bullock-carts, tractors, jeeps and
innumerable people. Its growth has been rapid because of the influx
of government funds for the district. The handful of older buildings
- including a mosque, a college and a few large homes belonging
to traders - have been far outstripped by scores of new brick
buildings, weakly built but two storeys high, that have gone up in
every direction, seemingly without licence or planning. One positive
legacy of its years as the constituency of a prime minister is the grand
railway station.

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Introduction: This naked, hungry mass • 19

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Why did I choose Ram Dass and his family out of the many million
impoverished families in India? And why Baba ka Gaon, Pratapgarh
district or UP province?
India’s size and social diversity mean that no one region, province
or district can be typical. As I was picking just one area, I took pains
to ensure that this area would not be unusually rich or poor, but would
approximate the average. An obvious candidate was UP. With its
current population of roughly 150 million, the province is home to
about one-sixth of India’s people. The northern, Hindi-speaking belt
of which UP is the major constituent also contains the largest aggre
gation of the poor within India. In addition, for several decades the
proportion of the absolutely poor in UP has been close to the national
average. Within UP, I chose Pratapgarh because it is a fairly average
district, neither unusually prosperous like the province’s western
districts nor as poor as the southernmost districts that border Bihar.
Apart from being quite representative of India’s development
experience, both UP and the area around Baba ka Gaon have been
at the epicentre of modern India’s emergence. From the early years
of this century, the Indian National Congress flourished in the United
Provinces of Agra and Awadh, as UP was then known, and the
province became the core of the nationalist struggle. Mahatma
Gandhi first enunciated his programme of non-violent aggression to
achieve independence in Allahabad in 1920, 75 km from Baba ka
Gaon. Allahabad was the birthplace of Jawaharlal Nehru. The demand for a separate homeland for Muslims, culminating in the

20 • Words like freedom

creation of Pakistan, was led by UP’s Muslims. The province became
even more crucial to national politics after Independence in 1947,
as the introduction of universal suffrage gave populous UP one-sixth
of the seats in Parliament. Seven of India’s 12 prime ministers have
come from UP, five of them - Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira
Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Vishwanath Pratap Singh - elected from
constituencies within about 100 km of Baba ka Gaon. Rae Bareli
and Amethi, the pocket boroughs of Indira, Rajiv and Sanjay Gandhi,
border Baba ka Gaon. What better site than UP and Baba ka Gaon
to come to grips with understanding why the Congress, Nehru and
his political dynasty, and independent India’s politics, have failed
to emancipate India’s poor?
Why choose Ram Dass and his family out of the half-billion or
more impoverished Fndians? Much as in my choice of province and
district, I made every effort to ensure that the family I chose would
be fairly representative of the Indian poor.
The vast majority of impoverished Indians are of low or lowermiddle castes, along with indigenous tribes ’and Muslims of low
status. Three-quarters of the Indian poor live in rural areas.3 Most are
artisans, landless agricultural labourers or farmers with plots too small
or infertile to meet their families’ subsistence needs. Generally, the
less land they own the more vulnerable they arel to labouring for others
at exploitative wages or renting land on adverse terms. In urban areas,
a large proportion of the. poor are recent migrants from their villages,
seeking relief from their poverty. On arriving they compete against
each other and the growing number of resident poor for any kind of
job: begging, pulling rickshaws and carts, working as porters, labour
ing at construction sites, quarries or road construction, cleaning toilets
and sewers, or working as menial help at roadside eating places.
Generally illiterate and without appropriate skills, their employment
prospects are so bleak that the luckiest are those who end up as
domestic servants or as manual workers in factories. The migrants are
generally men, who leave behind their families in the village. Only
the most desperate of families move entirely to urban areas, with
every able adult and child taking up whatever work they can find. But

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whether single or in families, the migrants often find that because of
high unemployment rates and low wages there is no relief from their
poverty. Crowded into the hutments and slums that now dot every
Indian town and city, or surviving on the pavements, they discover
that living conditions in the urban areas are often as harsh as the
deprivations of the villages they fled.
Ram Dass’s family is in many ways ‘typical’ of this vast
multitude. They live in a rural area. Like large numbers of the rural
poor, his family until recently owned no land at all and survived
primarily by working for wages as agricultural labourers. They are
of an ‘untouchable’ caste, who have always comprised a large and
disproportionate share of the Indian poor. For aeons there was not
one literate person in Ram Dass’s family. Members of his family
have generation after generation fled to urban areas to seek work.
Some now live there permanently.
Ram Dass’s family is also representative of that small percentage
of the poor who progressed in this half-century from intense depri
vation to being above the threshold of absolute poverty. I focused on
a relatively mobile family for two reasons. The less weighty reason
was to avoid the accusations that would have followed — to the effect
that I was exaggerating India’s failures - had 1 chosen a family that
was still direly impoverished. (Of course, such charges are entirely
misplaced because extreme deprivation is the common fate of at least
40 per cent of India’s population.) The more important reason was
because the experience of Ram Dass’s family testifies that even
families that rise above the threshold of absolute poverty still remain
trapped in want and oppression.
There were other compelling (and beguiling) reasons to choose
Ram Dass’s family. Ram Dass and Prayaga Devi, his wife, are amongst
the few surviving poor people of their age in Baba ka Gaon or in the
other villages I visited in the area. They are both still fit with their
memory and senses undiminished. Both lived through the last two
decades of British colonial rule, witnessed Independence and a full
half-century of India’s sovereignty. They are amongst the few remain
ing witnesses of the history of the Indian poor in the past half-century.

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22 • Words like freedom

Moreover, Ram Dass was one of the few poor people in the area
who knew of the 1919 Awadh revolt and, even more important, that
his family had participated in the revolt. (He was born half a decade
after it.) Another unexpected bonus was that a branch of Ram Dass’
family lives in Amethi, the pocket borough of former prime minister
Rajiv Gandhi, presenting an opportunity to compare whether the
decades of being a ‘VIP’ constituency had benefited the poor there
in comparison to those in Pratapgarh.
Ram Dass, Prayaga Devi, their two sons, their eldest grandchild
and Ram Dass’s sister are the core of this memoir. Their vision of
life, their view of independent India, and their life stories are por
trayed here. Like the millions of other impoverished Indian families,
they suffer hunger, disease, the death of young children, illiteracy and
every other conceivable deprivation. As untouchables, they dispropor
tionately experience the cruelty sanctioned by the Hindu caste system
against low castes. Landless, they are exploited and abused by the
landlords they are bonded to. The members of this family speak of
these things, they convey what it means to be poor.
They also talk of their unremitting struggle for survival and for
social and political emancipation: their efforts to save their children (
and to educate them, the fight to acquire some land, their inspiration
by radical leaders of the untouchables. They'speak of their achieve
ments, of the gradual changes in Baba ka Gaon, and of why the vast
majority of the village's people are still impoverished and oppressed.
They assess the politics and policies of independent India: the Congress
party, universal suffrage, land reform, local self-government and
progress on alleviating poverty. They enunciate their criticisms of such
national icons as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru and leaders
like Indira Gandhi. They speak of their betrayed dream that India’s
independency wpufd liberate them from poverty and subjugation.
This memoir is a record of their experience and understanding of
these developments. It is also an insight into why, despite their own
efforts and the coming of Independence and democracy, Ram Dass’s
and many millions of other Indian families are still impoverished and
possess only a grudging measure of social and political freedom.

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RAM Dass was born in the Pratapgarh village of Baba ka Gaon six
or seven years after Nehru’s visits to the district - in 1927 or so. He
has only a hazy memory of his parents telling him about the revolt
against the exploitative rule of the taluqadars and zamindars, the
mighty landlords of the region. He knows that his parents and several
other relatives participated in the two-year-long struggle but remem
bers little about their involvement. He does not know about Nehru’s
visits to Pratapgarh nor of how the landless and the poorer peasants
were eventually betrayed by Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and other lead
ers of the Indian National Congress. But Ram Dass’s recollections of
his childhood and youth testify to the oppression and misery that
Nehru glimpsed in his brief weeks in Pratapgarh.
The zamindars were the slaves of the British but we were the slaves of
slaves. Because of this we were so poor. We had only our miserable
earnings from our labour for the zam indars. We would slave all day
long for them and then get to eat a handful of grain at night. Our
zamindars were Thakurs. There were three Thakurfamilies who con
trolled this village. They shared ownership of the entire village audits

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24 • Words like freedom
lands. They were rich and powerful people. They had about 800 acres ■
of land between them.
Because of the zamindari system, we had no land at that time.
Everything was in the control of the zamindars. Everyone used to work
for them. Even the land on which we built our houses was theirs. The
administration was theirs, the land was theirs, everything was theirs.
The zamindars would never work. They had to do nothing at all. They
would just sit and eat!
Each of the zamindars had groups ofpeople dependent on them,
and they would either give us land to plough as sharecroppers or
give us work as field labourers. We were bonded by tradition. We
were like slaves, we would only work for one family. They gave us
loans and then made sure that we were never free of the debt. At that
time we were giving the zamindars Rs 10 for renting a half-acre field
for the year. My family could sometimes afford to rent an acre or
so. What would we earn? Nothing! There was no irrigation and
productivity was low. But the zamindars would pay just quarter of
a rupee in rent to their overlords — the zamindars of Rajapur and
Rampur - on a half-acre, even though we paid Rs 10 to them. They
would give us land on either a rent or a sharecropping basis. The
terms were up to their whims. They would give it to you for a year
or two and then they would take it back, saying that they wanted to
cultivate it themselves. Sharecropping was half of the threshed grain
- you didn ’t share the husks. But then the zamindars started
demanding half the husks too. They could demand anything they
wanted because they owned all the land. Today a fraction of what
you produce is enough to pay the rent. Then more than half of what
you cultivated was not enough.
It was only sometimes that my family could afford to rent land
from the zamindars. But even then we would need to work as labourers
for them as we were so poor and the rent so high. The rest of the time
we would do their field labour and be paid for the days they gave
us work. For a day of hard labour they would give us one or oneand-a-half kilograms of grain. You took that back to eat with your
family. And that wasjust one-and-a-half kilos - which an adult man

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could eat by himself! We would have to think what to do with this
little bit offood: should we feed ourselves or our families or pay our
debts? So how much could a person save, what portion of this food
could they forgo eating so that they could buy clothes?
The zamindars could do anything. They could beat us, thrash us,
torture us! How could we have gone to the police? None of us poor
people ever went to the police. Ifwe had, the Thakurs would have told
us to get out of the village and they would have just kept all our
possessions. Anyway, the police also belonged to the zamindars! The
zamindars ’ attitude was: 'Obey my orders or leave my village. ’ You
had to do what they wantedyou to do, and ifyou didn ’t, you had to run
away. If we uttered a word, they would take off their shoes and beat
us. If we didn’t understand their orders properly, they would beat us.
And that’s how time passed, my ancestors ’, my parents ’, and mine. We
had tofinish workingfor them and only then could we do our own work.
We had to finish theirfields before we could work on the land we had
rented from them. Sometimes when we rented land, we would have
planted the crops, tended and harvested them, and then the zamindars
would come and take away the harvest! Or they wouldput their horses
and bullocks in our field to graze. They would harass us in every
possible way. And we couldn ’tfind refuge because they even owned the
houses we lived in. Ifyou can’tfindprotection in your own home, then
where can you go? And ifthey were passing byfrom a distance and you
didn’t get up from where you were squatting, they would shout to you
to come to where they were and then they would thrash you.
There were some zamindars who were kind. Not everyone was
bad. The kindness was only in the way they treated you, not in how
much they paid you. If some zamindar oppressed you too much, the
kind ones would try to stop that harassment. And the kinder ones
would not exploit you as much with the begar and hari [forced, unpaid
labour and ploughing, respectively]. Others would make you labour
the whole day and not even give you food after that! Not just the
zamindars but all the members of their family would harass us. Ifyou
spoke to one of the upper-caste children not only would the child hit
you but one of his elders would come and hit you. ‘Hai! Give the

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damned creature a few blows!' Some villagers who were harassed a
lot would just run away al night to their relatives or to a city. They
would leave stealthily, because the zamindars wanted us to labour for

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them and wouldn 7 let us go.
Whoever is powerful, it is normal to be afraid of them, especially
those who have you at their mercy. We were scared that they would
beat us up or hit us because we were poor and depended on them.
How could the poor fight the zamindars? How could people who have

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The Persian terms zamindar and taluqadar originally referred to
a large range of intermediaries between the ruler and the cultivator
who played a role in revenue collection. Under the British, however,
they became synonymous with landlord. The terms were essentially
interchangeable across India, though in Awadh taluqadar referred
to the grander zamindars', zamindar is used here to cover both senses.
Awadh’s agrarian system had by the 1900s reached an intensity of
exploitation of the peasantry in great part because of comparatively
recent developments, dating back to the late 1850s. The British East

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nothing to eat fight?
Ram Dass’s family had been subjected to this poverty and oppres
sion for as long as he and his parents could repall. Aeons ago the
untouchables were thought to have been the original and privileged
inhabitants of fche Gangetic. plain. But that past was legend. The real
past, the one his family recalled, was of their being condemned to the
base of an exploitative social order.
Describing Awadh of the 1920s, Nehru wrote:

It was, and is, the land of the taluqadars - the ‘Barons of Oudh ’ they
call themselves - and the zamindari system at its worst flourished
there ... In the greater part of these zamindari areas [Bengal, Bihar
and the United Provinces of Agra and Awadh] there were many
kinds of tenancies - occupancy tenants, non-occupancy tenants,
sub-tenancies, etc. ... in Awadh, however, there were no occu
pancy tenants or even life tenants in 1920. There were only short
term tenants who were continually being ejected in favour of
someone who was willing to pay a higher premium.

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The slaves of slaves • 27

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India Company annexed the kingdom of Awadh - the largest of the
Mughal successor states, in area and population substantially greater
than most European nations - in 1856. Shortly after deposing the
kingdom’s Nawab rulers, the British Crown (which in the meantime
had claimed the Company’s Indian possessions) settled absolute pro
prietary rights in land on the larger of the zcunindars, who combined
the role of local chief and hereditary revenue-collecting intermediary.
This strategy of coopting dominant local chiefs as junior partners and
collaborators in their rule had already served the British well in
establishing a Pax Britannica in the areas that they had annexed over
the preceding century. But, as in those areas, the vesting of land
proprietary rights with the chiefs fissured Awadh’s rural society.1

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The disruption occurred because though the larger zemindars had
during the waning years of the Nawabi often raised themselves to the
position of de facto rulers of petty principalities, they were not landlords in the European sense of owning extensive landed estates.
Under the Mughals and in the successor kingdoms, there was little
notion of private ‘ownership’ of land. In practice rights to land were
shared between peasants, who enjoyed hereditary occupancy rights
that often approached de facto ownership, and village zamindars, who
typically raised revenue from the peasants in their village and had a
limited power to alienate land. Land was seldom sold or purchased
as a commodity, and so long as the peasant paid the taxes and dues
levied on him, he could not be evicted by anyone and typically could
even repossess land on paying arrears. It was only on a small pro
portion of the cultivated area - the ‘home farms’ - that the village
zamindars had an untrammelled right of ownership. The larger, elite
zamindars rarely owned home farms, deriving their wealth from a.
share of the land revenue.
But to the British, logic and custom demanded that there be a clear
owner of land, that this owner pay the land revenue, and that the
owner’s rights on the land be extensive and permanent so that he could
work the land profitably. Rural Awadh, like most other parts of village
India, was remade in the image of the contemporary English coun
tryside. The zamindars’ right to collect revenue from a given area was

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28 • Words like freedom

elevated into the absolute proprietary right of landlord. Not only did
ownership of the vast bulk of cultivated land shift to the zamindars,
but their power and wealth multiplied as the British soon made them
the owners of inhabited sites, fallow and barren land, groves and
orchards, water sources, river crossings, markets and roads. These
landlords became the linchpin of the colonial order in Awadh, pros
perous and loyal allies of the British.
Awadh was soon a paradise for landlords, a trend common to
most of India during the century-and-a-half of British Company and
Crown rule. In Awadh, some 200 large estates emerged. These land
barons, like the Rajas of Amethi, Kalakankar and Pratapgarh, whose
estates lay close to Baba ka Gaon, controlled scores of villages and,
in some cases, thousands of acres of cultivable land. Next in the
size of their estates were several thousand middling landlords. These
included the wealthy landlords of Rajapur and Rampur, kinsmen who
shared ownership of Baba ka Gaon as well as independently owning
several other villages.
Below the large estates were thousands of village landlords. Some,
such as the Thakurs of Baba ka Gaon, were ‘under-proprietors’ of the
larger landlords, who left it to the village worthies to extract labour
and exorbitant rents from the peasantry. But even the latter group were
in effect powerful landlords, as they generally had absolute control
over the land they rented from the larger landlords, which they did,
most often at a low rate fixed in perpetuity. Thus, the Thakurs of Baba
ka Gaon were in essence owners of about 850.acres of land which
they leased from the Rajapur and Rampur landlords and then rented
at vastly higher rates to tenants.
In this agrarian order, the landlords, great or small, elite or village,
did not play a produbtive role in either cultivation or exchange. They
took no part in agriculture beyond renting out their land or having
it worked by labourers. But even if the landlords did not add a paisa
to the agrarian economy, the British were unflinchingly committed
to them: the landlords had become their trusted intermediaries in
revenue collection, policing and administration. The British faith was
stated eloquently by a senior British administrator - soon to become

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The slaves of slaves • 29

the Governor-General of the province - Harcourt Butler, who as
serted, ‘For political purposes the Taluqadars are Awadh. In times of
peace, and still more in times of civil disorder, their voice will be the
voice of Awadh,’3
In turn, Awadh’s landlords, like chiefs and princes across India,
did not fail the trust put in them. They curried favour with the British.
They jockeyed to win ever grander titles: Rai Sahib, Raja, Maharaja.
And in the decades before India gained independence, they proved
time and again that they were the imperial government’s most loyal
defenders against both peasant revolt and nationalism.

But while Awadh’s newly elevated landlords prospered, the condi-. .
tions of the mass of Awadh’s peasantry became increasingly wretched
as an outcome of the colonial land settlement. The settling of own
ership of land on a tiny elite exposed them to extraordinary exploi
tation, trapping them in the worsening spiral of impoverishment that
was the common fate of the peasantry across India under British rule.
Though pre-British Awadh was far from idyllic - agrarian society was
inequitable and stratified by caste, the zamindars were oppressive, the
land revenue demand high, violence frequent, and the mass of lowcaste people condemned to being bonded serfs — the bulk of historical
evidence indicates that the condition of the peasantry worsened greatly
under colonial rule. The crucial difference between the two periods
was that in the pre-colonial agrarian system rights to land and its
produce were far more dispersed, restraining the zamindars' depre
dations. In contrast, under the British the zamindars acquired near
absolute power. While, during the semi-feudal system prevailing earlier,
they had to rely on force and social hierarchy to wring revenues from
the peasantry, they now enjoyed ownership of virtually every inch of
arable land, the legal power to fix rents and to eject tenants, and the
backing of colonial state power. These changes brought to an end the
old feudal system, with all its evident failures and inequities. In its
place - in Awadh and across India - a complex and ugly mix of
feudalism and colonial capitalism emerged. In this strange new sys
tem the zamindars were empowered to rule as despots.

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30 • Words like freedom

And rule despotically they did. Secure as landlords, backed by
British might, and undeterred by the rare and obsequious British
emurral, they multiplied their demands on tenants and labourers,
raising rents and imposing numerous illegal dues. In Pratapgarh disiToo
WTe i a,Sed
38 mUCh aS 50 per Cent between 1862 and
ut the burden on the peasantry was in fact far larger
because the landlords imposed, over and above rent, a range of ru
inous new dues that soon probably outweighed the revenue demand.
One such exaction, nazrcma, a large tribute or bribe required of tenants
when they wanted to take out or renew leases, was so common and
ci ipp mg that it often amounted to twice the recorded rent. The burden
on tenants and labourers did not end there, for there were other dues
hke ghodawan, hathyana and motorana - levied when a new horse
elephant or a motor-car was bought by the landlord - and also
pelpiravan, a gift to the landlord when his wife conceived. In one
documented case, charges were levied on the peasantry for a boil on
he landlady s leg! The forms of exploitation were so multitudinous
lat one British administrator ruefully noted. Tn fact the Indian land
lord seems to consider that a resident of his village should pay for

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to the landlord. The overwhelming majority of Awadh’s culti
vators were soon reduced to tenants-at-will or landless labourers or
were evicted from working the land.6
Describing “the condition of the poor in Awadh at this time a
British administrator wrote that the tenants endured

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peimission to do any conceivable action, even for eating, drinking
and sleeping.’3
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AndI as these new demands came on top of customary but onerous
duties hke begar and hari and-the requirement that a number of
agr,cultural products be supplied for free or below market price far
from even making a subsistence living most petty tenants and share-

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or the most part, a dim, slow moving and too often a povertystncken and hunger-bitten life . . . a narrow round of struggle
between the rent collector and the village usurer ... Following
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The slaves of slaves • 31

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them at the bottom of the scale (though not quite) were the tenants
at will, the ‘will’ in question not being, as a rule, so much their
own as their landlord’s. These were tenants whose rents could be
raised each year barring no holds, and the landlord, if he so
wished, could evict them from their holdings at pleasure ... [At
the very bottom] there was the serf-bond cultivator who worked
for high caste tenants usually being indebted for life. This debt
may have been contracted generations back, it did not matter.7

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A primary outcome of the bolstering of the zemindars ’ position under
British rule was the strengthening of the upper-caste domination of UP
society, as the vast majority of the zamindars were upper-caste .Hindus
(along with high-status Muslims). Conversely, families like Ram
Dass s from the untouchable castes shared in the worsening impover
ishment of the lower-caste petty peasants and labourers. Their desti
tution made them ever more vulnerable to the severe forms of discrimi
nation sanctioned by the caste system against the untouchables, who
were ostracized and treated as neither fully Hindu nor fully human.
Ram Dass recalls, Religion here consisted only of discrimination
and untouchability. Centuries ago, ifHarijans [literally God’s People,
a term popularized by Mahatma Gandhi in the 1930s] like me over
heard the Vedas, they would be punished by having molten leadpoured
into their ears. When I was a child, neither women nor Harijans had
the right to read, to be educated. If our family got a letter we had to
go and plead with the Thakur or Brahmin to read it for us. We had to
wait until they were free. Or we would work extra hard andfinish all
their work and then beg them. Even then, they would read it if theyfelt
like it or otherwise they would shout, ‘Get out, go away! ’ The upper
castes would treat us untouchables worse than dogs! They would at
least accept water served by the middle castes, but from us they would
not accept water, nor would they ever sit with us. If by mistake we
touched any of their eating vessels they would throw them away, but
if a dog licked the vessels they wouldjust wash them!
They call us dirty but they are dirty inside, in their souls. The
outside dirt can be washed with soap, but the dirt from inside cannot

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32 • Words like freedom

be washed. Earlier we could not enter the temples in the towns and
cities, though we could go to the ones in the village. We could not
touch the wells used by the upper castes, even if the few wells in our
part of the village dried. I only got angry about the discrimination
if I was harassed too much or beaten. If there is a caged animal, and
you irritate it, it will obviously get angry.
Though the poor and those considered inferior are mistreated and
isolated in most societies, the Hindu caste system was unique in the
intricacy of social stratification, in the intense strictures against those
considered polluted, and in the enormous proportion ofpeople-about
one-fifth of the Hindu population - who were exiled from society.8
Hindus across India, particularly those of the upper castes, ostracized
the untouchables because of the belief that any form of contact with
these permanently polluted people would infect them.
The stigma of untouchability fell on groups associated with ‘un
clean occupations such as scavenging, butchery, fishing, tanning, and
toddy-tapping; castes who were considered an offshoot of a caste with
an unclean occupation; those who kept pigs or ate pork or beef, or
those who drank alcohol. Ram Dass’ caste, the Pasi - one of the four
major untouchable castes of UP - was considered untouchable pri
marily because of their association with the tapping and consumption
of toddy. But even though over the centuries many untouchable castes
often entirely gave up the occupations they were historically associ
ated with, the mark of untouchability was impossible to erase. Thus,
from well before Ram Dass’s birth not one of Baba ka Gaon’s Pasis
worked as toddy-tappers. Across the province, the Pasis had over the
past century begun working as field labourers, petty tenants and
guards for the landlords. This did not dilute the stigma of untouchability.
The contempt they were held in and their exclusion from society did
not mean that the untouchables were notan integral part of the economy.
They were indispensable. They performed the bulk of the hardest
labour, undertook the menial services that caste Hindus considered
unclean, and were powerless to demand adequate returns for their work
As cheap labour and the performers of defiling tasks, the untouchables
were essential to maintaining the way of life of the upper castes.

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The slaves of slaves • 33

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Caste made India’s feudalism - whether the feudalism of Mughal
or Nawabi rule' or the amalgam of feudalism and capitalism that
emerged under the British — qualitatively different to feudalism the
world over. The intricate rules of the caste system, particularly the
hereditary division of labour and the ban on marriage between castes,
preserved the agrarian status quo and foreclosed lower-caste mobil
ity. In addition, the caste system sanctioned preferential treatment
for the upper castes even in the purely economic sphere. Thus, in
Awadh and in most parts of India, upper-caste tenants were charged
lower rents, were given better land, and were not required to perform
forced labour for the landlords.
Consequently, caste was a powerful determinant of prosperity
and class. The relationship between caste and class was never so
perfect that castes were economically homogenous. Amongst the
upper castes there was a spread in economic status, and their
members could range from fabulously wealthy landlords to petty
tenants, though even the poorest were never as impoverished as
those from the lower castes. But there was little variation towards
the lower end of the caste hierarchy, whose members were virtually
without exception poor. And for the untouchables, the ‘pollution’,
ostracism and illiteracy sanctioned by the caste system irrevocably
destined them to destitution.
British agrarian policy and the mechanisms of the caste system
reinforced each other so powerfully that at the time of Independence
the distribution of wealth and political power in UP closely approxi
mated the caste hierarchy of Vedic Hinduism, which had blossomed
centuries ago in this north Indian Aryan heartland. In orthodox Hin
duism, the Brahmin, Kshatriya and Vaishya castes were the elite of
society, signified by their ritual status as ‘twice-born’ castes. The
Shudra castes were considered distinctly lower than the twice-born
groups, and though they suffered ritual debasement, unlike the
untouchables they were considered to be ‘clean’ and ‘touchable’.
(They are now commonly referred to as middle or intermediate castes.)
The untouchable castes simply did not figure in the orthodox caste
scheme and so were literally ‘outcastes’.

34 • Words like i-reedom

The congruence between high caste status and wealth was so great
that about 90 per cent of the province’s land was owned by upper
caste Hindus and high-status Muslims, though together they com
prised just over one-third of the province’s population.9 In contrast,
the .middle castes were 42 per cent of the population but owned only
8 per cent of the land. And though the untouchable castes comprised
about 23 per cent of the population - more than all the upper castes
together — they owned just 0.9 per cent of the land.

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By the early years ofthe 20th century, Baba ka Gaon and the region
surrounding it was a sea of poverty, broken by outcrops of prosperity
and a few islands of immense wealth. Baba ka Gaon’s population was
less than 200. There were 40 or so homes. About half were miserable
hovels, situated at a distance from the village. These were the homes
of the untouchables, including Ram Dass’s family. Most of the
untouchables were bonded serfs of the village landlords.
In the village proper were another 15 poor huts, virtually all of
middle-caste families. The majority were Only slightly better than
the hovels of the untouchable area. These were the homes of the
landlords pettiest tenants, though some were labourers. Although
many of these families were impoverished, almost none were as
destitute as the untouchables. About half a dozen of the huts were
more solidly built, containing several rooms and small courtyards.
These belonged to the best-off among the tenants, including two
upper-caste Brahmin families.
The only signs of real prosperity in Baba ka Gaon were the
homes of the three Thakur landlords. Each of the landlords controlled
several hundred acres of land, which they rented out or had worked
by labourers like Ram Dass’s family. Like all other homes in Baba
ka Gaon at that time, theirs were also built of mud and thatch, but
were substantial and many-roomed, with carved wooden doors and
windows: luxurious mansions in contrast to the huts of the other
villagers. The landlords were well-dressed, had stores of grains,

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The slaves of slaves • 35

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.savings and jewellery, and were not affected by the famines that
swept the area.
There was even greater prosperity close at hand, in the large brick
mansions of the Rajapur and Rampur landlords, who shared control
over Baba ka Gaon as well as independently owning about a dozen
villages each. To the labourers and tenants of Baba ka Gaon, in awe
and terror of the village Thakurs, the overlords were so mighty and
distant as to seem unreal.
But even their mansions paled in comparison to the palace of the
Amethi landlord, who controlled the extensive neighbouring estate,
in which Ram Dass’s father was born. This prosperous landlord, who
boasted the title of Raja, lived in a fortified palace, sprawling over
several acres of land, surrounded on two sides by thick jungle. The
fort’s carved gates were high enough to allow the landlord’s elephants
to pass. Inside were several palatial buildings, garnished with a lar
gesse of spires and turrets. Outside the gates was a large barred cage
to hold captive animals? The region was dotted with a handful of
similarly luxurious mansions and palaces.
The peasant revolt that swept Awadh from 1919 to 1922 emerged
from this background of poverty and inequity, much like the numer
ous other rebellions that broke out across India from the mid-19th
century onwards.10 Tenants and labourers united against the landlords,
their agents, and the British colonial administration, o
The beginnings of revolt were apparent by°the end of 1919, first
in Pratapgarh and then in the three adjoining districts of Rae Bareli,
Sultanpur and Faizabad.1' Independent kisan sctbhas — peasants’ as
sociations - were organized by local leaders, which focused on the
oppression by the landlords, particularly on the practices of nazrana.
bedakhli and begar which to varying degrees effected tenants of all
levels as well as labourers. Though large tenants were active in the
Clll ly StllgCS bl the revolt, trying to secure occupancy rights and curbs
on rent enhancement, tenants-at-will and labourers were the main
actors in the revolt’s later, violent phase, when they attacked the
landlords’ mansions and farms, and, in some areas, even property
belonging to large tenants. As they composed the overwhelming

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36 • Words like freedom

r

majority of tenants-at-will and labourers, the lower-middle castes and
untouchables (particularly the Pasi caste, to which Ram Dass belongs)
were most prominent in this later phase.
The revolt was strengthened by the emergence of charismatic
local leaders. Though most belonged to the region, there is virtually
no record today of their names or of what eventually happened to
them. The most influential of the leaders of whom there is some
record was not a native of the area, but had lived there for
decades: Baba Ramachandra, a Maharashtrian, was for a while an
indentured labourer in Fiji and then became a wandering ascetic
in Pratapgarh. Under Baba Ramachandra’s leadership, the movement
rapidly acquired a mass following — its popularity was such that
some 100,000 peasants reportedly joined the association within
weeks of its initiation.
Led by Baba Ramachandra, the peasants sought the support of
the Indian National Congress, which was then essentially an urban
based, upper-class nationalist party, drawing most of its members
from the intelligentsia, the professions and industry. The movement’s
influence and fame escalated when Nehru, the Congress’ most
promising young firebrand, and a number of UP Congress workers
tendered their support in mid-1920. Together with Nehru and UP
Congress leaders, Baba Ramachandra established the Awadh Kisan
Sabha, which within a month had 330 branches across Pratapgarh,
Rae Bareli, Sultanpur and Faizabad districts. By the close of 1920,
the movement was demonstrably powerful and militant: in Septem
ber about 50,000 peasants surrounded the Pratapgarh jail to press
for the release of Baba Ramachandra, who had been arrested on a
trumped-up theft charge; in December, close to 100,000 peasants
attended the first Awadh Kisan Congress in Ayodhya, in the neigh
bouring district of Faizabad.
In these initial 18 months or so of protest, the peasants used
demonstrations and social boycott of the landlords to draw attention
to their discontent. Landlords who were considered to be especially
harsh were denied the services of the barber, the washerman and
others who were essential to their comfort.

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The slaves of slaves • 37

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The peasants became increasingly radical. Soon, at the formation
of each Kisan Sabha, members vowed that they would not permit
‘beating or abuse from anyone’, would require a receipt for rent paid,
would ‘not pay illegal cesses [taxes], (and) not work as labourer
without payment’, and ‘shall not be afraid of constables. If they
oppress (us) we shall stop (them). We shall submit to no one’s
oppression.’ After they returned from the enormous Kisan Congress
in Ayodhya in December 1920, many groups of peasants refused to
accept eviction orders by the landlords or to till their home farms.
Clashes occurred frequently in the next few months between the
peasants and the landlords’ agents. The increasing radicalism of the
peasantry and of local leaders like Baba Ramachandra, who began
openly to advocate attacks on landlords’ property, also revealed that
the movement was no longer under the command of Nehru and the
UP Congress leaders, who were opposed to any attempt to arouse
political consciousness along class divisions.
In January 1921, the hitherto peaceable revolt spontaneously ex
ploded into violence. The violence was sparked
by
- the •police firing on
huge crowds of unarmed peasants who had come to attend demonstrations at two market towns in Rae Bareli district. Though less than ten
people were killed, dozens were wounded. Subsequently, violence
spread across the entire area, with large groups of peasants, in some
cases numbering 10,000, plundering markets, attacking landlords and
their agents, battling with the police, and burning and looting the
landlords’ crops. Many of the larger landlords fled their estates to their
town mansions in Lucknow and Allahabad. In some areas, the rebels
briefly set up parallel governments. The turmoil occupied national
headlines, especially when Nehru visited Rae Bareli and ofher badly
affected areas. In March that year, Sir Harcourt Butler, the province’s
governor-general, warned, ‘You have seen in three districts in southern
Awadh the beginnings of something like revolution.’
But the revolution failed. At the moment of their greatest strength,
the peasants were betrayed by Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi. On behalf
of the Congress, they exhorted the peasants to abort their struggle.
Because the Congress’ disavowal of the revolt came immediately

«

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38 • Words like freedom

’

after the violence of January 1921, Gandhi and other Congress leaders'
sought to portray their decision as being impelled by Gandhi’s famed
allegiance to non-violence. But, in truth, the peasant-Congress alli
ance had effectively ruptured months earlier. The UP Congress’s
close links to the large landlords and Gandhi’s conservatism in eco
nomic matters turned the Congress against the peasants, particularly
because the peasants were becoming increasingly radical.
Visiting UP a few weeks after the upsurge in violence, Gandhi,
by far the Congress’ most powerful leader, issued public instructions
to the peasants and their leaders. The instructions were phrased in
such a way that they seemed to call for non-violence. But they were
in fact a demand that the peasants end their struggle altogether.
Gandhi instructed the peasants to abjure even non-violent methods of
resistance-such as practising ‘non-cooperation’ by travelling without
tickets on trains and offering ‘passive resistance’ by lying on the
railway tracks - and to end their social boycott of the landlords.
In contrast, not only did Gandhi’s instructions not require sacritices of the landlords, but in fact displayed great sympathy for them.
lWe may not withhold taxes from the Government or rent from the
landlord’ (Instruction 4). . . Tt should be borne in mind that we want
to turn zemindars into friends’ (Instruction 6). ‘We should influence
our friends by kindness’ (Instruction 3). Gandhi lectured a peasant au
dience in Faizabad in February, ‘You should bear a little if the zemindar
torments you. We do not want to fight with the zemindars. Zemindars
are also slaves and we do not want to trouble them.’ He urged them ‘to
suffer rather than fight, for they had to join all forces for Fighting against
the most powerful zemindar, namely the Government.’
Nehru, despite his florid espousal of the revolt in his autobiog
raphy, written decades later, acquiesced to Gandhi’s views. In fact,
at that time he probably shared Gandhi’s condemnation of the radical
turn that the peasant movement had taken. Thus, Nehru confessed in
his autobiography that at a meeting with peasants in Faizabad he
ordered those who Ihad indulged in violence to put up their hands, even
though he knew that the police were present and would arrest them.
More than 1,000 men went to jail; many died there; and many were

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The slaves of slaves • 39

still there years afterwards - ‘boys and young men, spending their
youth in prison’, Nehru later wrote - to burden his conscience when
he was himself imprisoned by the British.
With historical hindsight, the rift between the peasants and the
Congress was not surprising. The UP Congress, at that point domi
nated by the urban upper class and landed elite, had traditionally been
allied to the province’s large landlords. The peasant revolt forced the
UP Congress’ leaders to grapple for the first time with the dilemma
that it could not build a mass base in the province if it continued to
ally itself with the tiny and oppressive landed elite. Motilal Nehru,
Jawaharlal’s father and a Congress worthy at that time, revealed the
ambivalence within the party: ‘True it is that the Party stands for
justice to the tenant but poor indeed would be the quality of that justice
if it involves injustice to the landlord. The Party believes that it is
only by serving the true interests of both that it can find a solid base
for Swarajya and is pledged to stand by the one as firmly as the other
in its hour of need.’12 Though a decade-and-a-half later the UP

Congress had turned against the grandest landlords - instead backing
the smaller landlords and prosperous tenants, though not the mass of
poor peasants and landless - in the early 1920s its leaders took the
side of the landlords, great and small.
Gandhi’s conservatism was another crucial factor in the decision
to forsake the poorer peasants and labourers. So sympathetic did
Gandhi seem towards the Awadh landlords that they passed a reso
lution in late 1921 supporting him and the Congress. Paradoxically,
though in the decades ahead the uniquely charismatic Gandhi drew
the mass of the peasantry across India into the nationalist movement,
he always opposed the radical economic and social changes which
were a precondition to measurably easing their poverty Instead, as
revealed in the Awadh revolt, Gandhi attempted to gloss over class
tensions and to blunt radical agrarian demands, particularly land
reform. He counselled mutual trust and understanding, but when
forced to take sides sacrificed the interests of the poor, going so far
as to destroy the Kisan Sabha movement in neighbouring Bihar
province, which towards the end of the 1930s was gaining strength

■IS

I

40 • Words like freedom

in its efforts to abolish the zamindari system and to help evicted
tenants to reoccupy land. Gandhi’s relationship with urban labourers
was no different: he drew them into the nationalist movement but
repudiated them whenever their demands threatened the Indian capitalists who were major financiers of the Congress. ’
Consequently, the priorities of the poorer Awadh peasants and
those of the Congress proved to be entirely incompatible. To the
leaders of the Congress, the peasants’ fiery revolt was a distraction
from the Congress agenda of planned, mass civil disobedience cam
paigns. Worse, the revolt had revealed itself to be class war directed
against the major supporters of the Congress. In contrast, the impov
erished peasants and labourers of Awadh were searching primarily for
relief from their impoverishment and oppression by the landlords. At
a meeting in 1921, an angry peasant told Nehru, ‘Give us food, we
1
-514
do not want swaraj.
But without the Congress’ support, the peasant revolt was doomed,
too localized and isolated to withstand the might of the British co
lonial administration. The police and army moved against the peas
ants. The most influential peasant leaders were arrested, including
Baba Ramachandra in February 1921. The landlords singled out and
retaliated against peasants and labourers who had been prominent in
the revolt. Reports of abuses against the peasantry carried out by the
police or directly by the landlords’ agents no longer made it into the
national newspapers, in large part because the draconian Seditious
Meetings Act was clamped on the worst-affected districts. In about
a year the revolt had been squashed.
The landlords returned, unsubdued, to their exploitative rule.
Though some colonial administrators had during the revolt spoken
eloquently of remedying the abuses that had fuelled it, they made
only pusillanimous efforts to do so in the following 25 years for
which colonial rule lasted. The UP Congress was by 1936 publicly
advocating the abolition of zamindari, but the alternatives it
proposed would benefit the smaller landlords and the substantial
tenants, and not ease one whit the impoverishment and oppression

of the mass of peasants and labourers. The upshot was that, for the

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The slaves or slaves • 41

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poor, Awadh’s agrarian structure remained unaltered in its
essentials right up to the time of Independence. Families like Ram
Dass’s were condemned to many more decades of oppression and
extreme poverty.

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The British legacy of poverty

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At the time of Independence, land ownership in UP was so inequitable
that of the province’s total rural population of roughly 12 million
families, about 80 per cent were poor tenants, sharecroppers and
landless labourers.15 Even those with access to some land - the av
erage holding was less than two acres - needed to work as labourers.
The untouchable castes and those on the lower end of the middle
castes composed this impoverished mass.
Above this mass were about two million cultivating peasant fami
lies. A large share had holdings of more or less economic size, with
about half working an average of 16 acres each. The majority held
their fields as tenants, though a few had small portions on zamindary
title. Most worked their land through their own family’s labour,
although the most privileged of them would hire labour at peak
cultivation times. The poorest of the cultivating peasants would them
selves labour for others. The vast majority were of the middle castes,
with a small share from the upper castes.
In contrast to this enormous group of labourers and peasants was
a tiny elite of landlords. Numbering no more than 50,000 or 60,000
families, they owned or controlled virtually all the private land in UP,
whether fields, groves, forests, village sites or marketplaces. The
concentration of land control was so extreme that the province’s top
20,000 or so families owned 60 per cent of the province’s land. This
elite was almost entirely of the upper castes, with a sprinkling of
families from the high cultivating castes.
The vast proportion of this elite were village landlords, who
controlled land in just one or two villages. The village landlords
leased out most of their land and also operated as money-lenders.
Most had home farms, and typically closely directed the cultivation

BF’l
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42 • Words like freedom

of this by labourers. Almost all lived in the villages in substantial
residences.
At the very apex, of this elite were no more than a couple of
thousand families, the grand landlords. They owned estates compris
ing many villages, which in some cases included several thousand
acres of cultivated land. The scale of their holdings was such that
the 390 grandest families owned nearly a quarter of the province’s
land. The grand landlords’ land was rented out either to village
zcimindars - their under-proprietors - or by their bureaucracy of
agents and retainers to tenants and sharecroppers. In contrast to a
century ago,<>they also owned vast home farms, which were cultivated
by tenants or labourers. Most were absentee landlords living in their
mansions in Allahabad, Varanasi, Lucknow or the nearest district
headquarters, though they typically also maintained mansions or
palaces on their estates.
Conditions in UP were typical of British India and the princely
states. Over 80 per cent of India’s 360 million people lived in rural
areas. A small number of princes, land barons and village landlords
owned virtually all the privately held land, and prospered from the
high rents, illegal dues and free labour they extorted from their
tenants and labourers'. But over two-thirds of the rural population
owned no land at all.
The extraordinary inequity in land ownership was by itself a
guarantee of pervasive and acute poverty. But the magnitude of poverty
in colonial India was amplified as a consequence of several other
factors. Chief amongst these was that the revenues raised by the
colonial government and the profits of British firms in India were not
reinvested in India but siphoned off to British coffers.16 This colossal
drain left hardly any surplus for investment in either agriculture or
modern industrial development.
Particularly devastating for the living conditions of the mass of
India’s population was the stagnation in agriculture. The stagnation
was a result both of government indifference — barring the production
of agricultural raw materials, such as jute, needed for British manu
factures - and of the inequity in land ownership. In the half-century

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The slaves of slaves • 43

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preceding Independence, food-grain output fell behind even the modest
0.67 per cent per year increase in population, worsening India’s
. capacity to feed itself. Between 1911 and 1941, per person food-grain
availability shrank by nearly one-third.17 Chronic hunger and famine
became hallmarks of Indian life.
Nor was there substantial growth in other sectors of the economy
to compensate for the worsening conditions in agriculture. On the
contrary, indigenous Indian industries, such as textiles,Jiad by the mid19th century been destroyed as a result of deliberate British policy,
which favoured their own manufacturing industry. The devastating
result was a sharp rise in the proportion of the population dependent
on agriculture, which increased from just over half the population in
the mid-19th century to nearly three-quarters in 1921 .18 And though
enclaves of industry later came up in port cities like Bombay and
Calcutta, India’s industrial base was tiny at the time of Independence.
By the close of nearly two centuries of British rule, the over
whelming majority of India’s population lived in conditions of ex
traordinary destitution. At least one-third of the population was
impoverished or destitute, and an even larger proportion poor. Over
80 per cent were illiterate. Hunger, famine and disease killed millions.
As a consequence, average life expectancy was about 30 years; those
from destitute families like Ram Dass’s rarely made it to this age.
Over one-third of all children died before their fifth birthday.
Some share of this poverty certainly preceded rule by the East
India Company and the Crown. But despite this qualification, meas
ured by the welfare of the mass of India’s population, British rule was
a disaster. By the most charitable assessment, the British colonial
government had perpetuated the impoverishment of India’s popula
tion. Judged more rigorously, it had probably worsened their poverty.
Independent India began with this legacy.
Recalling his family’s destitution at about the time of Independ
ence, Ram Dass says: That was the time of poverty. Poverty had
weighed all us landless people down. Only the zamindars were wealthy
and the only other people who used to eat well were those tenants
who could afford to rent a lot of land. For them it was happiness and

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1

44 • Words like freedom

ease. But for those of us who worked as field labourers or could only
rent little land, it was very difficult. Sometimes we would get work;
at other times we couldn’t find work. That’s how we lived our lives.
The zamindars would still pay us only 1 or 1.5 kg of grain for
a long day of labour. And some of the grain would be mud and stones!
Because we were paid so little our whole family would workfor them,
even the little children. Sometimes when we didn't have food, we
would go and ask a neighbour and sometimes even they wouldn ’t give
us because they had none themselves. Poverty and hunger go together.
The zamindars used to give us little, little bits offruit from their fruit
trees in the summer when there was no grain to eat. For the month
ofApril we wouldlive on mahua [the succulent flower of a local tree].
And then for two months in the monsoons, we would eat only mangoes.
The zamindars would give us just enough to live on, to survive. There
used to be famine here, whenever the harvest failed. We would go to
the zamindars, who would say, ‘We will loan you something, but you
must give us so much more. If we give you 2 kilos we will take 3 kilos
back from you. ’ And we would say, ‘Take 3 kilos, because we have
to somehow survive today, we have no choice. ’
All year round we wore thick, coarse cloth. We would, have only
one piece ofcloth. We wore it until it disintegrated. The women would
have one torn saree and sometimes another good one. And those of
us men who had only one dhoti, half we would wrap around our waist
and the other half we would put over our shoulder. Those who had
money being sent by relatives working in the cities had more to wear.
It all depended - some people had more clothes, others just had rags.
One has to endure not having enough to wear. Just like there are
people who eat three times every day, while others survive on one
meal a day. We didn ’t get any clothes from the zamindar we were
bonded to. But the kindest zamindars in the village would give away
their used or torn clothes to their labourers. Thejajmani [a patron
client relationship between lower castes, who provided specialized
goods and services, and their upper-caste patrons] would only be with
the washerman or barber, and the zamindars would give them clothes
and some land or some share of the crops.

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they could change into. In winter, those who could afford to do so
yVOUld1Set aPiece °f cloth, stitched double and cover their shoulders
wan.his. Inbolh thewinler andlhe monsoon youjust hid to ZaJ
even though tt was difficult in the cold and rain. And in the winter
hA 7 7
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hde under that. What did we know what a quilt was? We didn 7 even
know what shoes were! Only al the lime of marriage the bridegroom
might have got a pair of shoes, which at his death would be given
away to the barber or some other person. This pair of shoes would
have to last from your wedding
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The slaves of slaves • 45

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AT the time ofIndependence we had lots ofdesires: that the zamindari
system would end; that once our slavery ended we would be able to
earn our living somehow. At that time we could not even talk. There
was so much domination at that time that if we didn 't get up from
our charpai in respect even if we saw a Thakur from a long distance,
they would come and beat us up.
But the excitement of Independence and the traumas of Partition
died down and there were still no changes in Baba ka Gaon - no
revolutions, no emancipation for the impoverished, no attack on the
landlords’ power. Things were as they had always been. It was as if
the British had never left, and the radical Nehru never become the
new nation’s prime minister. R.am Dass’s family heard that in faraway
Delhi and Lucknow the Congress leaders still planned to rid the land
of the landlords, as they had promised the peasants during the struggle
for India’s freedom. But in Baba ka Gaon the landlords were as
despotic as ever.
About a year-and-a-half after Independence, Ram Dass joined the
ranks of impoverished people from Baba ka Gaon who left the village
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Bombay I: 1949-1952 • 47

in the search fortheir own and their family’s survival. He was about 22.

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He left behind his wife and his first son, Shrinath, who was just 3
months old. They stayed with Ram Dass’s parents. His father had re
turned to the vi I lage a year earl ier from working in Bom bay and Karach i.
How could I live my life earning just this little bit from being a
labourer for the zamindars? Here I used to get 1.5 kilos of grain as
wages for a full day’s work. So I decided to leave the village andfind
work in the cities. I went to Bombay, where my father had worked.
I got much more money there, and so my family here used to live on
that money. This was the only way to ensure that my family survived.
I had no other choice.
And I had to pay off my father’s debts to the zamindars. This
consumed my entire wages for nearly three years. I was able to pay
it from Bombay but I wouldn 7 have succeeded in paying it off if I
had remained in the village. I kept sending more and more money
because some of the zamindars would cheat and would say that we
still hadn 7 paid off the debt. The accounting of the debt was entirely
in their hands and they just told you how much you owed them. But
luckily I had the postpl receiptsfor the money I had sentfrom Bombay
and finally they had to accept this. Whenever these people have a
chance they would slit the throats of the poor!
On an April morning in 1949, Ram Dass walked to Gauriganj
alone, an hour-long trek across fields glowing with mustard and ripe
wheat. The coal-powered train came at about midday, taking him to
Allahabad. After a short wait in Allahabad, he caught another train
to Bombay. The journey from Allahabad to Bombay - a distance of
over 1,800 km - took more than two days and cost Rs 15, an enormous
sum at that time, well over a month’s wages in the village.
I had only Rs 5 with me. Iwasn 7 carrying any luggage. Just some
thing to eat for the journey and the kurta-dhoti I was wee iring. I was
carrying things that people from the village had sent to their relatives
in Bombay. There were a lot of people from the village working in
Bombay. This was the first time I had left the region, and I enjoyed it.
Bombay’s population was less than three million in the year that
Ram Dass arrived there. He disembarked at the then suburban Dadar

i W”

48 • Words like freedom
station in the morning, entering a strange world of whistling and
strange world of whistling and
uggmg hams and of hundreds of oddly dressed people rulhing
across innumerable platforms.
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me ithe number of my uncle \ tenement and the name of the area he
lived in. It wos m Band,■a. number 63 chaWl [tenement] and room 74
So I caught
the bridge There", 'O‘f0''"’‘arel- lhen feP' diking and crossed
g . There I asked a shopkeeper the way to this chawl who
said go straight and then turn right.
workRamRDaStWa t°ne °f hU,ldredS ofthou»nds of migrants seeking
work
Bombay. For decades before Ram Dass made this journey

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sacked from his foreman’s post at the Hirjee Mills because he had
to take responsibility for a damaged mould.
When we were children, we would send letters to him at the work
address which was in Bombay 13. There was a box there and they would
sort out the mail. The letters would be written with the help of some
upper-caste man in BabakaGaon. In Bombay, Ram Dass’s father would
find someone to read the letter out to him, as he was illiterate.
On leaving Bombay, Ram Dass’s father returned for a few years
to Baba ka Gaon, but even though he and his entire family worked
as labourers for the landlords they could not earn enough to survive
on. He then went to Rori, now in Pakistan, where he worked as a
gardener. The violence and massacres that erupted during Partition
in 1947 forced him to flee back to Baba ka Gaon.
Ram Dass spent from 1949 to 1952 in Bombay. He returned then
for the first time to Baba ka Gaon, where he spent just over a year
^before returning once again to Bombay for eight years. These years
in Bombay were a period of great ferment in Ram Dass’s life. Through
hard work he was able slowly to pull his family from the depths of
destitution, though they were still impoverished. And in this city that
brought together people from across India, Ram Dass’s innate reluctance to resign himself to his bitter lot of being destitute and untouch
able was strengthened by movements that fought for the emancipation
of the untouchables.

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For the first six or eight months in Bombay, Ram Dass could not find
any work. He says he would never have taken oiwertain types of labour
that he found demeaning, such as pulling rickshaws or goods carts.
During this period, he lived with another uncle of his — his father’s
cousin - who worked as a gangman with the Western Indian Railways
and had two rooms in a railway chawl in the central Mahalaxmi area
of the city. When 1 didn 7 earn my uncle used to feed me.
At this time, many of Ram Dass’s close relatives were working in
Bombay, and in this alien land it was this far-flung network that
enabled him to find work. Through his uncle in the railways, Ram Dass
found work for two weeks in November 1949 laying railway tracks in

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50 • Words like freedom

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a rural part of Ahmedabad district, in what is now Gujarat province.
The job had been contracted out to a private firm, which hired the
labour, including a large number of scheduled-caste men from Baba ka
Gaon who were living in Bombay. Ram Dass was paid about Rs 20 for
these two weeks of backbreaking work: very low wages — the equiva
lent of Rs 300-350 today1 - but many times what he would have earned

in Baba ka Gaon. We are harcWorkingpeople anyway. We work the
plough in the fields, even during the monsoons when the soil becomes
mud. So our work in the village is even harder than what we had to do
on the railway°track. So it was not a problem for us.
A few months later Ram Dass found his first long-term job, in
which he eventually worked for two years. The job was with a con
tractor to the Western Railways, who had been given responsibility
to clear the ash from coal locomotives and to load fresh coal. Ram
Dass was one of about 30 labourers employed by the contractor at
the ‘Bamy-yard’, a railway yard some 20 km outside central Bombay.
We used to clean the ash from the engine and load the fresh
coal from the wagons. The ash from the engine was sold. We would
be paid one rupee each for unloading a wagon of coal. A wagon
contained 20 to 22 tons. Six people would work together and would
get five or six wagons done in a day. So our salary was about Rs 6
every day, but in the village at that time we would only have been
paid one-quarter of a rupee!
Sometimes we would work all 24 hours. At peak periods, we would
get just two to four hours rest every day, the rest of the time we would
work. We would even unload at night. The contractor would sit there
and watch and tell us to work hard because otherwise he would have
to pay demurrage. We would unload the coal as soon as the wagons
arrived. So we would get to sleep only a few hours, but on other days

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we would have very little work. The contractor was a Parsi trader.

His accountant was an old Brahmin man. The minute we finished our
work the accountant would shout at us to come and take our money.
He was very good about this. We would say, 'We will bathe and come
back, but he would say, 'No, come now, don ‘t you all go in different
directions, come now and take the money but don't dirty the notes. ’

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Zamindari abolition • 69

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lords could not emerge as a political threat. The strategy reaped rich

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dividends. Even the most recalcitrant grand and large landlords were
forced into recognizing that the Congress was now the dom inant politi

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cal force in UP and at the centre; within a decade many had joined the

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service of the Congress. Similarly, across India, princes and land barons
who had opposed the nationalist movement and the Congress now de

party as crucial vote-brokers, puttingtheir wealth and connectionsatthe

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cided to join the party. With this development, in New Delhi and in

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provincial capitals.across India, the Congress became irreversibly the
party of property and of domination, not of redistribution.

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In sum, despite endowing independent India with "socialist’ aims,

the post-independence Congress pursued conservative policies. Apart
from the mild land reform effort represented by the abolishing of
zamindari, which in no province material ly aided the poor, the Congress

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did not contemplate any other redistributive measures. To the contrary,

it adopted colonial laws inimical to the poor. Chief amongst these was
the Land Acquisition Act, which in the decades to come allowed the

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government to oust tens of millions of farmers and tribals from their
land, and then use this land for dams, large industrial projects, nature
preserves and, not least, luxury housing for India’s elite.26

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Equally important, neither of the two major Nehruvian initiatives
- economic planning and development of heavy, basic industry through
the public sector-i-were in any sense redistributive or socialist, though
their association with Soviet-style socialism gave them the stamp of
being intrinsically progressive.27 Rather, the approach to planning

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adopted at that time, and continued through the 1960s, was framed
on the ‘trickle-down’ reasoning that the achievement of self-reliant
growth would automatically eliminate poverty. Within this theoretical

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construct, redistributive measures were unnecessary and could even
hamper growth. In addition, the state-led industrialization of India
aided the capitalists and boosted their political power. Since then, the

not inconsiderable benefits of public-sector-led growth and the expan
sion of Indian industry have flowed almost entirely to India’s indus
trialists and the urban upper and middle classes, not to the poor,
especially as few jobs were generated for them.

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70 • Words like freedom

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The first years of Nehru’s nearly two decades of tenure as prime
minister did see the Congress moving to blunt the most offensive
features of colonial India, notably the overweening power of the
princes and the grand landlords in rural life, and that of British
companies in industry. But these changes proved to be the sum total
of the Congress’ potential for transforming the economic and social
order. The one clear opportunity available to Nehru and the Congress
to ameliorate the poverty of India’s masses - when the great landed
elites were in disarray, private industry and commerce still puny, and
the Congress in command of enormous public support — had passed,
unexploited. The tragic legacy of this great failure was the perpetu
ation of India’s mass poverty.28
But though Nehru and the Congress had been the architects of a
conservative, pro-propertied India, they continued with their socialist
rhetoric. At the annual Congress session in 1955, the Congress adopted
a resolution, drafted by Nehru, saying:
In order to realise the object of Congress . . . and to further the
objectives stated in the Preamble and Directive Principles of State
Policy of the Constitution of India, planning should take place with
a view to the establishment of a socialistic pattern of society, where
the principal means of production are under social ownership or
control, production is progressively speeded up and there is equi
table distribution of the national wealth.

Two of the dominant leitmotifs of independent India were now solidly
in place: that the mass of poor would remain impoverished, and that
the Congress would combine radical rhetoric with policies that benefiteo tne propertied.

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Zamindari abolition unfolds in Baba ka Gaon
Ram Dass witnessed the formal abolition of zamindari in 1952, but
it was while he was away in Bombay for another decade that the
changes legislated by the abolition bill actually affected Baba ka
Gaon. People in the village told me that in 1954 the government

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Zamindari abolition • 71
officials first came and did a survey of the land and how much there
was, whom it belonged to and who was renting it, and then they left.
They came with some other people, who were not officials, and started
measuring the land like people possessed! They were here for only
a few days. They stayed at the village headman’s house.
The process of giving title to tenants who possessed stable- oc
cupancy tenure, called maurusi in Hindi, was completed in 1956 in
Baba ka Gaon. The village Thakurs were not much affected by this
process, as very little of their land had been given out under stable
tenancy rights. But they fought fiercely against the second phase, in
which the sub-tenants or subordinate cultivators - known as shikmi
- were to be given title, as most of their land was worked by tenantsat-will and sharecroppers. As the Zamindari Abolition Act recognized
the claims of these sub-tenants, the Thakurs risked losing ownership
of this land.
The shikmi was in 1959. There was a lot of tension at this time.
Either you agreed to leave your land, or ifyou decided to stay you had
to fight against the Thakurs. Much of the land that was supposed to go
to the tenants didn 't go. We couldn 't retain possession of the land. The
Yadavs got the most land and the Mauryas [both m iddle castes] some
what less, but us Pdsis the least. It so happened that the Yadavs were
cultivating the Thakurs ’ land slightlyfar awayfrom the village, but the
Mauryas and Pasis were cultivating land close to here. The Thakurs
managed to keep most of their land here, though they lost some to the
richest Mauryas, but the Yadavs managed to wrest the land that was
at a distance because the Thakurs went there very little.
Only those people who already had some landfought, as they had
the means to live! Whoever didn 7 have the means to fight left the land
and just depended on God. There were no physical fights in our vil
lages, though it did happen in other villages. Ifyou decided to fight,
the nayap [a clerk in the lower courts] came with the papers. He would
tell people that your case was filed and would be heard at this time.
P eople were asked ifthey wanted to compromise, which could be done
here and now; and if not they could fight it out. The nayap used to
collect all the people from the village. He would explain to everyone.

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Don t fight unnecessarily, you will waste your money ifyou do, only
people who know they are in the right shouldfight the case. ’
No one from the scheduled castes fought against the Thakurs. We
were too poor and too scared. And only two scheduled-caste people
got land in these years. My maternal uncle was one of them. Two acres
were put in his name. But he lost most of this land later because he
was blind and the Thakurs cheated him.
By the close of the 1950s, by which time all the changes driven
by the zamindari abolition legislation had been implemented, the
agrarian situation in Baba ka Gaon and its vicinity was not remarkably
different from colonial days. For all the passion it had ignited in the
poor, and the feverish worry engendered in the landlords, zamindari
abolition had proved to be nothing close to a significant reordering
of the agrarian order. The concentration of land ownership had
weakened somewhat, but measured by the power of the upper castes
or by the numbers of landless, little had changed.
The wealthiest and most influential families in the area were still
the large and grand landlords, the rajas of Amethi, Pratapgarh and
Kalakankar and, some levels below them, the landlords of Rajapur
and Rampur, the overlords of Baba ka Gaon. Though shaken by the
abolition of their privileges, the shrinking of their estates and the loss
of steady revenues, they were still wealthy - some fabulously so and still rulers of much of what they surveyed. Most still owned
several hundred acres as home farms, huge areas of groves, and, in
some cases, many hundred acres more of land now held in the names
of relatives, servants and even fictitious tenants. The compensation
they received from the government they invested in boosting produc
tion and profits from their farms and groves. Adding to their income
were profits they earned from the large amounts of land that they did
not manage themselves, which they gave out on sharecropping
arrangements, which were still legal, or from surreptitious tenancies.
They made sure that neither sharecroppers nor their tenants could
ever assert tenancy claims. Thus, ensconced in their mansions,
palaces or city pleasure-homes, the capable among them were ideally
placed to begin to multiply their wealth and to capture power in this

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72 • Words like freedom

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Zamindari abolition • 73
new India. Those who saw their wealth slip away in the next decades
could, in honesty, only blame their own profligacy; the terms of
zamindari abolition had been too favourable to them to blame-their
ruin on the Congress.

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The prosperous Thakurs of Baba ka Gaon were in a similarly
enviable position, as the abolition of zamindari had led to only a slight
broadening of land ownership in the village. They were now outright

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owners of much of the 850 acres of land on which they earlier paid
a nominal rent to the Rajapur and Rampur overlords. The land they
owned was the best in Baba ka Gaon. They had lost control over the
village public lands, some land under occupancy tenants, and a small
portion of the land they had earlier given out to sub-tenants and to
sharecroppers. But not only had they been well compensated for these
losses by the government, they had also succeeded in illegally putting
in their names a large chunk of the village’s waste and degraded lands.
And as they had large crop surpluses to sell, they also benefited
enormously from the low taxes on agriculture.

But though the Thakurs were well placed, they were no longer
the only controllers of cultivable land in Baba ka Gaon. Some of the
former tenants and sub-tenants (two Brahmins and others from the
middle castes) now owned ample holdings, in some cases as much
as ten acres. And two former sharecroppers - both, extraordinarily,
scheduled caste - also owned fields of an acre or two. Another blow
to the power of the Thakurs was that the home-sites in Baba ka Gaon
no longer belonged to them but to the government.
Though zamindari abolition had made owners of some former
tenants, it had hurt a much larger number of families in Baba kaGaon:
smaller rent-paying tenants and sharecroppers from the lower-middle
and scheduled castes, many of whom had been evicted by the Thakurs.
A large number were reduced to working solely as labourers on daily
wages, because the Thakurs and other new landowners were now wary
of leasing out their land. Even those who were allowed back as
sharecroppers had no hope of ever claiming tenancy rights, as the
landowners made sure never to let them cultivate the same field for
more than a year or so.

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Wage rates remained as low as ever because an even larger
proportion of the village’s families were now dependent on wage
labour. While the Thakurs’ ability to demand that tenants and labour
ers provide them with begar or hari and other dues weakened some
what because they were no longer the only landowners in Baba ka
Gaon, these abuses continued for several decades. The local police,
all drawn from the upper castes, were not inclined to enforce laws
that had been imposed in distant Lucknow.
Though his family’s destitution and oppression did not diminish
one whit as a result o\' zaniindari abolition, Ram Dass says he was
not disappointed. Just the legal ending of zamindari was sufficient
for him: even if the former landlords remained the de facto lords
of Baba ka Gaon, at least they were no longer the anointed, legal
lords. India’s Independence had brought, in form, if not in fact, what
Ram Dass had long dreamt of. He was content with just this grudging
measure. Maybe we didn 7 get any landfrom the ending ofzamindari,
but at least ire escaped from slavery!

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RAM Dass returned from Baba ka Gaon to Bombay in early 1954.
He lived in the city for another eight years, returning permanently to
the village in 1962. In his second stay in Bombay he was particularly
lucky with employment, finding jobs that paid relatively well and
were not as gruelling as his previous job unloading coal and ash at
the railway yard.
I had gone to Baba ka Gaon for nearly two years, and the day
I came back from there I went to the Mumbadevi temple to pray to
the Goddess. And then I went to some relatives in Kurla who were
my bhai ka mamiasasur [brother’s wife’s maternal uncle], and he said
I’m going for my daily duty but don ’t leave, stay here for dinner. But
then he came running back in the afternoon saying they are hiring
people. I ran there with him and got a job! This was a dyeingfactory
in Worli. This factory closed some months later, but then both he and
I shifted to Kamal Dyeing.

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a large home in Love Lane in Byculla. Byculla was then a quiet
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industrial suburb. Today, the suburb is prime downtown property.
There is no longer any trace of the Kamal Dyeing factory. In its place
is a featureless apartment block.
Ifelt very happyfrom myfirst day at thefactory because I hadfound
good work. Naturally one wouldfeel happy. Ididn 7feel strange as I was
used to factories because some of my relatives in Bombay worked in
them. As I was a village person I used to befascinated by the machines.
Ram Dass worked on a machine called a jigger, of which there
were six at Kamal Dyeing. There were two rolling-pins in the water,
two in the middle and two on top. There was cloth on it. And the colour
had been made fast with caustic soda. It was passed over four times
and the cloth would get colored. There was a supervisor who would
check the cloth. If it was too light, it was run over once more; if too
dark, they would wash it with soap.
The factory officers used to talk to me nicely. If you worked
properly and spoke properly then they would of course be nice to you.
I used to work harder than everybody else.
In his seven years at Kamal Dyeing, Ram Dass’s salary increased
from Rs 80 per month to about Rs 135, depending on the number of
days he worked. In today’s currency, this would be equal to roughly
Rs 1,100, rising to about Rs 1,700, still an average salary for unskilled
factory workers. The amount I spent varied from Rs 10 to Rs 50 out
of my salary. 1 would send the rest home.
In one month in 1956, five of my close family died: my maternal
grandfather and grandmother, my brother Ram Tehel, my maternal
uncle, and the 3-year-old son who was younger than Shrinath. First
my son died. I was here in Bombay. And so I went home to the village
and then I saw that my uncle and others had died. We had no land
at that time, we worked as labourers. There we laboured and here
we laboured. All of them there - my wife, my mother and father, my
sisters - they all worked.
Shrinath. my eldest child, used to study at that time but I saw that
though he was in the third grade he hadn 7 learnt anything. I thought
I must educate him properly. And I said to my wife, ‘Get him out of

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Bombay II: 1954-1962 • 77
school, I will educate him in Bombay; I don ’t care how. ’ My wife said,
'What about the goat and cow: who will look after them if our son
is not here to do this work? ’ But I said, 'Sell them and I will support
youfrom Bombay. ’
Shrinath stayed for two or three years in Bombay. We stayed in
the Mahalaxmi chawl and the people there were very loving with him,
not allowing me to pay for his food. He would sleep in a small bed.
He would go to school alone.
Jhoku, the only other child to survive, was born in 1959; Sfiririath
was then 10 years old and studying here. Jhoku came here in the year
of his birth, when he was 10 months old. He was very active and
started walking when he was very young. When we went walking in
Mahalaxmi a Dhobi man [Dhobi is the washerman caste, also sched
uled caste] had made friends with him and would give him tea.
Everybody liked Jhoku because he was fair and clean.
None of our other children ever came to Bombay. Most died in
infancy and the rest when they were 4 or 5 years old.

For part of his second stay in Bombay, Ram Dass lived with his uncle
in a small two-room quarter at the railway chawl in Mahalaxmi. Ram
Dass shared the quarter with his uncle and two other male relatives,
though most of the other quarters in the chawl housed many more
people, usually 25 people to a two-roomed quarter.
The chawl is a long, three-storey building on a surprisingly quiet,
shady street off the Saath Rastha roundabout in Mahalaxmi. Its rear
virtually touches the railway tracks and the Mahalaxmi railway sta
tion. From the top floor where Ram Dass and his uncle lived they
could peek into the adjoining racecourse and watch the horses thunder
past, though for a better view they would climb on to the bridge nearer
the course. The building is honeycombed with small roams, each not
much larger than a walk-in closet. The rooms are dark and damp,
seemingly without windows; they emit a heavy entrapped odour of
fungus and cooking oil. There are no furnishings beyond bare bulbs,
charpais and clothes piled one on another on hooks. The chawl is not
unclean by the standards of low-income housing in India. But it is

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78 • Words like freedom

bleak, its symmetry broken only by the corrugated shacks that the
ground-floor residents have set up to expand their living quarters.
Only on the ground floor is there the usual mess and movement of
urban India: emaciated cats slink through the garbage and plastic bags,
a solitary television blares in the recesses of a shack, and adults play
with little children.

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When I lived with my uncle and relatives, whichever of us four
would con.e back earliest would cook. We used to cook well. Not
like dhabas where, they just put some chillies and masala. I had never
cooked in the village but I learnt from my male relatives here.
My uncle died in 1956. When he died I shifted into the neigh
bours. They were so kind to me that they never took rent from me.
. . They just used to take Rs 20 each month for food. For this I used
to get two meals.

There were 22 people in my neighbours ’ rooms. We could all
sleep because people used to work in different shifts. Four people
slept here, six people there, another four here. And we would make
bunks from the charpais.
I didn't have to do any housework when I stayed here. If I ever
tried to clean the dishes, the neighbours would catch my hand and

stop me, saying that they were younger and they would do it. The only
work I would do was to collect the food rations.
The chawl was clean because it was run by the railways. There
were bathrooms in the chawl. There was a bathroom for women on
one side of the stairs and for men on the other. There were four
bathrooms altogether. But you bathed in your own rooms — there was
a tap in each. There was water in the early mornings but not in the
evenings, so you would have to fill the water earlier for drinking and
washing in drums hut you bathed when the water was there.

Kamal Dyeing folded up in 1961.1 was a member of the union. When
the factory dosed down, the union helped us to get compensation from
the labour court. Ram Dass received Rs 1,662 in compensation roughly Rs 20,0.00 today - money that he later used to buy the first
bit of land that his family had ever owned.

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Bombay 11: 1954-1962 • 79

A short while after Kamal Dyeing’s demise, Ram Dass was
introduced to a job at Bombay Union Dyeing Mills, a larger factory
in the same neighbourhood, by a friend who worked there. He took
me there to get recruited. The officer asked me if I already knew the
work and I said, ‘Yes, I know how to operate the jigger machine. I
can also work in the washing section and on the dyeing oven. I can
also use the sewing machine. ’ I had learnt all these things because
Kamal Dyeing was a small factory and we would be asked to fill in
for workers who were sick.
Bombay Union Dyeing, which shut up shop in 1995, covered
several acres in the Lalbaug area of the city. The area is now part of
central Bombay, but in the 1960s was an industrial suburb which housed
the grande dames of Bombay’s once-proud textile mills - Bombay
Dyeing (a blue-chip firm not associated with Bombay Union Dyeing),
Century Mills, Morarjee, Finlays, and others - many of them estab
lished here at the close of the 19th century. Bombay Union Dyeingdidn 7
do any weaving. They used to dye military uniforms. Big traders from
Kanpur used to give them the cloth and they used to dye it. They used
sodium to make the colour fast. It was' made yellow by salt and then
Congo Red was added to make it red. There were a lot of angrezi
[English] words for the colours - white, black, rose, pink, orange.
The factory’s high steel gates would open each morning at seven
to let in the several hundred people who worked there. At the front
of the factory compound was an ornate three-storey mansion, on the
ground floor of which was the office while the next two floors were
the wealthy factory owner’s home.
Nearly 100 yards behind the mansion was the factory: a gargan
tuan metal hangar, tens of thousands of square feet, with steel-beamed
ceilings that towered into the air and an enormous work-floor that
shrank the huge dyeing machines into insignificance. The ceiling was
a network of large channels and pipes. Outside (his main building
were several other buildings, small only in comparison to the main
one, which housed the boilers and other machinery.
At its peak, which was around the time Ram Dass worked there,
Bombay Union Dyeing employed about 600 workers, including some

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80 • Words like freedom

350 temporary workers. Ram Dass was i
employed as a temporary
worker for a little under a year. When I was lea
— .—.'ving, they said come
back and we’ll make you permanent. But I didn’t come back to
Bombay because I had to look after things in the village.
Most of the workers were from different districts in UP. But there
were also Maharashtrians. Some workers were educated, others
}\’eren t. But al that time who was educated? We didn’t have enough
to eat so how could we study?
It was very hard work in thisfactory. But ifyou ’re used to working
since your childhood you don ’l get tired. And ifI can drive the plough,
why should I get tired by this? It was only eight hours here, but
farming is a fill-time job. This life was much simpler; you leave here
and go home and cook yourfood. But withfarming your worries don ’t
cease even when you re asleep.
We would come at 7 a.m. We took a half-hour break for lunch
at 11. .I brought food from home. We left at 3.30. Then the second
shift would start. ---There
J were 36jiggers here, but I would usually work
on No. 9.

For safety we would just wear vests and shorts. We would bring
our clothes and change here. Anyway the clothes would get covered
with colour. And it used to be hot in the factory because of the steam
And it used to be so noisy that we would communicate by gestures.
Of course the conditions were bad here compared to the village. But
we got more money and we also got used to it. It used to be difficult,
but to earn money one has to endure difficulties.
As with his other jobs, Ram Dass recalls every detail of the
piocesses at Bombay Union Dyeing: how the material was
bleached, dyed, boiled, steamed and wrung; how it went from one
machine to another; and which workers were responsible for
which tasks:

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family were amongst the poorest 20-30 per cent of India’s population.
. . J hey were landless, heavily indebted and scheduled-caste, character
istics that defined the deeply impoverished in rural India.

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Bombay II: 1954-1962 • 81

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In the decade from the early 1950s, according to national surveys
and several studies, poverty worsened across India. At the beginning
of the 1950s, somewhat less than one-third of India’s rural and urban
populations were considered deeply impoverished, unable to afford
a survival-level diet and other essentials of human survival. This
minimum expenditure level was set as the poverty line. Most analysts
agree that poverty worsened in the half-decade that followed, largely
because of poor harvests, so that by 1960—61 about half of India’s
population was estimated to be below the poverty line. Another onethird of the population was considered poor, but able to ensure the
minimum diet and other essentials.1
With Ram Dass’s earnings in Bombay, during the 1950s his
family moved from a situation of sheer destitution to being close to
the poverty-line threshold. Most estimates for that period set the
poverty line for a family of five at roughly Rs 100 per month in rural
areas and Rs 125 per month in urban areas. In his penultimate year
in Bombay. Ram Dass earned Rs 135 per month at his Kamal Dye
ing’s job, and somewhat less-the following year as a temporary worker
at Bombay Union Dyeing. But Ram Dass was supporting several
children and adults - his parents and wife could earn little in Baba
ka Gaon, where wages had not increased for decades - and had spent
a large amount of money in trying to treat his brother’s tuberculosis.
Moreover, a major part of his earnings were absorbed by paying off
his father’s large debts to the village landlords.

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Ram Dass’s 11 years in Bombay were a period of great change for
him and his family. Before he went to Bombay, neither he nor his
wife had ever travelled more than a few dozen kilometres away from
Baba ka Gaon. In these years, Ram Dass became the primary earner
for his extended family, which, for most of this period, included his
parents, his wife, a younger brother sick with tuberculosis, and several
children. Many of his closest adult relatives, and most of his children,
died in these years. For the first time Ram Dass had some savings,
and had succeeded in paying off his family’s inherited debts to the
village landlords.

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In Ram Dass’s recollections of these years, two things stand out
as having been of crucial importance. One was that he learnt to read
and write. Ram Dass was virtually illiterate when he arrived in
Bombay, capable only of signing his name and reading a few Hindi
words. As a child he studied forayear at the government-run primary
. school in Devapur, a kilometre from Baba ka Gaon, defying the
upper-caste stricture against untouchables being educated. Neverthe
less, Ram Dass was forced to leave the primary school because his
family’s destitution meant that he had to start working as a labourer
for the landlords.
I went t ? school for a year, because my father wished me to do
so. My father was angutha chhaap [illiterate: literally, to use one’s
thumb imprint as a signature] but because of going to school for this
one year, I could write my name and read a little bit even before
coming to Bombay. But on the way to school the Thakurs used to mock
me, saying ‘Oh Mr Clerk, namaste. Mr Clerk, salaam. ’ They had so
much power that we untouchables could not go to school and the
atmosphere at school was such that we could not study there. I could
go inside the school but could not get water to drink there — we had
to ask someone to serve us - could not touch the bucket nor the serving
vessel for water. We were considered so low by the upper castes that
even the dogs could eat or lick their leftovers, but not us!
In northern India at the time of Ram Dass’s youth, untouchables
were barred by the upper castes from attending schools. The few who
did attend, like Ram Dass, encountered only virulent hostility from
both teachers and students. Most often, untouchable students were
made to sit outside the classroom and their work was corrected by
the teacher from a distance. Untouchable students were often not
allowed to speak or to answer questions, for teachers feared that even
this was a means of pollution. In some places the upper-caste ire was
so strong against untouchables who dared to seek education that the
upper castes destroyed their homes and crops. As a result, only a
minuscule percentage of the untouchables ever attended school or
were literate. In UP in 1931, about half a percent of untouchable men
were literate, though nearly 30 per cent of Brahmin men were.2

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Bombay I: 1949-1952 * 51
The labour was allfrom UP. We were all scheduled-caste apart
from a few backward-caste people,
When working, we would look
like black ghosts! We would have to .
scrub ourselves with soap. We
would work barefoot. And just wearing an old torn lungi and vest.
When we were unloading coke it was so hard we would get hurt
and we would bleed. But one has to do these things to live We were
ready to do any hard labour. When your family is hungry you don ’t
worry about the blood you shed.
When we unloaded the ash, it would be burning hot and we would
have to cool it by pouring water over it. We would wear wooden
slippers. Slippers made of rubber would melt and none of us could
afford leather. And we would wear a cloth around our hands and neck
to make sure that the hot ash would not.fall on us. One person would
fill in the ash, another would pour it. We would work with shovels.
There wasn’t too much danger with this work because the fire hadbeen doused earlier.
Ifwejust cleared the ashfrom the engines we would earn about Rs 60
per month, which wasn ’t enough. So all ofus would work-on unloading
and loading the coal from the wagons for which we would get one
rupee per wagon. And if I had some free time, I would go to work on
separating the ash - thefiner sections were separatedfrom the bigger
pieces and bits ofcoal by a sieve and these would be bought by different
buyers. Andfor this work, which wouldn ’t take more than an hour I
would get Rs 5, much more than we were paidfor unloading the coal
Even if we were eating we would stop and run to do this work because
it was so well-paid. But you only got this work rarely.

From his years of working at the yard and because several of his
relatives have worked with the railways, Ram Dass knows intricate
details of how trains switch tracks; how long it takes to stoke a coal
engine; that there was a ‘sick line’ for engines that didn’t work; the
duties of railway employees and their work schedules; how wagons
were detached and shunted; railway contracts and tenders; and the
functioning of the various stations in Bombay, particularly which type
ot trains - goods or passenger - would stop where. Ram Dass says

52 • Words like freedom
that railway staff are given housing because they must report imme
diately for duty whenever needed. In the railways you can rest as
much as you like but when you are on duty you have to work non
stop and for as long as necessary.
In the early 1950s, when Ram Dass worked at the railway yard,
it was little more than a mess of tracks criss-crossing a swampy,
smelly tract that doubled as a garbage dump and a site for small
tanneries. It used to be so smelly, because of the tanneries, that you
had to cover your nose when you came here. There were no shops.
Nor did the road come as far as Bamy-yard. There was nothing else
here but the railway quarters.
Today, though the yard still functions, it has been engulfed in
Bombay’s pell-mell expansion. No longer is this a distant suburban
area: it now lies at the heart of Bombay’s industrial girdle. Surrounding
the yard, and inexorably encroaching on railway land, is yet another of
the city’s horrific, disorganized slums, indistinguishable from other
such poor neighbourhoods that spread thickly across Greater Bombay.
Diesel and electric engines move back and forth across the yard,
occasionally towing carriages. The number of tracks has multiplied.
The yard is enclosed behind high walls. But there is no dark mountain
of coal waiting to be loaded, no labourers grimy with sweat and coal
dust, and in place of the steamy whistle of the coal engine there is
the brassy hoot of the electric locomotive.
On the pedestrian walkway that spans the yard are hawkers
selling fruit, plastic bdttles, mirrors, key-chains, food, handkerchiefs.
Most have a space no larger than a shawl in which they display their
wares. There are beggars everywhere. One old man, reduced to skin
and bones and torn clothes, helplessly urinates where he is Sprawled
on his side, the liquid enveloping his lower body. Refuse spills down
the steps of the walkway.
In the surrounding slums, grimy two- and three-storey buildings
stand pressed against one another, their corrugated tin and tile roofs
formingableaksea.Innumerablelittleshopsofferfood,cheapfurniture,
bricks, motor repairs. Tinny film music blares somewhere. There are no

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Bombxy V. \949-\952 • 53

of the road. On the road’s edges are piled deep clumps of compost-like
garbage, studded with plastic bags. Naked children defecate on the
roadside, walking barefoot through the garbage and human excreta.
On the main road, which is a congested, diesel- and petrol-fumechoked highway to Ahmedabad city, garbage is piled high along the
side of the large drains. The drains are about 15 feet wide, uncovered,
with sewage a foot deep. The sewage is thick, dark, glutinous, filled
with all kinds of rubbish: bloated plastic bags, dead animals, solid
excreta, oil. Smaller drains feed the large ones. Adult men and women
defecate in full view along the side of the drains, their embarrassment
dulled by habit. They gaze blankly into the traffic.
Ram Dass says: This poverty has always existed. People always
lived in hovels. Now it’s easier to beg because there are more rich
people.

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I had no particular pastimes in Bombay. I used to work, cook and
eat. But when I hadfree time from work I used to go and walk around
the city. I liked the atmosphere here in the city.
Ram Dass’s favourite place to visit in Bombay was the Prince of
Wales Museum. He calls it Kala Ghodha - black horse - because this
is the informal name given to the neighbourhood in downtown Bombay.
I came to the museum with afriend thefirst time. We caught a tram
to get here. And my wife also came to see it. I have been here many
times. I like the old things in the museum the most. The first time I came
here I was so astounded by it that I spent half the day here. I prefer
it to the zoo at Rani ki Bagh where all the animals are in a lunatic
asylum or in a jail. The zoo is only for the pleasure of humans.
At the museum, Ram Dass’s most treasured room is one which
displays ancient Indo-Greek statuary. They belong to the Gandhara
kingdom, which from the first to third centuries ad stretched across
contemporary Punjab into Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. Most of
these stone statues are of the Buddha and their smooth, naturalistic
forms radiate piety.
I would also often go with friends and walk from the Mumbadevi
temple to the Madhavbagh temple. We would eat our morning meal

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54 • Words like freedom

first, and then go home in time for the next meal. We would sit and
listen to the devotional songs and I would do my prayers from far
away because it doesn 7 matter from what distance you pray to God.
This area of temples in central Bombay was Ram Dass’s favourite
walking place. At one encl is the Mumbadevi temple, dedicated to the
goddess after whom the city is named. The temple is small, colourful,
and has the usual mess of Indian temples around it - milling crowds,
beggars, flowers and sweets to buy and offer to the gods. In Mumbadevi
there used to be a small pond, where people used to bathe. But it used
to get very dirty because of the flowers thrown into it. Then the
government closed it down. On the other end of the area is the
Madhavbagh temple, which in sharp contrast to the Mumbadevi is
clean and secluded in a huge courtyard off the road. The temple is
dedicated to Krishna. In between the two temples is a large flower
market, where Ram Dass would often go wandering.
1 would also go with friends to the zoo at Rani ki Bagh, and
Chowpatty beach too. I liked all these places.. With millions of nice
buildings, with nice people inside them, one can only like these areas.
Of course I felt something inside me looking at these houses. In
Bombay, there were rich people and poor people, there were all kinds
ofpeople. The ones who were rich then are still rich now. But if my
heart is at peace, there is no envy. Someone whose heart is restless
or fickle will not be content even if they have hundreds of things.

My first visit to Bombay was for three years and three months. I then
went back to the village. I used to think about my wife and parents
and children and village a lot. But there was no option. There were
debts to repay both here and in the village. When man gets caught
in the trap of labour, he has to continue working.
When my relatives would go to the village I would send clothes
with them. I would also send money with them or through money
orders. I used to eat well because I ate at home, and so I wouldn't
spend too much money.
1 used to live most ofthe lime in a shanty. But, depending on work,
I would sometimes stay on at the Bamy-yard; there was a huge shack

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Bombay I: 1949-1952 • 55
where 30-35 people could sleep. There were 10-15 charpais on this
side and an equal number on that side. It was nice and shady. All
us labourers would cook with the coal from the yard. There was a
tap there to bathe. And if we needed hot water for bathing we would
go to the train engine and ask them for it. Everyone knew us here
because we worked every day.
There was not much need for bedding because it is never very
cold in Bombay. In the winter, all you need to do is put a sheet on
the ground and then put another sheet over you. We were poor people
and just slept like this.
I and the other people would spend Rs 20 on food, Rs 10 for tea
and incidentals, and then send Rs 30 or more home. And that was
a lot of money because when I was younger - say ten years before
I went to Bombay - if anyone borrowed Rs 20, people would worry
how that debt would be repaid. And the zamindars would rent out a
siuall field at Rs 10 a year!
My eldest child was 3 months old when Ifirst left. He had come
here with his mother in 1951 for six months or so. My wife and he
travelledfrom the village with my uncle. They stayed at the railway
tenement in Mahalaxmi. For that time I moved back to the railway
tenement because there was no privacy here at the Bamy-yard. But
after a few months I sent my wife back and moved back to the yard.
My wife would come for five or six months at a time. When she
was here I could not save anything. And I had to save because I was
supporting about eight people at home.

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Zamindari Abolition: ‘The vision of
a new heaven and a new earth’

RAM Dass spent most of 1952 and the whole of 1953 in Baba ka Gaon,
before once again returning to Bombay. In his first months in the village
he witnessed the legal abolition of the zamindari system, under an act
passed by the UP assembly a year earlier. We always thought that
zamindari would end with Independence. Most of us thought that the
zamindars would leave with the British and go to England!
The movement to abolish zamindari started much before Inde
pendence. We poor people didn 7 know very much earlier, we didn 7
even go to the market very much, we stayed around the village, but
around the 1940s ire started to learn that zamindari was to be abol
ished by the Congress. We used to hear about this in public announce
ments and meetings. Local officials like the patwari [in charge of
village land records] used to tell us that zamindari would be abolished.
I had come back to the village in 1952 from Bombay. This was
the time when zamindari was finally abolished. In the market place

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Zamindari abolition *57

of Pratapgarh town, the public cryer had beaten the drum and when
there was silence he shouted, ‘The system of zamindari has been
ended ...' I heard this because I was in the bazaar. Ten or twenty
men from the village were there and we rushed back and spread the
news, saying that the drum had been beaten and this announcement
made. The Thakurs in the village were very upset, saying that their
rule had been finished.
The succeeding years were to reveal that the act that abolished
zamindari was never intended to benefit the millions of petty tenant
or landless families like Ram Dass’s. Of UP’s rural population of
50 million people, the poorest half to two-thirds were left as bereft
of cultivable land as earlier.1 The failure to redistribute land in their
favour was tantamount to condemning them to continued poverty and
to unceasing exploitation by the land-owning upper castes.2 In rural
India, land has always been the primary source of wealth, as well as
of powei and high social status. Ownership of some land would have
given the poor food as well as an economic asset with which to
advance themselves materially. By making them free of the landed
uppei castes, village society and politics would have become more
equalitarian. And because small farms are worked more intensively
than large farms, utilizing more labour for every unit produced, re
distribution would have sharply boosted employment prospects for
the poor. In short, had the millions of landless, low-caste families like
Ram Dass’s been made owners of even tiny fields during the abolition
of zamindari, their future in independent India would have been
radically different to what transpired.
The shape given to zamindari abolition was the outcome of a
prolonged drama, riven with intrigue. The drama was also tinged with
grand irony, for despite having perpetuated the poverty and oppres
sion of this naked, hungry mass’, Nehru and the Congress succeeded
in claiming that they were its champions. For Ram Dass and for many
others of the oppressed, it was progress enough that the Congress had
formally and legally ended the hated zamindari system.
During negotiations with Congress leaders in 1946-47, which led
soon after to India’s emergence as an independent state, the British

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mediated the accession to the Indian union of the several hundred
princely states because they had enjoyed a semblance of semi-independent rule under British paramountcy. Despite popular resentment
against the princes for their profligacy and brutal efforts to squash
nationalist demands - ‘personal autocracies, devoid even of compe
tence , was how Nehru had once described them - the new Indian
government assured the potentates of kindly treatment and continued
privileges.3 The princes retained their palaces, much of the extraor
dinary wealth in their treasuries, exemption from income and wealth
taxes, immunity from prosecution, and they and their descendants
were guaranteed generous government pensions in perpetuity.
Unluckily for the grand landlords of UP (and elsewhere), they were
not governed by treaties with the British Crown, even though some
rivalled the more splendid princes in wealth and dominion, and the
British government did not mediate on their behalf. The barons
bemoaned the fickleness of even the best-served masters. The
Maharajkumar of Vizianagaram, who had made his home in Varanasi,
wrote in a newspaper column in 1946, ‘The Zamindars were not a
political force because they had backed the wrong horse and always
pulled the Britishers' chestnuts out of the fire forthem and they were not
wanted by the Congress and now they were not wanted by the Britishers.
In a nutshell, the Zamindars' goose had been cooked for all time.’4
The reversal in the landlords’ fortunes began in the early 1930s,
when the British colonial government, buffeted by nationalist demands,
expanded suffrage for the provincial legislatures, giving the vote to
those with properly or substantial income. Even though this enfran
chised only the wealthiest one-quarter or so of UP’s adults — in rural
areas this covered just large landlords to superior tenants -the political
calculus turned against the larger landlords, who proved woefully inca
pable of meeting the challenges of a competitive political environment.
The British had gambled on the hope that the grand landlords, the
few thousand barons who were their major allies and who had ben
efited so richly from their rule, could be shaped into a conservative
pro-British party which would counter the Congress’ nationalist threat.
That hope died quickly. The grand landlords failed to organize

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Zamindari abolition • 59
themselves into an effective political force. They instead formed two
parties, both of which were riven by petty disputes, such as the
demand by the grandest lords that lesser magnates never be allowed
to supersede them in the party hierarchy. And though it was evident
by now to the British government and to the more realistic of the
landlords that agrarian reform could no longer be delayed, as tenants
comprised 80 per cent of the electorate, the landlord parties failed to
formulate policies that would win tenant support.
The failure was rooted in the landlords’ haughty disdain of the
peasant, whether tenant or labourer. Sir Jagdish Prasad, a mighty
sugar-baron and luminary in landlord party politics, enunciated\he
view of his peers, writing in the Landholders’ Journal in 1935 that
the villager ‘is a willing tool in the hands of any self-seeking, intel
ligent man . . . His political life is blank. He is completely ignorant
of his rights and privileges. Any man with a little knowledge or power
can lord it over him.’5
In contrast, the expansion of suffrage pushed the UP Congress to
tailoring its agrarian policies to the needs of the smaller landlords and
superior tenants and, consequently, to breaking with the grand land
ords, once their firmest allies. (In practice, the line between smaller
landlords and superior tenants was often fuzzy; not only were there
some privileged tenants who functioned aszamindars, like the Thakurs
of Baba ka Gaon, but, in addition, many smaller landholders had only
a small share of their holdings on zamindari title, renting the rest from
arger zarmndars.^ The shift in policy did not come easily to the
Congress, in UP and nationally, dominated as it was by conservatives
hostile to any attack on the institution of private property.
In particular, the process of charting the Congress’
agrarian
policy sparked a bitter confrontation between Nehru and Gandhi already divided by Nehru’s insistence that the party’s leadership
address the prickly question, ‘for the freedom of which class or
classes in India are we specially striving?’ - with Nehru openly
criticizing Gandhi for his unflagging defense of the landlords 7 Thus
of the Mahatma, the man whom he called ‘an extraordinary paradox’’
Nehru wrote in about 19315:

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60 • Words like freedom

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To my surprise I have discovered during the last year or so that
Gandhiji approves Of the taluqadari [zamindari] system as such
and wants it to continue. He said in July 1934 at Kanpur ‘that
better relations between landlords and tenants could be brought
about by a change of hearts on both sides ... He was never in
favour of abolition of the taluqadari or zamindari system ... I
shall be no party to dispossessing propertied classes of their
private property without just cause. My objective is to reach your
hearts and convert you [Gandhi was addressing a deputation of
big landlords] so that you may hold all your private property in
trust for your tenants and use it primarily for their welfare . . . But
supposing that there is an attempt unjustly to deprive you of your
property, you will find me fighting on your side.’8
Such views were by this time anathema to Nehru, who declared, ‘The
taluqadars and the big zamindars, barring a few notable exceptions,
are physically and intellectually degenerate and have outlived their
day; they will continue only so long-as an external power like the
British Government props them up.’9 To Nehru, the ‘semi-feudal’
zamindari system hampered agricultural and industrial ‘production
and general progress’.
Nehru’s views on agrarian policy prevailed within the Congress.
This was so because even many conservatives reluctantly realized
that the imperatives of electoral politics called for strategies to
attract tenants, as they were the largest bloc of voters. Moreover, it
was clear by now that Nehru, despite his inspiring socialist rhetoric,
was not proposing a radical redistribution of rural property.10
Rather, Nehru’s agrarian programme was aimed at curbing the
power of the tiny number of grand landlords, and, conversely aiding
the smaller landlords and superior tenants, who were numerous and
had the vote. This electoral calculation was obvious when in 1936
he wrote:

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The word zamindar is rather deceptive, and one is apt to think
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Zamindari abolition • 61

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so far as 1 can remember, there are [nearly two and a half million
persons] classed as zamindars. Probably over ninety per cent of
these are almost on the same level as the poorest tenants, and
another nine per cent are only moderately well off. The biggish
landowners are not more than five thousand in the whole province
and of this number, about one-tenth might be considered the really
big zamindats and taluqadars . . . Both these poor landowners and
the middle landlords, though often intellectually backward, are as
a whole a fine body of men and women, and, with proper edu
cation and training, can be made into excellent citizens.”

Nehru s distinction between the large landholders and the others
had a profound impact on Congress agrarian policy and, just oyer a
decade later, on the shape of zamindari abolition in UP. In effect, the
distinction allowedjhe Congress to attack the few thousand large
landholders and the zamindari system (whose egregious aspects these
barons displayed in abundance) while backing the interests of the
smaller landholders, who comprised a major share of the electorate.12
Zamindari abolition in UP' was to spare these ‘excellent citizens’,
falsely described by Nehru as being as impoverished as ‘the poorest
tenants , when in fact they controlled anywhere from fifteen to several
hundred acres each, the higher end including the Thakurs of Baba ka
Gaon, and to diminish the power of only ‘the really big zamindars
and taluqadars’.
Thus, despite persisting divisions, by the mid-1930s the UP
Congiess agrarian policy was geared to benefiting the province’s
superior tenants and smaller landlords. Tenants were promised lower
rent, secure hereditary tenancy rights, an end to nazrana and eviction,
and the staying of all suits filed by the landlords against them. These
promises also attracted a significant number of smaller landlords who
rented land from others. Others amongst the smaller landlords turned
to the Congress because they lacked the land and capital resources
needed to meet the British revenue demands, and were consequently
discontented with the existing agrarian system - including zamindari
- and colomal rule. The Congress’ resounding victory in the 1937 UP

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62 • Words like freedom

elections testified that its agrarian policies had secured the loyalty of
the lipper tenantry and smaller landlords. The two landlord parties
together won less than one-fifth of the seats won by the Congress.
But despite tailoring its agrarian policy to this privileged minority
and ignoring the needs of the many millions of poor tenants - at-will,
sharecroppers and labourers, who lacked the vote and hence any
political say - the Congress succeeded in luring the latter into the
nationalist effort because its bold electoral slogans proclaimed the
party’s intention to abolish zamindari and to give ‘land to the tiller’.
The province's Governor, Sir Harry Haig, marvelled at the alluring
power of the Congress election campaign: ‘Meetings and processions,
slogans and flags, the exploitation of grievances, promises which held
out the vision of a new heaven and a new earth, stirred the countryside
into a ferment such as it had never before experienced.’13 By the eve
of Independence, the Congress manifesto committed itself to zamindari
abolition, stating that ‘the reform of the land system, which is so
urgently needed in India, involves the removal of intermediaries
between the peasant and the state. The rights of such intermediaries
should therefore be acquired on the payment of equitable compensa
tion.’ Giddy with these visions, few among the poorer peasants or
landless thought it fit to ask just how thorough zamindari abolition
would be or who the Congress would classify as ‘the tiller’ when
Independence was won.

Independence and the Congress’ betrayal of the poor
Having bitterly castigated the British for beggaring India and her
masses, and generated popular support for the nationalist cause by this
charge, the Congress was duty-bound, on India’s independence, to
address the issue of alleviating poverty. As a result, India’s birth as
an independent nation was to the accompaniment of innumerable
promises of welfare for her impoverished masses. In a radio broadcast
on the eve of independence, Nehru promised to ‘plan wisely so that
the burdei on the masses may grow less and their standards of living
go up.’14 The Indian Constitution committed the state to securing for

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Zamindan abolition • 63
all its citizens ‘justice, social , economic and political’ and ‘equality
of status and opportunity’.
The abolition of zamindari was a centrepiece of these socialistic
visions. Hence, immediately after Independence, Congress leaders in
Lucknow, in tandem with the central government in Delhi, began
work on fashioning legislation to end zamindari in UP. The legislation
had to be passed by the state assembly because land and agriculture
had been placed under provincial jurisdiction in India’s federal sys
tem. The legislation took half a decade to emerge, as it was the focus
of fierce contests between the conservatives and leftist groups in the
UP and national Congress. Nothing less momentous than the future
shape of UP’s agrarian order was at stake.
The act that became law in 1951 showed clearly that the conserva
tives had exercised their dominant hold on the Congress. Indeed the
provincial government seemed extraordinarily eager to assure’ the
landlords that their wealth would not be damaged. The province’s
conservative chief minister, Govind Ballabh Pant, went so far as to
announce that the act would affect only the 390 grandest ‘zamindars
who controlled long purses and wagged long tongues’.15
Judged even by forgiving standards, the UP Zamindari Abolition
and Land Reforms Act was only mildly reformative. Though it did
reduce the concentration of land ownership somewhat and curb the
most egregious excesses of the existing agrarian system, it did nothin"
at all to reduce the poverty of the millions in UP who possessed little
or no land. Specifically, the act ended the power of the landlords to
collect land revenue. Revenue was in future to be paid directly to the

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government. Also abolished were their powers and privileges; thev
could no longer demand begar nor the host of other customary or
i legal dues they had long extracted from tenants and labourers. The
government took over village land, market sites and other public-use
land that had earlier been owned by the landlords.
The landlords remained owners of their ‘home farms’ and groves
They were also generously compensated by the government for the
loss of rent revenues. Title to the land not classified as ‘home farms’
devolved from the landlords to superior tenants, those who possessed

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64 • Words like freedom

occupancy or hereditary rights. Tenants who lacked established oc
cupancy rights as well as sub-tenants - those who rented from the
superior tenants - were, in principle, to be given secure tenancies and
the option of buying the land at a multiple of the rent they paid.
Though these clauses added up to quite considerable change in
landowning amongst the top one-third or so of the province’s
population, with ownership devolving to superior tenants, the op
pressive inequities ol UP’s agrarian order remained virtually intact
when viewed from the perspective of the poor. This was because
the act did nothing to redistribute land ownership in favour of the
many million sharecropper, tenant-at-will and labourer families with
little or no land - a vast majority of. the province’s population as had been urged by the leftist groups within the Congress. The
UP government committee preparing the act rejected ceilings and
redistribution as politically impracticable, instead ruling that ‘no
limit be placed on the maximum area held either by a landlord or
by a tenant. Everybody .now in cultivatory possession, will continue
to hold his whole area.’16
Moreover, though the landlord system had been abolished pur
portedly to give land to ‘the tiller of the soiP, the Act’s definition
of ‘tiller’ and ‘cultivator’ did not require them to perform any
manual labour, or even to live in the village, as long as they
piovided either supervisory or financial inputs. A result of political
piessure from the landlords, this indefensible definition was legis
lated on the grounds that the upper castes were prohibited from
performing manual labour by their caste traditions. In practice, the
definition ensured that land would not be redistributed to the poor
as it allowed landlords to continue having their extensive properties
worked by others. (Conveniently for them, the act allowed a form
oi sharecropping!) 1 he actual tillers got no land. In contrast, the
leftists in the Congress had urged that ‘personal cultivation’ require
a minimum amount of physical labour and [participation] in actual
agricultural operations’, a definition under which ownership of land
would have shifted to the poor peasants and labourers who were the
actual cultivators.17

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Zamindari abolition • 65

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were boons to the landlords, great and small. And as they wielded
enoimous power at the local level, with the collusion of pliant or
corrupt land record-keepers they ensured that the few clauses in the
act that threatened their interests were gutted. They converted tenancy
relationships to crop-sharing arrangements, engineered the falsifica
tion of land records, and put land in the names of their relatives.
Moreover, abolition had been so long in coming that many landlords
had evicted scores of tenants — largely the sub-tenants and sharecrop
pers, who lacked written tenancy records - and greatly expanded their
home farms’ and groves. In the decade preceding zamindari aboli
tion, tenants were ejected from more than one million acres, which
the landlords reclassified as their home farms. By 1951, almost onefifth of the total cultivated land in UP was classified as home farms
and remained with the landlords.'8 As the wealthier landlords con
trolled a disproportionate share of the home-farm land - typically the
most productive fields — they were the primary beneficiaries of the
clause granting this land to them.

Anothei bonanza for the landlords was the clause giving them
ownership of groves and orchards, which was done, once again,, on
the hollow claim that they were the ‘cultivators’. The profits from
selling the variety of fruit and other products from the groves were
enormous, while the area under groves was very large. At the time
of zamindari abolition, nearly one-tenth of Pratapgarh district was
under groves.19 The wealthiest among the landlords again benefited
dispiopoi tionately as they had the largest and most valuable tracts of
grove. Forty kilometres from Baba ka Gaon, the Raja of Pratapgarh
retained the famed Lakhpera grove, so named because the 80-acre
tract was reputed to contain 100,000 fruit trees. Ownership of such
a grove was a guarantee of tremendous wealth in perpetuity.
Almost as if all this largesse was not sufficient, the act established
rehabilitation grants for landlords paying less than Rs. 10,000 annu
ally in land revenue, on the grounds that they were not rich and needed

government support to survive. This was extravagant fiction, since
only the o90 grandest landlords were barred from these grants as a

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result, while se\ eral thousand exceedingly rich landlords, with estates
that sometimes spanned scores of villages, received government aid.
Much as Chief Minister Pant had promised, only a few hundred
grand land barons were affected by zamindari abolition, with their
great empires left in tatters. But barring those few hundred, the terms
of zamindari abolition were generous to other large landowners and
munificent for the top one-third of UP’s rural population who already
either owned or rented substantial amounts of land. Thus, some of
the grand landlords retained as much as 2,000 acres in a region where
the average holding available per household was three acres.20 Most
of the several thousand large landlords emerged from zamindari
abolition in nearly as favourable a position as earlier, owning
extensive high-quality fields and groves. The primary beneficiaries
of zamindari abolition were patently the smaller zamindars and
superior tenants, who had since the 1930s been the Congress’ most
faithful supporters. The tenants now emerged as landowners. And
both they and the smaller zamindars gained materially by cheaply
buying up land being disposed of by the larger landlords. Their
position relative to the larger landlords improved markedly, in terms
•oCboth political power and wealth. In sum, the concentration of land
ownership had weakened, but only to the degree that large tracts of
land passed from the hands of the grand landlords to superior tenants
and small landlords.
The zamindari abolition act did not significantly ameliorate the
harsh inequities of UP’s agrarian order. The passing of land to the
smaller landlords and large tenants was of no help to the poorer
tenants, sharecroppers and the landless, whose immediate oppressors
were, by sheer numbers, most often these landlords and tenants. As
a consequence, not only did the poor receive no land but their
exploitation continued. The poorest half to two-thirds of UP’s rural
population - millions of sub-tenants, tenants-at-will, sharecroppers
and labourers from the lower-middle and scheduled castes - re
mained as impoverished as they had been under colonial rule, or,
in the case of those evicted from the patches they had rented, even
worse Off.
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Zamindari abolition • 67

Why did the Congress betray the poor?
The incontrovertible fact that the abolition ofzamindari in UP did not
further the welfare of the mass of the province’s people was a signal
that the Congress’ commitment to social justice and welfare was far,
far weaker than suggested by its leaders’ fiery speeches and the
inspiring text of India’s Constitution. Why did the Congress’ pre
Independence promises of zamindari abolition and ‘land to the tiller’
- igniting visions of‘a new heaven and a new earth’ in the millions
of poor peasants drawn to the nationalist cause - end up leaving UP’s
agrarian status quo only slightly altered?
To a great degree, the pro-property and anti-poor nature of the
zamindari abolition act was not surprising. Though the pre-Independence Congress successfully united a huge diversity of groups for the
nationalist cause, its leadership was dominated by the propertied: the
smaller landlords and large tenants in rural areas, and professionals
business people and industrialists in urban areas. On the occasions
when it ran provincial governments before Independence, the Con
gress revealed that its policies, too, were aimed at the interests of the
propertied, who after all comprised the electorate.
However, despite retaining its core base of support amongst the
propertied, the Congress developed a socialistic visage during the
early 1930s, as a consequence of the party’s development from a
narrow, urban upper-class affair into a mass movement. But the
Congress’ socialist pledges, whether in slogans or manifestos, were
always vague and equivocal, exemplified in the promises to abolish
zamindari and to give ‘land to the tiller'. Of course, this vagueness
reflected the fact that the heterogeneous and deeply-divided Congress
had not reached a consensus on many crucial economic issues, with
its leaders resorting to woolly rhetoric to mask class tensions. But.
in practice, in the pre-Independence period, the ambiguity helped the
Congress leadership to represent themselves as the guardians of the
interests of both the propertied and the propertyless.21 (The inclusive
ideologies devised by Gandhi and other leaders also served the same
purpose of diverting attention from
.... class
---- j or caste tensions.) After

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Independence, the absence of clear policy commitments allowed the
Congress enormous leeway to diverge from its avowed socialist goals.
In the event, even this hazy commitment to socialism was con
siderably diluted by the time the Congress began to rule in New
Delhi.22 In the lead-up to Independence, the mildly Marxist Nehru and
the diverse leftist groups in the Congress were in battle against Vallabhai
Patel (who later became the home minister) and the conservatives who
dominated the party machinery as well as the provincial leadership.
By late 1947, though Nehru remained unchallengeably the most
powerful national leader, the party was effectively controlled by the
conservatives. The rout of the left within the Congress was so com
plete that the Congress Socialists and Communists were ejected from
the party, the radical Directive Principles of State Policy reduced to
mere declarations of intent in the Constitution, and the right to prop
erty included amongst the legally enforceable Fundamental Rights.
And in a development that severely circumscribed the potential for
land reform, the Congress conservatives allied with the rural prop
ertied to ensure that provincial governments, where the power of
landowners was greater than at the centre, would be primarily respon
sible for agricultural policies and agrarian reforms.23 Moreover, faced
with the challenges of ruling India, beset at that time by mass refugee
movements, conflict with Pakistan, and the integration of the princely
states, the Congress government chose to concentrate on the task of
ensuring political stability rather than to risk further unrest by broach
ing redistribution.24
Although by now it was overwhelmingly dominated by the proper
tied and conservative sections of the party, the Congress pressed ahead
with zanundari abolition. Rutzamindari abolition wasno longer viewed
as an opportunity for redistribution but as a means of consolidating the
party’s political power in the provinces.25 Consequently,
zamindari
abolition act was shaped so that it would not attack the institution of
private property nor the existing distribution of land, which favoured
the Congress leadership and its core supporters. Rather, by withdrawing
the revenue-collecting and overlord rights that lay at the root of the
landlords’ political power, the Congress ensured that the larger land-

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Bombay II: 1954-1962 • 83

I learnt how to read Hindi when Shrinath began to go to school
in Bombay; he was in the third grade. There was a friend of mine
who taught Shrinath everything - every accent and letter of the
alphabet - and 1 learnt with him too. I am poor at writing, but I can
read. After learning how to read I bought the Ramayana. And I also
had some books with devotional songs written in them. And these had
the explanations written in simple Hindi.
Extraordinarily for a person of his age and origins, Ram Dass also
knows some English. In Bombay Union Dyeing, the master dyer
would send me to the store to bring the colours for the dye. So I had
to learn English. I learnt it slowly from a reader [a book which has
both English and Hindi in it]. Because of this 1 could go and choose
the colours. Ram Dass can now spell his name in English - he says
it letter by letter. He knows a handful of English words which he uses
while speaking Hindi; they range from such common words as ‘po
lice’, ‘wagon’ and ‘train’ to complex ones like ‘pollution’ and ‘de
murrage’; he pronounces the last as ‘damrage’. He can also slowly
read unfamiliar English words. I would have even started writing
English ifI hadn ’t gone back to the village. And I can also understand
English numbers.
Education is very important. It is the only wealth that cannot be
taken away from you. I had decided years ago that even if I had to
beg, I would educate my children. I saw that we are all uneducated,
and that only educated people progressed and got jobs. Now manv
of us are educated and ensure that our children are in turn educated.
Slowly and gradually there will be progress.

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The true leader of the untouchables

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The second great change in Ram Dass’s life was his introduction to
BabasahebAmbedkar, the great untouchable leader. I or Ram Dass and
virtually every other of India’s former untouchables, Bhimrao Ramji
Ambedkar — respectfully known as Babasaheb or Baba Ambedkaris a demigod. From the 1920s until his death in 1956, Ambedkar led
the emancipation of the untouchables, secured for them a remarkable

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84 • Words like freedom

range of civil rights protections, committed the independent Indian
state to programmes for their education and employment, and sparked
in them an enduring sense of self-respect and an awareness of how
future gains could be secured through electoral politics.
By the time I went to Bombay people didn’t believe in caste and
untouchability as much as they used to when myfather and uncle lived
there. When they lived there, us Harijans would not be given tea in
the roadside tea andfood stalls. My father and uncle could not enter
the stalls, just as they couldn 't enter the temples. When they went to
the tea stalls they had to carry their own mugs and buy tea and sit
far outside. People knew what caste my father and uncle were from
and would tell others that these are untouchables. They would find
out their caste because there were lots ofpeople in Bombay from our
village and from places close to it. And anyway people of our Pasi
caste had to give attendance at the police station every day because
we were considered criminal castes, so even people from Bombay
knew our caste.
But because ofBaba Ambedkar’s work, the Harijans started being
served at the roadside stalls. This was just two or three years after
Independence. According to the law passed by the government, whoever
wished to eat at public hotels could do so freely.
I heard about Babasaheb Ambedkar from my scheduled-caste
friends from Maharashtra who worked at Kamal Dyeing and Bombay
Union Dyeing. They would teach us about life in Bombay, warning us
about the dangers of the city. They were as poor as us and more or less
all illiterate. They came from villages and said their oppression was
similar to ours. And they came here for the same reasons as us.
■ ■ My two good friends ' names were Devji and Tano. They were at
Kamal Dyeing. One oj them worked on the next machine and so we
got to know each other. When we stopped working together, we lost
touch, but whenever we ran into each other we would ask with
affection how the other was. 1 would speak to them in Marathi, which
I had learnt a bit because oj listening to it everyday.
The difference between their situation and ours was that they were
less scared than us. 1 hey couldfight back against their landlords. But

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Bombay II: 1954-1962 • 85
w were very scared of the Thakurs. I’m not sure whether they owned
any land or not, but like us they also worked as labourers in their
village. They told me about Ambedkar, about his concern for the
untouchables and the poor and how he had studied why people were
forced to live so poorly.
Baba Ambedkar made us aware of the Dalit’s power in elections
[‘Dalit’ is Marathi for ‘oppressed’. Coined by Ambedkar, the term
was widely adopted by the former untouchables in the 1960s as an
expression of pride and assertiveness.] That whether you are a Raja
or a Dalit you have equal votes! That on this one day of voting you
have power equal to any upper-caste person! He assured us this much,
and just this much is enough,
Ambedkar would come and address rallies and say don’t give up
hope, continue the struggle, work hard and continue tofight. Continue
to fight and continue to work. He said ifyou stop working no one will
notice you.

1

When ihe meetings would happen it would either be declared a
hohday, or a lock-out or a strike. There used to be big meetings in
the park, and we would get to know about this and go there. Either
Ambedkar or other big leaders would come. There they would explain
all this to us, that we should continue to fight our own battles but that
we must work to meet our everyday needs. They would say continue
your fight, don’t close the factory down and then whatever happens
legally you should accept.
I saw Babasaheb at a large public meeting in Bombay in 1956 I
had also seen Nehru and other political leaders. Il was too far at the
meet,ng to see Babasaheb closely. The man was there, far far awav
And there were lots ofpolice with sticks in their hands, andyou were,', I
allowed to talk: the police would say you should only look as this is
what you came herefor. And we people were not educated at that lime
and were very scared ofthe police. Infad, village people thought that
even guards were police because of the turbans they wore!
Ambedkar died in 1956. Us scheduled-caste people were all very
unhappy when he died. The local scheduled-caste people took out a
procession on his death. We just went and watched. Because we were

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86 • Words like freedom

■ bntsiders we were more vulnerable to getting harassed by the police,
which is why v c rarely joined processions.
Self-respect, the outlawing of untouchability, a panoply of af
firmative action programmes, special representation in Parliament
and state legislatures, political organization across India: Ambedkar’s
extraordinary legacy to improving the conditions of the former
untouchables spans all these and other hard-won victories. Because
of his popularity among the scheduled castes across India, Ambedkar
is, with Gandhi and Nehru, arguably the only pre-independence
leader who even today evokes allegiance nationally, though from
very different constituencies. As important as the other two,
Ambedkar embodies what all former untouchables can aspire to
achieving. Overcoming the oppressive disabilities of being an un
touchable in turn-of-the-century India - he was born in 1891 in
modern-day Maharashtra province to a Mahar family - Ambedkar
acquired professional qualifications on a par with those of the most
eminent upper-caste leaders of the independence movement.3 He
gained a doctorate in economics from Columbia University in New
York, a D.Sc from the University of London, and was admitted to
the Bar from Gray’s Inn in London. As a statesman, he was
independent India’s first law minister and a primary architect of the
country’s Constitution.
But despite this political legacy and his personal achievements,
Ambedkar is, baffl ingly, absent from the records that purport to explain
modern Indian history and politics. In these records Ambedkar has
been relegated to the shadows, much as untouchables were for millen
nia banished from the sight of Hindu society. Thus, British historian
Percival Spear’s classic account of modern India, written in the early
1970s, mentions Ambedkar once, though even this reference is omitted
from the book’s index. Some fifteen years later, the New Cambridge
History of India, a study of post-independence politics, written by
American political scientist Paul Brass, again gives Ambedkar a single
mention. Avowedly revisionist writers are as much at fault: Indian
historian Sum it Sarkar’s account, Modern India 1885-1947, mentions
Ambedkar just twice, while a-comparative lightweight like Motilal

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Nehru (Jawaharlal Nehru’s father) gets five times as much attention,
and industrialist G.D. Birla perhaps twenty times as much.4
Ambedkar’s exclusion from the historical record stems in part
from the exclusive obsession of analysts of pre-Independence India
with elite nationalist politics, particularly the Congress and its char
ismatic leaders. In the case of some writers prejudice is a factor, as
Ambedkar’s origins as an untouchable and his harsh condemnation
of Hinduism have alienated many upper-caste Indians. But a crucial
yet too often overlooked reason is that in a supremely ironical twist
of history, much of what Ambedkar achieved for the untouchables has
been credited - in India as much as abroad - to Mahatma Gandhi,
who, despite his own abhorrence of untouchability, opposed
Ambedkar’s demands for political and civil rights for the untouchables.
The irony is underscored by Eleanor Zelliot, one of Ambedkar’s
most important biographers. She writes:

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Bombay II: 1954-1962 • 87

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The Constituent Assembly of independent India passed a provision
legally abolishing untouchability on November 29, 1948, nine
months after the death of Mahatma Gandhi. z\s the measure w.as
approved, the house resounded with cries of‘ Mahatma Gandhi ki
Jai’ - victory to Mahatma Gandhi. . . Present at that session of the
Constituent Assembly as chairman of the drafting committee for
the constitution was Dr B.R. Ambedkar, an untouchable . . . The
irony of the moment was lost on those present — a legalistic measure
was taken in the name of Gandhi who had no use for legalism,
coupled with lack of recognition for Ambedkar, the Untouchable
who drafted the measure and who had bitterly fought Gandhi to
secure legalistic approaches to the problem of untouchability.5

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The view that Gandhi was the Mahatma who led the untouchables to
freedom is anathema to many former untouchables, whether those like
Ram Dass who were adults in 1947 or today’s youngsters. For them
Gandhi was certainly a Mahatma and a leader in the fight for independ
ence but he was not their leader, an honour reserved almost exclusively
for Ambedkar. Ram Dass says, Gandhi was a leader ofonly the upper

K-i

88 • Words like freedom

castes. During the Round Table Conference in England, he would keep
saying we are all one people, but this is just the usual stance of the
upper castes who keep saying we are all one when it suits them. But
the rest of the time they beat the lower castes. [The Round Table
Conference ol 1931 marked a milestone in negotiations between the
British government and Indian nationalist parties, but was also the first
of many bitter confrontations between Gandhi and Ambedkar.]
Though both Gandhi and Ambedkar condemned untouchability,
their approaches to tackling the problem were fundamentally irrec
oncilable. Their relationship was marked by hostility and angry public
criticism of each other. Gandhi questioned Ambedkar’s right to as
sume the mantle of untouchable leadership. Ambedkar accused Gan
dhi of being a stooge of the upper castes.
Gandhi’s approach to untouchability was essentially that of a
reformer of Hinduism. His abhorrence of untouchability did not lead
him to reject the caste system, which he considered crucial both to
Hinduism and to reconstructing Indian society once independence
was won. (Gandhi did repudiate his belief in the merits of the caste
system in the last years of his life, but this change went virtually
unnoticed because of the many decades in which he had upheld the
system.6) Instead, Gandhi , focused on bringing about a voluntary
‘change of heart’ on the part of the upper castes so that they would
end their oppression of the untouchables, accept them into the Shudra
‘touchable’ category of castes and, hence, allow them full participa
tion in Hindu society.
Because he viewed untouchability only in spiritual and religious
terms, Gandhi saw no need to address the material deprivation the
untouchables suffered, nor any role for government to aid their progress
through compensatory policies. To the contrary, Gandhi argued that
the untouchables should continue with their traditional menial and
despised jobs, such as scavenging, as long as society accorded them
as much respect as that given to Brahmins. Ambedkar called this idea
of Gandhi’s ‘an outrage and a cruel joke’.7
Gandhi’s stature and the strength of his condemnation of
untouchability was such that he unquestionably did greatly advance

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Bombay II: 1954-1962 • 89

the cause of turning public opinion against untouchability. In cleaning
his own toilet and insisting that all the inmates of his ashrams do so
too, Gandhi challenged the prejudices of many upper-caste Hindus,
the majority of whom found his views on untouchability discomfiting
and radical. Moreover, Gandhi did his best to keep the issue of
untouchability at the top of the Congress agenda, despite objections
from Nehru and other leaders that it diverted energy from the task
of winning independence.
But many untouchables, whether highly educated like Ambedkar
or without formal schooling like Ram Dass, found much in Gandhi’s
views on untouchability to be patronizing and offensive. Particularly
galling was that in Gandhi’s scheme they were essentially objects of
pity. The upper castes had to act by becoming penitents and purifying
themselves through serving the untouchables. This condescending
attitude was embodied in the name of the organization started by
Gandhi in 1932, the Harijan Sevak Sangh or the Servants of the
Untouchables Society. The Sangh soon had no untouchable members,
an anomaly Gandhi countered by asserting that it was an organization
for the expiation of the guilt of caste Hindus.
And in Gandhi’s concept of service to the suffering untouchables,
there was little room for the politically conscious untouchable- like
Ambedkar - pressing for substantive social and economic change.
Indeed, Gandhi earned their ire because of his insistence that he and
other Hindu reformers could by themselves adequately represent the
untouchable cause and knew betterthan leaders like Ambedkar how the
untouchables could be emancipated. At the Round Table Conference in
1931, Gandhi argued, T claim myself in my own person to represent the
vast mass of the Untouchables ... There is a body of Hindu reformers
who are pledged to remove this blot of untouchability .. . Those who
speak of the political rights of Untouchables do not know their India.’9
But to Ambedkar and other untouchable leaders, Gandhi’s pro
gramme of religious reform and humanitarianism seemed calculated
to subvert their demands and to be an effort to ensure that the social
order —and hence the social and material privileges of the upper castes
- would not be disturbed. Ambedkar wrote:

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What is the object of this Harijan Sevak Sangh? Is it to
prepaie the Untouchables to win their freedom from their
Hindu masters, to make them their social and political equals?
Mr Gandhi ncvci had any such object before him and he never
wants to do this, and I say that he cannot do this. This is the
task of a democrat and a revolutionary. Mr Gandhi is neither.
He is a 7ory by birth as well as by faith ... His main object,
as every self-respecting Untouchable knows, is to make India
safe for Hindus and Hinduism. He is certainly not fighting
the battle of the Untouchables. On the contrary, by distrib
uting through the Harijan Sevak Sangh petty gifts to petty
Untouchables he is buying, benumbing and drawing the claws
of the opposition of the Untouchables which he knows is the
only force which will disrupt the caste system and will es
tablish a true democracy in India.

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Ambedkar was equally angered by Nehru, who consistently dismissed
the demands of untouchable leaders as a distraction from the inde
pendence effort. ‘Turn to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru,’ he wrote. ‘He
draws his inspiration from the Jeffersonian Declaration; but has he
ever expressed any shame or any remorse about the condition of the
60 millions of Untouchables? Has he anywhere referred to them in
the torrent of literature which comes out from his pen?’
Ambedkar s radical vision of the untouchables’ future was that
•the untouchables would, through self-respect and organized action,
make themselves equal to upper-caste Hindus in every way. Reform
of Hinduism, the religion which had reduced the untouchables to the
status of despised slaves, would not gain this future for the
untouchables. Consequently, early in his political career, Ambedkar
turned to securing the political, economic and legal rights that he felt
were essential to the untouchables’ emancipation. The British recep
tivity to these demands, especially for a separate electorate for the
untouchables, stemmed in part from their calculation that the array
of separate electorates would both appease and weaken Indian na
tionalist pressure.

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Ambedkar’s efforts in the early 1930s to gain for the untouchables
special electoral representation as a minority (akin to that already
granted to the Muslims in 1906 and subsequently to other communal
and special interest groups) pitched him against the combined might
of Nehru and Gandhi, who were adamantly opposed to allowing either
reserved seats or separate electorates for the untouchables. Their
opposition stemmed from much the same reasons that had led them
to repudiate, a decade earlier, the revolt by Awadh’s impoverished
peasants. To both Nehru and Gandhi, Ambedkar’s demand for a
separate electorate threatened the Congress’ claim that it represented
every Indian, and certainly every ‘Hindu’, in the nationalist effort. The
Congress’s power would diminish greatly were the untouchables given
a separate electorate. Gandhi’s outrage, in addition, stemmed from his
belief that in politicizing the untouchables’ demands, Ambedkar was
threatening the unity of Hinduism as well as stoking a class war where
the exploited lower castes would revolt against their upper-caste
oppressors. In desperate protest, Gandhi began a ‘fast unto death’.
Horrified at the prospect of being held responsible for the Ma
hatma’s death, Ambedkargave up the demand for separate elector
ates. But Gandhi’s recourse to what was in effect blackmail immeas
urably embittered Ambedkar, who wrote angrily: ‘Mr Gandhi, the
friend of the Untouchables, preferred to fast unto death rather than
consent to them and although he yielded he is not reconciled to the
justice underlying these demands.’10
Ambedkar’s battle with Gandhi and Nehru was not entirely in vain,
as in lieu of a separate electorate, he wrested agreement that the
untouchables would be given reserved seats in Parliament and the state
legislatures in about the same ratio as their proportion to the total popu
lation. Th is was the genesis of programmes of protective, compensatory
discrimination for the untouchables. In 1935, the untouchable castes
were listed on a government schedule for special privileges and prefer
ential policies, hence the term Scheduled Castes. The groups listed on
this schedu le were entitled, in addition to reserved seats in al 1 legislative
bodies, to reserved places in government jobs and seats in schools and
colleges. In independent India, the protective programmes secured

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during British rule were to grow into a vast machinery of protective
discrimination forthe untouchables, the world’s largest such scheme.
Surprisingly, in the immediate post-independence period
Ambedkar was given a central role in the Constitution-making process
as well as being made independent India’s first law minister. This
brief period of co-operation between the Congress and Ambedkar
stemmed from the recognition by Nehru and other Congress leaders
tiat the untouchables remained alienated from the Congress As the
head of the committee drafting the Constitution, Ambedkar ensured
that the programmes and safeguards for the untouchables secured
from the British were incorporated into the Constitution, and a number
.
• •
—
al proposals for
he emancipation of the untouchables were rebuffed. The most im
portant of these was his demand that the government undertake an
ambitious land reform programme to benefit the untouchables The
Congress government's repudiation of this measure or of any other
orm of redistributive land reform, which would have transformed the
condition of the overwhelmingly landless untouchables, was tanta
mount to permanently perpetuating the untouchables’ thrall an out
come proved by the experience of the past half-century."
As a result of Ambedkar’s influence, the Indian Constitution
corporated a large number ofjusticiable Fundamental Rights aimed
the suT b8 “T d'SCr|,m,'nation ortl’e Practice of untouchability by
he state or by individuals.'-Article 17 abolished ‘untouchability’and
thePtTOunCdslofa "rf->lm Otl’er ArtlCleS Prohibited discrimination on
the rounds of religion, race, caste or sex in ‘access to shops, public
estaurants. hotels and places of entertainment’, or in ‘use of tells
tanks bathmg ghats, roads, and places of public resort’, or in admis
sion to educational institutions. Article 23 outlawed begar or forced
a our, to which the scheduled castes were most vulnerable. Article
25 guaranteed entrance to Hindu religious institutions. In 1955 the
centra government passed the Untouchability (Offences) Act, which
uTto
Z05'1'0" °f dlSabilities a crimc punishable by a fine of
up to Rs 500, mtpnsonment for up to six months, cancellation or
suspension of licences and of public grants.

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Ambedkar resigned from his post as law minister in 1951 over
irreconcilable differences with Nehru. The record of the last years of
Ambedkar’s life is dominated by his dramatic conversion, along with
nearly a million other former untouchables, to Buddhism in 1956. His
conversion set in motion a movement that endures until today.
Ambedkar’s decision to convert to Buddhism and to encourage
other scheduled caste people to do so was the culmination of decades
of wrestling with the problem of untouchability and its relation to
Hinduism. In the early 1920s, Ambedkar was against conversion as
a means of attacking caste discrimination, but within a decade was
convinced that the untouchables could only be free - and the caste
system destroyed - if they left Hinduism. Ambedkar explained the
imperative of conversion by likening the caste system to a four-tiered
wall on which the Brahmins were at the top and the untouchables at
the bottom: if the bottom tier were pulled out, the whole structure
would collapse.13 In 1935, Ambedkar had declared, ‘I was born in the
Hindu religion; but I will not die in the Hindu religion.’14
To Ambedkar, Buddhism was the ideal religion for the
untouchables to convert to: it was of Indian origin, casteless and
egalitarian. It was also anti-Brahmin, and Brahmin opposition had
been a primary cause of Buddhism’s virtual extinction in India by
the 10th century. Moreover, Buddhism’s recent record in India-was
distinguished by concern for the untouchables. Buddhist groups in
southern India were by the 1900s encouraging untouchables to
convert to their ‘democratic religion’.15 Typically, Ambedkar empha
sized the religion’s stress on equality, justice and humanity, not its
philosophical or mystical aspects.16
Ambedkar died less than two months after converting to Bud
dhism. His death dislocated the conversion movement, but even so
the overwhelming majority of his fellow Mahars - several million
in number - and smaller numbers from other scheduled castes in
Maharashtra had soon converted to Buddhism. Conversions became
increasingly widespread across India, and the 1961 Census reported
a roughly twenty-fold increase in the number of Buddhists. The
strength of the conversion movement was all the more remarkable
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94 • Words like freedom
because converts were barred from the affirmative action pro
grammes for the scheduled castes on the specious grounds that
untouchables leaving Hinduism for other religions did not need
special safeguards as they were no longer ‘untouchable’, and that
caste Hindus would no longer discriminate against them. The de
cision by millions of scheduled caste people to forgo these benefits
reflected the extraordinary respect they accorded to Ambedkar, as
well as the revolutionary spirit he encouraged in them. In independ
ent India, empowered by the vote and by the constitutional safe
guards against untouchability, they joined Ambedkar in his most
revolutionary act - the repudiation of Hinduism, the religion that
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Some of us Hurijcms thought that we should create our own religion.
But Babasaheb said why don’t we choose a religion that suits us. He
didn ’t like the Hindu religion - because of untouchabilty, of not being
allowed to go to temples, of not being treated as humans. He would
say to the upper-caste Hindus, 'If we are not humans, why should we
stay-in your religion? If by sitting even far away we pollute you then
why should we stay in your religion? ’
If you read Baba Ambedkar’s works he makes references to the
various Hindu scriptures pointing out that they are often worthless
fi’om a moral and social standpoint. The Ramayana is full of such
instances. For example, if you read it carefully, you will see that it
says that the upper castes should beat untouchables, poor villagers,
the drum, animals and women as much as possible, that this is their
fate. Because we were all illiterate, the Brahmin priests could fool

us into believing such rubbish!
In Hinduism, we do whatever the upper castes say, we believe
whatever they insist. We are oppressed and have to agree to their
point of view. The priests take a lot, they are always demanding
things, they tell us to offer something here and something there, they
demand money for all their services. You even have to wash the feet
of the priests. But in Buddhism people only have to greet each other
as equals and to bless one another.

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In our village no one changed from Hinduism to Bodh Dharma
at the time that Babasaheb left Hinduism. If someone else had maybe
I would have also. If large numbers change, then you have more
confidence to do so as well. We were too bound by tradition. But
recently even in our area afew people have changed to Bodh Dharma.
There is now a Bodh temple near Baba ka Gaon.
The Hindu religion has improved. All because of Ambedkar.
Where we earlier could not sit with others or have tea at a hotel, now
we can do this. The older people of the upper castes still have these
prejudices, but the younger ones have learnt io behave better.
Ambedkar spoke for us. He saw to it that the lower castes and
women were educated. If Ambedkar had not been there we would
not have been helped by the government, and my son Shrinath
wouldn ’t have been able to go to school. Because of Ambedkar, we
Harijans got job concessions. If Baba Ambedkar wasn’t there, none
of us untouchables would be awake and aware today. We would have
not got anywhere.

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IN 1962, Ram Dass returned from Bombay to settle permanently in
Baba ka Gaon. I came back here because I had to look after the family.
IfI was not here, my children would have had to look after the animals
and couldn ’t have gone to school. So I thought ifI come and stay here,
they would be able to study and would be happy. And I had already
finished paying off my family’s debts to the zamindars, so we were
more free of them than earlier.
By 1962 there were some differences in the village. There was
an improvement of at least 25 paise in a rupee. Though the zamindars
were still very powerful, their ownership ofproperty had become less.
Earlier they owned everything, even the land that we built our houses
on. Nobody else owned anything. Then their property became some
what less and other people also began to own land.
I had the money given to me when the Kamal Dyeing factory
closed. The Thakurs that my family worked for here offered to sell
me halfan acre of land. This was land that myfamily had in the 1940s
tilled for ten years as sharecroppers and that should have become
ours in the shikmi. But anyway I paid Rs 400for it. Then this Thakur

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told me that he would transfer the title to me later because it would
be cheaper this way. But he didn ’t transfer it. Sometime later he died.
Then the Thakur’s brother denied that I had paidfor the land, saying,
‘Can you prove that you paid him? ’ I was so angered with this
cheating that I jusi said, ‘God is my proof but keep your land! ’
How could I fight them? The patwari [local land-record keeper]
was a Brahmin and despised mefor being oflow caste. And the Thakurs
had money with which to bribe him and I had none. You can’t trust these
big people! If they get hold of any money that belongs to the poor, it
never comes back. They are cheats in everything. They will slit your
throat! Because of their cheating I was left with just one-seventh of an
acre. But even this little bit ofland gave myfamily some means to live.
And myfamily and I were sharecropping one more acre. And we would
also work as labourers for the Thakurs and the middle castes.
No longer bonded to the Thakurs by debt or the force of custom,
Ram Dass was able to search for other ways of ensuring his family’s
survival and welfare. I started to do some business, buying cattlefrom
villages and towns, and selling them here. I wouldfirst use them for
a while and would sell them when I found the opportunity. I would
make Rs 25 or Rs 50 profit for each bullock as I would have trained
them to pull the plough or the bullock cart. I would keep two bullocks
at a time because I could use them for ploughing my land and I could
also rent them to others.
The cattlefairs were sometimes held asfar away as Kanpur, Unnao
or Gwalior. Iwouldn ’tgo to the very distantfairs because I had myfield
to look after. There were thousands ofbullocks and cows brought there
for sale. They were ofmany different breeds. The Gwalior bullocks are
very large, much taller than a man, spotlessly white and quiet. They.are
good workers. But the ones I like best are the bullocksfrom Kheri. They
are the best workers even though they are very small. But they are as bad
tempered as they are hardworking! They try to hit everyone and they
fight with the other bullocks! I only had one pair ofthese. One died, and
the other refused to work with any other bullock so I had to sell it.
At thefairs there would be lots ofpeoplefrom my area—Pratapgarh,
Allahabad, Rae Bareli—and we would walk back together until we had

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to take our separate routes. We were like the caravans ofBaghdad! We
would walk at least 30 miles a day. We d make the cattle walk for an
hour and then give them a halfan hour break. They would get to graze
when we stopped to rest or eat. The journey was quite safe; there were
animal thieves, but as we were about 30 of us, no one would attack us.
We would take turns to stay up at night. The thieves would steal but they
weren ’t violent, so if they saw you awake they would not do anything.
And we used to camp near villages because we could buy fodder and
coidd take help from the villagers.
Now 1 don 7 have enough lime or I would still do this business.
You can make quite a lot of money, though of course you can also
lose everything if the animals get sick.

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The major characteristics of Congress government rule had been
established in the early 1950s, and there was no break with this pattern
of development in the 1960s, despite Nehru’s death in 1964. His
successors as prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi,
amplified his policies. Thus, much as in the previous decade, the
record of Congress rule in the 1960s was dominated by the rituals of
radical rhetoric and symbolic attempts at redistribution on the one
hand, and the continuation of economic policies that overwhelmingly
benefited the upper and middle classes, both rural and urban, on the
other. Not unexpectedly, Ram Dass’s family remained impoverished
throughout the decade, while both the numbers and the proportion of
the poor increased.
Indeed, the Congress’ major redistributive effort of the 1960s -the
imposition of ceilings on agricultural land and redistribution to favour
the poor-was an extraordinary travesty in both conception and results.
After the abolition of zamindari in 1952, the Congress governments in
New Delhi and the provinces turned away, relieved, from the unsettling
issue of agrarian reform. They were compelled to return to the issue at
the close of that decade becapse the Congress had suffered electoral
defeats to parties promising radical land reforms.1 To counter their

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appeal, the Congress central government, under Nehru’s guidance,
promised reform that seemed intrinsically radical: the imposition of
ceilings on the amount of land that could be held by an individual or
family, with the ‘surplus’ land redistributed to the poor. Strikingly, this
measure had been rejected by the Congress leadership just a decade
earlier, during the contests over the shape of zamindari abolition, for
being politically unfeasible. The Congress’s rediscovery of the policy,
of course, was not prompted by a sudden burst of radical energy.
Rather, in the course of the 1960s the Congress governments in New
Delhi and the provinces were to demonstrate how even ostensibly
radical policies could be reduced to being harmless.
The need for land redistribution was incontrovertible. The ineq
uity in land ownership across India was enormous, with the rural rich
continuing to own vast properties. An elite of less than Haifa million
families - about one-half of one per cent of the rural population owned well over ten per cent of the cultivable land, with average
holdings of 80 acres each. The next million owned roughly as much,
with holdings that averaged 37 acres.2 In contrast, more than one-tenth
of India’s rural families were landless. The next poorest quarter
owned less than half an acre each. If an average ceiling of 20 acres
per rural household had been applied at this time, roughly 55 million
acres would have been ‘surplus’. Redistribution of this huge amount
of land would have had a tremendous impact on reducing poverty.
But, as events unfolded, less than five per cent of this land was
declared surplus; and not all of this was redistributed!3
In UP, the scope for redistribution was as great, as the abolition
of zamindari had not reduced the enormous inequities in land own
ership, and quite possibly had increased them.4 At the beginning of
the 1960s, one-fifth of UP’s 13 million rural families were landless.
Another quarter of the rural population - including Ram Dass’s family
- owned less than one acre each. Together, this mass, verging on half
the province’s rural people, owned just 1.6 per cent of the cultivable
land! In contrast, the top ten per cent owned well over half the land,
with a sizeable number of this elite each still controlling thousands
of acres of land?

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But despite these obvious inequities and the scope for alleviating
poverty, Nehru’s government lacked commitment for land redistribu
tion almost as much as the provincial Congress governments, which
were transparently dominated by the rural landed. This was obvious
from the mildness of the central government’s land ceiling directives
to the provinces.6 They were so extensively shot through with exemp
tions and loopholes that even if enforced they would have left un
touched the majority of large landowners. Thus, the directives rec
ommended that the ceiling laws exempt ‘efficient’ or ‘mechanized’
farms, however large, along with cattle breeding and dairy farms,
sugarcane farms owned by.sugar factories, orchards and plantations.
Also exempted were farms owned by religious, charitable or educa
tional institutions, or co-operative societies.7
The ineffectual proposals were weakened further at the provincial
level, where virtually no Congress government was prepared to coun
tenance land redistribution. Though most of the provinces adopted
ceiling legislation in 1960-61, almost all expanded the myriad exemp
tions recommended in the central directives. As a result, landowners
needed little ingenuity to be able to retain control of their holdings,
however extensive.
In UP, resistance to the land ceiling effort came from a large and
politically dominant section of the population. The number of families
owning large holdings of fifty, one hundred or even several hundred
acres had expanded several-fold since the abolition of zamindari, as
the smaller landlords and the more prosperous tenants had purchased
land being sold by the large zamindars. With this new congruence of
interests, these Thakurs and Brahmins, with a sizeable sprinkling of
elite cultivating and higher-middle castes, emerged as an extraordi
narily powerful force against agrarian reform.
This group’s power stemmed not just from their ownership of
sizeable properties but also from their nearly absolute control of the
Congress in UP. The UP Congress, which ruled the province from
1947 in an unbroken innings of two decades, had, from well before
Independence, drawn its main source of support from the smaller
landlords and substantial tenants. But by the close of the 1950s many

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The 1960s • 101
of the erstwhile land barons had also joined its top leadership, desert
ing the landlords’ Praja Party which had been routed in the 1952
o
elections? Others from amongst the former barons led the challenge
to Congress by conservative opposition parties including the Jana
Sangh, today’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). But whether within or
outside Congress, whether erstwhile grandee or former superior ten
ant, the province’s new and old landowners were united in their
opposition to land ceilings or other redistributive agrarian reforms.
From positions of power in the legislature and administration, they
and their kin ensured that their holdings would never be whittled
away. They were almost always able to ensure that the laws passed
by the state legislature were too weak to threaten their interests. On
the rare occasions when threatened by particular aspects of a law, they
used the corrupt and pliable bureaucratic system to gut the policies
or even to twist them to their advantage.
■ The land ceiling act that came into force in UP in 1960 was
a first victim of this opposition. The act was so mild and so riddled
with exemptions - most proposed by the central government - as
to seem farcical to even generous observers. It imposed nothing more
threatening than a generously high ceiling per family of five mem
bers of 40 irrigated acres or 80 unirrigated acres; an additional 8
acres were allowed for every additional family member. Under this
ludicrous formula, a landowner could retain 128 acres of land in
addition to limitless orchards and land covered by other exemptions.9
Given the abundant exemptions, the UP government itself from
the start expected very modest results in terms of the amount of land
that would be declared surplus: nothing more than 400,000 acres, just
about one per cent of the province’s cultivated area. But the results
fell far short of even this modest goal. Just 20,000 acres were redis
tributed, of which fully half were unfit for cultivation.10
Because it was apparent that the Act would not be enforced, given
bureaucratic collusion and the patent lack of political commitment,
landlords flagrantly put large amounts of land in the names of serv
ants, dead relatives, fictitious people, and even pet dogs, cats, and
elephants! Others retained thousands of acres of land by establishing

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bogus co-operatives or charitable, religious or educational trusts. Many
cheated the public exchequer by claiming huge sums as compensation
for land that they never gave up.
Events in Baba ka Gaon transparently revealed just how weak the
redistribution effort was. No land was redistributed to the poor; to the
contrary, the village Thakurs secured for themselves title to all the
degraded land around the village - about 30 acres - as well as the
rights for fish-farming in the large pond outside the village!
The land ceiling effort in the 1960s was nothing short of a farce.
The sense of burlesque was accentuated by the fact that by the close
ot that decade India’s central and provincial governments had together
issued such reams of agrarian reform legislation that they could claim
that no other country had developed such a voluminous body of agrar
ian laws so quickly. No matter that the laws were in their entirety so
toothless that a Planning Commission review caustically noted, ‘In no
sphere of public activity in our country since Independence has the
hiatus between precept and practice, between policy pronouncements
and actual execution, been as great as in the domain of land reform.’11

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The landlords prosper with the Green Revolution
By the mid-1960s, 15 years of government threats - though never
implemented - to appropriate and redistribute their land had given
those with large landholdings ample opportunity to disguise their
holdings in any number of ways, ranging from legal exemptions to
illegal transfers. With their tens or hundreds of acres securely under
their control, UP s landowners were ideally placed to reap the benefits
of the ‘Green Revolution’ in agriculture, which began to spread in the
province at this time. Within a decade, those with large holdings had
giown even richer; those with five to ten acres had prospered, but
millions of land-poor and landless families like Ram Dass’s remained
as hungry as ever.
The boom in agriculture in UP and several other northern prov
inces brought to an end a century of near-stagnation in agricultural
giowth in India. In the first four decades of the 20th century, food-

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The 1960s • 103
grain output in India grew by a yearly average of only about one-third
of one per cent. The dismal performance of agriculture stemmed
from the inequities of land ownership, insecure tenancy, and the
paucity of government funds for irrigation and other necessities of
agriculture. And because food-grain output fell behind even the modest
one per cent annual increase in population, India’s capacity to feed
itself worsened significantly in the first half of this century. By
Independence, the availability of basic foodgrains was one-fifth lower
for the average Indian than half a century earlier.13 Chronic hunger
and famine were hallmarks of Indian life.
During Nehru’s regime, the central government lacked a coherent
agrarian policy, with its energies devoted to furthering industrial
growth. There was little consistency in the policies attempted community development, agricultural extension, land reforms, im
proved irrigation and even co-operative farming were all tried
without vigour and then discarded.14 Agriculture continued to per
form poorly, and through the 1950s and 1960s the shortage of food
grains forced the Indian government to rely on the US government
for several million tons of food aid each year, a dependence fraught
with political sensitivities and uncertainties. No less than in colonial
days, India’s reputation abroad was such that to many the word
‘India’ evoked only images of bone-thin or pot-bellied children, and
of gaunt, half-naked adults.
On Nehru’s death, first Shastri, Nehru’s successor, and then Indira
Gandhi paid greater attention to the agricultural sector. The impetus
behind this was several years of acute food shortages in the mid1960s, which both slowed economic growth and stoked public anger.
Worried by the prospect that the Congress would be trounced in the
1967 elections, Mrs Gandhi sought a ‘quick-fix’ solution to the short
age of food-grain.15
I he thrust of Mrs Gandhi’s strategy was rapidly to boost foo'd-gram production by concentrating government resources on highpotential districts - essentially those with good irrigation - and on
large and medium farmers. Within these districts (almost all in north
ern India), the government identified the large and medium farmers.

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104 • Words like freedom
and then showered them with easy credit, assured irrigation, extension
services and price support for the output, so that they would succeed
in adopting the new high-yielding grain varieties. In effect, a com
mercial enclave was being created within the vast, technologically
backward and neglected agricultural sector. The strategy succeeded
admirably in its limited goal of rapidly raising total food-grain pro
duction. With this success, Mrs Gandhi accomplished for the rural
propertied what her f ather had wrought a decade earlier with the urban
.
furthered their business interests through favouring them with
government finances and support. Under the Congress, there was to
be socialism in neither urban nor rural India.
The approach chosen by. Mrs Gandhi suited not just the prop
ertied in rural areas, but also the urban elite and middle classes,
because it forestalled the need for a redirection of government
finances from industry to agriculture. But the rural poor suffered in
numerous ways as a consequence. The exclusive concentration on
boosting production through larger farmers meant that alternative
strategies that would have improved production, employment and
equity, such as land reform and making small farmers viable, were
ignored. Rural inequity worsened because of the growing prosperity
of the large and medium farmers, and the unchanged position of the
landless and small farmers. And because large farms use more capital
and less labour per unit of produce than small farms, rural employ
ment grew much less than it would have if land reform had taken
place and the increases in production come from smaller farms. Yet
another egregious outcome was that although the Indian government
soon had vast stocks of ‘surplus’ food grain, purchased from the
Gieen Revolution districts and farmers, the rural poor could not
afford to buy this food and remained as hungry as ever, though tons
of grain rotted or were eaten by rats in government warehouses.
(Anyway, it was only in rare cases that the government’s public
distribution system ever serviced rural areas, especially in poorly
administered provinces like UP.) This was a particularly ironic
outcome, because for the Indian government, public and the world
in general, the ‘surpluses’ were taken as evidence that hunger was

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The 1960s • 105

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now a thing of the past in rural India. In fact, foodgrain production
had grown barely faster than population.16
In UP, the Congress government had by the late 1960s substan
tially increased allocations for agricultural development, particularly
for minor and major irrigation projects. By the close of that decade,
the Green Revolution approach resulted in astonishingly large in
creases in wheat yields in western UP, paralleling the earlier success
of Punjab and Haryana. Almost entirely because of the enormous
wheat production increases in western UP, Punjab and Haryana, the
national production of wheat doubled between 1962 and 1973.
In Pratapgarh, the Green Revolution technology reached large
farmers at the very end of the 1960s, essentially because the
provincial government first focused its efforts on the western dis
tricts, which had since the turn of the century been far better
irrigated than the central or eastern areas of the province. Bui by
the early 1970s the Green Revolution had taken such firm roots
in Pratapgarh, in part because the area irrigated by canals and
minor irrigation sources had increased several-fold since Independ
ence, that in the following decade the district recorded amongst
the largest increases in food-grain output of any of India’s several
hundred districts.17
In the early decades of the spread of the Green Revolution, in
Pratapgarh as elsewhere in India, the landlords and medium farmers
cornered almost entirely the benefits of rising agricultural productiv
ity and profits. Many of the larger farmers were former landlords, who
invested the compensation received from zamindari abolition in
acquiring Green Revolution technology. By the close of the 1960s,
virtually every district in UP boasted a number of capitalist exzamindars, their 30-, 40-, 50-, or 100-acre holdings lush with the latest
high-yielding varieties of wheat or paddy.18 The growing profitability
of farming strengthened their resolve to fight any attempt at land
reform, while at the same time their prosperity once again bolstered
their local political power.19 The medium farmers, generally of the
middle castes, were also well placed to share in the benefits flowing
from the Green Revolution. Though few were substantial landlords,

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106 • Words like freedom-

11

most owned enough to prosper and to sustain upward mobility through
their access to Green Revolution technology.

And the poor got poorer
In 1960-61, about 40 per cent of India’s rural population and about
50 per cent of the urban population were estimated to be below the
absolute poverty threshold. By the close of the decade, rural poverty
had worsened, with as much as another 10 per cent of the rural
population moving below the poverty line. Urban poverty levels
remained essentially unchanged. The worst hit were the poorest
1^0 per cent of India’s population, whose incomes fell by perhaps onefifth from already rock-bottom levels.20
The worsening poverty came despite a fairly sustained national
economic growth rate of about 3 per cent per year. As the rate of
population growth had increased to 2.5 per cent per year, the increase
per person of 0.5 per cent per year left only limited room for improve
ments in the well-being of the poor. -But far from poverty being
reduced by even this amount, it worsened as a result of growing
inequality between the upper-income groups and the poor. Thus,
rather than economic growth ‘trickling down’ to the poor, as India’s
politicians and policy-makers had insisted would occur, the gains of
growth were in the 1960s hogged by India’s tiny upper-middle-income and rich classes. A major cause of the increase in rural poverty
was the spiralling prices of food grains, which hit the landless and
those with too little land to produce enough for their needs. Ironically,
food prices climbed despite the boom in national grain production,
testifying to the power of the rich farmers’ lobby.
Even in
’ i the few dozen districts where the Green Revolution
technology was widely adopted by large farmers, the incomes of the
impoverished did not rise until many years later. Most of the poor
were landless, so miracle seeds, canals and tube-wells were of no
relevance to their fortunes. Those who sharecropped or owned a little
land were so impoverished that they could not afford the new seeds,
nor the fertilizers and pesticides that had to be used21 In Baba ka

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The 1960s • 107
Gaon, for instance, the Thakurs began to adopt the high-yielding grain
varieties by the close of the 1960s. Because virtually only the Thakurs
had access to credit or sufficient savings, even the few middle-caste
families owning five to ten acres did not adopt the high-yielding
varieties until a decade later. The Thakurs prospered. But though their
extensive fields were soon lush with the bounty of the Green Revo
lution, their power over the landless labourers or marginal farmers
who toiled for them, including Ram Dass, his wife and his parents,
was such that wage rates did not rise at all for nearly two decades.
Ram Dass and his family were most probably below the poverty
line through this decade, though not as destitute as they were before
Ram Dass had gone to Bombay at the end of the 1940s. Their main
source of income was from Ram Dass and Prayaga Devi working on
daily wages as agricultural labourers for the Thakurs; the wage rate
had not risen since Independence, nor was there any increase in the'
number of days for which they could find work. And together with
Ram Dass’s parents, they cultivated the tiny sliver of land that they
owned, and sometimes sharecropped another half-acre of land. This
did not provide enough food for the family’s annual needs, and as a
consequence they were badly affected by the rise in food prices. Their
income was occasionally supplemented by the trade in bullocks that
Ram Dass had started. A major factor contributing to their poverty
in this period was that the number of earning family-members was
outweighed by dependents, even though Shrinath, Ram Dass’s elder
son, and Kaalu, his orphaned nephew, both in their early teens, helped
in the fields and in looking after the younger children.

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The Messiah of the Poor:
Indira Gandhi

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INDIA seemed poised on the brink of apocalypse in the late 1960s.
The major cities were torn by strikes and mass agitations by industrial
workers, many fuelled by shortages of food grains and other essential
goods. Bihar and eastern UP were swept by a prolonged drought that
threatened to become independent India’s first fully fledged famine.
Fierce ‘Maoist' revolts had begun in north Bengal’s Naxalbari area
and in several tribal districts of Andhra Pradesh, where the Left led
‘land grab’ agitations. Fractured by social instability and economic
failure, India’s future seemed bleaker than ever before in the 20-odd
years since Independence..
For the poor, in particular, there could not have been a grimmer
time since Independence. Poverty had worsened substantially in the
previous decade. At the same time the upper and middle classes had
visibly prospered: industrialists, professionals and government offi
cials in urban areas; landlords and substantial peasants in the regions
touched by the Green Revolution. With Nehru’s death, even the

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The Messiah or the poor: Indira Gandhi • 109

Congress’ ritualistic pro-poor rhetoric had dimmed. Looking at the
dismal record of the decades since Independence, there was little
reason for the poor to persevere with their dream that in independent
India they would be freed from poverty and oppression.
Yet, in one of the most dramatic turns in Indian politics, concerns
about poverty re-emerged strongly at the very end of the 1960s. The
next decade witnessed a renewed attempt at land reform and the
initiation of an impressive range of anti-poverty programmes. The
Congress strove to win back its reputation with the poor. Politicians
of every ideological persuasion were forced to adopt the rhetoric of
social justice and poverty eradication.
This perplexing twist in Indian history was precipitated by none
other than that enduring enigma of modern India, Indira Gandhi.
Within shot! years of emerging as a political force in the mid-1960s,
Mrs Gandhi had pushed poverty higher on the national agenda than
it had arguably ever been before in independent India’s history. But,
eventually, her record on tackling India’s poverty was as discredked
as the record of her political career. In the two decades in which she
dominated Indian politics-from her rise to power fol lowing the death
in 1964 of her father, Prime Minister Nehru, to her assassination in
1984 - Mrs Gandhi’s stature amongst the poor fell from being their
messiah to being their dreaded nemesis, and then settled at the un
hallowed level of the run-of-the-mill politician who used populist
appeals for political gain.
Mrs Gandhi began her first term as prime minister in early 1966
with economic policies that continued the conservatism of Lal Bahadur
Shastri, her predecessor. Shastri had abandoned the idea of economic
planning, with its socialist underpinnings, in 1965, and
Mrs Gandhi extended the ‘plan holiday’, declaring herself to be a
‘pragmatist’. She followed up this declaration by devaluing the rupee
by half, under pressure from the US.1
But within a year, Mrs Gandhi had ostensibly forsworn her con
servative economic world-view. The impetus for this was the Con
gress’ rout in the general elections of 1967, which saw its share of the
518 seats in the Lok Sabha, the crucial lower house of Parliament, fall

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from 371 to 281,2 The disavowal threatened the Congress’ ‘one-party’
rule of India, fo stem the erosion of confidence - support from the
urban middle class, the poor and Muslims had visibly declined Mrs Gandhi set the party in an aggressively populist direction on
economic policy and set about reinventing herselfas the messiah of the
disadvantaged.' These tasks were accomplished with the dramatic flair
and charisma that were soon established as her great political strengths.
The uiban working and middle classes were one target of
Mrs Gandhi’s new-found populism. Her pledges to them were in their
entirety little more than a hodgepodge of symbolic changes, rather
than real social and economic transformation. They ran the gamut
from nationalization of banks and businesses, and curbs on industrial
monopolies, to pride in India’s growing military power, and then to
ceilings on urban income and property, attacks on ostentation, and
abolition of the privileges and ‘privy purse’ pensions still enjoyed by
the former princes. Announcing the nationalization of the major banks
in 1969, she prom ised this to be ‘only the beginning of a bitter struggle
between the common people and the vested interests in the country’.4
But as these moves failed to rouse much support, prior to the 1972
general elections Mrs Gandhi drew the poor to the centre of her
political strategy. She adopted the thrilling, resonant slogan, ‘’Garibi
Hataol’ - Abolish Poverty - as the main plank of her manifesto.5 The
rural and urban poor, at 40 to 50 per cent of the population, had the
potential of being a vote bank that would surpass any that her rivals,
in the Congress or elsewhere, could seek out.6
Having captured the public imagination as a heroine of the masses
- a task eased immeasurably by being Nehru’s daughter- Mrs Gandhi
called national elections for March 1971, ayear earlier than scheduled,
to gain a populai mandate for her rule. The election results proved the
extent of her success in remodelling herself and the Congress. The
Congress won 352 of the 518 seats in the Lok Sabha, nearly as much
as the undivided Congress had enjoyed before the 1967 electoral deba
cle. (In 1969, the Congress had split, leaving Mrs Gandhi’s conserva
tive rival, Morarj! Desai, with the rump party, the Congress-Syndicate.)
Scheduled caste support was crucial to Mrs Gandhi’s victory; of the

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constituencies reserved for scheduled-caste candidates, the Congress
won two-thirds. Mrs Gandhi’s remarkable victory was interpreted as
her having won the allegiance of the poor, across regional, religious,
caste and ethnic lines, with the Garibi Hatao slogan.7
Mrs Gandhi’s triumph was cemented when the Congress swept
70 per cent of the assembly seats in elections in 16 major provinces.
As the architect of the Congress Party’s recovery and with clear
Congress control in Parliament and most provincial legislatures, she
now wielded unchallengeable power. There was little to prevent her
from fulfilling the promises of social and economic justice which had
brought her victory: there was little resistance within the Congress;
the opposition parties had been trounced; and the often conservative
Supreme Court could be overridden by parliamentary majorities. Those
who had voted for Mrs Gandhi expected action from her.8
Ram Dass says: Nothing much happened to me from Mrs Gandhi's
promises oj garibi hatao. My family was left as poor as we always
were. And neither was I optimistic that much good would come. There
used to be orders from the government: Hatao, hatao, hatao. But who
will remove poverty? The orders came from the government but they
just stayed on paper.
The results of Mrs Gandhi’s multitudinous promises to eliminate
poverty were painfully modest in UP. This was so even though
Mrs Gandhi had every reason to pursue the goal of Garibi Hatao with
special keenness in the province, as it was the Nehrus’ home, the site
of Mrs Gandhi’s election as a member of Parliament (from Rae
Bareli), and historically the foundation of Congress power.
Certainly, judged by appearances, the Garibi Hatao effort should
have resulted in a substantial amelioration of poverty. In New Delhi,
within Mrs Gandhi’s first months in office, anti-poverty efforts had
been raised to the level of being an integral part of the planning
process. For the first time in independent India’s planning history, the
traditional emphasis on economic growth was matched by a stress on
the need for overt redistribution of assets and of the benefits of
growth.9 The chief elements of the Garibi Hatao strategy were a
renewed effort to lower and enforce land ceilings as well as the

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112 • Words like freedom

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launching of massive anti-poverty programmes. The reasoning behind
this double-pronged approach was that land ceilings would structur
ally transform rural society and loosen the upper-caste stranglehold,
while the poverty programmes would provide the poor with assets and
a minimum standard of living.10
But the appearance that Mrs Gandhi and her regime were com
mitted to a revolutionary assault on the structural causes of poverty
was illusory. As the unchallenged head of the central government,
there was nothing to prevent Mrs Gandhi from ensuring, at the very
least, that the central government’s policy recommendations to the
provinces on land reform and other related matters were truly pro
gressive. That even this did not transpire revealed Mrs Gandhi’s
commitment to social justice to be far weaker than was suggested by
her fiery rhetoric. Of course, she was only following in the established
mould of Congress leaders in the constant interplay of radical rhetoric
and conservative policies.
The chasm between rhetoric and practice was especially trans
parent in the central government’s recommendations on land reform,
the major initiative of the Garibi Hatao strategy. Though the rec
ommendations were less generous than those issued under Nehru a
decade before, they were still so compromised and rife with exemp
tions as to be incapable of real transformational impact. A ceiling
of 10 to 18 acres was proposed for the best irrigated land, but farmers
with private irrigation were permitted to own more, a resounding
victory for the larger farmers’ lobby. Each family could own an
additional 27 acres of single-cropped irrigated land, as well as 54
•acres of dry land or orchards. The exemptions allowed were just
marginally less liberal than in the farcical ceiling law of the 1960s.
Exemptions were continued for plantations, charitable or religious
organizations, co-operatives, and agricultural universities or insti
tutes." The only exemptions revoked were| for ‘well-managed’,
‘mechanized’, or sugar-cane farms!
Not surprisingly, given the liberal exemptions and scope for
classifying prime land as ‘single-cropped’, the government expected
to acquire only four million acres of land, about one per cent of the

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total cultivated area. In contrast, if the stricter ceilings and less gen
erous exemptions proposed in a government planning document had
been adopted, over ten times that amount would have become avail
able for redistribution^ The planning document estimated that redis
tribution of this amount of land would lower the number of people
below the poverty line from 40 to 33 per cent.12
Events in Lucknow confirmed just how unthreatening were the
central recommendations. There, extraordinarily, without significant
dissension, the provincial Assembly adopted the central recommen
dations virtually in toto. The relative quiet in the Assembly was not
a sign that the Congress and opposition ranks were no longer domi
nated by substantial landlords. To the contrary, in interviews before
the legislation was debated, over 100 legislators, across party lines,
admitted that they opposed land ceilings because their personal hold
ings would be affected.13 But when it came to voting, the legislators
did not oppose the legislation simply because they knew full well that
the loopholes and exemptions in the law could so easily be exploited
during implementation that they - and their kin and supporters - could
escape with their illegal landholdings entirely untouched.
Sure enough, there was soon ample proof that this was indeed the
reason for the lack of opposition: the provincial government projected
that the enforcement of the ceiling legislation would result in at most
400,000 acres being declared as surplus, no more than that expected
under the first ceiling act of 1960. Eventually, implementation of the
act was so poor that only 200,000 acres were declared surplus and
about half of that allotted. By government calculations, about 200,000
families benefited, but in reality a sizeable share of even this small
number of families were either not able to secure control over the plots
alloted to them because of the ire of the landlords, or found themselves
owners of barren or unproductive slivers of land.14
Ram Dass comments: I here were some small improvements. A
little land was distributed to the poor. Till then, of the 80 families in
the village only about 10 owned land. Almost none amongst the
scheduled castes had any land. This did change because of Indira
Gandhi s garibi hatao. But till today, it is only the Thakurs and some

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114* Words like freedom

of the middle castes who have enough land. The rest don 't even have
enough to feed their familiesfrom. Poor people were supposed to get
enough land to live on.- At a minimum they were to get enough land
to make full use of a plough and pair of bullocks. This was about three
acres. But in practice, people got two-thirds or one-third of an acre,
or even less. My family got one-third of an acre.
All the landless people in the village got titles to land, hut some
were never able to take possession and others were able to take
possession of only a little bit of the land alloted to them. The Thakurs
threatened that they would cut us into pieces if we tried to take
posssession! They harassed anyone who protested. And they filed
legal cases against our taking over the plots, and we poor people were
ensnared in these cases for years. Many of the poorer people just gave
up sooner or, later. Some of them don’t even know till today where
the land is that they had been allotted!
Even with the allotments madefrom the village land, the pradhans
[heads of the elected village council], who were always Thakur or
Brahmin, put the land in the name of their own relatives!
Three landlesss families in Baba ka Gaon have land on paper,
but they will never get possession. One is a Pasi and another two from
middle castes. The law is that whoever has title should be given
possession. The laws are very clear and strong to say that action
should be taken if people aren ’t allowed to take control of the land
given to them. But who is going to enforce this, who is going to take
action? No officials came to ensure that things were being done
properly. The ones who are supposed to implement are the ones who
benefit from the law not being implemented! For all her promises,
Indira Gandhi was always so busy visiting hundreds of countries that
she never had time to see the poverty at home or to see whether her
laws were working!

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The Messiah of the poor: Indira Gandhi *115

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earlier that year, a ‘land-grab’ attempt by activists on her expensive
four-acre farm on Delhi’s outskirts - Indira.Gandhi imposed Emer
gency rule on the ground that India’s security was ‘threatened by
internal disturbances’. (Though the imposition of Emergency is al
lowed by the Constitution, it had until then been used only during
wars.) Power was concentrated in her hands. Parliament effectively
suspended, and fundamental rights abrogated.
Mrs Gandhi evoked the welfare of the Indian poor to justify her
recourse to Emergency rule. In an address to the nation that morning
on All India Radio she insisted, ‘I am sure you are conscious of the
deep and widespread conspiracy which has been brewing ever since
I began to introduce certain progressive measures of benefit to the
common man and woman of India.’ Just days later, on 1 July, she
proclaimed a Twenty-Point Programme of economic and social re
forms. This was a smorgasbord of promises to the poor - who were
assured that land reform laws would be implemented ‘with redoubled
zeal’, rural debt liquidated, bonded labour abolished and minimum
agricultural wages enforced - and to the urban working and middle
classes, who were proffered tax cuts, ‘better quality’ cloth, and an
assault on the ill-gotten wealth of the urban elite.15 And some months
later, to demonstrate the depth of her allegiance to social justice.
Mrs Gandhi amended the preamble to the Constitution so that the
Indian state was henceforth described to be ‘socialistic’.
But despite Mrs Gandhi’s constant invocat ion of the poor, by the
close of the 22 months of Emergency rule few amongst the poor still
regarded her as their heroine. The campaigns of forced sterilization and
slum clearance begun by Sanjay Gandhi, Mrs Gandhi’s 29-year-old son
and heir-apparent, left her reputation tarnished almost beyond repair, as
it was inconceivable that they were pursued without her concurrence.
The campaigns - which singled out population as the cause of India’s
poverty, and the poor as a blight on the urban landscape - also betrayed
Mrs Gandhi’s retrograde attitude to the poor: that though they were a
valuable vote bank, they were also the root cause of India’s troubles.
In viewing ‘over-population’ as the cause of India’s myriad prob
lems, Mrs Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi echoed a fear that had been heard

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116 • Words like freedom

for centuries, ironically from well before the start of the high popula
tion growth rates that began in India only at the close of the 1920s. In
his famous late-1 8th-century treatise predicting that population growth
would outstrip food supplies, the English demographer Malthus de
voted an entire chapter to the Indian subcontinent, arguing that the
poverty, chronic hunger, starvation and general misery on display there
proved his theory of over-population. And in the 1920s, shocked by the
poverty of the Awadh peasants - ‘this vast multitude of semi-naked
sons and daughters of India’ - Nehru, schooled at England’s most
hallowed centres of learning, reiterated Malthus’ reasoning, writing,
'1 he land was rich but the burden on it was very heavy, the holdings
were small and there were too many people after them.’
Both Malthus and Nehru were guilty of simplistic determinism.
Nehru paid little heed, at least in that comment, to how inextricably
the poverty of India’s peasants was rooted in the gross inequities of
land ownership and in their exploitation by landlords and colonial
government. Malthus’ theory was, of course, later disproved by the
experience of the Western nations, whefb progress in agricultural
techniques kept food supplies far ahead of population growth.
Certainly, by the 1970s, every visible measure showed that In
dia’s demographic situation deserved official attention. At Independ
ence, India’s population was 350 million; a quarter of a century later,
the 1971 census showed that the numbers exceeded 500 million. But
the approach of compulsion and forced sterilization pushed by
Mrs Gandhi and Sanjay during the Emergency revealed a total dis
regard for the complex forces that lie behind rapid population growth.
Thus, neither Mrs Gandhi nor Sanjay considered that the govern
ment was itself to blame for the population pressures, through having
patently failed to build an effective family planning programme,
which would advise couples and bring contraceptive methods within
their reach. Nor did they consider that fertility rates would remain
high as long as the poor continued to face vep/ high risks that their
children would not live to be adults. In UP in the early 1970s, more
than one-third of all children died before they reached the age of five,
clearly a powerful incentive for parents to spread the mortality risks

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The Messiah of the poor: Indira Gandhi •“ 11’7

by having several children. Nor did they stop to contemplate the many
other variables, well known to demographers by then, that encouraged
high fertility in impoverished, patriarchal peasant societies like India.
Among this welter of factors were such potent pressures as illiteracy,
the limited scope for women to make decisions about how many
children to have, and the reliance of poor rural families on children
to work and to support them in their old age. Clearly, the fact that
all these variables still encouraged high fertility reflected the root
failure: that 25 years of Congress rule had failed to improve the
conditions of the poor.
But ignoring these complexities, and the possibility of favourably
influencing these variables through government welfare efforts,
Mrs Gandhi and Sanjay settled on an approach that fused Malthusian
reductionism to ‘blame-the-victim’ prejudice. Family planning be
came one of Sanjay Gandhi’s favourite causes, and he pursued it
with the fascist zeal that was soon revealed to be his hallmark. The
fascist approach was not surprising in an individual who was
convinced lie knew better than everyone else what was good for them
and for India, beginning his extra-constitutional reign in the Emer
gency with the statement, T firmly believe that the best ideology
for the people is my ideology.’16 Unaer his direction, the govern
ment’s family planning programme was transformed into a crusade
to enforce male sterilization through vasectomy operations. The
crusade was most aggressively pursued in the Hindi-speaking north
ern states, whose chief ministers vied with each other to curry
Sanjay’s favour. UP’s chief minister unilaterally raised the target for
sterilizations from 400,000 to 1.5 million.17 In UP and in several other
states, the chief ministers imposed sterilization quotas on civil
servants, the police, health and family planning staff, and even
teachers. Many thousands of junior government employees had their
pay withheld for months; others were denied promotion and many
more dismissed from service because they failed to produce evidence
that they had induced a requisite number of men to undergo steri
lization. Given this chain of pressure, it was inevitable that brutal
abuses of the poor would occur.

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118 • Words like erei:dom

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Ram Dass recalls: The nasbandhi [vasectomy] happened in the
region around Baba ka Gaon too. No one from the village was
sterilized, but this was only because there was no way that a vehicle
could get to the village! This road hadn’t been built then. And we
lower-caste men would rarely go to the market then - and if we ever
heard the noise of a jeep we would run into the fields and hide!
But in my paternal uncle 's village in Sultanpur district, all the
lower-caste men had to hide the entire night in the fields. One wasn 7
even safe in one's home because the government officials would raid
the houses. Anyone who got caught was taken away in a jeep and
sterilized! They even caught my uncle, even though he was about 60
years old. He and another Harijan — a boy who wasn 7 even married
- escaped from the jeep and hid for 15 days in the fields.
It wasn 'ta bad policy in itselfthat men with three orfour children
shouldhave the operationfor sterilization. Butyou cannotforce people.
And it was directed only at the poor. The government officials never
touched the Thakurs or Brahmins even though they have at least as
many children as us! A nd the officials would catch hold ofpoor people
and sterilize them even if they didn ’t have any children. They didn 7
worry about the age ofthe man, they werejust interested in the numbers.
The sterilization programme developed into a wholesale cycle of
abuse and tyranny. Much as in the area around Baba ka Gaon, gov
ernment officials across north and central India raided villages, rounded
up the poor, and dragged them away for forcible sterilization. In cities,
police routinely arrested slum and pavement dwellers and municipal
sweepers and took them directly to sterilization camps.18 The intense
pressure to fill quotas of‘acceptors’ resulted in careless surgery and
many deaths.1"
Defiance provoked worse repression. In rural areas, communities
who resisted were punished by having all their men rounded up and
sterilized. In urban areas, demonstrations against forced sterilizations
and slum clearance led to police shooting — killing more than 70 in
the UP towns of Muzaffarnagar and Sultanpur (the latter just 60 km
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count) and 400 (the unofficial count) at Delhi’s Turkman Gate.20

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Many of the abuses were never recorded, nor is the scale known even
today because in early 1976 a blanket ban was imposed on criticism
of the family planning programme. But the pall of fear that developed
permeated the entire northern area.
The rural and urban poor were the primary victims of the slum
clearance and sterilization campaigns. But Indians of every class were
soon opposed to the Emergency, as in one way or another they too
suffered from the suspension of democratic processes and the abuses
inherent in dictatorial rule. By the end of the Emergency, some
200,000 people had been arrested or ordered to be arrested. A large
number of these were political leaders, but many others were the
victims of personal vendettas, orthose who had offended Mrs Gandhi,
Sanjay Gandhi, or their cronies. India was rapidly enveloped in a
miasma of fear and repression.
After nearly two years of rule by her and Sanjay Gandhi’s fiat,
Mrs Gandhi announced national elections for March 1977. Her de
cision was evidently based on the assumption that the Congress would
win: the economy was in good shape; she continued to believe that
the actions taken during the Emergency enjoyed support, especially
among the rural poor; and reports from the intelligence agencies
predicted a sweeping victory for the Congress..
The 1977 elections were fought on the single issue of the Emer
gency. The results exposed the depth of Mrs Gandhi’s hubris. She
was routed in her Rae Bareli pocket borough. Sanjay Gandhi was
trounced in the Amethi constituency, just across the district border
from Baba ka Gaon. The Congress won only about one-quarter ofthe
Lok Sabha seats, winning just two of these from the Hindi-speaking
belt. The Congress’ share of the vote in UP shrank from the 49 per
cent won in 1971 to 25 per cent; nationally, it declined by nearly 10
percentage points.21
Belying its glorious beginning, the record of Mrs Gandhi’s first

decade of rule as prime minister was a singularly unflattering one. In
that short period, she had tarnished Nehru’s legacy, earned an unsa
voury reputation for nepotism and dictatorial abuses of power, and
hastened the Congress’ decline in New Delhi and in virtually every

120 • Words like freedom

province. Most galling, perhaps, was that she had been disavowed by
the poor, whom she had assumed to be a compliant vote-bank.
The most spectacular loss of support for Mrs Gandhi was from
the scheduled castes, particularly in the hard-hit northern Indian states.
The repudiation was particularly apparent in the constituencies re
served for schedule-caste candidates, of which the Congress won just
a quarter, with most of these victories in the south. Ram Dass com
ments: Because of the nasbandhi, poor people voted against
Mrs Gandhi. JVe all voted for the Janata Party because we were so
fed up with what had happened during her rule. We were all very
happy when she lost the elections!

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The ascension of the Jnnata Party and its allies to power in New Delhi

and, after assembly elections in June that year, in eleven provinces,
marked a watershed in independent India’s history: nothing less
momentous than the end of the Congress’S ‘one-party’ dominance of
Indian politics. But, however important as history, this pivotal turn
was to hold few. if any, benefits for India’s poor, putting an end to
even the mild reformist thrust initiated by Mrs Gandhi so fulsomely
a decade before.22
As in New Delhi, the Janata government in UP was a combustible
alliance of disparate parties, drawn together momentarily by their
opposition to Mrs Gandhi. But taken together, the constituents of the
Janata effectively aggregated the support of large and medium peas
ants, many made prosperous by the spread of the Green Revolution.
A large proportion were from the elite cultivating and higher-middle
castes. Signalling the emergence of these castes as a major force in
the province’s politics, in 1977 UP had its first npn-upper-caste chief
minister in the middle-caste Ram Naresh Yadav.
Given its base of support amongst the medium and large peas
antry, Janata rule differed in important ways from that of the Congress
regimes, which had come to power with the backing of a more diverse
range of rural and urban interests. One consequence of the Janata’s

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The Messiah of the poor: Indira Gandhi. • 121

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more purely rural backing was greater emphasis, both in rhetoric and
practice, on public investments to promote agriculture and the rural
sector over industry and urban interests. A second consequence, with
profound repercussions for the rural poor in UP, was that the ‘rural
tilt’, as Janata leaders described their preferential policies for‘rural
areas, was matched by a neglect of distributional concerns. The dif
ference between Congress and Janata approaches towards issues of

11

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social justice and poverty was particularly apparent where agrarian
reform was concerned. In the case of the Congress, because of the
party’s historical commitment to agrarian reforms, the central lead
ership in New Delhi would periodically force Congress governments
in Lucknow to proclaim the government’s commitment to this goal.
Of course, the experience of the previous three decades had proved
that the commitment would not be implemented, in great part because
the central government’s commitment was itself weak, and in part
because the UP government generally lacked the political strength to
tackle the powerful.

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But under the Janata th^re was a conscious policy decision to bury
the issue of agrarian reforms. In the Janata-designed Five Year Plan
(1978-83) for UP, agrarian reform merited less than three of the
document’s 1,500 pages. Of these pages, the subject of ceilings and
redistribution received three paragraphs, to the effect that ‘much of
the work has been completed’. The message was evident: there was
no scope left for redistribution.23 In UP, Janata rule put an end to the
discussion of land reforms as a goal of public policy.
At the close of the 1970s, the percentage of the population estimated
to be below the poverty line was only imperceptibly lower than at its
beginning, and no lower than a quarter of a century earlier.24 This was
so even though the economy grew at a fair cl ip, with the national product
expanding at an average of 2.3 per cent each year. But these gains were
negated by the worsening distribution of income. And in a new devel
opment for India, the huge number of poor people went hungry despite
the stocks of wheat and rice overflowing from government granaries.
Like most poor families in UP, Ram Dass and his family remained
as impoverished through the 1970s as they had been in the 1960s. As

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122 • Words like freedom

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in that decade, they owned only the one-seventh of an acre of land
that Ram Dass had bought on returning from Bombay; this small field
could provide them with only an insignificant amount of food grains.
(It was as late as 1982 before they got possession of the one-third of
an acre of land from land reform.) Ram Dass and his wife, his mother
(his father died in 1973), his older son and his orphaned nephew, all
worked as field labourers for the Thakurs. Their wages did not in
crease despite the burgeoning ‘Green Revolution’ harvests from the
Thakurs large fields. The 1970s drew to a close with every sign that
Ram Dass’s family would never be able to extricate itself from the
deprivation that they had long suffered.

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IN 1978, Shrinath, the elder of Ram Dass’s sons, was employed as
a teacher in the primary school system operated by the UP govern
ment. With this, Ram Dass’s family began a slow climb o.ut of
poverty, though it was to be nearly another decade before they were
no longer impoverished and could meet all their basic needs.
The manner of their emancipation spoke volumes about the limi
tations of India’s development since Independence. For more than
three decades, Ram Dass’s family had remained deeply impoverished,
and tyrannized by the village landlords, despite their every effort to
progress. In these decades, the numbers of impoverished and destitute
people in India had nearly doubled, increasing by about 100 million.
The Congress party, which had ruled in Delhi and Lucknow for three
unbroken decades, had emerged as a force to further the interests of
the propertied. The ‘socialism’ promised by Nehru. Indira Gandhi and
other Congress leaders had never even begun to be delivered, and the
paltry redistributive efforts initiated since Independence had only
marginally aided a small proportion of the impoverished, or

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ameliorated their oppression. In Baba ka Gaon, neither the number
nor the proportion of impoverished families had diminished. Thus, if
families like Ram Dass’s moved out of poverty, they were the ex
ception, and their limited emancipation came because of good fortune
and extraordinary endeavour.
Ram Dass says: If I hadn’t worked very hard as a labourer and
educated Shrinath, it would have been impossible for him to become
a teacher. It was very difficult for me to send Shrinath and Jhoku to
school. But I had this conviction that I should make them study
however poor I was. So I worked harder so that they could study. I
bore a heavier burden. I told Shrinath that you will have to wear torn
clothes like me but at least you will be .able to go to school. When
there were four days left to pay the monthly school charges for slate
and chalk of Rs 5, he would tell me, Dada, I need this money on this
day, ’ and I would try to arrange for it. I would sell some grain that
we had stored, or borrow money from someone.

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Shrinath is known to all the lower-caste people in the village as
•Master]!’. ’Masterjl’ is more a honorific than a nickname, for Shrinath
is held in high esteem for accomplishing what was always regarded
as impossible for Baba ka Gaon’s scheduled castes - completing
secondary school, and, even more wondrous, becoming a teacher. He
teaches at a primary school close to Baba ka Gaon.
Shrinath’s learning and reputation for integrity have made him
one of the most respected middle-aged men amongst the lower castes
in Baba ka Gaon. By example, he has encouraged other scheduledcaste families in the village to educate both their boys and their girls,
so much so that an unusually large proportion of the younger scheduled-caste population of the village is literate. Shrinath’s eldest son
was the first scheduled caste person in Baba ka Gaon to gai’n'a
Bachelor’s degree, and his eldest daughter the first to complete the
eighth grade, which is typically the highest grade that even upper
caste women study in rural UP.
In his mid-40s today, Shrinath looks quite like Ram Dass, but is
more reserved, almost sombre. He rarely talks, preferring to listen

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126 • Words like freedom

closely to others. 1 le smiles less readily than his father, but when he
does laugh it is rich and full. His face generally wears a faraway
expression. His mother, laughing, says: Sometimes he is so lost in his
reading that you can pass your hand in front of the paper and he still
won’t notice you. Most often, Shrinath wears a kurta-pyjama of white
or brown khadi. While working in the fields, which he does every
morning before school and on returning in the late afternoon, he wears
a dhoti, wrapped high above his knees. In the slush and mud of the
monsoon, he dons a vest and old, small shorts, which look incongru
ous on him.
Shrinath first studied at the primary school in Devapur, 2 km
away, at which Ram Dass had studied for a single precious year
decades earlier. When Shrinath joined the school, there were already
four or five other scheduled-caste students from Baba ka Gaon there.
Ididn 7 even learn the Hindi alphabet in the two years that I spent
at the school! The teachers were all from the upper castes and
wouldn 7 bother to teach us lower-caste students. They would only pay
attention to the upper-caste children. Everyone knew which caste you
were from because we all came from nearby villages, and the teachers
could always find out because they wrote down your caste at the time
of admission. This is done even now. As we scheduled-caste people
usually do not have a last name, unlike the upper castes, everyone
would know that we were scheduled-caste. The untouchability of my
father’s time had diminished somewhat. At least we didn 't have to sit
far awayfrom the other students. But we still weren 7 allowed to touch
the drinking-water vessel or mug. Even though India had been inde
pendent for ten years, the old prejudices had not changed.
Since my father was living in Bombay and saw that my progress
was next to nothing, he called me to Bombay in 1959 or so. I stayed
there for three years. We were taught very well. A different teacher
used to come every hour to take the new class and we were taught
every subject. I came back to the village in 1961, and then went back
to Bombay. But in 1962 I had to shift back to school here because
the factory my father worked in was being closed down and he was
going to come back to the village.

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Shrinath went back to the Devapur school, join ing the fourth grade.

It was difficult. There was a great difference in the education between
here and in Bombay. I was happy that I had studied outside, where I had
gained so much. Here I was just lying around not learning anything.
The discrimination had become less. And 1 was a very good
student, especially because I had learnt so much in the Bombav
school. In class four, I was the best student. And because of this I
got a lot of appreciation from the teachers. And in particular there
was one good teacher who lived close to our village and he gave me
a lot of help. His name was Ram Dev Upadhaya. Despite being a
Brahmin, he did not discriminate against me at all. All people are
not the same and some are very compassionate. After eating dinner,
I and some other students would go to his house. He used to say. 'You
all come, I will teach you for one or two hours. And if there is some
problem in understanding we will solve it together. ’
I was at the Devapur school until Ifinished the fifth class. I then
went to the secondary school in Sanghipur. which is about a 40
minutes walk fi-om here. I was taught there well. I had a very good
mathematics teacher there, Chedi Lal-ji.
When I was in school the monthly fees used to be Rs 7 per month.
It was very difficult for my family to pay this. We would postpone
paying it for a few days but then we would eventually have to pay.
And there used to be a fine for each day you were late with the fees.
I cot Id not study enough al night because I was worried about
how much lamp-oil I was using. We didn't own a lantern but had a
chimney lamp. Ofir poverty was so much at that time that I would stop
studying becau^T wanted to save the lamp-oil. I used to study until
midnight or even later, but then my parents wouldfinally tell me, 'Go
to sleep because you’re using too much oil. '
One day when 1 was a child I was studying during the monsoons. It
was raining heavily and it was dark and so I was lying in the doorway
ofthe hut There was also astrong wind and to protect the flame in the
lampfrom going offI used a book as a wind-break. Ifell asleep and the
bookfell onto theflame and caughtfire. And my pillow caughtfire! And
it was only when my hand started burning that I woke up!

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128 • Words like freedom

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I would wake in the morning and go to brush my teeth. Then I
would cut a huge bundle of fodder for the cattle. This was from the
fields of the zamindar. Them I would have a bath, eat my breakfast

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either. You had to walk past the canal and through the fields.
School used to start at 10 but we had to arrive 15 minutes earlier
because there was a prayer and attendance. At 10 the study would start
and we would go to our classrooms. The clothes we had werefar worse
than what the children wear today. We would only wear dhotis and
shirts. Some would wear a pyjama. It was very rare for boys to wear
ji^nts. But in Bombay I wore pants. In the village I had one dhoti and this
I would wearfor about one week before washing. When I worked in the
fields I would wear underwear. It was only when Ijoined class six that
my parents got a pair ofpyjamas and kurta stitchedfor me. When these
began to tear, only then did I get another one.
In 1973 Shrinath graduated from the twelfth grade after passing
the Intermediate examination required of all students. He was nearly
20 years old. I was interested in studying further, but it was very
expensive to do this. And my family’s situation wasn't good at that
time. We only had income from labouring, and just a tiny plot of
land from which we could get some grain. My father was alone, my
brother was very young, and there were lots ofpeople in the family.
My grandfather and grandmother were very old: 1 stayed at home
for one year, working as a labourer and in our field. Then I applied
to the government training course for primary school teachers. I got
into the course after two years. I got in on merit as I had scored
56 per cent in the Intermediate exams. There were reservations for
the scheduled castes and if 1 had got less I would have got in on
i hat quota. But even after completing the course 1 didn ’t get a posting
to a school until 1978.
Under a government affirmative action programme to raise the
number of scheduled-caste teachers in the government school system
(virtually ail the primary schools and a majority of secondary schools
in rural India are funded and operated by provincial governments),
qualificatiohs are somewhat relaxed for applicants from these castes.

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Shrinath • 129
As with other affirmative action programmes for the scheduled castes,
roughly 18 per cent of all job openings are reserved for them. When
Shrinath applied to the training course that precedes hiring, so few
scheduled-caste persons were educated that the vast majority of posts
reserved for them would go unfilled and would be allowed to lapse.
At the time that he graduated from school a quarter of a century ago.
says Shrinath, teaching still remained the exclusive preserve of the
Brahmins and other upper castes, and he cannot recall there being a
single scheduled-caste teacher in the surrounding schools then.
With Shrinath’s employment as a teacher, Ram Dass’s family
began a slow climb out of poverty. Shrinath began on a salary of
Rs 300 per month; by the end of the 1980s this had increased to
roughly Rs 3,000. By carefully saving from this income, in the early
1980s Ram Dass and Shrinath bought slightly over one acre of good
land. In 1983, the family got two-thirds of an acre of infertile land
from the land ceiling effort begun by Indira Gandhi a decade earlier.
But until at least half-way through the 1980s, Ram Dass’s family
remained deeply impoverished, probably close to the threshold of
absolute poverty. Ram Dass, his wife, and Shrinath, as well as Shrinath’s
wife and teenage sons, continued to work as labourers for the Thakurs.
Hansraj, Shrinath’s eldest son, recalls that until about 1985 they all
went short of food, did not have money for clothes, and often could
not pay his school fees.
Coincidentally, the turning point in the well-being of Ram Dass’s
family came at about the time in which the proportion of the abso
lutely poor declined significantly, the only sustained stretch of progress
on poverty ever in independent India. In the decade-and-a-half from,
the late-1 970s, the proportion of the population below the poverty line
fell from roughly 55 per cent to about 37 per cent.1 This success came
about because of an unusual combination of factors. Rapid economic
growth played some part. But far more important to reducing poverty
was the unprecedented increase in government spending (at twice the
rate of growth of the economy), which added an element of‘trickledown’ to a growth pattern that created very few jobs at all.2 In fact,
because a major share of these funds went to rural areas, where the

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130 • Words like freedom

bulk of the poor live, the impact on poverty was especially large. The
rural rich and better-off groups cornered the overwhelming share of
the government’s largesse, swallowing funds and monopolizing the
expanding opportunities for rural trade and business, but the transfer
ol finances was so vast as to trickle down to some amongst the poor.
Had the poor gained more directly from both economic growth and
government spending, far greater numbers would have been lifted
above the absolute poverty threshold. But because the gains went
disproportionately to the better-off and middle classes, the pace of
decline in poverty did not even match the speed of population growth
and the number of poor continued to grow through this period.

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The Congress’ ‘trickle-down’ strategy

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Despite the persistence of mass poverty, by the end of the 1970s the
Congress no longer even made any pretence that it would seek to
initiate radical solutions to poverty and inequality. Discussion of land
reform and other redistributive means of addressing the structural
causes of poverty wa.s terminated. Ironically, this development was
led by Mrs Gandhi on her return to power in 1980. This was a new,
pragmatic Mrs Gandhi, not the rhetoric-spouting heroine of the past.
Gone were the promises to redistribute land and to eradicate poverty
through radical change, promises which anyway had hardly been
translated into policy.3 Though Mrs Gandhi continued to woo the
poor, she now did so by promising them goodies from ‘poverty
alleviation’ programmes, which were in theory supposed to provide
them with employment, skills and income-generating assets.
The poverty alleviation programmes had actually begun during
Mrs Gandhi’s Garibi Hatao phase, with the launching of several rural
development and short-term employment schemes for the rural poor.
The most important of these was a Food for Work programme (la
bourers were paid with the surplus food-grains garnered from the
Green Revolution), another rural employment scheme for developing
local infrastructure, and a scheme for providing technical assistance
and “subsidized loans to small farmers and agricultural labourers.4

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Shrinath • 131

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None of these programmes performed well nor made any significant
impact on poverty. This outcome was not surprising as the pro
grammes were premised on the assumption that the spending of
money would by itself be sufficient to reduce poverty.5 Nevertheless,
on Mrs Gandhi’s return to power, the poverty alleviation programmes,
were immeasurably expanded. Her decision to expand them, despite
their evident failure, spoke volumes about Mrs Gandhi’s true political
interests. These were that she preserve the fiction of being pro-poor,
a task accomplished by this array of schemes; and equally important,
that the status quo of wealth and power be left undisturbed. It mattered
not one whit to Mrs Gandhi or to other Congress leaders that the
poverty alleviation programmes were patently incapable of having
more than a marginal impact on poverty: the Congress had abandoned
any effort to aid the poor.6
The central government’s outlay on such schemes - they were
overwhelmingly initiated and funded by the centre - nearly trebled
in the next five years. By the time of Mrs Gandhi’s assassination in
late 1984, they were a principal part of public policy.7 Indian planning
documents have since been decorated with an ever-multiplying number
of unintelligible acronyms - IRDP, NREP, RLEGP, TRYSEM, JRY
— all to do with these rural development schemes.
The programmes reached their acme under Rajiv Gandhi, who
had succeeded his mother as prime minister. Rajiv Gandhi made little
effort to hide his lack of interest in equity concerns, and the palliative
schemes fitted in with his emphasis on boosting economic growth to
the disregai d of redistribution. The top-down, centralized programmes
also complemented his technocratic approach to India’s development,
which was in essence that the country’s many problems would be
remedied il every Indian simply heeded the advice of Gandhi’s cohort
of whizkids.8 Moreover, emulating Mrs Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi ex
ploited the vast resources for patronage offered by the schemes to
mobilize electoral support from the poor. A third and crucial factor
was that the centrally funded schemes aided his effort - a process
begun by his mother - to concentrate power in the central government
and to bypass the political structure in the provinces and districts.

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Under Kajiv (nindlii and his successors, expansion was so rapid that

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Provincial politicians, surprisingly, have not noticeably com
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shaie a consensus that they should no longer vie against each other

with offers of redistributive reforms; moreover, like the Congress’

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leaders, they care little about impact. Again, as the majority of funds

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go through the provincial government and have to be disbursed by
their administrative officers, the provincial government garners some
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most important cause for the provincial politicians’ silence is that
they siphon off the enormous funds for the poverty alleviation

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piogrammes to enrich themselves as well as to lubricate their
political machines. With their blessing, district politicians, admin

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media! ies who have sprung up between the poor and the government,

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get a cut of this money.10 At the village level, the primary benefi
ciaries of these programmes are the upper-caste ex-landlords and
middle fanners, as they control the panchayats and are typically
ielated to officials and politicians. (The increasing government

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control of the economy begun under Mrs Gandhi - for instance, in
die.allocation of licences to trade in essential commodities or for
setting up mral industries - has for the same reasons also benefited

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these elites, further widening the gap between the rural rich and

poor.) As a result, almost to the last paisa, the funds for the poverty
alleviation programmes go to the well-off, those who are part of the

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flourishing network of corruption.

Shrinath says: The money is eaten up on the way from the MP
to the MLA [member of the provincial assembly] to the pradhan.
Someone takes a hit. someone else a little more, and all that is spent
is Rs 5,000 while Rs 50,000 is pocketed. But on paper it is shown that
all the money is spent and that development takes place!

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Shrinath • 133

Only a tiny bit of the government’s schemes for villages are
implemented. The administration, by the time it gets things to the
villages, doesn 't deliver any service, anything for progress. Even the
gram-sevak [the village-level development worker; sevak means a
person who serves’] is now called a gram-officer, and hence is not
interested in speaking to any ofusl He should tell us how to cultivate
according to modern techniques and why we should give up old ways,
but he doesn 't tell us anything.
Ram Dass says: The government keeps making these announce
ments about reducing poverty, but the poor never get anything. We
hear from the radio that the government has released so much money
for the poor But half or three-quarters of it is eaten, and here us
labourers don't even get the wages we are supposed to for the work!
The policy is announced, and then at this level the lower officials send
back reports saying that everything has been done, but in reality
nothing has taken place. And if we protest in writing officially, these
officials make sure that the complaints don 't go to the senior officers.
There’s no solution to this because everyone is corrupt from the top
to the bottom. And when nothing happens from the top, people just
give up. And even when there are concessions for the poor and the
scheduled castes, the officials take half of it! For instance, the sched
uled castes get about 50 per cent off loans from the government. From
that, one official wants 10 per cent as a bribe, and then another
official says he also wants something. And on top of that we have to
pay interest to the government! So nothing really changes. That’s why
none of us ever goes Io the bank for loans.
Durbhe, a young relative of theirs, says: There are all these
schemes but nothing happens. For instance, Rajiv Gandhi had or
dered that potable water be made available to all villages in Amethi
[Gandhi’s electoral constituency, which borders Baba ka Gaon] but
when he came for inspection he found a handpump there but also that
one old woman was still drawing water from ihe well. So he asked
her, ‘Why are you drawing water from the well and not from the
handpump? ’ She said, 'Sahib, just one hour before you came they dug
this handpump here, but believe me no waler will ever flow from it. ’

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Decrying this corruption, in 1989 Rajiv Gandhi’s government
decided to channel funds for the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana, an enormous
employment programme, calculatedly named after his grandfather,
Jawaharlal Nehru, directly to villagepanchayats, bypassing the pro
vincial governments. In two public speeches that caused a furore
(Indian prime ministers are not expected to reveal such things), he
declared that 70 per cent of the resources earmarked for anti-poverty
programmes were consumed by the administration, and that over
85 per cent of the funds allocated for development programmes never
reached the people they were intended to assist."
But Gandhi’s assertion that the benefits of the programmes would
flow to the poor now that the funds were going directly to thepanchayats
was political chicanery. In UP, particularly in Awadh and the eastern
areas, as a consequence of land reform never having been seriously
undertaken, the upper-caste former village landlords dominated the
panchayats much as they continued to dominate village politics. In
Baba ka Gaon, the same Thakur held the crucial post ofpradhan from
the first panchayat elections in the early 1950s until 1995. Because
the former village landlords as well as the land barons had since the
mid-1950s become the Congress’ most influential supporters in UP,
Rajiv Gandhi made no attempt at all to prevent them from consuming
the funds coming to the panchayat. In a travesty of what he had
promised, thepanchayats' expanding budgets simply made the upper
castes more wealthy and bolstered their ability to oppress the poor.
Shrinath says: The pradhans are all from the upper castes and
whatever comes from the government they eat up. A lot of money is
allocated but no facilities are ever developed. There is no drainage
system in the village and in the monsoon it gets totally flooded. These
people just get together and eat the money; they don’t spend it on the
village. If somebody really wants to do work, there is so much money
given by the government that you could build roads through the village!
Ram Dass says: I’ve been a panchayat member for the last six
years.. The pradhan is supposed to call a meeting every month. But
in all these years we must have met just once! He and the other upper
caste members put false thumb-prints on the papers, saying that we

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Shrinath • 135
agreed to this and this and this. (Ram Dass was elected to the
panchayat on a seat reserved for the scheduled castes.)
Durbhe, their young relative, says: The Thakurs always had enough
land and enough money. And now their bank balances have become
huge by eating this money! This has been going on for years. About ,
Rs 2.5 lakhs [250,000] comes for development work from the state
government. Then more money comes for the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana
from the central government. Altogether about Rs 3-400,000 comes
for the village. Of this only about Rs 50,000 is spent each year on
work, the rest is eaten up by the Thakurs.
Shrinath says: There is always corruption within the panchayat.
Especially when distribution of land is involved, there is corruption.
Bribes are given. And if there is a scheduled-caste man who has been
allotted land, an upper or middle-caste person can always give money
and somehow get the land!

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The failure in Amethi
The inability of the trickle-down approach, even when complemented
by munificent poverty alleviation programmes, to make an appreci
able dent in poverty is nakedly evident in Amethi, the electoral'
constituency first of Sanjay Gandhi and then of Rajiv Gandhi. Directly
across the district border from Baba ka Gaon (it is part of the adjacent
Sultanpur district), Amethi is where Ram Dass’ father originally came
from. Though under Rajiv Gandhi and now under Congress politicians
handpicked by Rajiv Gandhi’s widow, Sonia, millions upon millions
of rupees have poured into the constituency, poverty is as intense and
prevalent there as in Baba ka Gaon, across Pratapgarh or in other parts
of Sultanpur. Amethi does have far smoother roads and finer govern
ment guest-houses, a plethora of industries, incomparably better tel
ephone connections, and many more schools and hospitals, but by
each and every indicator relevant to the poor it performs no better than
areas not favoured by political largesse. The inequity in land own
ership is as great, wage rates for labourers no higher, and oppression
by (he upper castes as intense as elsewhere in the region. The enor-

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136 • Words i.iki-: i-reedom

mous funds pumped into the Amethi constituency have been swal
lowed whole by a thick network comprising the former land barons
and village landlord, who form the core of the Congress political
machine in the area. Opportunities for the poor to emancipate them
selves have not expanded one whit more than in Pratapgarh.
Ram Dass s father was from the village of Ranipur, earlier part
of the large Amethi estate. The village is 8 km from Amethi town,
and loughly 25 km Irom Baba ka Gaon. Somewhat larger than Baba
ka Gaon, Ranipur is a pretty village, surrounded by thick groves, but
like Baba ka Gaon, it is approached by a dirt road. Its homes are no
better than those of Baba ka Gaon.
Ram Dass’s closest relative in Ranipur is Babu Lal, his father’s
first cousin. Though 80 years old and physically frail, Babu Lal’s
memory and mind are sharp. He is now hard of hearing, and conse
quently tends to shout when speaking. The two huts that he and his
extended family live in are poorer than Ram Dass’s hut in Baba ka
Gaon. Babu Lal says that of Ranipur’s roughly 150 families, about
six have no land at all. Another six own less than half an acre. Of
the remaining families, about 70 have just over an acre each. Babu
Lal s extended family of 11 adults and several children owns one-anda-half acres. With the other two dozen scheduled-caste families, they
are amongst the poorest people in Ranipur. The richest are the 13
Brahmin families, descendants of the former village landlords, who
each now own between 10 and 15 acres.
Two thin men, their stick-like legs and tattered dhotis caked with
mud, sit down to talk. They are both of the Koeri caste, another
scheduled caste. They are visibly even poorer than Babu Lal’s family.
Ram Salawan is the younger of the two, probably ho more than 25
years old, with sparkling eyes illuminating an emaciated face. His vest
is torn, showing his thin chest. He owns one-sixth of an acre, which
he inherited from his grandfather, who received it under Mrs Gandhi’s
land reform programme. He has title to another one-sixth of an acre,
also from the land reform programme, but this is under a legal battle
as one of the Brahmin landlord families has refused to relinquish it.
In the six years since he was formally given title to the field, Ram

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Shrinath ‘J37

Salawan has never been able to cultivate it, first because the landlord
threatened to kill him. Three years ago Ram Salawan tried to start
working the field but at this point the landlord began a court case in
the district court, which passed a stay order under which the landlord
is allowed to continue cultivating the field until the case is decided.
Ram Salawan says that he has spent about Rs 2,500 on legal and
transport costs in these three years. He has to travel on average once
a month to the court in Sultanpur, about two hours away by bus, which
costs him Rs 10 each way. The lawyer charges Rs 23 per hearing.
Ram Salawan says there is no legal aid for the poor or the scheduled
castes. The land is worth Rs 5-7,000, as it is only of average quality.
The Brahmin has about ten acres, with about six persons in the
family. And here lam with seven people living on less than one-sixth
of an acre. Ram Salawan and his wife have five young children, four
sons and a daughter. This is how poor people damn themselves. It’s our
lack of knowledge that kills us. Ram Salawan says he could only study
up to the fourth grade because his parents were as poor as he is now.
The one-sixth of an acre that he owns produces roughly 200
kilograms of grain each year, about two-thirds of the minimum
nutritional requirement for two adults.12 He and his wife-also work
as labourers, but each can find only about three months’ work over
the year. Ram Salawan earns about Rs 20 a day if he works at building
or repairing homes. For field work, he and his wife earn Rs 12-15
per day. With these meagre earnings and small quantity of food-grain,
Ram Salawan and his family are far below the absolute poverty line
that marks the inability to ensure a survival-level diet. Their desti
tution is compounded by the expense of fighting the legal case.
Ram Rai, the second man, who is related to Ram Salawan, owns
one-third of an acre. He is in his 50s. Our village pradhan, the
Brahmin, keeps telling us to get sterilized. But I have three daughters,
they will get married off and live elsewhere', and there won’t be a
single person to give my wife and me a mug of waler! So I told the
pradhan that if you give me in writing that someone will look after
me when I’m old, I ’ll get sterilized right away! But luckily our fourth
child was a boy. He was born just a year ago.

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Babu Lal, Ram Dass’s old relative, chuckles and says that during
the Emergency officials caught him and a teenage relative of his and
dragged them away for sterilization. They succeeded in escaping but
had to hide in the fields for 15 days. But J' was already sterilized in
reality by then, because 1 was so old!
Shrinath says: All the mills and industries in Amethi, not one of
them gives employment to a single local person. Even the labour
comes from outside. The private steel plant on the Lucknow road has
employed all its labourers from Delhi or Haryana. There was one
person from our village working in the cycle factory, but he got
selectedfrom Delhi. P eoplefrom here try to get work in the factories,
but one needs a lot of connections to get jobs. So it has not helped
us at all. The only benefit has been that during the construction of
the plants some of the young boys got to be employed there as
construction labourers.

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Shrinath - the 1990s
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Shrinath and his wife, Draupadi, have five children. Hansraj, Shrinath’s
eldest son, aged 27, was the first scheduled-caste person in Baba ka
Gaon to earn the Bachelor’s degree. He currently lives in Allahabad
where he is unemployed. He was married in 1987 and has three young
children, all of whom live with his parents in Baba ka Gaon.
Bansraj, the second son, is four or five years younger than Hansraj.
He is married, lives with his parents, and has one child. Vidyawati,
Shrinath’s eldest daughter, was the first scheduled-caste girl in the
village to complete the eighth grade. She was married in early 1996,
at the age of 18. Rakesh Kumar, the youngest son, is 16 and com
pleting secondaiy school. Sarita, his youngest child, is a year younger
and is in the seventh grade.
While Ram Dass, his wife and Jhoku’s wife and three children
live in the small hut that has been their family’s home for many
decades, Shrinath lives at some distance from them, at another corner
of the village, in a two-roomed brick house. Ours is a combined
family, but there's a problem of space in our old home, so as there

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Shrinath • 139
was some empty land left on this side of the village I thought let me '
build a house here because later there may not be any land left here.
Everyone from the scheduled castes was also building here. The land
was given as part of the land redistribution programme. We were each
given a patch of land to build homes on. It was given to those families
who had two or more adult sons. The logic was that one son can stay
in the parental home, but the other needs a place to live. The iden
tification offamilies and the giving of land was done by the panchayat.
At least this was done honestly!
The house is small, single-storey, built of unpainted brick and
mortar. It is entered by a small verandah. The verandah is just large
enough to keep a charpai and some chairs. In a cage hanging at one
end is a young green parakeet, who clambers around, clowning for
visitors. The house cost about Rs 50,000 to build. This is about triple
the cost of building a kucha mud and thatch hut. Kucha houses are
much cooler in summer and also warmer in winter, says Shrinath,
somewhat wistfully.
By the mid-1990s, Ram Dass and Shrinath had bought more land.
Added to the patch of land Ram Dass had bought in the 1960s, the
other patch from the land-ceiling programme and their first purchase
in the 1980s, they now own 2.5 acres, which would place them
amongst UP’s marginal farmers. In part because there are currently
many able-bodied people in the family, they also sharecrop more land,
generally another 2.5 acres. The unfavourable terms of sharecropping
have not changed: they give half the produce to the owner, beyond
providing the labour and most inputs, ranging from water and seeds

to half the fertilizer.
The fields produce enough for the family’s annual requirements
for grains. There is rarely anything left to self Consequently, the
extended family depends on Shrinath’s salary for cash. By the stand
ards of the many poorer families in Baba ka Gaon, Shrinath s current
salary of roughly Rs 4,000 per month is enviable. But when divided
between a family of ten adults, three teenagers, and four young
children, it is barely sufficient to meet all their basic needs for clothes,
medicines and education. Thus, though they are no longer impover-

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140 • Words like freedom

ished or below the absolute poverty threshold they are still „„„ u
continue to be substantially in debt
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Shrinath has (aught at the primary school in Kusauli, a small village
some 15 km from Baba ka Gaon, since 1978. He now bicycles there
SIX days a week, and works from IO a.m. to 4 p.m. Normally he puts
in an our m the fie.ds before scboo. and severai hours moreX
XIV 1 VIU1 I lb.

The sc|100| in Kusau|i opened (he

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leached by a winding, tree-lined brick road that passes thronol, n
sect.cn ofthe viliage. When Shrinath firstjomed, “ X T

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mg, and classes for the 70 students were held in the shade of a la™
banyan tree. The school is now housed in a two-room brick bmX
The building ,s dilapidated; thick cobwebs cloak the ceiling and the
eamish paint has peeled tn enormous swathes. Like the vast majority
of rural Indian schools, this one does not have eleclricitvTo a
bath, oom. Bulat least there is a hand-pump for water nearby a facility

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to be cared fo, wh.le their parents work in the fields
Apart from Shrinath, the Kusauli school has two other teachers

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Shrinath • 141
Rs 50-100,000 as a bribe! And then many people pay bribes to net
certificates that show that they are scheduled-caste when they are not.

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The increase in the
- inumber oi scheduled-caste teachers has come
despite the hostility of the
‘ upper castes. For a long time the head of
the Pratapgarh district
council was a Brahmin, who would try to
appoint only other Brahmu
-ins to the teaching posts. But because us
xchednled-caste people hegc,
m to be educated and because of the

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142 • Words i iki-: irekdom
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reservations policy, they had to appoint teachers from the scheduled
cas es. The predommance of the upper castes persists because it is
only when they retire that their posts can be filled by other castes
But slowly and gradually, the numbers of the scheduled and middle
castes are increasing.
The three teachers take turns teaching different grades, which in
n tan primary schools are from grades one to five. Grades one and
two are taught together on the verandah; three and four in the class
rooms; and grade five outside. One group of kids is under a young
anyan tree most Sitting on old gunny sacks, a large blackboard placed
X P
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Sr°UP Si‘S ",e SUn’ COUntin8' UP'° 8'r«le two, the
Children use slates and chalk. Older students use paper and ink pens
As there are just three teachers to teach five grades, two grades
art d'd'"3?0^ °n ,l,eir 0Wn- In Practice this
^t the

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On X X Ty °thCr "’dian 8—nntent-run primary schools.
One-third of them have just one teacher, saddled with the
extraord inary charge of teaching five grades simultaneously 14 On ------average,
60 S,Uden'S f°r eVery Prilnary soh001 '“-her 'in India
of elation ■St
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Most of the children in the school are from the upper castes. Until
985 or so, says Shnnath, there were even fewer lower-caste children
In comparison to the prejudice he faced in school, overt caste dis
crimmat,on .s now rare. Things are so much better now IhTwZ
I was a child. Now scheduled-caste children even
play with uppercaste children! Children from the lower castes are
: virtually all worse
dressed than upper-caste children. Most younger <
ones are dusty and
unwashed, hair caked with filth, their bodies ; ‘
and clothes stained by
rnud, slate, chalk and food. The older children tend to look somewhat

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because they “n care for themselves,
irtually all these children wear torn clothes - some are just rags
Without uttons - which are so beaten into the dust that it is difficult
say wiat material or colour they were originally. Most of these
children are barefoot; a few wear rubber slippers.

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Shrinath • 143

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Without exception, all the lower-caste children are bone-thin.
While superficially most look healthy and are voluble and active, the
vast majority are much shorter and thinner than the upper-caste children,
an indication that they are stunted from chronic malnourishment and
frequent illnesses. Shrinath says that many children from poorer families
are often too sick to study because of fevers or infections, but that
virtually none come to school hungry. All the children get enough to
eat. They may not get milk or fruits but they get enough other food.
I know that in rich homes unless the child gets milk they consider the
kid not to have eaten. But here it’s enough that they get something
to eat, whatever this might be. The conditions at Shrinath’s school
reflect UP’s dismal performance in literacy in the decades since
Independence. Nearly 60 per cent of the province’s population is
illiterate. Of the population over the age of 7 years, eight of every
ten females and every second male is illiterate.15
Though UP is amongst the worst-performing Indian provinces in
terms of literacy - as it is on almost every other index of human
welfare - even India’s overall performance is shockingly poor in
comparison to China and other Asian nations. In rural India, amongst
those aged 10-14 years (a measure of recent performance), every
second girl and every fourth boy is illiterate, incapable of writing or
reading a simple letter in any Indian language. In contrast, in rural •
China far fewer than one in ten girls and one in twenty boys is
illiterate. And although literacy has gone up moderately in India, from
roughly one-fifth of the population in 1951 to just over one-half in
1991, it has lagged far behind population growth. Consequently,
between 1951 and 1991, the number of illiterates increased from 300
million to 450 million.16 Ironically, at Independence, India’s Consti
tution had set a goal that by 1960 every Indian would have eight years
of free schooling.17
The failure to provide even basic education has had tremendous
costs in human suffering and in the perpetuation of mass poverty.
Illiteracy is a major factor in keeping poor people impoverished and
hence in preventing economic mobility. The illiterate are hampered
in their efforts to progress as all but very low-paid, labouring jobs .

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144 • Words like freedom

f- •

depend on primary education. Their prospects are further prejudiced
as the inab.hty to read and write is strongly linked to undernourishmeat, ill health and the early death of children.18
UP’s dismal performance in education is rooted in its comprehen
sive neglect of pubhcservrces. In contrast, Kerala and other provinces
which have succeeded admirably in raising literacy have done so
because of government commitment to the provision of primary
education an^ other public services. Given the extent of poverty in

riX k WX meanS ,hat m°St families cannot afford the S“bstanes evie y private schools, there is no plausible substitute for
11 ®ff>c‘enl system of public education. Reflecting the neglect of
public education, UP has the second-lowest level of average expendire on education of India’s 26 provinces. The difficulties posed by
inadequate budgetary allocations are compounded because even these
unds are misallocated. Thus, comments Shrinath, rather than training

aheadewRh n8 T Primary SCl100'teaCherS’ 'he 8ovemm<=nt presses
ad wnh spending its money on constructing schools for which it
has no teachers. Matters are further worsened because the govern
ment s indifference to public services means that there is little super
vision or accountability in the school system. Teachers have Me
incentive to take their job seriously, as their salaries do not depend
tech" On’1?nCet
r‘SkS °f bei"8 SaCked are sii8ht because they are
techn cally hired on a permanent basis. The rare government inspector
Xt ZhX b"bed °r
frOm ,ak1"8 a"V -Ton because

most teacheis are upper-caste and hence well connected
Without an institutionalized means of accountability, parents are
not m a pos.tion to pressure the teachers, particularly as most teacher

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SlIRINATII • 145

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At Shrinath’s own school, the upper-caste principal rarely attends.
Shrinath comments: The upper castes are predominant in everything,
and naturally in education. But even when they are teachers they are
only interested in politics, in chasing after politicians. Our headmas
ter isfrom a landlordfamily and this is all he does. He comes to school ■
on one day, but then won’t come for the rest of the week. In all the
schools there are lots ofpeople like this, who sometimes come to the
school and sometimes don’t come. They are not really interested in
the school or in teaching.
Because the teachers never attend, the quality of our primary and ■
secondary education is of course very low. Unless the teacher really
wishes to teach, how will the children get educated? No one is born
educated from the womb! It’s only people like us, who either out of
their own moral values or out offear of the village people, come'on
time and teach properly.
The persistent absenteeism by teachers and the poor quality of
education means that most parents see little benefit in keeping their
children in school. In HP’s rural schools, for every 100 children who
enrol in grade one in any year, only around two children enter grade
twelve.19 As it is, for poor rural families the cost of sending children
to school is very high. Shrinath says: Here many people find it difficult
to pay the monthly fee of Rs 10, which is equal to the wages for a
day’s work. In theory, education is free in government schools up to
class eight, but in practice tuition and a range of other fees are
charged, often adding up to a considerable sum.20 The actual costs
to parents are in fact much higher, because when children attend
school they forgo a variety of crucial tasks: caring for younger sib
lings, helping with agriculture, looking after farm animals, and often
even working for wages.
Nor does UP’s cash-strapped, ill-run public educational system
provide the incentives which have helped raise primary school
attendance levels in other provinces. Barely two per cent of rural
primary school children receive scholarships from the government,
and even they are barely helped because the scholarships give only
Rs 144 for the year. And though a small percentage of UP’s rural

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146 • Words like freedom

primary schools now provide meals to students during school-hours,
the programme is so vitiated by corruption as not to function at all.
Says Shrinath: 1 wish that children would get more facilities, like
meals at school. This would definitely increase the number of
children coming to school. Some schools have this feeding pro
gramme already, it s called Balahari Yojana. But the food and money
get eaten up because of corruption. The teachers just keep half the
food in their houses!
The dismal state of India s public educational system particularly
limits the chances of the scheduled castes to acquire basic literacy,
let alone education. Across India, only one-fifth of the scheduled
castes are literate - half that of the rest of the population. The odds
of being educated are even more adverse for scheduled-caste females:
only one-tenth are literate, three times less than other females.21 In
Baba ka Gaon, very few of the three dozen scheduled-caste families
have, like Ram Dass and Shrinath, educated their children. Of the
dozen scheduled-caste men in their mid-20s, only three have passed
the Bachelor’s degree - including Shrinath’s son, Hansraj - while
none of the others has even graduated from secondary school. And
Shrinath’s and Jhoku’s daughters were the first scheduled-caste girls
to attend school. Following their example, a majority of the sched
uled-caste families are finally sending their daughters to primary
school. But none of the scheduled-caste women who have married
into the village is educated. Says Shrinath: It’s like this in all of UP
and that’s why our children are absolutely worthless. Unless the base
is strong how can they be good as adults?
The persistently low levels of literacy amongst the scheduled
castes reflects a welter of adverse factors. In the overwhelming
majority of scheduled-caste families who are poor, children are
essential to performing household and agricultural chores, making
it difficult for their parents to spare them for school.. As important,
because many scheduled-caste parents see little room.. for economic
mobility and continue to regard unskilled casual Ilabour
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hereditary occupation, they see little point in education for their
children. And scheduled-caste children
--------- 1 are particularly handicapped

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by the low quality of teaching in public primary schools, as they
can rarely turn for help to their parents or elders, almost all of whom
are illiterate.
Because of their illiteracy, the overwhelming majority of young
scheduled-caste men and women are fated to remain impoverished.
Their families lack land or other productive assets. Their illiteracy
means that they will not be able to acquire remunerative non-agricultural work, which now anyway requires much more than basic edu
cation. Shrinath comments: It is not enough to study only through the
primary level, which is what most scheduled-caste people do because
of their poverty. To progress these days, an individual increasingly
requires higher levels of education - at least college graduate. Even
high school, which is what I completed, is now not sufficient.

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THE eldest of Shrinath’s five children, Hansraj was born in Baba ka
Gaon in 1970. Since 1993, he has lived in Allahabad, some 80 km
from the village.
When myfather was a child, myfamily's poverty was natch worse.
They used to survive by working as labourers for the Thakurs. When
my father was studying, his family never had enough money to buy
oilfor the lantern so he would go and study in another person’s house.
They didn 't have enough clothes. Of course there were no shoes at
all. When my father would go for examinations, he would borrow
someone else’s clothes. They faced every kind of hardship. What I’ve
seen is nothing compared to their difficulties because when I was
young we al least had some land, even if it was just a little patch.
As a child, I used to go to school in an old vest and shorts. Just
for food there was a problem for many years, even after my father
got his job, which was when I was about 10 years old. In the afternoon,
at some time, one got to eat a potato or have some rice water. In the
evening, somehow we used to eat a full meal. Rakesh, my younger
brother, who is now 15, does not face those difficulties.

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also don t think my brother Rakesh who is 15 shn-, U
married soon, at least not until he gets a job but th J

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My wifi hasn 'tbeen to school. lean ’l teach her because Im never
in the village. My father would teach her but he’s away from the
morning until the evening and then when he comes back he always
has some work to do, to cut the fodderfor the animals or to look after
something in the field.
,,, 77three children- T]™y are all very small. Two are boys Akhilesh and Karunesh - and the youngest, who was born in 1995
ts a daughter. We ve named her Manjusha. I don 7 want any more
children. 1 m thinking of getting an operation done, so that 1 can look
cijter the children, my wife, my pcirents
I did my BA degree in 1991 from the college in Amethi. I was
the first person of the scheduled castes in Baba ka Gaon to get the
BA^ Now two other scheduled-caste boys from the village have their
BA but they are all at least four or five years younger than me. I
studied education and military science. In the military science course
you learn about defence and offensives in war, which wars took place
and with whom, how they were fought, did it involve the army or naw
or planes. I chose this subject because I had heard that one could
easily earn high marks in this field. Its important to get high marks
even if one does one’s degree in a subject that is not useful for
employment, because your division shows up higher. I got a third
division missing a second by one per cent. I enjoyed studyingfor the
BA,
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that ifl had had the chance t0 study ^d
a child,
1 could have achieved something.

Shrinath’s secondary school education had been the avenue by
Winch Ram Dass’s family was freed from severe poverty. Hansrai’s
undergraduate degree was meant to be a guarantee of continued
upward economic and social mobility for them. The hope proved to
be tllusory. Hansraj says: After I graduated, Ijust wasted two years
at home, working iu the fields. Then 1 went to Allahabad in 1993 I’ve
been prepar,ng for entrance exams fir government fibs since then
Jo, nearly four years. H is very difficult. The application fees for the
exams become more and mare expensive every year. This year I will
sit .for the Provincial Civil Service exam for UP
also preparing
Jot the Lower D,v,s,on Service, which has posts fir assistants and

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152 • Words like freedom

clerks in the government. One exam is in March, and the other in
February. Last year I gave exams for the provincial service in Bihar
and in Madhya Pradesh. I didn ’t get into either. One doesn’t get in
. .on the first try. One has to improve oneself by taking the exam many
times. For each of the exams, one has to give several papers.
I haven t tried to get ajob with a private office because I don ’t have
any free time from studying to search for Jobs. I want to try as much
as I can, to v^ork as hard as I can, to get a government job. If I don’t
get a government job then I don 7 know what I will do. I guess I will
just have to go back home and work the fields, or take up some other
work. Ijust don 7 know what to do; Ifeel desperate all the time.
My father is the only one earning in the family, and there are too
many of us dependent on him. There are eight or nine of us studying;
there are two families tofeed. Because ofall these pressures myfather
has many debts. But even then he somehow manages to save some
thing to send to me. In Allahabad I need about Rs 500 or more every
month just to survive. This is after I take wheat and rice from home
for my rations. I wish all the time that I.couldfind some work. I have
a wife and three children. But I can 7 look after them, let alone look
after my parents and the rest of my family.
Hansraj is dark, thin and short - no more than 5’ 3" - with his family’s
large, slightly slanted eyes. At first glance he seems distant or pain
fully shy, but this is a facade to cover tension and worry. Sometimes
by the end of a conversation about his life and family’s circumstances,
Hansraj is unable to prevent himself from sobbing.
He is always neatly dressed, though he possesses only two sets
of clothes. He alternates between a pair of grey pants and a white shirt,
and a grey safari suit. In addition he owns a single sweater. Hansraj
shares a box-like room in a slum in Allahabad with three other young
men, whom he knows from home and are of his caste. The room, no
bigger than 10' by 10', is in the rear of a dirty, single-storey house
at the end of the street. The room is itself clean and tidy, and there
■s a burlap sack at the door to wipe one’s feet on; shoes are not worn
inside. The room is furnished with a single metal bed covered by a

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ragged greenish bedspread, two tables piled high with books, two
chairs, and an electric stove with a single burner. A few clothes are
hung on nails around the room. A recessed shelf runs along one entire
wall, and is used to store nylon bags of grain and a few cooking
utensils. The room has a single window. The bathroom is outside, in
a corner of the courtyard of the house.
The neighbourhood is poor- an open drain runs past the houses and
pigs rootle in the sewage - but because it is located at the very outskirts
of the town and most of the small houses are newly built, it is worlds
betterthan most of India’s slums. Just a few dozen yards from Hansraj’s
house, the area opens on to the fertile flood plains of the Ganges and
Yamuna rivers, which have their confluence in Allahabad
/ only study in Allahabad. Nothing else. I don’t go roaming about
or take any interest in politics. After two or three months just studying
and studying here, I get very upset but there’s nothing to do, it’s my
circumstance. I feel guilty all the time that I'm wasting my family’s
money. One can’t study at all in the village. I was there recently for
ten days and did not have one minute to study. There I have to work
all the time, ploughing the fields or sowing something or cutting
fodder! And then as I work the whole dav, I’m so tired at night that
I fall asleep while reading.
Here, we usually study late at night, from about midnight to about
eight in the morning, because that’s the quietest time. We take turns
sleeping -two of us share the bed and two of us study. It’s not possible
to study during the day because we get disturbed all the time. There
are so many of us sharing the room. And then we have to clean, and
cook food and wash our clothes, all the things that we don't have to
do ourselves in the village. I do most of the cooking but the others
also help by cutting the vegetables or doing other things. We eat twice
a day, once at about nine or ten in the morning and then in the
evening. Our meals are vegetables and roti and rice in the morning '
and dal and roti al night. We have vegetables only once a day.
None of us ever go for movies because we can 't afford the tickets.
But sometimes someone in the neighbourhood will let us watch
television. In the summer, most of us go back to our villages because

•I

154 • Words like freedom

the electricity fails and so there s no water. And the electricity fails
all the time in Allahabad!
Hansraj’s bleak reality-of being unemployed for years, of trying
vainly for the right job, and then of eventually resigning himself to
manual or other low.-pajd work that he considers below hL aspirations
— is shared by many millions of ‘educated-unemployed’ Indians. A
large share are, like Hansraj, the first in their families to acquire a
college degree^ an achievement secured through incurring large ex
penses and forgoing years of wages. But the degree that was meant
to be a surety of better things, perhaps some kind of clerical or white
collarjob, proved to be nothing of the kind; instead, in a harsh turn,
most find that they remain as impoverished as those of their peers who
never completed secondary school, let alone college.
Their straitened situation, in part, reflects the failures of India’s
higher education system. Despite growing phenomenally since Inde
pendence, the higher education system has failed to provide its gradu
ates with a decent education — though standards are better than in the
abysmal public primary and secondary school system — or with
employable skills. Hansraj says: Our education in rural areas has
trained us to be nothing but clerks. And not very good clerks either,
fit only for government employment! It’s better than having no edu
cation, but not very much better. It is true that there are no factories
in rural areas, but even if there were they wouldn 7 employ us as none
of us is trained to do anything.
••■Despite the poor quality of education and the enormous number
of'educated-unemployed’ - one-fifth of the people on the unemploy
ment registeis in 1990 had an undergraduate or postgraduate degree
— India s higher education system continues to grow inexorably and
to churn out graduates who cannot find remunerative work. Between
1950 and 1990, the system expanded from 175,000 students and about
700 colleges and universities to more than four million students and
some 7,500 colleges and universities; ten times the number of insti
tutions and 22 times the number of students! The overwhelming
majority of colleges and universities depend for the greater share of
their budgets on government funding.1

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This extraordinary rate of growth continues, in great part, because
despite high unemployment rates a formal college degree - rather
than, say, training in a polytechnic - is still considered the only means
of securing a clerical or professional job, and still carries social
recognition. The system’s juggernaut-like growth has come at the
expense of both quality of education and relevance to India’s devel
opment needs. Forced to educate incredibly large numbers, the col
leges provide a sub-standard education bereft of training in job skills
or self-employment-oriented courses. And because both the govern
ment and owners of colleges have taken recourse to expanding ad
missions to the arts and theoretical science courses, which have low
overhead costs, the glut of liberal arts and ‘science’ students is jux
taposed against a dearth of doctors, engineers or veterinarians, as well
as a shortage of skilled workers for modern agriculture, horticulture,
fisheries, food processing and other business and industrial areas.
But the failures of the higher education system are only part of
the reason why Hansraj and millions of other educated persons find
themselves unemployed. More important, India’s industrial and serv
ice sectors have failed to generate a sufficient number of even mod
estly remunerative jobs. Thus, total employment in India’s ‘organized
sector’ - which encompasses all offices, manufacturing units, plan
tations, mines and organized agricultural concerns employing more
than ten persons - currently stands at just 25 million, out of a national
labour force estimated to number 350 million. Not only is this organ
ized sector tiny in comparison to the labour force, but it is even
dwarfed by the number of people seeking employment on the ‘live
registers’, which in 1990 totalled 36 million people!2
The paucity ofjobs reflects the failure of India’s industrial sector,
despite its size and diversity, to grow fast enough and to be suffi
ciently labour-absorbing in relation to the huge amounts of capital
invested.3 And because the private sector has Jagged behind the public
sector and government itself in employment opportunities, 70 per cent
of organized sector jobs are today in government or quasi-government
organizations. The private sector’s share of total organized employ
ment shrank from 40 per cent in 1961 to 28 per cent in 1990. Ad-

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ditional employment in the organized sector is being created at the
rate of about 400,000 jobs per year, just about one-third of the number
of fresh college graduates.4 Hence each year several hundred thousand
graduates are condemned to join the enormous backlog of the ‘edu
cated-unemployed’. •
Given the pressure of numbers, the competition for organizedsector jobs is ferocious, more so for government jobs, as .these offer
job securityjBy the 1990s, there were often several thousand appli
cants for a single government post. And though the scheduled castes
are constitutionally reserved 18 per cent of government and public
sector posts, a legacy of Ambedkar’s efforts, competition for these
posts is now bitter. One reason, of course, is that there are simply not
enough government jobs for all the scheduled castes. A second reason
is that a majority of the middle and higher grade government posts
reserved for the scheduled castes are routinely allowed to lapse-they
are then open to all applicants - on the grounds that there are ‘no
qualified candidates’.5 In effect, this shrinks the number of posts
available for scheduled-caste candidates.
Hansraj says: The upper castes used to grab everything. Now, with
reservation, others too are getting a chance. That is why the upper
castes are angered by our having reservations (affirmative action).
In my view, the biggest change that has come since Independence is
that the traditional elite, the Brahmins and Thakurs, are fearful that
they will be removedfrom their high place. And the person from the
lowest castes thinks: I have always been working hard, and still have
to work hard, but have not got to the place that I should have. ’ All
this fighting over reservations is because of this: that the upper castes
know that through reservations these low-caste people will snatch
away the chair, their power. And we think these people have been the
elite for quite a long time, now we should also get a chance. This is
the battle today, in both the city and the village.
Unsurprisingly, given these pressures, the application process for
government jobs is dominated by corruption. Today one can’t get
government jobs on merit, without corruption, as was possible in my
father s time. Just topass the Primary Teacher’s Certificate one has

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to bribe, just likefor other government service jobs. Bribing is the only
way to pass the exam and to get ajob, there’s no attention to merit. To
get a good grade in the exam you have to give Rs 50,000 to someone,
or Rs 75,000, or even Rs 100,000. Even ifyou pass the exam on your
own, you still have to bribe to get a post, otherwise you just remain at
the end of the line however well you might have done. But where will
I get Rs 100,000 from, when my family is barely surviving.
I n Baba ka Gaon, in the early years after Independence, reservations
enabled several scheduled-caste families to get jobs with public sector
organizations, especially the railways. Though all these jobs have been
either labouring or at best semi-skilled, they have boosted the living
standards and self-esteem ofthe village’s scheduled-caste families. But
opportunities to secure even these jobs are drying up because the
number of applicants has long outstripped the number of jobs.
In contrast, until today it is only the upper castes, and a small
minority of the higher middle castes, who secure white-collar gov
ernment or public-sector jobs. They have the advantages of having
relations in the government, of being able to study at better colleges,
and being able to afford bribes. Of the scheduled-caste people of my
aSe from Baba ka Gaon, most are in the cities working as labourers
in brick kilns, small factories or shops. Some don’t have any work.
Only the children of the upper castes have got government service.
Many are clerks. And the son of the Thakur Tilakdhari Singh is in
the military. One of my fellow caste people is in the airforce, but he
is a labourer, loading and unloading cargo in the airplanes.
The problem ofthe‘educated-unemployed’ and the failure to create
jobs in the organized sector mirror a failure of even greater magnitude:
that India’s economic development has not generated even modestlyremunerati ve jobs for the burgeoning labour force, whether in industry,
services or agriculture. The capital-intensive industrial strategy chosen
by Nehru in the 1950s is partly to blame. The strategy brought few direct
gains to the poor, as it generated only a small number of unskilled jobs,
the only employment opportunities open to the illiterate and unskilled.6
But the much greater share of blame has to be apportioned to the
government’s strategy for the rural economy, where, since Independ1 0 9

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158 • Words like freedom

ence, the government has failed to foster the conditions for the kind
of growth that would provide jobs, both in agriculture and in non-farm
activities. The rural economy is crucial to providing employment for
India’s labour force, and so to reducing poverty.7 Three-quarters of
India’s people (and the same proportion of the absolutely poor) live
in rural areas. Moreover, though greater job opportunities in industry
and services will ease the pressure on agriculture, it is impossible for
industry to expand fast enough to absorb the annual additions to the
urban work-force, let alone the backlog of the unemployed and ‘un
deremployed’, or, even more, the huge increases in the rural popu
lation. Assuming that industry continues to absorb labour at the same
rate as it has done so far in India, industry would have to grow by
an impossible 27 per cent each year to absorb just the current incre
ments to the urban population.8 Yet the overwhelming majority of
Indian politicians and planners persist with the Nehru-age belief that
industrial growth holds the key to all India’s development problems,
including poverty and unemployment.9
Not only has rural economic growth been central to poverty-reduc
tion in the past half-century, but despite the increasing population pres
sure on agriculture there is still scope to raise rural employment and
agricultural productivity in India. Thus, India’s agricultural employ
ment density of 35 persons per 100 hectares, is still much lower than
that of other Asian countries.10 Yields could also be far higher. Despite
this vast potential, job- and output-producing investments needed in
agriculture and rural public works - such as better irrigation, livestock
farming, and multi-cropping-continue to be under-exploited. A major
reason for the failure to exploit this potential is the inequity in owner
ship of cultivable land. Because small farms are Worked more inten
sively than larger ones, greater equity in land ownership would signifi
cantly boost rural employment opportunities as well as yields. In ad
dition, without land as collateral it is almost impossible to get credit
from formal banking institutions, circumscribing opportunities for
setting up non-farm businesses. In effect, land ownership brings with
it other assets, and if the poor owned more land they would be in a
position to generate employment for themselves."

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Hansraj says: There are very feyv options for work in the village.- ■
If work was available in the village, I would never have left. If I could
have earned a livelihood there, I would not have come here. But there
is no work and poor people don’t have enough land. My family is
better off today than many, but even then we have at most 2.5 acres,.
and that has to be shared between my father and his brother, even
though he doesn ’t live in the village. And then there are three of us
brothers to divide my father's share!
Shrinath says: The problem with my children trying to stay in the
village is that you need land and we can't afford to buy enough land.
Agricultural land is expensive. For just one acre one needs Rs 45,000
or more. This is why every poor person from the village runs away
to the cities. And suppose we were to try to start a business here: that
needs capital. But right now, I m not able to save anything because
of spending money on trying to educate the children. Only those who
can save can think of such things as businesses. I only think about
making ends meet.
I fear that there is nothing for my sons to do here. If they can
get work in the cities, so much the better. If not, then we ll have to
think of setting up a small business. There are three of them, and let s
see who settles down where.
Of the 22 scheduled-caste and middle-caste men of Hansraj’s age
in Baba ka Gaon, only four have not left the village to find work in
urban areas. Poverty is the reason they leave: they are too poor to buy
enough agricultural land or to raise the capital needed to adequately
irrigate or produce higher yields from the patches they own. In con
trast, from amongst the Thakurs of Hansraj’s age, five out of twelve
have stayed in the village as their families own sufficient land for
them to work at a profit.
Hansraj says: I feel anger sometimes when I see how many of us
are so poor and others so rich. A person wants respect, dignity. One
wants to be able to fill one's stomach, feed one 's family well. Nobody
should die of hunger, like my family has for so long.

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PRAYAGA Devi, Ram Dass’s wife, is from the village of Sarme,
some 40 km from Baba ka Gaon in the adjoining district of Sultanpur.
Sarme is a bigger village than Baba ka Gaon, with a population that
has remained about five times as large. Till the abolition tfzamindari,
the village was part of the grand Tiloi estate.
In the time of my mother and father we were slightly better off
than my husband’s family, because his family had no fields of theis.
own to work. My father had been given one acre free of rent by •
the Tiloi raja. So we didn’t have to earn our survival through
working as labourers for others. But in return for the land we had
to do all the Raja’s agricultural labour for free. This was a lot of
work and so our poverty was only slightly less than that of my
husband’s family.
I was about 6 or 7 years old when I was married and my husband
was about 10. The wedding was in Baba ka Gaon. But I was given
away in gauna [when the bride actually moves to her husband’s
home] quite late, when my husband was about 20. It was at the time
of India’s Independence.

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162 • Words like freedom

In arranging (heir marriage, Prayaga Devi’s and Ram Dass’s
parents searched only within families belonging t0 the same sub-caste
of the Pasis the Kaswen Pasis. When Rant Dass’s father and some
othe, male relatives first came to see Prayaga Devi, they carried a staff
on which Ram Dass’s height had been notched and against which they
measured her; th,s was an effort to ensure that Prayaga Devi would
not be taller than Ram Dass as an adult.
I came here by bullock cart. He didn 't come to fetch me as it
fff
to do Ms- Mn Nov the husbands
also go m the marriage procession to bring their vives.
I wept all the way here. I was very unhappy to leave my home
fof'f
‘ 'VO',,dg° hOme ,0 myP^- > ^ouldgo on
foot with some relative, taking the children with me. It would take us
the whole day! And 1 would stay therefor one to two months. After
y<
my parents died about 20 years
ago. I began to go only every six
months. I have a brother and
,,,,
,
an uncIe
live in the village
When 1 came here, in front of the men 1 used to keep my head
■ and face covered. But when we were working in the fields if there
was no man nearby we would lift the pallu and only pul it back if
tve saw someone coming. If we kept our pallu as low as the upper
caste women we would not be able to work, we would keep cutting
our hands or feed
tuning
While only upper-caste women in relatively wealthy families have
histor.ca ly been fully secluded - the practice known as purdah - even

amongst ower-caste women a semblanceof seclusion is maintained by
keep,ng the saree or a headcloth pulled over the face, whether at home
or while working. Typically, younger women maintain the symbolic
toi m of seclusion much more strictly than older women.

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Piayaga Devi is a thin, erect woman, nearly as tall as her husband
She wears printed cotton sarees, most so faded that their colours are

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Prayaga Devi • 163

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barely discernible. Her head is always covered with the saree’spallu,
but unlike young women she does not pull it down to cover her face.
She wears green glass bangles, a gold-coloured stud in one nostril and
thin silver anklets.
At the age of 60 or so, she is frail to the point of being emaciated,
a consequence of decades of deprivation, physical labour and child
bearing. But she continues to work long hours every day in the fields
and then at home. Like her children, Prayaga Devi is striking 'ih'
appearance. Even though her skin is now webbed by wrinkles and
crow-feet, the craggy nose and dark grey eyes make her commanding
and attractive. Since her birth, the irises of her eyes have been
clouded, as if by spreading cataract. This has not affected her
eyesight, but gives her a distant look, totally at variance with the
warmth of her personality.
She holds her own when she is teased by the young men in the
village, which they are traditionally allowed to do with much older
women as long as they show no disrespect. She says sternly that they
are terrible boys and should be beaten; her look is so serious that those
who do not know her would think that she is truly angry.
Where Ram Dass is nearly garrulous, Prayaga Devi is quiet, most
often sitting silently. She says that Ram Dass talks too much, and that
she neither pays much attention to what he says nor understands much
of it. They have a visibly warm, mutually dependent relationship,
marked by camaraderie. She calls her husband ‘Buddhau’, literally,
old man. Ram Dass says that a doctor in Amethi told him years ago
that his wife suffers from blood pressure. I took her to the doctor
because she would faint from anger if she saw someone beating
anyone else, or from sorrow if she saw someone hurt or sick.
Prayaga Devi says: All my children were born in Babaka Gaon. The
ones who died also died here. There were n ine more sons apart from
Shrinath andJhoku, and one daughter. They died usually after the age
of 5. They would die of diseases for which we had no cure. There were
no crippled children then in the village as there are these days because
sick children would all die. There were no injections or medicine or
doctors, so they died cf any illness they contracted. There woe no

164 • Words liki; i-reedom

'.1

religious rituals for children who died. They were buried in the

ceme^ry outside the village. I was always sad, but what could I do?
to eat ’Ur'7
a"d '''"lre yu',nllw "mr used to have enough
to eat. Sul we managed somehow or other. We used to work at
whatever labouringjobs we couldget because we didn ’thave our own
fields. But even ifyou were ready to work, you couldn't find many
ays work m a month. The poverty was worst until tny husband went
to Bombay for the second time and started sending more money,
efore that, we would all only get one proper meal. This was al night
and we would have some chickpeas and coarse cereals, from which
we would make rotis. There was no rice or wheat. During the dav
we would boil potatoes or chickpeas, but we would only eat a little
bit of these as there wasn't enough for all of us. Sometimes when
t mgs were bad we would get even less to eat. But after he got his
. job at the mill no one went hungry. We could eat twice a day. But
ad only one saree even after he went to Bombay, and he had one
dhoti If the saree or dhoti lore it was handed down to the children
as they could make do with a smaller piece of cloth.
My husband used to send money through a money order The
postman would take a little cut of the money but at least we would

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sme of the debt would become one-and-a-half times as large
foraf77Sb,andCamebaCkfromBombayh^°^edasalabourer
for short time. I also used to work. But then he and I started working
hu7 77 7‘
h^gfi-om the Thakur, with the money my
husband had earned in Bombay. The Thakur was supposed to,put Z
and m my husband's name but didn't - he Just look the money. So we
had to buy another smaller piece of land. And then we worked on that
•^dasweH as working as labourers for the Thakur and for 7lher

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Prayaga Devi • 165
Things are better now for most of us people in the village. Now
no one will die of hunger. No one goes hungry, we all eat twice a
day. We eat vegetables at one meal and lentils at the other meal.
People have stocks of grain. But there are still many, many people
who don’t have clothes, or blankets for the cold, or money for medi
cines or for school. But they manage somehow or the other. But since
zamindari finished, things have improved slowly. Earlier, it was the
Thakurs ’ zamindari and they treated us like animals. At that time they
could hit and abuse us and do what they wanted.

The upper-caste women still discriminate against us. They won’t
touch us. Earlier, we couldn ’t even go near them! We couldn ’t use
their wells. All this happens till today, but who cares, we now don’t
have any reason to go to them! Earlier when there was a new wife
amongst the lower castes they would have to go and pay their respects
to each of the Thakur families. We would go to meet their wives. But
their wives would not come to meet us! None of the Thakur men would

work. Even after zamindari ended they would not work in the fields.
They would make us work, do. everything, the ploughing, the sowing,
harvesting, everything! They only started working about ten years ago
because most of us scheduled-caste people stopped working for them.
That was when we got possession of the land to which we had had
title [from the government’s redistribution programme] about five
years earlier Earlier all us lower-caste people, including the women,
would have to stand up when the Thakurs passed. But now I keep
sitting and don ’t care whether they are passing by! I never feel fear
any more. Earlier of course we were all afraid, but no longer.
Many of us lower-caste women have been beaten by the Thakurs!

I was also beaten by them. It was when my husband was in Bombay.
I had harvested lentils and stacked it and the Thakur came with his
men and started threshing it, and so I went to stop them and shouted
at them and they started beating me. They beat me with the leather
shoes they were wearing and I fell down. When I was being beaten
there were others of my caste close by but no one had the courage
to come to help. Later someone came and picked me up. I was
defenceless as my husband was not there and his father was too 'vid ’•

3

166 • Words like i-rei-dom

to say anything. Now 1 can hit them! 1 can pick n/> a staffand hit them!
During that fight |duriiig local elections in 1995, the schcdulcd-caste
families for the lust time physically fought back against the Thakurs;
see chapter 16], I took a staff and went to hit them. I was the only
woman who went there to hit them.
Such autonomy of action on the part of the average rural woman is
in northern India generally restricted to women of tribal or scheduled
and other lower-caste families. Traditionally, they have exercised far
greater independence and possessed substantially more rights than
upper-caste women, who have borne the full weight of Hinduism’s
overtly patriarchal society. The Thakur and Brahmin women have never
ji
worked in thefields. They do some work at home, but most often theyjust
cook and eat! They keep their pallu down and they can ’t remarry. None
of them have been to school, even though the upper-caste men are
educated. They can ’t even leave their houses and don ’t even know where
theirfields are! But in myfamily, if I don 't do the work in the fields, no
one will do it. 1 take the lead and then everyone follows me.
In orthodox Hinduism, greater constraints on women are as es
sential a part of ritual purity and high caste status as vegetarianism,
teetotal ism and the prohibition on performing manual labour. Con
sequently, castes that wish to improve their ranking impose greater
restrictions on women as part of their attempt to prove that they follow
upper-caste practices and deserve higher status. This thinking is the
basis for the web of discriminatory and inimical customs that bind
upper-caste women in rural northern India.
Extreme physical and social controls are exercised over women’s
sexuality and autonomy, through such customs as arranged and child
marriage, the prohibition of divorce and widow remarriage, purdah,
and, at the extreme, the enforcement of sati, by which widows in
aristocratic households were required to immolate themselves on their
husbands’ funeral pyres.1 Upper-caste women are prohibited from
working outside the house,, as a consequence of which they are not
credited with making an independent contribution to the family’s
finances. And because the upper-caste custom of dowry depletes the
parental family’s wealth, female children are considered a burden; in

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contrast, the male child is an asset as he will eventually augment the
family wealth by gaining a dowry from his in-laws. On marriage,
moreover, women are irrevocably alienated from their parental fami
lies. The woman shifts to her new home and literally becomes the
property of her in-laws’ family. Because she possesses few if any
rights of shelter and inheritance in her parental home, she is virtually
captive and open to any kind of exploitation by her in-laws’ family.
She is made even more defenceless because of the orthodox prohi
bition of divorce or of widow remarriage.2
Particularly inimical to women’s welfare is that their traditional
inheritance rights, in all but the lowest castes and tribal groups, are so
circumscribed that they lack any form of inheritance comparable to the
absolute inheritance rights of men. Women cannot consider their dowry
as a form of economic security as it is transferred to the bridegroom’s
parents and controlled by them. In theory a woman’s jewellery is her
personal property, a category of stridhcma or female wealth, yet in
practice it is also treated as the family’s common property.3 And though
women’s inheritance rights to agricultural land - the most valuable
asset in rural India- have been expanded as a result of legislation since
Independence, the ground realities have barely changed. Thus, though
modern law gives daughters and sons equal shares, in practice the land
is divided solely.between sons. Widows have only slightly more ex
tensive traditional rights on land and other immovable property. If the
widow leaves the village, she forfeits her rights and so do her children.
If she has sons, she does not inherit her deceased husband’s land, which
goes directly to the sons. She is considered the temporary owner, as
guardian, if the sons are young.4
The bias against women, particularly in the north and amongst
the upper castes, is also apparent in the neglect and diverse kinds of
discrimination they suffer within both their parental and in-law fami
lies. The outcome of this anti-female bias and strong male preference
is that by every measure of deprivation, whether sickness, hurigef, ’
illiteracy or higher mortality, Indian women are far worse off than
men, suffering greater hardships solely as a consequence of their
gender. Female children are breast-fed less and weaned earlier than

p

168 • WOKllS l.IKL, IKI I DOM

males; as a result, a majority of malnourished children are girls. As
gii Is are given health care more infrequently than boys, large numbers
die. Those who survive frequently fail to achieve their full growth
potential. Yet girls generally work longer hours than boys, as they are
expected to perform both domestic and agricultural work.5 And de
spite women ’s higher mortality and the especially high risks of death
associated with childbirth, far fewer women than men use health
services, which anyway rarely cater to women’s reproductive health
needs. Beyond matters pertaining directly to sickness and death, females
f ace severe discrimination in terms of access to education, work and
opportunities for economic betterment. Thus, illiteracy is twice as
high amongst women as men, with only about one in four females
literate in rural India. In over half of UP’s districts, fewer than one
in ten females is literate.6
A graphic measure of the extremely disadvantaged situation of
Indian women is the fact that India is one of the very few countries
where males outnumber females. Under normal circumstances, fe
males slightly outnumber males, as they have a longer natural life
expectancy; thus, in sub-Saharan Africa and in the industrialized
nations, there are more females than males. But in India, serious anti
female bias in care and feeding, and, to some degree, female infan
ticide, has meant that mortality rates for females are far higher than
fot males. In effect, millions upon millions of Indian women are
literally missing’. According to one calculation, there would be 37
million additional women today in India if it had sub-Saharan Africa’s
favourable female-to-male sex ratio.8 But, ironically, despite gradualjly improving health care coverage in India, the proportion of women
continues to decline. In 1901 there were 972 women per 1,000 males,
but by 1991 there were only 929.9
In contrast to upper-caste women, women in lower-caste and tribal
families are traditionally accorded far greater rights and better treat
ment by both their parental and in-law families, even though their status
is rarely equal to that of men. Their relatively better situation is to some
degree an outcome of the fact that by working outside the house, either
as wage labourers or in their family’s fields, they are recognized as

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Prayaga Devi • 169

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making an explicit contribution to the economic well-being of the family.
However, as regional patterns affect the practices followed by all
communities, lower-caste women in northern India share to some degree
the disadvantages faced by upper-caste northern Indian women, and
are consequently worse off than their lower-caste peers in southern and
eastern India, where more women work and own land, and dowry,
purdah and violence against women are less common.10
Amongst the Pasis and other lower castes, women are not required
to practise purdah, since their labour is needed in the fields for
survival. Most of these communities do not have a tradition of giving
dowry, but instead require the bridegroom’s family to pay a bride
price. Divorce is allowed, and amongst the Pasis in UP, wives can
initiate divorce on virtually any grounds, including incompatibility.
If the wife seeks divorce to remarry, the new husband must pay
compensation to the ex-husband. If the husband seeks divorce, he
must pay a fine to his wife as well as return her dowry. Widows can
also remarry. Ram Dass’s sister-in-law remarried on the death of Ram
Tehel, his younger brother, who was about 22 when he died. On her
remarriage. Ram Dass and Prayaga Devi began to look after the
couple s only child, Kaalu. Prayaga Devi says: We took Kaalu into
our family as his mother had remarried outside the village. Their
other children had died earlier. His mother never came to see him
because we barred herfrom visiting us. She married someone without
our consent. Otherwise it’s good that women can get remarried.
And in the crucial arena of inheritance rights, the Pasis and most
lower-caste communities have customary practices that are more
gender-equitable than those of the upper castes. For instance, Pasi

women are allowed a share of their husband’s property on being
widowed. Divorcees and widows have full rights to return to their
parental home, and are guaranteed subsistence there, though they do
not inherit land from their parents. All these factors give lower-caste
women a substantial degree of authority and autonomy. Prayaga Devi
says: The husband and wife make decisions about the children and

expenses together. The man doesn ’t make decisions alone. He knows
what I’m doing and I know what he’s doing. It has been like this

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170 • Words i.ikb i-Ri'i-:i)OM

right from when we got married. In my children 's families it is also
the same; my daughters-in-law decide everything with their hus
bands. Amongst the important issues that Prayaga Devi and Ram
Dass jointly decide on are agriculture, the children’s marriages, or
expenses of any kind.
One issue on which Prayaga Devi has no interest in making
decisions is electoral politics, and she says that she does not care to
exercise independence in how she votes. I have voted in every election
since I was very young. Whichever party my husband gives the vote
to, I do so too. I don’t know too much about politics and my husband
doesn 7 discuss it too much with me. None of my daughters-in-law or
my grandchildren’s wives have any interest in politics.
The authority of women increases when they and their husbands
become the heads of the household. At this point, their status often
approaches that of a matriarch. My daughters-in-law don’t need to
assert themselves as I am the one that everyone must listen to, whether
male or female. Shrinath, you know, he touches my feet every day.
Rakesh [Shrinath’s youngest son] doesn’t because he’s a child, but
Hansraj and Bansraj do. In addition, Prayaga Devi is accorded high
status by her family in ritual and religious matters, a role generally
denied to women in upper-caste families in northern India. Ram Dass’s
family has for several decades followed the practice that someone from
the family must bathe in the Ganga every month. Prayaga Devi has
usually been the one to do this, until recently walking the 60-km
distance to Manikpur, where there is a temple and bathing ghat, along
with other lower-caste people from Baba ka Gaon. She no longer walks
as there is now a bus to Manikpur from the main road.
According to Prayaga Devi, in lower and most middle-caste
families men work just as hard as women. Everyone works hard! Not

just the women. In the fields, the man does the ploughing and sowing.
We do the weeding and also transplant the young rice. But we both
• . share in looking after the cattle and goats, and in turning up the earth
when the crops are already planted. The men do no work in the house.
This is the women’s work. But the men look after the children seeing
that they don 7 get into mischief or trouble; they see whether they are

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Prayaga Devi • 171

,.aked or clothed and they take them to the hospital. But they don’t
oil their hair or feed them! They look after the children when they

■

are outside the house.
The situation of lower-caste women has changed in many ways
since her childhood, says Prayaga Devi. Of course there is a change
because earlier there was so much poverty and suffering and diffi
culties - what do my sons' wives know about what we’ve been through!
They have so much free time! Earlier if we walked around and wasted
time there wouldn’t have been food to eat. Both men and women of
the lower castes have more leisure time now than they did earlier, says
Prayaga Devi. In part, this is because in the past 15 years or so the
former landlords’ power has waned somewhat and the lower castes
can no longer be compelled to undertake each and every one of their
tasks. In addition, this period has seen the introduction in Baba ka
Gaon of machines that save time and ease physical labour. Earlier
we had to grind the flour. But since the chakki [mill] came to the
village, we women have had more free time. Before this we had to
work many times as hard, and would only sleep until four in the
morning and then set about milling the grain for the next day’s meals.
The men also have more fi'ee time. Now they don 7 have to draw
water for the fields from the well because of the pump and the
irrigation canal. And because of the fodder machine, they no longer
have to chop the fodder for the animals by hand. Just this would take
them several hours each evening.
Another change is that education is now available to scheduledcaste women, a revolutionary break from the past when they were
barred by Hindu orthodoxy from education on two counts - for being
untouchable and female. But given this legacy of discrimination, it
is not surprising that till today very few scheduled-caste females are
literate, far fewer than males of their castes or females of the uppercastes. Across India, just nine per cent of all scheduled-caste females
are literate, less than half the national average for females. Neither
Prayaga Devi, her daughters-in-law, or her grandsons’ wives can read
nor write. But every one of Prayaga Devi’s granddaughters has been
to school. The younger granddaughters are still in school; the older

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172 • Words LIKE FREEDOM

ones completed the eighth grade, which is typically all that girls in
rural UP study because of concerns about their safety over the long
distance to school. Prayaga Devi says: Women should study as much
as they can, till they get married. It is always useful to be educated.
It never harms a woman to be educated.
Shrinath ;adds that from his experience of teaching, most families,
whatever their caste, choose to send their sons but not their daughters
to school, primarily because they discriminate against female chil
dren. He says it is essential that girls be educated and trained in some
skill because this empowers them in every area of life. On leaving
school, Shrinath’s eldest two daughters learnt sewing in a local course.
Yet another positive change is that for the last decade women in
Baba ka Gaon have been paid as much as men for agricultural tasks.
Earlier, women’s wages were far lower than that paid to men for the
same work. But because by the 1970s a very large proportion of the
lower-caste men migrated for many months to urban areas to work,
women weie able to pressure the landowners into increasing their
wages so that they were on a par with' those of male workers.
But on balance, the gains that have accrued to lower-caste women
in UP in the decades since Independence have been outweighed by
a countervailing trend: the adoption by the lower castes of orthodox
upper-caste customs, including the myriad practices which are an
tagonistic to the well-being of women. Thus, while neither Prayaga
Devi nor her sons’ brides brought a dowry, Shrinath gave a dowry
for his daughter’s marriage as well as accepted dowries when his sons
were married. The trend for lower castes to adopt orthodox customs
has strengthened in northern India in the past few decades because
the weakening of the caste hierarchy - a result of the new-found
solvency of castes that were once destined to penury - has offered
the lower castes a <
singular opportunity to attempt to improve their
caste status by emulating the upper castes. But: as a consequence
younger generations of lower-caste women are much more disadvantaged than older women of their communities.11
The deteriorating situation of lower-caste women is explicitly
visible in the precipitous decline amongst the scheduled castes in the

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Prayaga Devi • 173

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number of female's to males. Earlier, the gap between male and female
mortality was smaller in poorer households, which are overwhelm
ingly from the scheduled and other lower castes, than in more pros
perous ones. Thus, in UP in 1961, the fcmale-to-male ratio for the
scheduled castes was 941 while the ratio for all females was far lower
at 909.12 But by 1991 the scheduled-caste female-to-male ratio had
fallen to 877, even lower than the average of 879 for all females,
which had also fallen in these decades.

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Puttu

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PU1TU is Ram Dass’s youngest sister and his only surviving sibling.
‘She was born at the end of the 1940s. When she was 15 or so she
was married to a man whose parents had emigrated from Pratapgarh
to Dehra Dun, 700 km to the north-west, to work as labourers on the
tea plantations established there by the British in the late 19th century.
Jhari Ram, her husband, was born on the plantation in the crude,
stable-like housing provided for the labourers, a string of brick and
mud huts joined together in a long row.
Thousands of other destitute, low-caste families from Pratapgarh
and othei parts of Awadh and eastern UP came to work on these tea
plantations. At their peak, the plantations numbered nearly 70 and
employed some 10,000 labourers. While the plantations here, in a
verdant valley at the foot of the Himalayas, did well for many years,
they were by the beginning of the 20th century eclipsed by the tea
industry in the north-eastern states of Bengal and Assam. Today, there
are only a handful of functioning tea plantations in UP.
Most of the families never moved back to their villages. Though
they were materially scarcely better off at the plantations, because of

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Puttu • 175

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the low wages, they were far freer socially. There were no landlords
to fear, and the burden of untouchability was lifted, as there were no
upper castes amongst the labourers in the plantation.
Harbanswallah Estate, on which Puttu works, was once in a
remote area of Dehra Dun, flush with large trees, leopards and wild
boar. But since the mid-1980s the company which owns the estate has
sold off large chunks of the land, and the area is now an upper-income
residential colony known as Vasant Vihar.
Puttu lives in what is now a peri-urban slum across the road from
the substantial homes of Vasant Vihar. On the slum side of the road
is what remains of the Harbanswallah plantation: scraggly, undernour
ished tea bushes, ravaged by grazing cattle and goats, and a ram
shackle office in what must have once been a fine mansion.
The huts in which Puttu and Jhari Ram live were built by the
tea company for their labourers, and was until recently owned by it.
The company lost ownership when it tried to evict some of its
former employees in order to sell off the valuable land, and then
government records revealed that the housing had been built on vil
lage land. The company only owns the material that this house is
built, of, says Jhari Ram.
... .
The houses in the slum range from crude huts to brick houses to
the long rows of huts that Jhari and Puttu live in. Richer families move
out of the row huts and build brick houses. Only a handful of the
homes have electricity; bribes of the order of Rs 2,000 are required
to get connections. Television aerials sprout from a few homes.
In from of the row huts, which predate the other homes by nearly a
century, are patches of vegetable gardens. Mango and kachnar trees are
common. In both the row and the new houses, people keep goats and
cattle. The houses are interspersed with clear land, on which grow wild
bushes, dry and unattractive. Streams of waste water run through the
slum carrying slime, soap suds and thick vegetable-like muck. A single
handpump and tap serve the entire slum. There are outhouses attached
to some of the homes. There are no sewers. Plastic bags litter the area.
Fairly close to.the slum’s entrance is a small, new temple, with
a large concrete yard outside on which people sit to pray and to listen

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176 • Words like freedom

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to i eligious songs and sermons. The voice of the old, emaciated priest,
amplified over the loudspeaker system, is harsh but compelling.
Most people in the slum are noticeably thin and lacking in energy.
Scabby, dusty kids run around barefoot, their clothes dirty and torn,
their noses running and hair uncombed.
Puttu and Jhari’s is amongst the poorest homes in the slum. They
live in a corner hut of one of the row houses. It is a single L-shaped
room, but large and well built. At the back is a kitchen area, with a
wood-burning stove and numerous brass cooking pots. The room is

almost bare apart from the wooden charpai. On one wall, a small shelf
holds medicines, keys and other things that need to be on hand. Puttu
says: We don’t have a radio nor electricity. I sometimes watch films
on television at someone’s house, but usually I’m too tired to do this.
And the films start too early when I'm still at work.
Puttu’s world in Dehra Dun is very different to that of women
in Baba ka Gaon. In her estimation, the most important difference is
the greater authority that women have here. The authority stems from
the fact that the tea plantations overwhelmingly hire women labour
ers, as they are considered to be inherently better at plucking the
leaves. Male labourers are not central to the tea plantation system,
and as a result men soon found that their wives and daughters had
replaced them as the household’s primary source of income. Most of
the men work at construction sites as labourers, or herd cattle or goats.
Puttu says: Here women can boss over men, but men can't boss
over women. In the east, in the village, it’s men who boss over us.
In the east, women treat men with awe. They are afraid of their
husbands. Here the women are ready to fight the men, they don’t get
scared. Here all the responsibilities are on the women and that’s why
the women are stronger. We work on the tea plantation, collect fuel
wood, repair the torn clothes, look after the children, clean the house.
In the village, our elders would never utter or disclose the names
of their daughters-in-law. There, no one utters women’s names. But
. as I had to have a name for the register at work, my in-laws gave
me the name Sarju Devi. Because they didn’t want people to know
my real name they gave me this name. So I left my home name and

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now use the name Sarju Devi. Here, we all call each other by our
names, even the women. But this would never happen in the village.
Here, I don’t pull the pallu over my face. And anyway this is not
the custom here. Look at the marriages here — the women openly show
their faces and have their photographs taken! Only at the time that
the bride actually bids farewell to her parents ’ home does she cover
her face a bit. If we were to do such things at home, the men would
say, ‘where has this shameless creature come from? ’
The women here decide every important thing. How money should
be spent, who our children should marry. Even how many children
our families should have! Throughout Puttu’s comments, Jhari Ram
and a group of three other men sitting nearby remain silent.

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At 50, Puttu is slim, with strong features that are only now beginning
to be shaded by wrinkles. She is particularly attractive when she smiles
or is relaxed or not too exhausted from work. But most often she looks
worn, with creases of tiredness and tension around her mouth.
Yashodara, a relative of Puttu’s who also works on the plantation,
giggles hysterically and hides her face, as if she had broached a
particularly mischievous subject, and says that Puttu is known as
Lal Chhari, literally ‘red stick’ but implying fire-cracker. She is my
sister-in-law and hence I have the right tojoke with her, says Yashodara
defensively, now only half-giggling, as Puttu, who has coloured with
embarrassment, glares at her angrily. Emboldened by her audience’s
attention, Yashodara says: When I saw her first she was wearing a
red saree and a red teri-cot blouse that she had got from her home
during her marriage. And since then she’s always managed to find
red to wear. That’s why we call her Lal Chhari. Now everyone knows
her as Lal Chhari. Ifyou ask for Sarju Devi people \von 't know her,
but they will know her as Lal Chhari didi. Yashodara dissolves in
laughter, all the while casting cautious glances at Puttu, who is blush
ing and visibly irate, and now threatens to hit Yashodara.
In the Hindi film Jaanwaar, released in 1956, cavorting in the
sylvan meadows of Kashmir, actor Shammi Kapoor sings to his love
- played by Rajshri, who sports tight red pants and a shirt with a fur

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178 • Words like freedom

collar Chhari maidan khari, hum dil se gaye, humjaan se gaye
■ ■ . [Fire cracker, standing in the meadow, I’ve lost my heart to you,
1 ve lost my hie to you]. This association is the source of Puttu’s
embarrassment.

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uttu works six days a week. She gets 15 days’ annual leave and an
equal number as sick leave. Currently she earns roughly Rs 850 every
month - a very low salary even for manual labourers - depending on
the quantity of tea she picks. I began working on the plantation the
ay after I reached Dehra Dun on being married and have worked
hke this ever since! I never had to work in the fields as a child. That’s
why I am complaining today! I knew nothing about working in the
field. I only worked at home looking after the children and so forth.
All the rest of the family worked in the fields.
In Puttu s case, the pressure to be a reliable income earner is
especially intense because Jhari Ram, her husband, has never been
hardworking nor had a regular job. From the beginning, he hasn ’thad
a full-time job. And since he hurt himselffour or five years ago, when
he climbed a tree to pluck some fruit, he hasn 7 been able to do
anything. Before that, he was among the casual labour at the plan
tation. Sometimes he used to get work, sometimes he didn’t. He used
to get workforfour to six days at a time, but otherwise he didn’t work.
The pressures on Puttu are intensified as the couple are childless,
a cause of great worry as the poor depend on their children to look
after them when they become too old or infirm to keep working. In
their estimation and that of their friends and neighbours, Puttu and
Jhari Ram face a bleak future solely because of their not having
children. While discussing whether people in their community were
better off than in the past, Puttu said: Earlier the people here couldn’t
afford good clothes. Now sometimes they can. But for me it hasn’t
made a difference as I am alone and don’t have anyone to help me.
Those who have children are obviously better off. So there’s been no
_ • improvement in my life.
A woman neighbour of Puttu’s added: Our lives have improved
because we ve had children and they ve started working. But how can

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Puttu • 179

there be improvement in her life as she doesn t have children. This
was said without malice, in the tone of stating an incontrovertible fact.
Puttu said: Yes. I had to work to eat then and I still have to work to
eat now. I have no one to depend on. And though there are children
in my brother’s family, why would they feed us? As long as 1 m fit
I’ll be able to eat, but not after that.
Puttu is particularly concerned about being widowed. Widows

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comprise a large core of the very poor in India. Biologically, women
tend on an average to outlive men; and in India, unless they have adult
sons to care for them, they face tremendous deprivation. Puttu says:
Women have longer lives. We have to suffer this. Men die first and the
women keep hanging on. What can we do? God has written it in ourfate.

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The women labourers fight the plantation
management

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When I came here, everyone in my husband’s family worked on the
tea garden. My father-in-law had died by the time I came. He and
my mother-in-law had come from the east to be employed here.
I was taught the work by the contractors. They first showed us
how to break the leaves. We would use a cloth tied to our heads to
store the leaves, not the bamboo baskets they use in Assam. Earlier
we had to break two leaves and a bud. But now it’s different and we
break much more and so the tea is not so good. The leaves go to a
machine. Earlier the tea used to be made by roasting. But now they
boil it in a machine that works on electricity. This makes it stinkl'While
earlier it used to have a nice fragrance. When we used the roasting
method, the male labourers used to lake a stack of wood and shove
it into the oven. The leaves would gel roasted by this. That used to
be good lea. Bui now the owner is trying to save.
The English managers used to be here in my mother-in-law's time,

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hi my time there were only Indians.
!larhanswallah is a large estate. It used to extend to C hakrata

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Road. This land used to he al! under tea. hut now it's nearly all been
sold for rich people to build their houses on. Now even the tea hushes

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e starved. Earlier the cattle were not allowed to graze in the garden
Ihcammats ma/,o be sen/ imo the jungle; the herding was arranged

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V te company Now the company does,. 7 seem to care, and every
day there are fifty cows grazing! Earlier there was care for the tea
But now they don't care, so how can there be good tea?
Earlier there used to be thousands of labourers and how many
me left now. There were at least 1,000 labourers then. Now there
are only about 30 or 35 women left as permanent labour, and al most
only 5 or 7 men.
At its best, the plantation management treated the labourers,with
a semblance of paternal care, according to Puttu. But the general tenor
of labour conditions has been one of exploitation and lack of care for
the labourers, she and her friends say. The tension between manage
ment and labour has risen progressively with the company’s decline
and move into the real estate business.
Earlier they needed us more than we needed them. Now they don't
need us as there tsn 't such a needfor labour on the plantation. And
wten there is a need, they hire casual labour from amongst us - our
gu children who aren 'I married yet. Now they don't hire people
permanently. They have stopped this practice totally. Even our jobs

are not secure tVe don 1 know how long we will last. As we get to
Wh
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K“re l'S md n°‘ repluCe us wi,h any°ne ^e.
hen they don l have any permanent staff left, they will use casual
labour. It entirely depends on their will.
When I first came we used to get one rupee for 11 kg. which is
i w most women could pluck in an entire day. And then because of
our protests they raised it two or three years ago to 55 paise a kilo'
Now we get one rupee per kilo. Now because the wage is higher, some
Of us do 16 or 17 kg, some can do 20.
We had to fight a lol to get these increases in our wages Our
union first petitioned and.fought. We used to demonstrate. We would
take out a procession from here to the Parade Grounds. We also
g eraoed a s.t-m strike where the factory owner is made a virtual
hostage] lhe ownei, We sajd w

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will lake a procession to lhe District Magistrate s house. And we
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PUTTU • 1 81
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stayed there the whole night, hungry and tired. And that s when our
daily wages became Rs 5. This was years ago. The procession was
largely women.
First we all used to be on contract. We could go and work at any
time when we wished. Then we demanded wages according to the .
hours we worked, especially as we all worked about 12 hours. The
union went to the labour court. The manager said, 'Why do you work
for 12 hours, you do it for your own sake! We want you to work for
8 hours.' Then us labourers said, ‘Okay if we are working for our
own sake we will work for only 8 hours. '
Ten per cent of the salaries of the permanent labourers goes into
a government-mandated pension fund. In Puttu’s case this would
currently be about Rs 80 a month. When she retires after nearly 45
years as a labourer, she can expect to receive between Rs 15-20,000

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in a lump sum.
The union has been there from before my time. The leader of the
union lives in the city. 1 don’t know his name. We pay Rs 3 to the union
each year. And if there is any conflict with the company we all have
to pay an additional Rs 5-10 for filing the papers and for lawyers.
Our union has helped us a lot. But if there is no labour left of
course the union will get weak, and now there is no chance of getting
our wages increased again. The union can only work on the basis of
our strength. Now that the company is not admitting any more per
manent staff, the union is getting weaker and weaker. The company’s

strategy is that if we can kill them by giving them sugar, why should
we give them poison? Slowly, slowly they have reduced our numbers
and one day when there are none of us left they will close down the
garden. And then they will start to pay the casual labourers Rs 10
per day, and then if we want to work we will have to accept this low
wage. Il is impossible to get the same wage we get as permanent
labour if we work on a casual basis. If we are dying of hunger, we
will have to go and beg the sahibs for work.
For Puttu, the trade union leaders and the pradhan are the most
crucial political figures. The leaders of political parties are distant and
irrelevant images.

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182 • Words i.ikk irijjjom

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The tnicle union leaders don 7 come here. They cad us and we
thej c to their ojfice, either when there
----- e is a trade union election
or when there is ci fight for our rights that we have to be involved
m. Or sometimes they come here, when they need to hold a meeting,
and they tell us that such and such has happened.

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1 vote for the MLA and the MP. But who goes to hear the
big leaders even when they come here? We have no time. We don 7
have a minute, free. We /mow that such and such leader is coming,
but we don’t have time to go. Mrs Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi had

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come here to Dehra Dun, but who are we to get to see them or get
near to them?

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The political leaders never come here to where we live, but they
wot k through the pradhan. They give him money, and he puts one
truck-load of gravel on these roads and then he eats the rest of the
money. We vote according to whatever the pradhan says. Everyone
votes, but according to who the pradhan tells us.
He s been pradhan for a few years. Earlier his father was the
pradhan, then his uncle. When his uncle died, then this nephew won
the elections. This is the way things have been going on. He’s a

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Maurya. They are very rich. They have always been rich and owned
■ lots of land. Now they are also employed, but they still have lots of
land. The pradhan comes here around election time when the political

party needs votes, but who pays attention to us otherwise? All of us
wi ote apetition that there should be a connection for a water tap here,
and we all took it to him and he said, ‘Yes, it will be done, it will

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be done, but the matter still hangs nowhere.
When we complain to the pradhan about the situation of the
widows not getting pensions or the lack of a water tap, he keeps
answering, ‘Yes, yes, we’ll get it done, we’ll do this and we’ll do
that. But he never does anything. The government gives lots of
money foi the poor, but the rich eat it up. Nothing reaches the small
or the weak.

♦

It doesn 7 bother the pradhan if we threaten that we won 7 vote
Jor him. How does it make a difference if we don 7 vote? The rich from
the city decide what happens in politics.

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Puttu • 183

How the poor progress

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When I came here from Baba ka Gaon, we were as poor here as we
were there in the village. But things have improved here quite a lot.
But see, things are also far better in the village. So there s been

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improvement in both places.
In the village, we could never have worn good clothes infront ofthe
Thakurs; they would have seethed with anger at seeing us in good
clothes. They would not let us touch them or use their wells. There used
to be a time when their women would lift the hems of their saree if they
saw us and would say, ‘Stay away! Don ’(pollute us! ’ But now we can
sit as equals, we can eat as equals, we are their equals in every way.
It used to happen here too that there wasn 't enough to eat. Here
it didn ’t depend on how well the crops had done or on the weather.
The wages were low here, and as the families used to grow in size
there used to be less and less to eat. And at the end of the month,
before we got our salaries, there would be no money and there was
no place to find money. And then there are no fields here where we

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could produce our own grain.
Now everyone gets enough to eat. It s much better than befoie.
First we. wouldn 't even get clothes, even from coarse material. We
wouldn ’t have soap to wash with or to clean our clothes. The little
salary that we got wasn’t enough to do all this.
In the village we were poor for centuries because our ancestors
used to work for wages, and what could they accomplish with those
miserable wages? Without land you can 't progress. And our ancestors
used to say that because their ancestors hadn 'I been able to accom
plish anything, how can we be better than them and achieve anything!
That's why we had a fatalism. But now things have changed. For
instance, my brother Ram Dass or others like him, they’ve done
something for their children and now the children have an example
and will work to improve the future oj their children.
And vi'e are poor because the rich extract more from the pool.
Some rich people are generous, but most of them are not generous:
if someone goes to ask them for something they’ll say, ‘Get out. go

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184 • Words like freedom

away, don t trouble us!' We poor people work for
a living but if
someone poorer came to us we 'd give them money.
Look at our case. We are uneducated. If we go to the market, the
rich shopkeeper will extract more money from us because we can 7
calculate. That’s how they become rich - by taking money from the
uneducated, from the poor. Now, for instance, look at the owners of
this plantation. We get such low wages from them, but if it was owned
by the government we'd get higher wages, and we 'd get fixed salaries
instead of thcontract system. And these rich people, they cry for
money They want to save each and every paisa. Whoever they are,
all, rich people treat poor people alike.
Even a poor person like me feels sorry far those who are poorer
than me Some poor people don 7 have hands or legs. Some have sores
from which pus is dripping. Some don’t have a house or any clothes
nothing at all. You fee I sorryfor them because you are al least physi
cally strong and can earn your own living. But how are these people
going to look after themselves? All they can do to survive is beg.
Ifeel happy when I see the lower castes fighting for their rights
We were the slaves of the Thakurs. We were oppressed in every way.
And if our children
-.1 are today rising higher, we rise with them. Of
course we ’re going to be happy.
Of us people who came from the east, some were smarter than
t ie others. Others just ate and spent all their money. But the children
°f S0^
Sot government jobs or jobs in factories and got
ahead. Those who are working on daily wages, how will they progress ?
ow can a daily wager who earns just enough to eat, how can they
save to get ahead?
y
Here, if you have the determination you can make your
son a
co ege graduate. Some .of the boys study; others quit. The ones who
quit and whose parents are fed up ofthem apprentice them to a scooter
mechanic or electric repair shops. Others work in the bulb factories
One can now earn about Rs 800 or more in these places. But there
are no big factories far them to find good jobs in.
The girls also study. It’s up to them. If they want they can find
work in hospitals, or they can sit at home. There are some organi-

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zations that teach them to stitch. Earlier there used to be a centre run
by the company to teach them. But as the centre is now closed they
learn on their own. The girls now get married here or in Doiwala
or Haridwar, which are close by. They no longer get married to men

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in the villages back east. Earlier, parents used to be stupid; they would
marry their daughters off when they were children. Now they are
smarter; they look around and wait and choose the man carefully.
Earlier, they used to find out through relatives that there is a boy .
there. The father and other men used to go together to see the child.
The staff they used to carry, they used that to say that the girl comes
up to here and the boy up to here. They wouldn 7 care whether she
was educated or not. Now they’ve started educating the girls; earlier
they used to say, ‘since you have to cook and clean, why bother with
education? ’ Now they say the girl should have studied at least to the
fifth or eighth class, so that at least they can sign their name. It is
good that our girls study because we uneducated ones stand aroundlike idiots because we don 7 know anything.
Just see how difficult it is for me to keep track of my salary! I
keep track of how many days I have worked. I also know in my mind
how much leaf I have plucked and I calculate how much my wage
should be. And when they give me my salary I ask why have you given
me this amount. They give us a slip, that this is how much you’ve done
and this is how much it works out to. But because I’m illiterate I don’t
know how much is written on the slip. So I have to get someone to
read it. And if there is a difference I go to them and say investigate
this because it should be so much. And they have to agree.

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12

Jhoku
I

AFTER Shrinath’s birth, six of Ram Dass’s children died, all by the
age of 2 or 3, all seemingly from either smallpox or pneumonia. Jhoku
was the eighth child. lie was born in 1959 or 1960. Desperate to
ensure that he survived, Ram Dass and Prayaga Devi tried the most
potent method known in the village to exorcise evil spirits. This was
to weigh the infant on a balance, and then to name him after this act
J okna is the verb ‘to weigh’ in Awadhi, the dialect of Hindi spoken
around Baba ka Gaon. Jhoku weighed four kilograms at birth. Though
he survived, four children born after him died.
In Dehra Dun, Puttu talked about Jhoku, whom she had looked
a ter when he was an infant and young child, and who had later lived
with her and Jhari Ram for several years. Jhoku has lived in Dehra
un since the mid-1980s. My family has no other worries but him.
He is causing sadness and difficulty to our whole family. He drinks
a ot. And he loses all his money on gambling. Al least he doesn ’l
nave another woman!
I was there when he was born, as I was when Shrinath. the elder one
was born. My sister-in-law and brother went through a lot of anxiety

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Jhoku • 187

about keeping Jhoku alive as an infant. So Jhoku was brought up with
such love and affection that he was not allowed to work in the fields.
Shrinath didn ’t get the same treatment. That’s why Jhoku got spoilt.
He failed his Intermediate exam. That's when he first ran away
from the village and came here to Dehra Dun without telling anyone.
He didn’t want to study. In his mind he began to feel scared that he

couldn ’t do well even if he studied hard.
The first time he ran away he stayed with us for two months. Then
I told him; 'Son, go and finish your Intermediate, go home. ’ He went
home and did study very hard but still failed, arid so he ran away here
again. I knew he would waste his time here if I let him do so. I was
ready to feed him here, whatever I could afford to, but I knew that
other people would comment that he’s a wastrel because he just eats
and loafs. So I thought I must make him work because if he had work,
people could not call him names.
In the next house, there used to be a neighbour, an old man, of our
caste. He said, ask Jhoku to apply to the army, and that he would help
as much as he could. Jhoku passed in everything in the exam for the
army. But he was disqualified because of his height, as he’s less than

5'6”. Then when he didn’t pass he stayed with usfor a year. He made no
effort to find workfor himself. He used tojust hang around the town the
whole day. He was never hard-working like Shrinath.
After he stayed here for a year, we told him why don't you go
home as we don't have the resources to get you a job. Here it costs
at least Rs 20,000 to secure a government job. Where can people like
us'get so much money?
Then he went to Faridabad, to where his cousin Kaalu is. I don’t
know what he did there but he earned well. He used to send enough
money to his parents. I don 't know what happened to his mind there
but he ran away and came here again. Then I got him apprenticed
in the upholstering business.
All this trouble has happened because of the company he has
found in this city. When he first came he wasn 'i like this. In the village
he was so shy that he wouldn't even speak. And when he spoke, he
spoke to vou with respect. Now in the city he has found bad company.

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188 • Words i.iki-: fritdom

1 don t know how much he earns but he doesn 7 send any money
to his family. My brother looks after Jhoku’s wife and children.
There s no one here to whom Jhoku is answerable. He spends what
ever he earns.
He has rejected his wi/e and his children. He doesn't like his
wife because she is dark. But she is a good and honourable woman
and hardworking. What more can he want? And if he now says that

she is too dark for him, why did he have so many children with her ?

Jhari Ram says: And I didn’t even question him when he woke
me up m the middle of the night, drunk, having run away from Baba
ka Gaon. What was I to do? He is my child and needed a place to
stay. I just let him in and let him go to sleep. Only in the morning
did I ask him. And then he admitted he had thrashed his wife, for .the
second time pulling her arm out of its socket. And so he hadjust run
away from the village. All this had happened in 1994, when Jhoku
had gone to the village for the marriage of Shrinath’s second son.
Jhoku ran away after staying there just eight days, though he had
promised to spend more time with his family. Until that night, he had'
been well-behaved and stayed away from alcohol, said Puttu, who was
also in the village for the wedding.
Jhari Ram says: He drinks and then starts cursing and insulting
peope. He never visits us .now. I don't mind that he neglects us.
e have no children and he was our son. It was our responsibility
to rear him.

Puttu: Why would he visit us? When he doesn 7 respect his father
or mother, or. elder brother, why would he listen to us?
I don 7 know what is in his heart, because we are all individuals.
I don t know whether he has the sense to ever correct his life. If he
has any sense, then he will finally listen to his parents. If he is
wo^less and stupid he will not listen to them. If he’s a human being
he ll understand, if he’s a donkey he won’t. If he rejects what they

say for his welfare, he will himself come to grief.
Men drink a lot of alcohol here, said Puttu. In the village they
drink very little. Here, people used to drink spirit first. They would
bring it for one or two rupees. That hits you immediately; you get

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Jhoku • 189
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drunk! If you pour water in it, it becomes like milk. Now men have
started drinking a lot of country liquor. In the village not only is
alcohol not so easily available, but they are afraid to drink. Here I
don't know why they are not scared of their parents.
Jhari Ram interrupted: Here they do not respect their parents.
Ifyou decide to leave alcohol you can do it, said Puttu, but ifyou
remain happy with your drinking who can stop you? We women
demonstrated at the liquor shop, saying that it should be closed so
that our men would not drink. But nothing happened and the problem
wasn ’t solved. I hate the smell of alcohol and if someone who’s drunk
even passes by me I feel like I’m going to vomit.
Another close relative of Ram Dass’s, who lives close to Puttu,
spoke frankly about the seriousness of Jhoku’s alcoholism. I don't
meet him everyday, sometimes not for a week or more. But whenever
I meet him he’s drunk. It would be no problem if Jhoku drank and
then went inside his house and went to sleep. But no, something gets
into him. He wants to curse people and to have a fight. When he’s
drunk, he ’ll insult and hit anyone, however much older they are than
him or however much they deserve his respect. He does this all the
time. Jhoku doesn’t listen to others. He pays no heed to the advice
given by others.
Jhoku is always well-dressed in dark trousers and clean shirts.
They are patently far more expensive than the clothes worn by the
rest of Ram Dass’s family. Like most of Ram Dass’s family, he is
fair and attractive. But his face visibly lacks the strength of his parents
or of his brother and nephews. He does not look directly at others or
speak forthrightly. He shows neither Ram Dass’s zest and strength,
nor his brother Shrinath’s introspection. The sour odour of cheap
alcohol rises from his body. The skin around his neck is dry, splotched,
wrinkled. He seems prematurely old and exhausted.
He lives in a small shack in a tangled urban slum that runs up
a hillside some miles from the tea garden. He built the hut about a
decade ago, in part with money borrowed from Puttu and Jhari Ram.
He has still to pay back the loan, lie got the land free as it is on a
river embankment; the river is now dry.

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190 • Words like freedom
Jhoku is uncommunicative. He does not speak about his life
beyond providing the bare details of his work and experiences. He
used to earn about Rs 1,000 per month for the five years that he was
an apprentice in the furnishing upholstery trade. He now earns Rs 56,000 every month. He gets work throughout the year. The demand
tor skilled upholsterers in Dehra Dun and the nearby hill station of
Mussoorie has increased because of the exponential growth in the
number of hotels. He has worked for many of these towns’ upmarket
lotels. He works long hours. He cannot move back to Baba ka Gaon
because it would be impossible to find this kind of work in Pratapgarh
or other towns close to the village.
He has worked in Delhi, where he lived in Daryaganj. He worked
years ago in Faridabad with his cousin Kaalu as a metal cutter. When
he was 20, he travelled with friends from Pratapgarh to Hoshiarpur
and Ludhiana in Punjab state, which he didn’t like because of the
language difficulties.
He cooks his own food - vegetables, meat and roti - having learnt
to cook when he first came to Dehra Dun. He says he rarely eats at
Puttu s home. He says his three children - two daughters and a son,
ranging in age from 16 to 10 - live with his parents, and that he
regularly sends money for their care.

In Baba ka Gaon, Shrinath said: My younger brother sometimes pays
attention to his responsibilities, but for the pastyear he has not sent
a single paisafor anyone. Earlier he used to send about Rs 1,000per
month. He has three children whom my parents and I look after. And
he has not been to the village for nearly a whole year. We ve sent
two, three letters but he has not answered. From other people who
live in Dehra Dun, we ve heard that he's saying that he must arrange
to get his eldest daughter married, that he knows that he needs to save
some money for this. My father and I said to each other that just this
is enough, that this will be a relief to us.
Separately, Ram Dass said: When he was a child, Jhoku would
treat Shrinath like a servant and order him around - ‘Get me food,
get me water I ’ We would jokingly ask Jhoku if he thought Shrinath

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was a servant and he would answer, ‘Yes, anyone who serves me is
a servant. But Shrinath loved Jhoku a lot and never gets angry with
him. And though Jhoku may fight with me or his mother, he will never
fight with Shrinath.
But he was ruined in Dehra Dun. Since then, I have never asked
him for anything.

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13

The Poorest Families

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THE gains made in the 1980s in reducing poverty proved to be
impermanent. By the close of that decade India’s economy was in
crisis, in large part because of the government’s unsustainable spend
ing spree. With the economy stagnating and severe cuts made in
government spending, the decline in poverty slowed and by the
beginning of the 1990s had reversed.
Despite this reversal, many amongst India’s middle and upper
classes, as well as observers abroad, began to believe that poverty was
no longer a significant problem in India, that there were simply no
longer any hungry, sick, illiterate or otherwise deprived people, This
peculiar misconception stemmed partly from the previous decade’s
boom and the continued prosperity of India’s upper and middle classes,
who did well despite the government’s austerity measures: Hence, they
assumed that India’s masses too were doing well. The fallacy was also
encouraged by the food-grain surpluses’ overflowing in government
warehouses, which were taken to mean that everyone was well fed.
But the most important reason was the deliberate campaign of
falsifying official estimates of poverty, begun at the close of the 1980s

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The poorest families • 193

by the Congress government of Rajiv Gandhi, which was then con
tinued by his successor, P.V. Narasimha Rao. The campaign’s aim
was to create the impression that their efforts to liberalize the Indian
economy and to slash government expenditure was benefiting the
poor. Thus, the Planning Commission asserted that in the half-decade
from 1983, the proportion of the population below the poverty line
shrank from over 37 per cent to about 30 per cent, reducing the
number of the poor by over 30 million. It reported even greater
progress between 1987 and 1994, claiming that poverty had fallen
further to under 19 per cent, shrinking the numbers of the absolutely
poor by nearly 70 million, so that about 170 million people were left
below the poverty line - half the level of the mid-1980s!
These estimates were invention. Worse, the government was ac
tively suppressing the findings of an official pxpert committee whose
report contradicted these claims. The expert committee’s estimates
both began and ended with far higher proportions and numbers of
people below the poverty line. For instance, its estimate for 1987 was
75 million greater than the government’s. Even more damaging to the
government’s propaganda effort, the committee concluded that pov
erty had sharply worsened after the initiation of economic reforms in
1991, with rural poverty rising in the following 18 months by about
10 percentage points, to 44 per cent in 1992, the numbers of the
absolutely poor rising by about 60 million. For 1993, the last year for
which data is available, estimates based on the expert committee’s
methodology showed that 40 per cent of the population was below
the poverty line, more than double the figure asserted by the govern
ment, and greater than the national population at Independence.1
In December 1996, with the Congress out of power, the United
Front government of Prime Minister I l.D. Deve Gowda accepted the
expert committee’s methodology for estimating poverty. Overnight, in
government records, the number of people below the poverty line
swelled by about I 80 million to total onceagain more than 350 million.2

Though Rain Dass’ family was once amongst the very poorest in Baba
ka Gaon, since the mid-1980s their poverty has lessened to the extent

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that they are at least able to meet their basic needs. From the perspective
of the many families in the village who are still impoverished, this puts
Ram Dass’s family in a higher bracket of well-being - despite their
•crippling debt and difficult circumstances. The consensus among the
poorer families is that about 10 of the village’s 1 OO-odd families come
in this loose ‘middle’ group, ranging from those who arejust above the
threshold of absolute poverty to a few who have relatively ample
incomes, sufticient land to feed themselves and just the right number
of able-bodied adults. This small group comprises a large number from
the middle castes and the best-off scheduled-caste families.
The ‘middle’ families in Baba ka Gaon typically own between
1.25 and 3 acres. Ram Dass’s extended family of 13 adults and four
children today share about 2.5 acres, but their finances are bolstered
by Shrinath’s salary of roughly Rs 4,000 per month. The poverty line
per adult per month is at this time roughly Rs 250.3 Durbhe the
impoverished 24-year-old relative of Ram Dass’s, says: My Uncle's
family became better off only because ofShrinathMasterji’s employ
ment, as this gave them an income that they can invest in renting land
and in farming. They were absolutely poor before this. It takes just
one person's good employment to become better off.
For a family offive, for example, of which three are children, you
need about Rs 7,000per month to survive. Rice costs Rs 6per kg, lentils
Rs 30, wheat Rs 4. Each man will often eat about one kilo in a day!
hat children eat in three meals we eat at one meal. School fees are
5. And then clothes, oil, soap, slippers . . . and clothes are very
expensive. A half-sleeved sweater costs Rs 200. You can gel cheaper
ones for Rs 90-100 but then they don ’t protect you from the cold at
all So what is a poor person to do? Should they eat or feed their
children. Anyway, where does one find a job to earn even Rs 1,000?
Above the handful of middle-ranking families are about 30 com
paratively well-off families. This group essentially comprises 20 Thakur
families, the 3 Brahmins, and about 5 of the higher-middle-caste
‘ families.

But roughly two-thirds of Baba ka Gaon’s families are still deeply
impover.shed. At least 50 are so poor that they probably fall below

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The poorest families • 195

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the threshold of absolute poverty, with the poorest 5-10 of these
families destitute. Whether destitute or close to the absolute poverty
threshold, this huge group shares many commonalities. About half are
from the scheduled castes, with a slightly smaller number from the
lower ranks of the middle castes, and seven from the scheduled tribes.
(The proportion of impoverished people within these groups is highest
among the scheduled tribes, next amongst the scheduled castes, and
then among the numerous but diverse middle castes.) They all own
little land. The poorest 50 families own no more than two-thirds of
an acre each, almost always infertile. Of these, five families own just
one-sixth of an acre each. Three have no land at all According to Ram
Dass and others in the village, a family of five would need about 1.25
acres of good land - and very hard work - to be able to meet the

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essential needs of life.
Ram Dass says: Nearly everyone in the village has very little land.
AU the people who got landfrom land reform got very little land. Some
have one-third of an acre, others have two-thirds. Very few got more
than two-thirds of an acre from the land reform, even though the
government had said they would be given three acres each. But they
just gave these little bits of land, not what they had promised. And

the land given to most families was so bad that it is of no use to them.
Because they own so little land, virtually all the members of these
families earn all or a major part of their income from working as wage
labourers for others. In many families, men work most of the year
in urban areas, almost always as unskilled labourers. Most men over
the age of 30 or so are illiterate, and most women over the age of
20. Many of these families have a large number of dependents, in
eluding young children, the disabled, and the old. A sizeable number

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are headed by widows.
Their lack of productive assets and savings, as well as precarious

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earnings, makes all these families vulnerable to the threat that any
large expense or catastrophic event will intensify their poverty. Those above the poverty line will sink below it, the impoverished will
become destitute, the destitute pushed to the brink of death. And
though there is some upward mobility within this group, including the

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experience of families like Ram Dass’s, who have moved onto a more
secure financial level, this large group of families comprises the core
of the poor in Baba ka Gaon. They have been poor for endless decades
and continue to face equally bleak prospects.

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The widows
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Sathan’s widow, which is how she is referred to - in the third person
- in the village, looks immeasurably old, but is about 60. She is tiny,
reed-thin. Under the saree’spallu, the dark, emaciated face is gentle,’
but almost broken in expression. She shakes constantly from some
kind of palsy. / have about one-fifth ofan acre of land. 1 was left this
by my husband and his two brothers. They each had one-sixteenth of
an acre of land. I also have two-thirds of an acre of land that was
given to my familyfrom the land reform but it is completely infertile.
No one will rent or buy it.
My husband was a labourer. He never worked in the cities. He was
crippled by illness for many years. He could only work slowly, doing a
day’s work infour days. Apartfrom the little land he owned, he would take
land as a sharecropper. He also had two small bullocks and would hire
th^se out. We could manage somehow when he was alive. Now I can’t.
I have given the land away on sharecropping and now work as
a labourer. I get about 40-50 kg of grain each year for the land, as
it’s good and near the irrigation canal. A man in the next village has
rented it. He is not of my caste; lam a Chamar [a scheduled caste]
and he is a Past.
I work as a labourer. Wherever I'm offered work I go running.
But I get very little employment as I can 7 do the heavy work. I get
paid about 3 or 4 kg [Rs 10-15] for a full day’s work.
My child is too small to work. He can just about walk now. He
is not really my child, but the son of my younger brother-in-law. My
brother-in-law died about the same time as my husband, a year ago.
His wife rem away.
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My parents were very poor, like I am now. My life improved a
bit when I was married here, because there were men to work in the

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The poorest families • 197

fields and some land and no problems, bat now life is bad again Some

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^d,^0 my {athp-‘n-law died a”d ‘hen the older brother-in-law
And then my husband and his younger brother.
Sometimes I eat dal and roti, but sometimes just roti. Vegetables
- I can only rarely afford them.
S
My brother helps me a bit by sending me
some food. He has one
acre in the village that I am from. He gives
me clothes sometimes.
This saree was given by him.
Rn 'f°The Widofs p^’0"
the government once. It was
Rs 00. Bui since then I have got nothing. 1filled the form again but
nothing can be done without bribes. From the bottom to the top you
have to pay people The lekhpal took Rs 20from me, but he still hasn 't
done anything. That' was all the money I had. I 've been to him twice
but he keeps putting me off.
The postman [a Brahmin] also took Rs 10 of the widow's pension
from me. saying 'You 're getting this moneyfor free from the govern
ment so why shouldn 't I keep it? ' I cannot say anything to him.

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here are seven other lower-caste widows in Baba ka Gaon. Two

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o them are as destitute as Sathan’s widow. The other five receive -

some support from their adult sons, but are also impoverished
Widows form a large core of the very poor throughout India
According

o the 1981 census, there were more than 25 million

WI ows, comparable in number to the total of male agricultural laouiers, another particularly impoverished group.’ The number of
widows !S larger than that of widowers, even though males outnumber
females in the total population. Rural Indian women have lower

mortality in the older age groups (after emerging from the peak

reproductive years) than men, and are generally substantially younger
tan their husbands, and far fewer women than men remarry Hence

most women are highly exposed to the risk of widowhood and the
perils that generally result.
A very large pioportion of widows are impoverished. The loss

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ie husband - generally a major earning member - cuts into the

economic well-bemg of the family. Because upper-caste widows are
subjected to myriad forms of discrimination
by their in-laws,

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198 • Words i.ike l■R^^l•DOM

including being disinherited from their husband’s property, even
widows within well-off families may be impoverished. And though
scheduled-castc women lace less discrimination than those higher
in the caste hierarchy - generally possessing greater inheritance
rights, the right freely to remarry, and to be employed outside the
house - they almost always face enormous economic difficulties.
Most of their families are poor to begin with. Even where they own
some land or possess other productive assets, there are enormous
hurdles to their remaining solvent. They are often unfamiliar with
modern cultivation practices, are denied credit from banks and other
institutions, and are ill-equipped to cope with the male-dominated
culture of rural north India, for instance in dealing with male
creditors. Because most are illiterate and lack general skills, they
are unable, to find remunerative non-agricultural work. None of the
lower-caste widows in Baba ka Gaon is literate. And because the
majority ol rural widows are over the age of 60, most are too infirm
to undertake the gruelling labour that agriculture entails. Conse
quently, they and their families slip .into destitution.
Despite the large numbers of widows and their intense poverty,
the government has done little to aid them. Like most Indian states,
UP in principle has a pension scheme for widows, in theory to provide
a base income of Rs 100 each month to widows who lack adult
supporters. But the pension scheme has had virtually no impact. The
budgetary allocation is too small to cover even this destitute subset
of widows, and complex application procedures and widespread
corruption have further gutted the scheme.
Ram Dass says: Not each and every widow without people to
support her gets the pension! The government said they would give
pensions to no more than JOO widows in a block [group of villages],
but in our block there are J 04 villages and so in some villages not even
one widow gets the pension. In our village there are three orfour who
don t have people to support them, but just one gets the pension.
And anyway, what can you do with Rs 100? It s not enough even
for a single old woman. A single person requires about Rs 300 or
Rs 400 every month to get enough to eat and to survive. In this

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The poorest families • 199

expensive time to buy dal, rice, wheat and vegetables one needs this
much. And you also need something for clothes.
The impoverished from the middle castes
Shambu is of the Kahar caste, a lower-middle caste. In Awadh, the
Kahars traditionally shouldered the landlords’ palanquins and worked
as field labourers. Historically, the lowest middle castes were con
sidered just a step above the untouchables in the caste hierarchy, faced
ritual discrimination by the upper castes, and worked as impoverished
artisans, share-croppers, field labourers or house servants. Today,
together with the scheduled castes and tribes and low-status Muslims,
the lowest middle castes comprise the mass of impoverished people
in northern India.
Shambu is short, no more than five feet tall, but broad and
strongly built. In a face that seems whiskered because of the bristly
moustache and unshaven beard, his eyes are bright and mischievous.
He wears ragged clothes. In summer, he wears an old T-shirt or a vest,
and most often a towel instead of a dhoti. When he does wear a dhoti
it is tattered. In winter, he wears a grey half-sleeved jacket and a torn
sweater over his summer attire. The contiguous huts that he and his
brother live in are narrow and small, and are amongst the poorest in
Baba ka Gaon.
My parents had a little land. My father shared the land with his
two brothers but they both worked outside, one uncle in a mill, the
other in the army, so myfather cultivated the entire land. It was about
seven acres. But when his brothers came back, it was just a third
again. And then this third was divided between us five brothers, so
the portion for each of us is very small.
When I was young, at the time of Independence, we used to go
through entire days without food. If we got to eat something, this was
just in the evening. There was no wheat or rice, only coarse grains. So
we used to eat rotis of those, and dal of the same. And that wasn I
enough to go around. Two rotis or maybe four and a little bit ofricefor
the whole day. We would chew mahua, eat all kinds of odds and ends!

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I went to school but did not study. I just went for a few days.
Earlier, there was no concern for education. What was the meaning
of reading or writing? But my two younger brothers have studied up
to the eighth grade.

■I

Things are better' than when we were children. In the past, we
did not have clothes or food. And there was zamindari, so on top of
the poverty we would be beaten if we spoke! If the Thakur demanded
that we plougji his field, we would leave our work and do his. That

1
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was the time of oppression! They enforced their will by the force of
sticks. The Thakurs were united against the poor, and they were
powerful and so we never had the nerve to resist.
There was discrimination even with the lower-middle castes, not
just the scheduled castes. The Thakurs did not practice untouchability
. with us but apart from this they treated us badly. We were allowed
to fetch water for the Thakurs, but could not share food or sit with
them, which the Mauryas could do. We could not talk in front of them.
If we did, they would take off their shoes and hit us.
They did not spare anyone who was poor. It was their sport to
trap the poor, to harass them. And where could we poor people go?
The Thakurs were in league with the police. The police would lock
us up if the Thakurs wished!

1 I

Their oppression of us has gradually been easing over the last
25 or 30 years, and today it is much less. Otherwise, even 15 years
ago, we could not sit on the charpai if they were nearby. If we did
not rise, they would not say anything, just straightaway hit us, saying,
‘You dare sit on a charpai in front of me! ’ Now we will hit them if
they dare to hit us!
Now, we eat properly. We eat twice a day, four rotis and a handful
of rice, with either dal or vegetables. We can't afford to have both
at every meal. But at least even those who were miserably poor can
now eat twice a day. Most people are better off than before.
Even though my family has less land than before, we can work
and grow more on the land. I have less than half an acre of land.
That doesn ’t produce enough to feed my family, even though there
are just three of us. This time, I got 50 or 60 kg of rice and a bit more

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amount. He s my only child, so I would have been disgraced if I
didn t. So I’ll spend as much as I can raise through loans. I went
to the government hospital. He got epilepsy when he was about 9

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\vheat. But for my family to eat adequately we need at least 250-300
g of rice and also a minimum of 200 kg of wheat. [According to
government estimates, an adult requires an annual minimum of
144 kg of gram to meet a subsistence diet.]
■•• •
iVe Kork as labourers to cover the shortfall. Our women work
too. We don't get work every day but perhaps every second day.
We get Rs 15-20, sometimes JO, for a day’s work. But we make
enough to eat.
Just before Diwali, I had to spend Rs 5-600 to treat my son
^ho has epilepsy. We had to take a loan from the Thakurs for this

16' ThiS iS thefirSl time that we llsed medicine
and he s been alright since then. Earlier, we stuck to magic remedies
but that only made it worse. The magic remedies cost a lot The
day he was very ill, I spent Rs J10 for a locket, but it didn’t work
He became unconscious. For three days, he didn ’t eat or rise or
do anything. When he didn 7 get better on the fourth dav, we took
tm to the hospital on a charpai, which we carried, two men on
either side. They gave him four bottles of glucose before he spoke'
He was in the hospital for three days. It cost me Rs 500 for the
medicines in three days. Now, they’ve given medicines for a week
crnd that costs Rs 15 for o week.
I never took a loan before. I had to because of the illness. I hope
io return the money little by little. One has to go away to the city
and work, drive a cycle rickshaw or do some labour. In a year I go

away to Kanpur for two or three months. My maternal grandmother
was there, so I was very young when Ifirst went. Il's become a huge
cay now bm i, was small when ! first went. Of course I was very
scared. I used to work in a mill there for four Or five years as a dyer
At first, my wages were Rs 5 a day. That was 25 years ago, so it
was equal to Rs 75-80 today! But the mill became sick many years
ago and they haven 7 opened the lock for about 21) years. So all us
workers became unemployed.

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202 • Words i.iki; fri-i:i)om

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I ve been driving a rickshaw in Kanpur for the last 10-12 years.
I can make Rs 50. 60 or even 70 a day, from which I pay Rs 16 as
rent for the rickshaw.

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The handicapped

■

Shambu s son, Bansi, is one of several handicapped youngsters in
Baba ka Gaon. The epilepsy he suffers began to worsen about six
years ago, when he was 10. He also has a severe learning handicap
and so has never been able to go to school. A strongly built teenager,
he has a broad face, with the mongoloid cast characteristic of those
with Down’s syndrome, a form of mental retardation. His voice is
extraordinarily gentle and low, like birdsong. Bansi sometimes has
fits of anger during which he attacks anyone nearby; as a result, both
his father and mother have often been beaten by him.
Bansi s first cousin, Jagdish, has cerebral palsy. He is dark, very
thin, and has a broad mouth with shining teeth. He is very affectionate
•and his face often cracks into a quizzical but trusting smile. His large
black eyes are thickly outlined with kajal (kohl). He holds one arm
against his body at an awkward angle, much like a bird protecting a
broken wing. Though he can walk, he tires after a few steps and often
falls. His speech is slurred to the point of being incomprehensible,
agdish has been to a doctor only once. His father, who is Shambu’s
younger brother, is amongst the poorest people in Baba ka Gaon
owning less than two-thirds of an acre.
Brij Lal, who is about 20, suffers from such severe post-polio
paralysis that he can barely move any of his limbs! As a consequence,
he cannot change his posture or move without assistance. In the day his
widowed mother, who works as a labourer, generally leaves him sitting
against the culvert that leads to the fields at the lower-caste side of the
village. Back against the wall, wasted legs and arms lying loosely, he
beams at the people who greet him. He remains there until the afternoon
when she comes to feed him. He cannot speak comprehensibly, though
his brain is not damaged. His relatives, including Ram Dass, who is
distantly related, have suggested to his mother that she put Brij Lal in

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The poorest families • 203

a charitable home for the severely disabled in Allahabad, but she refuses
to part with him. She is very poor, though not destitute, as her husband
was a labourer in the railways and she was given a lump-sum pension
payment on his death. In addition, she is the only widow in the village
to get the government’s widow’s pension of Rs 100 per month.
Two young children also suffer from the severe after-effects of
polio. One is a girl whose right leg is wasted and about an inch shorter
than the other; she limps visibly.
Physical handicaps and complete disability are a central reality
of being poor in India. The greater a family’s impoverishment, the
less likely they are to seek or be able to access health care, including
prevention measures like immunization for their children. Moreover,
because of the costs of caring for a dependent, who typically cannot
work, and of buying medicines, poor families are pushed deeper into
debt and destitution. Thus, in Baba ka Gaoh, of the five families who
have disabled youngsters, four are among the village’s very poorest.
Though the UP government has a scheme to provide the disabled
with a pension of Rs 100 every month, it has been gutted by the
problems that beset the widow’s pension scheme, notably inadequate
budgets, corruption and complex application procedures. If anything,
the disabled pension scheme performs even worse, with not one
handicapped child in Baba ka Gaon receiving the pension.
The handicapped themselves face a life of unparalleled bleakness.
There is no appropriate health care available nearby, neither physi
otherapy nor wheelchairs and prosthetic devices that would ease their
difficulties. Treatment at the handful of urban public hospitals in India
which provide specialized care is not an option, as their families can
not begin to meet the enormous costs involved in travelling to or living
in a city for an extended period, let alone negotiating good care athospitals that are overcrowded and poorly run. But in the village,

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incapable of the strenuous physical labour required for agricultural

tasks, the handicapped cannot find work. Their parents fear that-on
their death their children will not survive, for in Baba ka Gaon and in
rural India generally, only immediate relatives are willing to shoulder
the responsibility of looking after an orphan, whether disabled or fit.6

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The orphan
Durbhe was orphaned when he was 12. His father was Ram Dass’s
first cousin. When my mother got sick and died. I was in lhe eighth
class. My younger sister was 9. My mother had liver cancer. We took
her to hospitals in Ludhiana and then to Lucknow.
She hadfour daughters and me. Three of my sisters were older
and these three were all married by the lime of my mother's death
The youngest of my older sisters was seven years older than me.
i aZZ’s rnotl'er died in 1985>in ller
40s. His father had died
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with the Western Railways in Bombay. Durbhe’s mother was left a



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sma pension of Rs 106 per month, roughly the equivalent of Rs 350
oday. With this income, by labouring forthe Thakurs, and through hard
effort m cultivating the acre of land shejointly owned with her brother
in- aw, she managed to keep her family solvent. She sent Durbhe and
ns four sisters to school, forsaking their help in cultivating the field
But on ns mother’s death, this relative economic security shat■ ed. Dmbhe and Ins younger sister were plunged into poverty. The
primary factor behind this rapid descent was that the two young
orphans were left to fend for themselves, with relatives and caste
people m Baba ka Gaon providing very little support. No one helps
anyone tn the village. When problems come you have to face them
yourselves you have to act yourself, and no one is going to become
ZerZTdidn'tlZdin
looked after thefield.
We firs didu t know any agricultural work because my mother had
never let us work with her. At least we knew how to cook outfoodt

versZ voul
Wa‘Mn^eoPl- When faced with adversity, you learn quickly.
No one would give us food
us jooa or money even when we were very
hungry. But,/someone had tried to steal our land or trouble my sister

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would have supported us.

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most often. They tr.ed to reassure us and to give us emotional support.

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The poorest families • 205
They would say, Tf you need anything, tell us. ’ But who tells others
■ what they need? One can ask one’s parents for things, but one can’t
ask others no matter how much they love you. So somehow my younger
sister and I managed to get things going on our own.
The rest of our relatives were in Lucknow and Bombay. My
father’s brother in Bombay never came.
Durbhe’s case is the norm for the poor in Baba ka Gaon and, with
few exceptions, for rural India. Support for orphans or others who
need care or are helpless, such as infirm older people, the disabled
or widows, comes almost entirely from very close relatives.7 If there
are no close relatives, neither more distant relatives nor people of-the
same caste will provide much care at all, leaving them to fend for
themselves as best as they can.
Forced to do so, Durbhe and his sister coped on their own. To try
to get his father’s pension from the railways transferred to his name,
Durbhe, though he was just 12 years old, travelled alone to Bombay.
On reaching there, he found his way to his uncle’s house in the Jogeswari
area. I wasn ’t scared, because ifyou have to do something, what's the
point of being scared? But the journey was in vain, as on one ground
or another the railway’s officials refused to give the pension to either
Durbhe or to his uncle, who was legally his guardian.
For the next few years, Durbhe supported himself and his sister
by cultivating the field that he had inherited from his mother and by
working as a labourer. His uncle was in Bombay and let him cultivate
his share f or free. My sister no longer went to school. But I worked
and also went to school. For these four years, we managed with great
difficulty. We had just one set of clothes each. This set of clothes had
to last us one or one-and-a-half years.
I left the village in 1988 because we were in worse and worse
money trouble here. I had no income. My schooling was also stopping
because 1 didn 'l have money for books or for the fees. To whom could
I say that I wanted books? My sister also had needs. Everyone has
needs and desires.
• 1 also had to earn money so that 1 could save to get my sister
married. In our caste we have no system ofgiving dowry and we spend

1

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206 • Words like freedom

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according io our means on the marriage - we only want the girl, not
what she can bring with her. There were no demands from the in-laws
but I gave about Rs 1,200 which was all I could afford.
Because of all this I went to my brother-in-law in Ludhiana I
thought I would learn some work that didn t require too much skill
I learnt how to kmt sweaters. It is very difficult work; children can 't
do this. Most people do this when they are in their 20s, but I was
about 15. But I had to learn. Working on the sweater machine is
very difficult! When you work in the fields breaking the sodfor many
ours you don ’t sweat as much as you do in one hour with this work’
Somebody over the age of 50 couldn’t do this work. No women are

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employed because the work is so exhausting. You have to keep the
machine pressed against your chest, and then you push the spindle
right past you with your right hand. And you keep up this rocking

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motion with your body, back and forth. And with your left hand you
feed the wool, test it, raise it higher, or lower it. It takes a whole

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t0 Set yOUr hand set' And your arm hurts so much that
when I first go back to work then for at least a month my right arm
aches so hard that I use my left hand to soap my body’
First I earned nothing, but as I worked my hand became faster
Now make about 25 .sweaters a day. We get Rs 4 per sweater, so
earn about Rs IDOper day. I spend about Rs 1,000 on living there.

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a month’ 1 have lefi another Rs 1,000
S° 1 have zero! Sometimes

etters f om my wife that this is running short, that something

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The season lasts from early March to early December. You are

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assured of work in these months. The rest of the time I stay in the
village. Earlier, when I used to come back I would study very hard,
so I passed my Bachelor's degree in 1995. Only three of us from the
scheduled castes in the village have a BA.
First my sister used to look after the land when I wasn 't here but
now my wife looks after it. I still need to work every year in the sweater
Lactones because you can ’l survive on the amount of land I have if

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The poorest families • 207

you don’t have an outside income. And I can't find any other work
even though I have studied so much.
At 24, Durbhe is so thin as to appear malnourished. Just over five
feet in height, he is dark, with sharp features, and intelligent, watchful
eyes. His small moustache is almost unnoticeable against the darkness
of his skin. His teeth are stained brown from his fondness for paan.
He has made several efforts to get the arrears on his father’s pension
released, which now totals nearly Rs 50,000, a fortune for him.-But
the railway authorities have stalled payment on one excuse after
another, waiting for him to offer a bribe.
Durbhe is heavily in debt. You have to borrow from the Thakurs
because they are the only ones with any money. By 1996, he owed
the Thakurs Rs 6,500, equal to three months’ salary at the sweater
factory. Rs 500 of this he took in 1994 because his wife was ill and
he didn’t have money to buy the medicines she needed. The following
year, he fell sick with a severe stomach infection, for which he had
to be hospitalized in Pratapgarh town. The private clinic there ran an
ultra-sound test, put him on-a drip, and two days later presented him
with this huge bill. Durbhe pays five per cent interest each month on
the loan - in contrast, banks charge 12 per cent annually - and has
had to struggle so much to pay the interest that he has not been able
to pay off any of the capital.
It’s true that we younger people haven’t had to suffer poverty as
intense as that suffered by our elders, such as my uncle Ram Dass.
At least now we can eat what we produce from our work. They had
to give to the Thakurs what they grew from their labour. And on top
of that they would be beaten! We don’t have to suffer this; we can
fight back. But still, I saw a lot ofpoverty when I wajs young and my
mother had died. And I’m still poor. We’re all still poor.
The costs of ill-health
Though health conditions have improved significantly since Inde
pendence, India’s performance in the past hall-century on reducing
ill-health and early mortality has been worse than that of comparable

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208 • Words like freedom
Asian countries and even below the average for all developing coun
tries. Sickness, disability and early mortality still result in enormous
suffering and economic deprivation amongst the Indian poor. The

most pervasive and gut-wrenching sights of poverty in India continue
to be related to disease or lack of health care.
To those of Ram Dass’s generation, health conditions are today

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incomparably better than they were when he was a child or even a
middle-aged adult. In the 1930s, mortality from famine, malnutrition
and infectious diseases was so high in India that life expectancy was

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only 32 years, and no more than half the children born could be

expected to survive to the age of 20. At around the time of Independ
ence, over one-third of all children died before they reached their first
birthday. Though the levels of mortality for both children and adults
had declined considerably by the 1960s, at that time two of Ram
Dass s siblings died in their early 20s, another in her early 40s, while
ten of his twelve children died from the 1950s to the mid-1960s.

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Ram Dass says: Earlier there was no polio here, now lots of
children get it. Earlier the children wouldjust die whenever they got
sick. Just 30 years ago, children used to die from hunger. They used
to wither away [from marasmus, an acute form of malnutrition]. Now
they get some milk from the goats and cows and don ’t die like this.
Cholera used to come in summer. And smallpox in April or May.
There used to he cholera in everyone’s family, including ours. There

was no cure for it here. There were no doctors or hospitals, and we
used to take home-made medicines. Whenever this illness struck, there
would only be four, five or ten people left in some villages, and in
some families not even one person would survive. And there was a
lot of smallpox. Some people used to lose their eyes, others would get
such scars on their face that you could not recognize them. I still have
scars all over my body from when I got smallpox. I was very young,
just about 8 or 9 years old. Smallpox would get the young and the
old. Two of my children died of this. There was plague too. Often
whole villages would get exterminated. We used to know there was
plague when the rats died. Then their insects wouldjump on to people.
So whenever the rats died we would leave our houses and live in the

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The poorest families • 209

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fields for some weeks. But from 1950 or 1960 or so the plague has
become less.
Prayaga Devi says: Once when Shrinath was a child the rats
started dying and so we all ran away into the fields and we stayed
there for 15 days. We took all our grain with us and we would cook
there. No one died among those who had run away, but whoever

I

stayed in the village died, maybe about 50 people.
Ram Dass says: When we were young, we didn’t know what
doctors were. There was a hospital in Sanghipur. And there was a
compounder there who used to give you medicines in little paper
packets. And if anyone had a boil or something they would apply an
ointment. And it used to be free. But most people didn 't go to doctors.
They were afraid of them.
Cholera ended because there was education from the government
about not eating exposed food or food that had been stored for any
length of time. And smallpox ended about 20 or 30 years ago. All these
diseases ended because the government made the arrangements and
gave us medicine. The immunization for children started here only
about 12 years ago.
Though the first sustained improvement in health conditions in
India took, place in the 1931-41 decade, more substantive increases
occurred in the two decades between 1951 and 1971. As a conse
quence, life expectancy at birth increased from 32 in 1941 to 45 by
1971. By 1965, the infant mortality rate - a measure of how many
children die before their first birthday - had fallen to 160 per thousand
live births from 225 two decades earlier.8 The decline in mortality
came overwhelmingly from the control of the handful of infectious

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diseases that had caused millions of deaths earlier. The single most
important cause of the decline was the control of malaria through the
spraying of insecticides and other forms of mosquito control; from
the early 1950s to 1965, deaths from malaria fell from over a million
annually to no reported deaths at all. Mortality from tuberculosis was
reduced through the expansion of curative medical services and
vaccination. Deaths from cholera also fell, through modest improve
ments in water supply and quality of food, and increased access to

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210 • Words like freedom

medical services. Another major killer, smallpox, was wholly eradi
cated by 1975 through an ambitious inoculation campaign.
But the improvements in health conditions and the decline in
niortality had slowed by the close of the 1960s. The stagnation especially in states 1 ike.UP, where mortality levels were still very high
- was a consequence not just of inadequate budgets and the poor quality
of services, but also stemmed from the government’s failure to tackle
the huge problems of poverty and illiteracy that lay behind the high
levels of malnutrition and endemic disease. For much of the next
decade, little headway was made in improving health conditions in
most areas of India. As late as 1978, the infant mortality rate in UP was
172 per thousand live births, far higher than the national average and
not appreciably lower than the rate at the time of Independence.9
Though the expansion of immunization efforts and programmes
targeted at mothers and children has since led to significant reductions
in mortality - even in UP - the poor in India continue to suffer from
crippling communicable diseases (including diarrhoeal infections, mea
sles, pnuemonia and tuberculosis), malnutrition, and complications of
pregnancy and childbirth. Consequently, India’s performance to date
on improving, health conditions and reducing mortality has been far
worse than that of other Asian countries, such as China and Indonesia,
which suffered from equally devastating health problems half a cen
tury ago. In fact, India’s performance is worse than the average of
all developing nations. Thus, though life expectancy at birth in India
rose from 44 years in 1960 to 59 in 1990, in the same period it rose
in China from 47 to 70 years, and in the developing countries overall
from 46 to 62 years.
The government’s neglect of health is epitomized by its paltry
spending on disease prevention and health care. (In theory, the gov
ernment makes available free preventive and curative health services
through a network ranging from primary health centres to hospitals.)
Taken together, India’s federal and state governments today spend
about 1.3 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) on health, far less
than other Asian countries. This level of spending, which wbrks out
to just US $2-3 per person per year, is simply inadequate to meet even

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The poorest families *211

rudimentary health goals. But even these funds are misallocated, with
over three-quarters absorbed by wages, specialized hospitals andmedical education, leaving precious little for disease prevention, rural
health care, or for drugs and essential supplies. Compounding these
problems, the public health network is blighted by the corruption and
inefficiency that afflicts every public service in India.10
The government’s failure to improve health conditions dispropor
tionately affects the poor. This is because poverty and sickness are
inextricably intertwined, with each synergistically multiplying the
risks of the other. The poor face higher risks of malnutrition, disease,
disability and mortality than do more prosperous families. As chil
dren, this endangers both their physical development and their per
formance at school, quite apart from their survival. (Survival is still
far from a certain prospect in UP, where more than one-tenth of all
children die by the age of 5.)11 The frequent bouts of sickness and
malnutrition suffered in childhood means that as an adult he or she
is likely to be shorter, weaker and more susceptible to disease than
those from more prosperous, backgrounds. In Baba ka Gaon, both the
men and women of scheduled-caste and' other poor families are on
average three-five inches shorter than the Thakurs, and significantly
frailer. These handicaps reduce their earning prospects, as stronger
and taller people are employed more readily and paid higher wages
in labouring jobs. Moreover, illness is a major factor in pushing the
poor deeper into poverty, because of the loss of daily wages as a
consequence of absenteeism, from being unable to work productively
(or at all, in the case of the disabled), and from the costs of medicines
and care. Medicines for a simple sickness can cost more than two
days’ wages in Baba ka Gaon. In 1995, two months of ordinary,
uncomplicated fever forced Shrinath to spend Rs 700 - nearly onefifth of his monthly salary — on medicines. The expenses for more
serious problems are devastatingly large. The debt of Rs 30,000 that

Ram Dass’ family currently owes includes Rs 10,000 that was spent
on treating Shrinath’s wife for a severe obstetric problem.

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The Land Still Belongs
to the-Richest Families

RAM Dass says: Apart from the Thakurs, everyone was poor before
zamindari abolition. Some of the Banias [traders] did have money
fiom business. The middle castes were also poor, though not as poor
as us Harijans. And even up to now, the richest are the Thakurs, then
the middle castes, and the poorest are the Harijans! The Thakurs had
all the advantages earlier: they were rich, they were educated, they
had land, and they had us Harijans to be their slaves. So it is not
surprising that till today they are the lords and we are still poor.
Mata Prasad, a Pasi man in his 40s, comments: All the Thakur
families in the village are much richer than the middle castes and
scheduled castes. Now there are 20 houses of the three zamindars.
Because of this their holdings have become less. But they still have
more land than Jam Hies of other castes. They have more money. And
in each of their families there is someone with a job. They have
govei nmentjobs, one is a professor, another is in the police, someone
in the army. The poorest Thakur has 3.5 acres and quite a lot of
money. He sold a lot of his land. The richest, the former pradhan,

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The land still belongs to the richest families • 213
has more than 35 acres, and he is alone, no brothers. Another of the
richest lives near Rae Bareli. He supervises the work on the land he
owns here and then leaves. He is a businessman, he has a brick kiln
and lots of land in other villages. He comes now and again on his
motorcycle, the fat fellow, creates all the trouble and goes away.
Until today, the most prosperous families in Baba ka Gaon are
the 20 Thakur families. At a level of wealth equal to that of the less
prosperous of the Thakurs are the three Brahmin families. About five
of the higher-middle-caste families are also relatively prosperous in

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terms of the amount of land they own, but still do not approach the
Thakurs in terms of other assets, such as the size of their homes or
monetary savings.

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Primarily because the three original Thakur families have branched
out into 20 smaller families, none of the Thakurs individually owns
more than about 35 acres and about an acre of orchards. While the
two largest landholders in the village would by national standards be
classified in the top bracket of landowners — and also be violating
UP s land ceiling laws — the- remaining Thakur families on average
own about ten acres each, which ranks them as large holders by
current Indian and UP standards.
But although their individual holdings are no longer on the scale
of their undivided families, the amount of land owned by Baba ka
Gaon’s Thakurs as a group has not greatly diminished since the
abolition of zamindari. Moreover, of the land sold by them in the past
50 years, the bulk was bought by the higher-middle castes, with only
a small amount purchased by the few scheduled-caste families -

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including Ram Dass’s - who have improved their economic position.
The rest of the families in Baba ka Gaon have simply been too
impoverished to purchase any land.
In comparison with the impoverished and the merely poor (like
Ram Dass), who comprise three-quarters of Baba ka Gaon’s popu
lation, or even with the well-off among the higher-middle castes, the
Thakurs are still an incomparably well-off elite. By national standards
of income and wealth, they range from middle to upper-middle in
come. They own very many times more land than people of other

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castes in the village, and their land is of far better quality. Every one
of their homes is large and built of brick. Two own the only tractors
in Baba ka Gaon, and one the only jeep. Of the six pumps for
irrigation, four are owned by Thakur families. They are also very
much better off in terms of education, current jobs and future pros
pects. The vast majority have incomes from family members who
have secure, middle-income jobs in urban areas, generally with the

government, quasi-government agencies or the armed services. Their
children are likely to be employed in similar jobs. Virtually no other
family in Baba ka Gaon can aspire to such things.
Ram Dass says: The British 'have been gone for 50 years, and
India has been independent, but we are still not free of these oppres
sors'. We have gone from one bad spot to another! On the govern
ment ’s papers it’s all there that this has been done for the poor, this

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assistance, this land, for this poor person, but it all gets eaten up on
the way and the poor person gets nothing. And if there's ever an
enquiry, they are all in league with each other from the top to the
bottom, all the way from the officials to the village pradhan
Our poverty is man-made. The rich know how to extract money,
f take one rupee from them, they make two rupees profit from this
The rich become richer because they are in the business of being rich!

fyou have the facilities it is easier to make money. It takes me a day

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to reach Pratapgarh, but the rich can reach it in one hour by jeep.
And those who have money can also payfor a good education, so they
lave the skills to prosper. And once you've made enough money you

pass it on to your children. And even if you lose some you never
ecome badly off But if you 're poor you can only progress slowly,
and that only if you’re not being oppressed. The big fish eat the

smaller fish and that is why there is no progress for the poor. Those
oj the poor who manage to survive may sometimes progress, but they
are the targets of the anger of the rich. The rich find means ofkeeping

its in bondage, keeping us down. They don’t want us to rise.
These rich people will even take our little land away from us'
Bhagwan, who is of my caste, has had half his land eaten up by the
Brahmin lawyer from Lalganj. The Brahmin has got the lekhpal to

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The land still belongs to the richest eamilies *215

draw a boundary across part of Bhagwan’s land. Bhagwan has been
working this land for the last 20 years since he got it on patta [from
land reform]. It was very poor land, sloping, but Bhagwan cut it and
worked on it until it was good. Then the Brahmin paid off the lekhpal

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and got the land!
Durbhe, Ram Dass’s young relative, adds: The Thakurs have also
forcibly occupied the village waste land, about 35 acres of it. They
are sitting over it like a cobra with its hood spread.
In Baba ka Gaon, throughout UP, and across India, the battle over
land continues. The winners in the conflict today - as in the past halfcentury and earlier - are almost always those with large land-holdings,
not the poor. Where the large landowners have lost land, the ones to .
gain have been the medium, prosperous farmers just below them.
By the 1990s, a review of land-ownership data for UP and India
would suggest that in the past half-century all the large landholdings
had disappeared, equity had increased correspondingly, and there is
no room left for meaningful redistribution of land. These conclusions
are diametrically opposed to reality on the ground. True, the numerous
huge estates of 10,000 or 20,000 acres owned by the princes and grand
landlords no longer exist. But beyond bringing about this change, the
Indian government’s land reform efforts have achieved little, and even
less when seen from the perspective of the impoverished.
Thus, in UP and many other parts of India, many of the former
feudal lords still own several hundred acres each of land, either
through exploiting the liberal exemptions granted in the land reform
laws or through illegal strategems. Most also own the hugely prof
itable orchards that they were allowed to keep under the beneficent
terms of zamindari abolition. In the area around Baba ka Gaon, most
of the grand ex-landlords are each estimated to own between 500 and
1,000 acres of land, each adding up to a fortune of tens of millions
of rupees.1 Many have had long-running land ceiling cases filed by
the state government against them, including the ex-rajas of Kalakankar,
Pratapgarh, Bhadri and Amethi? If the cases have been pursued only
desultorily, and never won, it has a lot to do with the fact that these
ex-rajas have all been Congress worthies and held prominent political

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posts. A confidant of Mrs Gandhi’s, Dinesh Singh of Kalakankar was
India’s foreign minister in the late 1960s; on his death, his daughter
was elected to Parliament. Abhay Pratap Singh of Pratapgarh has been
an MP twice. Vir Bhadra Singh of Bhadri was governor of Himachal
Piadesh; his son, known across Awadh as Toofan (Hurricane) Singh,
has a long list of criminal charges against him, but the police or
government dare not arrest him. And the infamous Sanjay Singh of
Amethi, accused by a federal investigative agency of masterminding
the murder of his girlfriend s husband, was a Sanjay Gandhi strongman
and later MP and junior minister.
To the estates of the feudal lords have been added very many —
no one knows quite how many - huge farms and orchards owned by
rich businessmen, film-stars and politicians. They have purchased
faims in part for the status and pleasures of possessing luxurious
country retreats. An equally potent reason has been that the farms are
used to launder their black money, as income from agriculture is taxexempt. In HP’s Terai region, farms of as much as 3-4,000 acres are
no rarity, owned by very rich and powerful Indians, including H.P.
Nanda of the Escorts industrial empire, and Akbar ‘Dumpy’ Ahmed,
a courtier of Sanjay Gandhi and a former MP.3
The disregard of ceiling laws is so blatant that even on the outskirts
of Delhi the very rich own huge farms. The show piece is certainly the
(roughly) 180-acre spread owned by the Oberoi hoteliers, the land alone
conservatively valued at Rs 200 crores ($60 million). And by the mid1980s, farms around Delhi and other large cities were no longer used for
fanning, but sported (in violation of building codes) huge mansions,
most boasting swimm ing pools, tennis courts, fleets of servants, and the
other necessities of the good life. (Ironically, these multi-mill ion-do liar
mansions are typically rarely used second homes.) The government’s
blind eye to this visible abuse is because the owners of these farms are
the veiy elite of India, including the Gandhis, former prime minister
Chandrashekhar (once, professedly, a socialist), several ex-maharajas
and rajas, every media baron including the hugely influential owners of
the India Today magazine empire, and arriviste politicians who have
made illegitimate fortunes in the ‘get-rich-quick’ spirit of 1990s India.

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The land still belongs to the richest families *217
Because so much land is held illegally or through disguised own
ership, land ownership data for UP - or India - masks the extent of
the inequity.4 But even if the data is accepted at face value, the
inequity is enormous, exposing the failure of land reform since In
dependence. National data indicates that the top 2.4 per cent of land
owners, each with 25 acres or more, own nearly one-quarter of the
country’s total arable land. In contrast, the bottom 57 per cent of
India’s landowners, each owning less than 2.5 acres, occupy a little

more than one-tenth of the arable land.
Given this inequity and the vast amount of land held illegally
beyond the maximum allowed by current ceiling laws, the scope for
further land redistribution is still gigantic and would significantly
reduce poverty. A planning document in the mid -1980s estimated that
roughly 20 million acres could be redistributed if existing land ceiling
legislation was enforced^ this is about ten times the amount distributed
under Mrs Gandhi’s much-touted land ceiling programme in the 1970s.
Clearly, a stricter ceiling would free more land for redistribution.6
But with each year, the constituency advocating land reform
weakens and the numbers of those pushing to revoke land ceilings
strengthens. Especially in the period of economic liberalization begun
in the late 1980s, there has been a growing consensus amongst the el ite,
opinion-makers and politicians that ceilings on land are inherently bad
and counter productive, and hamper the development of agri-business.
There is complete disregard of concerns of equity or of the fact that
landlessness, unemployment and poverty will inevitably rise if more
land comes under large holdings. It is now progressive for a politician
to propose easing land Ceilings, though three decades ago such talk
would have been condemned as heresy. Consequently, in the past
decade ceilings on agricultural land (as well as restrictions on industrial
use of forest land) have rapidly been eased. In 1995, the government of
Madhya Pradesh leased out 10,000 acres of. forest land to a private
orchard business. The following year, on the grounds of the ‘new
environmentofeconomic liberalization sweepingthecountry’,the land
ceiling in Karnataka province was raised fourfold under Chief MinisterH.D. Deve Gowda (soon to become prime minister). Also inserted into

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218 • Words i iki

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the legislation was a remarkable clause allowing the state government
to allow holdings of any size in any case where it deemed it was in the
‘public interest’ to do so.7 As prime minister, Mr Gowda attempted to
do away with land ceiling laws across India. He failed - but only justbecause of opposition from the Communist members of the Front
government. His attempt is a premonition of the direction of change.

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The Rajapur overlords
Ram Dass says: Land redistribution is very important. Take the
zamindars. They save the land that they have by claiming it is under
a temple or part of a co-operative. They are very clever. Take the
Rajapur family. They lost some of it due to the ceilings as they had
chunks of 400 or 500 acres. But most of it they saved. And they can
always save it by planting orchards or claiming it is orchard land.
Hence every large landlord has managed to save a large portion of
■ his land. And lots of it they leave it lying fallow, and they won’t even
give it over to sharecropping.
Lalit Kumar Saroj, a distant relative of Ram Dass’s, who lives in
the nearby village of Anni, worked for decades as a guard at the home
of the Rajapur zamindars, the overlords of Baba ka Gaon, a job that
his "father had also done for decades. He left this job in the early
1990s, when he was well over 70 years old. These decades of associa
tion made him uniquely intimate with the affairs of his and Ram Dass’s
erstwhile overlord. (To protect their identities, the names of people
interviewed here have been changed, as has the name of the village.)
Lalit Kumar says: About five or six people still work at the
Rajapur kothi [mansion]. When Ifirst joined, about 40 or 50 worked
there. The zamindari covered 12 villages and all the land in the
villages. Today, near their home, they still have 50 acres on one side
and 40 on another, between three brothers. They have more land
further away, not even counting their orchards! Altogether, they have
more than 125 acres apart from the orchards. They leave about 40
acres fallow. And they have about 20 acres of mango orchards, which
they sell to contractors each year.

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The land still belongs to the richest families *219

The zamindar is Lal Pratap Singh. One of his brothers is a lawyer
in Pratapgarh. They are very educated - in Allahabad and Lucknow.
The other brothers look after the land. None are in politics. They still
have a lol ofcash but they don’t show their money. They have tractors
and jeeps. They hire labour; they don’t allow sharecropping. They
have very recently stopped the old system where they would give half
an acre or so to the labourers who work for them; there are still some
left, particularly on distant areas of their land, but this is a dimin
ishing practice. They know that even poor people now know about
the tenancy law - that tenants get title to the land after ten years -

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and they don’t want them to stake their claim.
I have 3.5 acres of land. My elder brother and I each had 2.5
acres that we receivedfrom our father. He was given this land by the
Rajapur zamindar. Since then we have increased the amount of land
we own. My brother now has 7.5 acres of agricultural land and
2 acres of orchards.
An old man from the Nai (barber - a scheduled caste) caste says:

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In our village, the scheduled castes were about 20years ago each given
about one-seventh ofan acre by the government. Not only was this very
little but most of the land was such that three generations could spend
their lives working to improve it and it still would not produce any
thing! So we have land only in name because we end up spending more
on the land than we get from it. Ifyou saw the land you would under
stand why! And, anyway, if you do start producing something, the
Thakurs will occupy it! There was a hillock that I had chipped away
at and levelled and when it was flat the Thakurs occupied it!
A young woman says: Some don 7 even have this much. We have

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to depend on our children to send us money so that we can eat. Our
small children have to go and work in roadside shops. My small son
works in a shop where they repair stoves. People learn trades because
they have io live.
Lal it Kumar: Pas is, Nais, Chamars, Yadavs, Mauryas - they all
had land here as sharecroppers at the time when zamindari was
abolished. [The first three are scheduled castes; the other two higher-

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middle castes.] The Pasis had taken a lot because they were numeri-

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cally large. The Thakurs would never work on the land. They would

give us a little patch to cultivate in exchange for our having to
cultivate the rest of their land.

When zamindari was abolished, we sharecroppers wereforced off
the land. None of us poor people had any money when these reforms
began. And we were all illiterate. But the rich people knew everything
about the laws and paperwork. Because of this we were all fooled.
We believed whatever we were told. Anyway, very often we didn 't even
know whose land we used to work on, we were that simple! Because
of this the Thakurs cornered all the land during zamindari abolition.
It was only when some of us started going out that we acquired
some knowledge about these things. Thus, even though the reserva
tions for government jobs had been started since Independence, none
of us knew how to take advantage ofthe reservations. It was only when
our people rose up somewhat that we gained knowledge of these
things. Some became teachers and learned about the law and our
rights. Before that the Thakur teachers would thrash the studentsfrom
the scheduled castes and purposely fail them!
Ram Lal, a destitute Pasi man: says, We are three brothers who
own two-thirds of an acre between us. We support a mother and
several children on this. Earlier we used to work as sharecroppers,
. we would take one acre or more, but when the zamindari abolition
law came the Thakurs took the land awayfrom us. Now they give land
on sharecropping only for one year.
We all get angry that the Rajapur zamindar and the other big lords
have so much land lyingfallow, when we are dyingfor land. But most
of the time we are so busy trying to survive that we don’t think about it.
Lalit Kumar interjects: The Thakurs would rather leave the land
fallow than give it away or give it to sharecroppers. In fact, they keep
hoping that one day our wages will fall because we are still poor and
then they will again get us to work all their land.
Ram Lal adds: We don't revolt because thefew who want to revolt
are outnumbered by those who are scared oflosing what little they have.
An old man says: We don 7 have the strength tofight because we are
afraid that the little bit of wages we get, we won't even get that.
!

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The land still belongs to the richest eamilies • 221

Anyway, the District Magistrate and the other officers don ’t do any
thing even though they know that the zamindars have benami [illegal literally, without name - implying that its ownership is disguised] land.
Lal it Kumar: And we are still very afraid of the Thakurs in the
village, let alone the big zamindars. If they see us sitting in this group
today they will abuse us and ask us what we were talking about!
Earlier, of course, we could not have dared to talk like this! The
Thakurs would have beaten us all up. It is because of these laws and
reform that they’ve become a bit cautious. But even today many of
them will still hit you before they bother to speak to you.

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In neighbouring RaeBareli district, once Mrs Gandhi’s pampered pocket
borough, the District Magistrate recounts his experience with land re
form: You know, poor people are so scared offightingfor the land that
they have been given title to that I often find them saying that they don ’t
want the land. Or even more common, they will give it to us in writing
that they have possession, when actually the Thakurs still have it!
During disputes I send, police to see that the poor get possession
of the land. At this time the Thakurs won’t do anything. But the minute
the police go back the situation reverts to the status quo. The Thakurs
are still too powerful for any poor person to challenge them. I some
times feel it is almost like going against nature to take land from the
rich and then to give it to the poor. It’s much easier to allow the rich
to grab the poor’s land!
The resistance to land reform comes because the landowners,feel
that this land belongs to them and should never be given to anyone
else. Even if their land is taken away and merged with the gaon sabha
land [common land vested in the village council], they continue to
act as if it is their land. In fact, they often act as if all gaon sabha
land belongs to them. And anyway, there are a lot of exemptions given
in the ceiling laws. For instance, take groves, which are exempt from

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any ceiling. Because of this a lot of landlords have converted their
agricultural land into groves. They also do this because it is difficult
to get the manpower neededfor agriculture as the old system ofbegar
is no longer available to them.

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In Rae Bareli district, to date only 4,000 acres have been taken
over as surplus land. That "s really nothing at all. There are thousands
and thousands oj acres left with large landowners. Much of this land
Ifallow, which is a waste of a national resource. The problem
is not that we don t know which land or how much is benami land.
We know all this. The problem is to act.

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How the poor are Subjugated, and
how they Fight Back

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NEARLY 80 years after the Awadh revolt and 50 years after Inde
pendence, the upper-caste former landlords of Awadh - Thakurs and
Brahmins alike - remain the most influential and powerful group in
the region, though they are far from being the supreme lords of the
past. Many of the former grand landlords are currently, or were
earlier, members of parliament or of the legislative assembly, gen
erally representing the Congress, the BJP (the former Jana Sangh) or
the Janata Dal. They and their kin include ministers, rich businessmen, ■
prominent lawyers and judges, senior officers in the civil service,
foreign service, army and police, and even a former prime minister
- the elite of independent India. And in virtually every village, the
former village landlords are still the local bosses and crucial inter
mediaries in the political machines of the Congress and other major
parties. From their ranks have come a large share of members of the
legislature, district-level politicians, provincial bureaucrats, police
officers and staff, lawyers, professors and teachers, and, not least,
prosperous ‘Green Revolution’ farmers..

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The persistent domination of both land ownership and positions of
power by the upper castes has meant that the poor and low-caste have
had little scope for emancipating themselves. Because the Congress
spurned radical land reforms, the poor began at Independence with
little or no land, with no other assets, and from a position of subjugation
to the grand and village landlords. In their quest for land and foreman
cipation since then, they have had to contend not only with the hostility
of the landed upper-castes to claims for redistribution but also the upper
castes’ domination of virtually every position of power, be it in the
pol ice, bureaucracy, legislature or judicial system. In such a system, the
upper castes have used money, superior information, status, fear, vio
lence, and their kinship ties to ensure that the poor get neither land, nor
higher wages, nor freedom from their bondage. The result has been that
the poor of Awadh remain poor.
In Baba ka Gaon, the descendants of the village landlords - 18
families or so - have managed to dominate the rest of the village,

■ desP'te the passing of a half-century since the abolition of zamindari.
Till about the mid-1980s or so, their hold was so strong that life for
the poor seemed not to have changed since Independence. In the past
decade, the momentum of change has become faster, and though their
power has now visibly diminished, the Thakurs remain by far the most
powerful group and caste in Baba ka Gaon.
Ram Dass says: It is more peaceful in the village now than in
the past. Things have improved by at least 50 per cent since when
I was a youth. But true independence has not come. Independence
means that the village is also independent, not just the nation; that
in the village the big and powerful listen to the small and weak as
much as the small listen to the big. There shouldn’t be tension and
this oppression. It’s not enough that we have a little more to eat
now than before. We should also be free of tension, we should not
be oppressed. The attitude of the Thakurs towards us hasn ’t changed.
They still feel that if anyone has to eat, it has to be them, if anyone
wears clothes it must be them. Their desire is this: that there be
rich and poor and the division between them be as great as it has
always been.

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HOW THE POOR ARE SUBJUGATED, AND HOW THEY FIGHT BACK • 225
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Begar might have stopped 20 years ago but even until ten years
ago the Thakurs would only give 1.5 kg ofgrain for 14 hours of work.
This is not wages! A healthy man eats 1.5 kg for one meal. The
Thakurs would ensure that you didn ’t die, that you had enough to
survive, but that you didn't live either! They knew we would then end
up taking loans from them and we would then be stuckforever in their
hold. It used to happen that many who had taken loans would have
to sell their land to the Thakurs because they couldn ’t pay off their
debts. The only way you could have fought this is by filing a case,
but how could you file a case when you didn t have enough to eat!
You need to organize to change things but until ten years ago we
were unable to do so, we were all too poor and defenceless. The
Thakurs would beat us up, they’d come, three or four of them, to our
house and beat us.. The rest of us would run away. We were fearful
because they owned everything, nothing was ours, even though
zamindari had been ended. They decided who got more, who got less,
where one s cattle could graze, even where one could walk! And no
one listens to the poor at the police station, even now. But over the
years some of us got little bits of land, and the government road
opened, so we can walk freely. And we have our own grinding-mill.
It’s only since all this happened that we began to slowly resist them.
We had to fight the Thakurs ten years ago to raise the wages. We
fought by all of us scheduled and middle castes saying to them that we
wouldn ' t workfor such wages, even ifwe died ofstarvation. Wesaidthat.
anyway we can’t live on what you give us, with this 1.5 kg only lean get
to eat, and so what is my son to live on? At that time the government used
to say that we should get Rs 18 per day, but we got nothing of the sort.
So we all decided tofightfor this, though ofcourse this was not a violent
fight like a lathi-charge. We forced them to give us what we demanded.
If someone went and workedfor them for less, we put pressure on that
person, saying ‘Why did you do this?

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and they stopped.

The Thakurs tried to scare all of us by saying that they would get
an outside militia to intimidate us. Many of us would wonder what
is the point offighting because we 'll just get killed. We were so used
to not having land or money and being defenceless. But since by then

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many of us had some land, even though it was so poor, and we’d
earned some money and been io the cities, we were braver than
earlier. The Thakurs only began to do any work in their fields after
t us battle with them! Till then they wouldjust stand there and order
us around. Now they do some work, even if it's only running their
irrigation pump or driving the tractor. And it was only at that time
that we stopped the practice of getting up from the charpai whenever
hI1
the Thakurs sP°ke ^ rudely to us as
they had done when 1 was a child. ‘Go and work in ourfields, do this,
go thei e. You can t do anything about the Thakurs ’ rudeness or cruel
comments. You have to bear it. Just like earlier we used to bear it
when they took off their shoes and hit
. us. Like they used to drink liquor
and pass this way and insult our women. Earlier, we would even
ignore whol they said about our women. IVe were afraid of getting
ln“> a fight. But now we can 7 bear their abuse of our women.
,t, "
70 yearS ,"'er”,heP°lice station for thefirst time during
the panchayat elections in 1995. There has been some goodfrom that
fight [during thepanchayat elections, for the first time the scheduled
and middle castes in Baba ka Gaon physically hit back on being

a aC.,e, y 1 ,e Tl’al<urs; see next chapter], even if we all endup going
to ja.l for tt. The Thakurs have been doing this in the past too
involving people who are trying to progress in false cases. They can

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"sUeTh '"t S, befcm^
ha'"! ,hePollce and‘h<t officials on their
. side. The local officials and police are all upper-caste, or if they are

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Wi"StiU^ ^ders ofthe upper-caste
P ,
‘"’O Pe°P,e of,hisfamHy involved in one case
ge the schoolchddren involved so they can ’I study, gel those who are
pi ogress mg^ When the Thakurs see us progressing, it hurts them like
they have dust in their eyes.
We have a saying here that if there are maggots in the wound
o n domesticated animal, all one does is to take the name of seven
lekhpals and seven darogas [local police official], and you sing this

mantra: the maggots will get out and crawl away because the lekhpal
anddaroga are even more parasitic and destructive than them! [Both
sets of officials have historically been of the upper castes ]

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HOW THE POOR ARE SUBJUGATED, AND HOW THEY FIGHT BACK • 227

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As us poorer people have become more aware of our rights and
how we are exploited, there have been more fights in the village
against the upper castes. If one has no option, then one has to labour
for the upper castes who own land. But now most of us have some
of our own land and won 7 work for them. This is what makes them
behave even worse towards us. Their oppression of us continues.
We will have to learn to do what they do. To use money or violence.
By remaining naked and helpless, you don ’t get your rightful share.
But there is no point in getting angry that things have only changed
so slowly and so little. One has to be happy even for the small
changes that have taken place. Earlier there was no food and now
most of us have something to eat. Earlier there was no road. We
never knew what electricity was. Some people grew old without even
seeing a train, let alone climbing into one. We used to live like

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land were given a patch.
Shrinath says: Myfatherfeels there has been a revolution because
he’s lived through slavery and terrible poverty. But I've lived through
comparatively better times. How can one be happy in slavery? If my
father had been happy, why did he rim away, why did he leave his

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animals. After Independence came and zamindari was abolished,
those of us who worked hard got a little. Those who didn 't have

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home? He tells me - I was just a young child then - that every
Scheduled- and low-caste man in the village used to work in the
Thakurs’ fields or in their houses. Everyone in the village was tied
to them; even the people who had some land had to work for them.
And the wages for working the entire day and night for them was only
1.5 kg ofgrain. My family would live just on this much grain! Nobody
is happy in slavery. Happiness is only in freedom. What kind of
happiness can there be in bondage?
■.. .
Even in the years since my childhood the oppression in the village
has lessened. We are more free. There was much more oppression
when I was in school. Every scheduled-caste person still had to work
as labourers for the Thakurs. This was in-the early 1970s. Even when
I became a teacher I still had to work as a labourer for the uppercastes. Only when I saved some money from teaching were we able

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228 • Words like FREEDOM

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to buy some loud and gradually stop workingfor others. But even this
was just 10 or 12 years ago.
The upper castes have nowadays become softer and more mild
in the way they treat others. They used to be the zamindars earlier
but now there is some kind of equality between us because we also
own some land, even if it is much less than them. Earlier we were
absolutely poor, we could not say anything, we were not free to leave
the village. Now at least we people are educated, we know our rights
and about the laws and regulations.
Now the upper castes don 7 do us harm directly, like they used
to beat us <earlier. They do it indirectly. For instance, if I’m going
' • alone somewhere they 'll inform their relatives outside ...c
the village that
I am from a low caste and that they should beat me \up.
~ They are very

experienced in this kind of thing. So they encircle you and beat yo
m
up. And their people ore in big posts in the police and government,
so no one bothers to listen to our <complaints. In both the government
and administration, 90 per cent are upper-caste people. If there
was
an equal balance between
'
the upper and lower castes in both gov
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ernment and administration, then everyone’s interests would be kept
in mmd. But until then, the government and administration will work
only far the upper castes.

It is not constantly tense everywhere. From village to village, it
varies depending on the proportion of upper- to lower-caste people.
e battle between us has been going on for centuries, and the upper
castes keep harking back to the time when they were the lords and
every word they uttered was law for us! But their word is no longer
law m villages where the lower castes are in large numbers, or where
the lower castes have managed to get educated. But in places where

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the lower castes are not educated or where there are few of them
t icy are still very repressed because they are not able to understand
or demand their rights.
Hansraj says: The village has changed even from when I was a
teenager. One could not move around the village freely like Rakesh,
my younger brother, does now, though even now none of us go to the
Thakurs' side of the village. Earlier, there was always tension. The

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HOW THE POOR ARE SUBJUGATED, AND HOW THEY FIGHT BACK • 229

Thakurs were always beating somebody from the lower castes. Even
the children would be beaten by them. Once our bullocks went into
a Thakur’s field and they thrashed me with a staff.
It’s only in the last seven or eight years that the oppression by
the Thakurs has slowly become less. This happened because most of
us found some alternative means of employment, offeeding our fami
lies. Some of us got a little land from the land reform, others went
to the city and came back and bought some land. So some of it's' '
stopped going to the Thakurs for work and so stopped fearing them
so much. It’s only the people facing the most hardship who have no
alternative but to work for them and these people are still terrorized
by the Thakurs.
But the Thakurs are still very powerful and oppress all of us.
There s still always tension in the village even though we are less
afraid than we used to be. Now what has changed is that they don’t
shout at us or order us aroundface-to-face, like they did earlier. Only
the future will tell whether the tension and oppression will get less.

•1

Discrimination
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Ritual discrimination by the upper castes against the former
untouchables has lessened in Baba ka Gaon, but is still pervasive.
Fifty years of protective legislation and other safeguards have not
made an enormous dent on untouchability in rural India, where the
vast majority of the scheduled castes live, though the situation has
improved radically in urban areas.1 In practice, discrimination is now
muted in public arenas, such as schools or roadside hotels, but ex
tensive in the ‘private’ sphere of the home.
Ram Dass says: There were so many discriminations against the
scheduled castes that it will take a long time for it to end. There are still
upper-caste people in the village who believe in untouchability. If we
touch something, they will sprinkle Ganga-jcil [Ganges water] on it.
A decade ago the scheduled-caste villagers defied the upper castes
and constructed a modest, whitewashed shrine in the lower-caste area
ofthe village. Says Ram Dass: The temple on our side ofthe village was

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recently built by the Dom [a scheduled caste]. Earlier there was a ped
estal there with a Devi statue. Now the upper castes let their sewage and

water run past it because they say a low-caste person should not have
dared to build a temple. Things like untouchability will only change
when we stop going where we are not allowed to sit. When we refuse to
go to the Thakurs ’ houses. We've started doing this already.
Durbhe, says: We now treat the Thakurs the way they treat us. We
might have ^aten at their house once or twice during their weddings or
festivals. Which is fine because they are bigger than us, but how many

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times can we allo w this ifwe keep offering them hospitality in return and
they never accept? We are also something after all, we are humans.
However weak you are at some point you are going to rebel. Ifyou are
rich you don t eat gold and silver, you only eat wheat like we do!
Ram Dass: One old Thakur woman had fallen into the well, anda man of our caste pulled her out. And on coming out of the well she
had a bath, saying that the man had contaminated her by touching
her when he climbed into the well to pull her out! This happened about
15 years ago, in the well near her house. And then she goes and cries
to her relatives, ‘Bring me water, I need to bathe, ’ even though she

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was soaked in water! When it came to saving her life then there was
no question about untouchability, but when her life was saved she
went back and said that she had been contaminated.
Everybody makes dirt. But people think that the person who
cleans the dirt is a dirty and polluted person. But this is completely
wrong. It is the person who makes the dirt and does not clean it who
is unclean. The people who clean not only their dirt but that of others
should be considered great or god-like, because they do what parents
do for their children. So.why is it that people who clean for others

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are considered dirty? Even with officials it’s like this. If the patwari
is of the upper castes, if we go to him, we can ’t even sit on the charpai
We will sit like dogs on the floor. Only if there is a middle-caste
.patwari can we sit on the charpai.
Shrinath says: Look at all the other religions, whether it is Chris
tianity, Sikhism or Islam - there isn ’t as much discrimination in them as
in Hinduism. The essence of any religion is ‘Roti ya beti ’ [bread or

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HOW THE POOR ARE SUBJUGATED, AND HOW THEY FIGHT BACK • 231

daughter] - you have, to freely eat or intermarry with each other. It is
important to have at least one ofthese relationships with anotherperson
if there is to be any equality. There might not be a relationship of
marriage; that will only happen when we are equal. A poor person
cannot have marital ties with a richfamily because the question ofstatus
comes in. But at least you can eat together! But it's not like this in the
Hindu religion where everyone is dividedfrom the other by caste! And
all these upper-caste people are the root cause of the problem.
Ram Dass: My father would eat meat, but I stopped at about the
age of 35. I got into the community of people who believed in the
sanctity of life. We save ourselves from sin by not eating meat,
because God is in everything. But even though I am a vegetarian, the
upper castes will not take a smoke from my chillum [clay pipe] even
though so many of them eat meat! Their sense of caste discrimination
is still so strong that they still consider us unclean. But I give my
chillum to people irrespective of whether they eat meat or not.
I am friendly towards all people, whether of high or low caste,
or whether Hindu, Muslim or Buddhist. Everyone is mortal, everyone
has been created by God. All people do their own work, they live in
their houses, and feed themselves. We all have come the same way
and will go the same way. We live together. Religion or caste is not
written in our blood, nor in our appearance. If God had meant these
differences io be important he would have given someone horns and
someone else four hooves so you could distinguish them.

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Terror and Violence
Across Awadh, the equation between the upper and lower castes varies
enormously from village to village. Thus, even in villages neighbour
ing Baba ka Gaon, the power of the upper-caste landlords, and their
monopoly on land, is almost as absolute as it was before the abolition
of zamindari a half-century ago. Their hold is reflected in their being
able to keep wage rates for labourers very low, in some instances three
times lower than in Baba ka Gaon. Generally, these are villages where
the upper castes outweigh the lower castes in number.

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But despite this diversity, one constant across Awadh and most of
UP is that upper-caste violence and brutality against the scheduled and
lower-middle castes is unrelenting. Much of this violence is a continu

^9

ation of the old pattern of subordinating the lower castes; some of it also
reflects heightened assertiveness on the part of the lower castes.2 Ac
cording to Ram Dass and others in Baba ka Gaon, upper-caste violence
against the scheduled castes is commonplace in the region.
Io comprehend the scope of the violence, consider that on con
secutive days, within a radius of 35 km from Baba ka Gaon, there
were brutal attacks by the upper castes on the scheduled castes. On
1 July 1995, an adolescent scheduled-caste girl was raped by a young
Thakur. A day earlier, a young scheduled-caste man had his forearms
lopped off by a Thakur landlord.

The village of Pithi, some 25 km from Baba ka Gaon, is cut off
from the mainstream of Pratapgarh district by the river Sai, which
must be forded to reach the village, as paths from other directions are
impassable most of the year. (The names of the village and people
have been changed to maintain privacy.) The village seems idyllic:
groves of mango and other fruit trees cascade down small hillocks
to the river, and peacocks call in the dark. It is about half the size
of Baba ka Gaon.

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Ramesh Pasi s family lives in a rudimentary hut at the edge of
the village. He and his family sit in a tight, tense knot outside,
whispering. According to the report filed at the police station by
Ramesh Pasi, his daughter Champa, aged 15, went at 7 a.m. to the
fields to defecate. While she was pulling up her sal war (stringed
pajamas), she was attacked by Prahlad Singh, the 25-year-old son of

an important Thakur landlord, who ‘caught hold of her hand with bad
intentions,’ reads the text of the report. Champa’s mother says, ‘He
was hiding somewhere and when she was pulling up her salwar he
attacked her from behind. Then she started screaming and he covered
her mouth. So she bit him and screamed again, which is when we
heard her. And then he ran away. We all saw him running away.’
In fact, Champa was raped by Prahlad Singh, said Shrinath, who
• . .found this out because he is of the same caste as her family. Shrinath

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HOW THE POOR ARE SUBJUGATED, AND HOW THEY FIGHT BACK * 233

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explained that the father did not write this in the complaint to the
police - and the mother denies it in public - because it would ruin
his daughter’s marriage prospects. But as a result of the parents
reluctance to state that Champa had actually been raped, their com
plaint was classified by the police under a statute that is far less serious
than rape. This makes it unlikely that Prahlad Singh will go to jail
for any length of time, even if the case reaches the courts, which is
itself improbable.
Champa’s father says: The case was written up right away by the.
police. The station officer came the next day for one hour. He did not
meet the boy; he only went to the place where the incident took place,
took my daughter with him, asked her a few questions and wrote
something. Then he said he would come back, but it's been a month
and he hasn 't done so. We went a week later to see the officer, who
said, ‘Why are you worrying, your case is registered and we will'do
what is needed. ’
His wife interjects angrily: They then went to Ram Lakhan. [The
Bahujan Samaj Party candidate for MLA; the party represents a large
section of the scheduled castes.] He took them to Lucknow to meet
Mayawati at the rally. But the crowd was so great that they couldn 't
even get close to her. What can we do if no one listens to us? [A
scheduled-caste woman, Mayawati was UP’s chief minister for a few
months in mid-1995. She is a leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party.] My
husband has sent a registered copy of the FIR to the police in Lucknow,
to Pratapgarh and to Allahabad. [The head of the district police is
based in Pratapgarh, the head for the region in Allahabad, and the state
head in Lucknow.] But the Thakurs went to see Pramod Tiwari, the
Congress MLA, and perhaps gave him some money, this is what some
people told us, which is why this case is not progressing.
The father says: The Thakurs are constantly threatening us now.
They pulled off the thatch from our roof. And they have threatened
to burn oar house down. We don't work for them anymore, but we
workfor anyone else who will employ us. All of the Thakurs are allied
with each other, so it’s very difficult for us to find work. Our house
is surrounded on all sides by fields belonging to the Thakurs. So they

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say that unless you work for us we won't let you cross our fields. We
have one-and-a-half acres between my whole family, but it’s near the
river and gives just one crop every year. It's one
kilometre from here,
but it’s flooded most of the time. We don’t get any rice from it. We
plant some things, but not much.
Only ten per cent of the scheduled caste and lower castes have
land. Earl,er none of the scheduled caste had land. Then some went
■ out and with their earnings bought some; others got a little bit from
and reform. The majority of land is with the Thakurs. They have at
least eight acres each. One has about 30 acres, and this family also
controls all the village common land, which they ve taken over This
family has even taken over the village burial groundsfor use asfteldsi
You get Rs 5-10 for a day’s labour. [One-third to one-half of the
wage rate ,n Baba ka Gaon], The Thakurs are shameless, and despite
l ese wages don t pay us even when we go to ask for it. There are
so few lower castes here in the village that we can do nothing against
the Thakurs, unless the police help us. If any action is taken „„ my
. daughter s case, the tension will increase. But the Thakurs will try
to oppress us further if nothing happens. If on this thing we cannot
ge anything done, how will we ever manage to fight them again^ We
wish and hope that they get as severe a sentence as possible.'

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Tl’e vi|lage of Kachwahan ka Purwa - literally, the hamlet of the
Kachwahan-Thakurs - is in Rae Bareli district, which was for two
Reades he pocket borough of Indira Gandhi. But these years of being

constituency and having millions of rupees poured in for
development has made the situation of the poor in Rae Bareli no better
than m Pratapgarh. The village is 35 km or so from Baba ka Gaon
he hovel is ragged even by the standards of the poor in Awadh the
atch torn and the mud walls crumbling. Outside the hut is an em’acited, hunched, small male figure, the limbs skeletal, a bony neck sup
break V
fC'0SS Wh'Ch C0UrSe’ transParent|y a"d almost without
eak waves of agony. The figure wears small shorts and a sleeveless
vest, both tattered and dusty. Across the tense shoulders is a thin cotton
towel, theendsjust hiding the stumpsofhis arms, both ofwhich endjust

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HOW THE POOR ARE SUBJUGATED, AND HOW THEY FIGHT BACK • 235

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above the elbow in dirty bandages. This figure, slack-jawed, emptyeyed, shrouded in despair, tries to prevent the towel from slipping off
by touching at it with the stumps of his arms. The movement is unprac
tised, tentative and elicits even more anguish; the wounds are less than
a fortnight old. Jerking in pain, the figure screams at the two toddlers
who come out from the shack and try to approach him. Though his stick- ,
like figure and dress make him seem just a young boy, Samar Bahadur
Koeri is 18 years old, married, and the father of the two toddlers. He
speaks blankly, softly, so gently that it is almost a mumble.
My father and my uncle were not here. Some relatives had come
so I decided that I would not work today. I was at home and then
Om Prakash Singh came and ordered me to work, to come and chop
the fodder. This is the work that I always have to do for the Thakur.
When I told him that I couldn ’t work because there were relatives
visiting, he abused me and said I had to come, that he would beat
me up. He forced me to go; he always terrorizes me. So I started
chopping fodder, and he said, ‘Why are you feeding the machine
so slowly? ’ It is a diesel fodder machine, not a hand-powered one.
And I said, ‘This is the best I can do. ’ And then Om Prakash said,
‘Come, I will show you how the machine is fed, ’ and he caught both
my arms and pushed them into the machine.
I screamed and then fainted. When I screamed and my hands had
been cut off, Om Prakash ran away. And then two of my caste people
were passing by and they came running when they heard me scream.
They told me later that they were carrying sticks in their hands and
they pushed this into the machine to make it stop, or otherwise even
more of my arms would have been dragged in and cut off. They told
me that my hands and cut portion of the arms came out from the
machine like strips of fodder.
Samar Bahadur’s father, Juggu, is a visibly worn, exhausted man;
short, thin, grey-haircd, with eyes streaming v/ith mucus from some
infection. I was in Ambala [in Punjab province] working at a brick
kiln when this happened. I only came to hear about it two weeks later.
Because my son was alone anyone could coerce him into doing
anything they wanted. When I got back and saw what had happened

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to my son, 1 went in anger to Oni Prakash. He made me stand outside
the dour because my family is untouchable. He told me he was very
won ied about my son. that my son had cut his arms while using the
thresher, and that he would pay for the treatment. He then said, ‘If
you file a case against me 1 will ruin you all. ’
I saw that the bby cannot support himself; he is incapable now.
So I took his wife and young daughter, and the three of us walked
to the police station and filed a case. The police wrote everything
down and then they came here and arrested Om Prakash on the same
day. This was on 19 July. He is in jail now. The senior policeman

at the Jagatpur station is a Verma, a backward [middle] caste man.
He wrote down our complaint without any problem.
Kachwahan ka Purwa is smaller than Baba ka Gaon. Of the 40
or so families, roughly a dozen are upper-caste, the rest middle- and
scheduled-caste. Between them, the middle and scheduled castes own
only five per cent of the agricultural land in the village, substantially
less than that owned by these groups in Baba ka Gaon. Though titles
to plots were given to tenants and also to the landless during the
several rounds of land reform, most of these people have not been
able to occupy the land they had been given titles to.
Om Prakash Singh, the Thakur who assaulted Samar Bahadur, is
not the village’s largest landowner, but he is arrogant because he
served in the army, where one of his sons is now, according to Samar
Bahadur’s father. He used to boast that he would have anyone who
dared defy him killed by the army.

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Samar Bahadur’s father says: I work as a sharecropper because
the Thakurs have not allowed us to take possession of the land that
belongs to us. My father has half an acre of land near the pond but

we have not got possession of it. The few times I cultivated the land
the Thakurs prevented us from harvesting the crop. They beat us up,
so we stopped trying to work it. And anyway it is useless land because
it is most often inundated by water.
What is the point offighting, of going to the courts? We went to
the court and won the case about our land but even then the Thakurs
bribed the court people and got the case dismissed.

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HOW THE POOR ARE SUBJUGATED, AND HOW THEY FIGHT BACK • 237

My son has studied until the tenth class. Earlier, like me, he would
work in thefields or doing whatever else we could get. We have no other
work. You can get work every day ifyou want, but the wages are only
fa g-io for a 13-hour day-from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. and sometimes you
will have to work even later. [Wage rates in Baba ka Gaon are nearly
twice this.] But even at these low wages the Thakurs will notpay us what
we are owed! We are owed about Rs 2,000 in back wages, but the
Thakurs have not paid us. I made that brick house over there, but they
have not paid me yet. When we go to ask them they shout at us and say,
‘We have no money so come back in four or five months.
The District Magistrate of Rae Bareli is sympathetic and intelli
gent. Commenting on Samar Bahadur’s family being owed a huge
sum by the Thakurs, he says: No poor person in his right mind will
go to the police to complain about this or other kinds of exploitation.
They will either try to resolve it or will just forget about the money
they are owed. Academics always emphasize how poor people in rural
India are always in debt to rich people. But everyone overlooks how
the rich owe money to the poor and never pay! This is just another

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way for them to keep the poor in their power.
In great part because of the District Magistrate’s conscientiousness,
Samar Bahadur’s family received Rs 100,000 from the state govern
ment, compensation given in cases where atrocities are committed against
scheduled castes. The District Magistrate also promised Samar Bahadur
that his family would be given secure title to 2.5 acres of arable land.
Three months later they had received most of the land. And a contingent
from the state constabulary was posted at the v i 1 lage to prevent the oth er.
Thakurs from fulfilling their threat to kill Samar Bahadur and his father
because oftheir defiance of Om Prakash Singh. Samar Bahadur’s father
put the cheque from the government in a fixed deposit in a nearby bank.
The interest on the amount is about Rs 1,000 per month, which the
fam ily will use to survive now that they have lost their only young, able,i
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bodied wage earner.
Samar Bahadur’s father praises the District Magistrate for his
empathy, but reviles the local member of the state legislature, even
though the latter is from the same scheduled caste as him. The MLA,

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• -who is from our caste, came and asked us ito compromise with the
Thakur, but we said we don 7 want to have
: any dealings with the
Thakurs and so we don 7 want to have anything to do with you. The
MLA asked us how were we managing for food and other things and
we said we are n tanaging because of our relatives. So he then asked

us to come to the hospital in Rae liareli where he would meet us but
when we went there at the appointed time he wasn 't there. Look, he
told us he would give us money for food but he didn 7 even give us
a sip of tea! Then we just left and went to the District Magistrate’s
office and when we got the cheque, the MLA arrived and told us to
keep it carefully. So we got angry and told him, ‘What do you think
yve Udo if not keep it carefully? Do you think we will put it in the
fire? He is from among us, but now he is a big man and lives in a

bungalow. He moves around in a car and has sentries with him When
the District Magistrate told us to have tea before we left the District
Magistrate's office, the MLA said, ‘Yes, yes, have tea before you
leave, but he himself left straight away! He had no time for us.
Samar Bahadur is helped by his father every second day to the
doctor where the bandages are changed and his amputated arms
cleaned. The roughly 10-km journey is done on a pony-cart or a
tractor’s buggy, as Samar Bahadur cannot bicycle or walk this dis
tance. His father says: This kind of violence happens here all the time
Just five days ago a Brahmin landlord beat a Pasi man so badly that
he lost six teeth. And this is when the army was already posted here'
The police have also arrested the Brahmin, but he has now been
released on bail.

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Why Political Democracy Has Not
Led to Economic Democracy

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RAM Dass says: I have voted since the first election in 1952. I was
in Bombay. My wife voted in the same elections, but here in the
village. 1 felt excited, but not as much as I was when zamindari was
abolished. That was the most important thing in my life. Having the
vote is better than having rajas! With democracy you can change
governments, but with rajas there is just dynasty and dictatorship. But
even then we have not gained much from the vote.
In 1956, inaugurating a seminar on parliamentary democracy,
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru expounded:

Democracy has been spoken of chiefly in the past, as political
democracy, roughly represented by every person having a vote.
But a vote itself does not represent very much to a person who
is down and out, to a person, let us say, who is starving or hungry.
Politicai democracy, by itself, is not enough except that it may
be used to obtain a gradually increasing measure of economic

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240 • Words i.iki- i-rerdom

democracy, equality and the spread of good things of life to others
and removal of gross inequalities.
Nehru s words — echoed by Ram Dass — have a prophetic ring four
decades later. I he persistence of chronic and intense poverty, as well
as the continuing oppression of the poor, is incontrovertible evidence
of the Indian democratic system’s failure to represent the interests of
the poor, despite universal suffrage and their very large numbers. To
some Indians, this failure proves that the vote should not have been
given to the illiterate or poor, on the reasoning that the unschooled
cannot make sensible political choices.1 But this is a prejudiced mis
reading of why universal suffrage has failed the Indian poor. The failure
is not intrinsic to universal suffrage nor to the illiteracy of India’s
masses. Rather, it stems from the nature of the independent India that
Nehru and Congress had such a powerful influence in shaping.
The dereliction of the interests of the poor in independent India
has its roots in the pre-Independence Congress, which at the time of
Independence essentially represented the interests of a range of prop
ertied groups. The Congress’ conservatism and pro-property bias is
partly understandable, as in the lead-up to Independence suffrage was
limited to the propertied, educated and those with at least moderate
. .incomes - the top one-fifth of India’s population. Moreover, the
colonial setting itself curbed the emergence of a more radical nation
alist movement, with the British colonial government routinely out
lawing many Communist and other radical groups.2
On Independence, by disregarding redistributive land reform in
practice (though not in rhetoric), Nehru and other Congress leaders
committed the original error that wrecked the emancipation of the
poor. They gave the ‘masses’ the extraordinary gift of the vote,
embodying the revolutionary principle of‘one person, one vote’, but
because this was the sole gain to the poor from Independence, in
isolation, without any material assets, the gift was almost worthless.
In contrast, radical land reform - the only means of transforming the
material conditions of the poor as well as of emancipating them - was
systematically shunned.

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Why political democracy has not led to economic democracy • 241

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The Congress then relied on the propertied and powerful in rural
India to deliver electoral support and keep it in power. This was the
final touch on the conservative superstructure of independent India,
damming the emergence of local democracy. The ‘socialist pattern
of society’ that Nehru and the Congress had dedicated themselves to
in their 1955 party resolution was nowhere to be seen.
Ram Dass says: Until Independence, the Thakurs were in conflict
with the Congress. The Congress was good then, but this ended when
the Thakurs joined it. These people realized that there was no point
being in conflict with the government in power and that instead they
should join that party. So they all became important people in the
Congress. But at least we got a little more food and more clothes with
the Congress. Earlier, in winter, we would just have to double our
dhoti to try to keep warm.
In the first few elections the Thakurs wouldn 't let anyone from
the lower castes enter. They wouldfill in the ballots themselves. They
wouldforce us uneducated people to do what they wanted, to put our
thumb print on this ballot paper and not on any other. Usually they
made us vote for the Congress.
Anyway, earlier we poor people wouldn ’t care about voting, we ’d
say who cares who we give our vote to? Who cares if the Thakurs
force us to do this or that? Who is going to bother to go and vote
at all? For us the vote didn 7 mean anything. We thought, what would
we get out of it? All us lower-caste people were asleep. OnlyDr Ambedkar was awake.
The Congress has always been dominant here. And their people
have always been rajas and the upper castes. The MP for many terms
was the rajafrom Pratapgarh. The Kalakankar raja’s daughter is now
an MP, and he was also an MP for one term. He - Dinesh Singh even came here to the village once while campaigning! And the MLA
for many terms has been Pramod Tiwari.
I he alliance between India’s dominant political party and domi
nant rural groups effectively throttled the chances of the poor rising
either materially or in civil and social freedoms. Not unexpectedly,
the rural poor (in UP or anywhere in India) have since failed to unite

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242 • Words i iki

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as a class or to emerge as an electoral force. Political power has not
shifted towards them despite their numbers.3 With the superstructure

of the state so visibly allied with the propertied and patently arrayed
against them, the poor face obvious dangers in attempting to eman
cipate themselves. In addition, there has been no even moderately-

powerful political party committed to their interests. Moreover, the

emergence of radical challenges was forestalled by the Congress’
nationalist legacy, its unceasing pro-poor rhetoric, and its initiation
of land reforms, reservations, and anti-poverty programmes, however
wanting in mtent.on and impact. And just the vote and parliamentary
democracy - embodying the hope that peaceful, orderly change is
possible - blunted class tensions.

The realities of rural India also militate against the poor emerging
as a political force. The difficulties of uniting across, first, diverse
castes - ranging from the multitude of middle castes to the many
layers within the scheduled castes - and, then, gradations of poverty

- from the small and marginal farmer to the absolutely landless - are

enormous. Moreover, in Baba ka Gaon and elsewhere, the poor must
concentrate on the arduous battle for physical survival, leaving little
tune and energy for what seem to be less immediate concerns.
Even for the scheduled castes, the one group within the ranks of
the poor which in effect has special electoral representation, electoral
politics has not led to significant gains. The scheduled castes have

not emerged as a strong political movement, nor has their deprivation
relative to other groups lessened. To some degree this is a legacy of

andhi s defeat of Ambedkar’s demand for a separate electorate for
.

the scheduled castes. Under the prevailing reservation system of
parliamentary and assembly seats, constituencies are set aside for
sc teduled caste candidates but the voters are not separated into sched-

uled-caste and ‘other’ electorates. Consequently, candidates must appeal

not only to the scheduled castes, but broadly to all voters. This reduces
their reasons for representing the interests of the scheduled castes and
has also set back the development of independent scheduled-caste
parties committed to their interests.4 Clearly, the joint electorates are
better than no reservations at all; without them, there would have been

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Why political democracy has not.led to economic democracy • 243
no reason for mainstream parties to have developed a core of scheduled-caste legislators.5 But, until recently, the scheduled castes have
been incorporated into the mainstream parties - usually the Congress
- and have had to be content with these parties’ limited commitment
to their interests.
In UP and at the centre in New Delhi, the Congress system held
together in this shape for two decades after Independence. Some of
the fissures that emerged in the next decade benefited the poor.
Mrs Gandhi's recourse to the poor as a constituency was provoked
by battles for power within the elite of the Congress. And in UP,
the rich, higher-middle caste farmers of western UP broke away from
the Congress in the late 1960s, enlarging the scope for competitive
politics. The gains to the poor in UP were not substantial, and the
Congress, during Mrs Gandhi’s second term and then more deci
sively under Rajiv Gandhi, returned to bolstering the power of the
rural elite. But even these tiny gains - the handkerchief-size patches
of infertile land - provided the poor with some weapons in their
battle against oppression.
The decline of the Congress in UP, once the land of its glory,
was palpably evident by the close of the 1980s. The province’s
politics has since been polarized between the BJP, an essentially
upper-caste grouping, and several parties representing middle and
scheduled castes. Scheduled-caste support for the Congress waned in
the 1980s, a trend made visible when in the 1989 elections the
Bahujan Samaj Party, a scheduled-caste grouping, won two parlia
mentary and 14 assembly seats.6
Uttar Pradesh has since been ruled in quick succession by these
parties representing the upper, middle and scheduled castes. I- rom end1989 to mid-1991, the middle-caste-dominated Janata Dal ruled the
province. Then, until December 1992, the upper-caste BJP was in
power. After a year of direct rule by the central government, the.
Samajwadi Party-drawing its support from the middle and some share
of the scheduled castes —and the Bahujan Samaj Party allied to form the
government, which lasted till rivalry between them ended their rule in
mid-1995. Then, extraordinarily, UP had its first scheduled-caste chief

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244 • Words i.iku i-reiidom

minister nearly two decades after the first middle-caste chief minister
and neat ly ha If a century since Independence. The event was even more
s.ngu ar because Mayawati was also the province’s first woman chief
minis ter dike many scheduled caste persons, she does not use ata
name). But her meteoric rise was brief: by Octoberthatyearthe Bahujan
Samaj Party had lost power and the province was placed under direct

■

ministration by the central government for nearly two years
the sHrad°i 7"Y’ deSpite the emer8ence of
Parties representing
e scheduled castes and the middle castes, land reform and other
e .st,,but,ve issues d.d not emerge even brielly on to the province’s
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Why political democracy has not led to economic democracy • 245

which we tear each other apart - and then they go and fill their
stomachs and, at the next elections, they throw another scrap. None of
the parties wants anything but to fill their own stomachs. But it’s still
important to vote, because sometime something will be of benefit to us •
poor people. When Indira-ji came to power the first time, some good
was done, some land was given to the poor. And now there has been
some advantage to us since we ve got the right to be pradhans through
reservations, which Mulayam Singh Yadav [the Samajwadi chief min
ister in 1995; see section below] provided. Now even the upper castes
have to treat us with respect because some of us are pradhans.
Durbhe, their relative, says: We would be happy if there was a
political party which would distribute all the benami land. We would
vote for them. But the politicians don ’t want to do anything about land
reform because they will have to give up their own land! All they do is
thatjust before the elections, their leaders come and promise you a lot
ofthings but this is all talk. All the politiciansfrom the scheduled castes
and middle castes only talk about reservations. But reservations in
colleges are ofno use to people.who don’t have the money to study, and
reservations in governmentjobs are no use when you 're not educated
enough to get governmentjobs! Even these politicians support the rich,
not the poor. We poor people would never speak frankly even to the
scheduled-caste politicians if they came here and talked to us.
The failure of both the Bahujan Samaj and the Samajwadi Party
to represent the interests of the poor, who are the primary backers of
both parties, is rooted in the fact that the parties are led by the small
elite of the scheduled and middle castes that has developed since
Independence. While the middle-caste elite developed largely as a
result of benefiting from land reform, the scheduled-caste elite grew
out of the affirmative action programmes in higher education and in
government jobs. By the early 1980s in UP, there was a core of middle
and scheduled-caste officials in the provincial and central civil serv
ices. The majority held low-ranking posts, and faced discrimination ’
from the upper-caste officials, who have tended to view the civil
services as their exclusive preserve. The Bahujan Samaj, in particular,
began essentially as a pressure group to improve the position of

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scheduled-caslc ofGceis in the bureaucracy/ Since then, the agendas
of both the Samajwadi and the Bahujan Samaj Parties have been
dominated by the effort to raise the numbers of, respectively, the
middle castes and the scheduled castes in colleges, specialized education and the bureaucracy.
Despite the failure to advocate land reform and other measures
to aid the poor, the parties have succeeded in evoking popular support
from the lower-caste poor. In part, this is because rule by a chief
minister of their general caste grouping is a potent assertion of their
emancipation, even if this is a symbolic rather than a material gain.
There is also a potential tangible benefit: that when the province is
ruled by ‘their government’, the police and bureaucracy will be forced
to be less abusive and hostile towards them. Both these are important
gains for the lower castes, who have so far always faced an environ
ment dominated in every way by the upper castes. Even when their
. rule offers no material gain, being ruled by a middle or scheduledcaste party and chief minister (or having more middle and scheduledcaste officials) is an advance over the continuation of upper-caste rule.
Thus, despite their dissatisfaction with the limited agendas of these
parties, in the 1990s many poor middle and scheduled-caste people
backed them strongly.

The pan ch ayat elections of 1995
Though the tenure in government of the Samajwadi and Bahujan
Samaj Parties was not marked by even the rumour of a possibility that
they would consider initiating land reform or other directly
redistributive measures, this period witnessed what Ram Dass con
siders to be the second most important political event of his life, next
only to zamindari abolition in its impacton his family’s emancipation.
This was the decision in early 1995 by the Samajwadi-Bahujan Samaj
alliance to reserve a large share of the posts of pradhan for the
scheduled castes as well as for the middle castes. Under the scheme,
just under a majority of pradhans would be from the scheduled or
middle castes.9

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Why political democracy has not led to economic democracy • 247
The decision was revolutionary because it threatened the upper
caste domination of the village panchayats and most important, theii
monopoly on the post of pradhan. In Baba ka Gaon, for instance, c.
single Thakur man had been the village pradhan since 1952, wher
the first panchayat elections had been held. The pradhan post was
crucial to the upper castes. There is enormous traditional power
associated with the post - literally, that of hereditary headman.
Moreover, thepanchayats had since Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure received
huge funds for poverty alleviation and rural development programmes,
which went almost entirely into the bank accounts of the upper-caste
pradhan and his allies. Being ousted from the post of pradhan was
a hammer-blow to the ancient upper-caste domination of Awadh and
to their profitable new role of intermediary in independent India s
elite-dominated political structure. The system that under Rajiv
Gandhi’s dispensation had been a travesty of its professed intention
— that of aiding the poor — was being shaped into a form that at least

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now held this potential.
The prospect led the upper castes across Awadh and UP to try
to abort the panchayat elections. Independent-mmded potential can
didates from the middle castes and scheduled castes were warned or
beaten so that they would not contest the pradhan"s post. For weeks
before the elections, rural UP was on the verge of exploding into
battles between the upper castes and the middle and scheduled castes.
The tensions blazed into violence during the elections: some 70 people
were killed, hundreds of re-elections ordered, as well as several dozen
elections countermanded. Such violence was unprecedented for
panchayat elections in UP, which in the past had been non-events in
which the upper castes swept most posts uncontested.
The 1995 panchayat elections irrevocably changed caste equa
tions in Baba ka Gaon. The village Thakurs threatened to kill the
former army sergeant from the Maurya middle caste who, with the
backing of the scheduled castes, decided to stand for the pradhan"s
post. They then burnt the crops of a particularly militant scheduledcaste man. A week before the elections, in mid-afternoon, a group of
Thakurs entered the hut of a middle-caste family and started thrashing

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248 • Words like freedom

the wife with their staffs while others pinned her husband down. But
foi the first time in Baba ka Gaon’s known history, the scheduled
castes - including Prayaga Devi - and the middle castes hit back at
the Thakurs, beating them away.
Ram Dass says: Earlier, I would bear it when the Thakurs would hit
or abuse me. But now if they hit me I will hit them back even harder.
The Thakurs filed a complaint at the police station, alleging that
they had beep assaulted , by the lower castes, At the local police
station, 7 km away, the upper-caste police official abused Ram Dass
for being the leader of the scheduled castes and threatened to arrest
all of them. Ram Dass’s comment, that as the woman had been
assaulted in her own house the Thakurs were clearly the aggressors,
provoked the official further. You must learn to live peacefully, he
shouted. Even if the Thakurs say something to you, behave like
Gandhi-ji and accept getting slapped twice and come and complain
to me. What has gone wrong with Baba ka Gaon? There was never
any trouble there earlier.
Ram Dass says: This was the first time that I’ve been to the police
station. In my 70 years, this is the first time I’ve been to the police
station!
Though the candidate supported by Ram Dass and the scheduled
castes won the elections, the complaint by the Thakurs was written
up by the police officer with such a bias that a few months later two
of Baba ka Gaon’s scheduled-caste villagers were arrested and jailed
for a week in Pratapgarh prison. Ram Dass comments: The police will
do whatever the Thakurs want. The police are theirs, so why should
they listen to us? The police are the most corrupt and worst part of
the administration. They never record our complaints and they never
take action. When they talk to the Thakurs they say, ‘Tell us what
happened, how can we help. ’ But with us they say, ‘Hey, why are you
creating trouble? They blame us for everything.
Policemen are like dogs - if you give them food they won’t bite
you but will bite whoever you want them to bite. If you give them
money they consider you a good man, if you don ’t give them money
you are a goonda.

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Why political democracy has not led to economic democracy • 249

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Durbhe says: In Awadh we have a saying qbout the police - my
mother taught it to me - ‘ Chore ke pichhari, aur police ke aghari
nahin janal’ [If you go behind the horse, it will kick you and if you
go near the police they will beat you so never go near them.]

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The scheduled and middle castes fail to unite

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The alliance between the scheduled and middle castes during the
panchayat elections was the continuation of a historically complex
relationship between these groups in northern India. While the rela
tionship between the upper and scheduled castes has been unremit
tingly hostile and oppressive - attested to by the vast gaps in social
and economic status, and the practices of ‘untouchability’ - that
between the middle and scheduled castes has not been as clear-cut.
The middle castes (the former Shudras or servant castes) are a very
large and disparate group, with enormous variation in their caste status
and economic well-being. The lowest middle castes have historically
been considered just one step above the untouchables. They are des
perately impoverished, and continue to be disproportionately repre
sented amongst the absolutely poor in northern India. But the bulk
of the middle castes have always been materially and socially im
measurably better off than the former untouchables.
Leaders of the middle and scheduled castes have often tried to
build alliances between the two so as to pose a united front against
their mutual oppressors, the upper castes. In UP, the various middle
and scheduled castes would together comprise roughly two-thirds of
the province’s population, far outweighing the upper castes. When
united, such as during the 1995 panchayat elections, they threaten the

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foundations of upper-caste domination.
But unity has been rare. Efforts to bring the scheduled and middle
castes together have generally been wrecked by differences in caste
hierarchy as well as by gradations of poverty. Dismayed by the failure
to unite the scheduled and middle castes, Ambedkar wrote.

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The reason for this want of solidarity is not far to seek. It is to
be found in the system of graded inequality whereby the Brahmin

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250 • Words like freedom

is above everybody, the Shudra is below the Brahmin, and above
the untouchable. If the Hindu social order was based on inequal
ity, it would have been thrown out long ago. But it is based on
graded inequality so that the Shudra, while he is anxious to pull
down the Brahmin, is not prepared to see the untouchables raised
to his level. . . The result is that there is nobody to join the
untouchable in his struggle. He is completely isolated. Not only
is he isolated, he is opposed by the very classes who ought to be
his natural allies.10

Shrmath says: At the time of Independence, there were three national
leaders. There was Jinnah, who was the leader of the Muslims. There
was Gandhi, who represented the upper castes. And then there was
Ambedkar, for us. The middle castes did not have a good leader And
when the debate started about which communities should be given
reservattons, Ambedkar wished that the middle castes shouldjoin with
the scheduled castes because then the numbers of the lower castes
would increase. But then the upper castes, started a movement directed
at the middle castes to ‘Rise Upwards', hinting that they could become
upper-caste. The middle castes were misled into believing that they
couldjoin the upper castes and so they left the scheduled castes. And
once this happened they were stuck in the middle - they couldn't go
into the upper castes nor with the scheduled castes. And it was only
the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes who were given reserva
tions. But if the middle castes had at that time joined the scheduled
castes, they would have immediately got reservations; they wouldn 7
ave had to wait to get it slowly, slowly as they are doing now. If
they had had a leader at that time, they would have joined hands with
the scheduled castes and for all of us things would have been better
than today.
Ram Dass says: Between us and the middle castes there would
also be levels of discrimination. All of us were tied into the. caste
system. The castes within the middle castes would not eat with each
other. Nor would people from different scheduled castes eat together.
These were traditional restrictions that we just accepted. The upper

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Why political democracy has not led to economic democracy • 251

castes who made the caste system would not allow these castes to eat
with each other because if they then got together they would dominate
the ones who had begun the system. But progress will only come for
us when we are one with the middle castes. Because of this the effort'
of the upper castes has always been to divide the middle castes from
the scheduled castes. They practise the politics of division. Because
of this, we have been at the receiving end of the violence, because
we were divided and we failed to unite.
In Baba ka Gaon, relationships between the scheduled and middle
castes have in the past century run the gamut from conflict between
them to allying against the Thakurs and Brahmins. Shrinath says: The
middle castes were always united with the upper castes. They also
used to practice things like untouchability because they were totally
linked with the upper castes and could even sit and eat with them.
Because the Thakurs allowed them to share their food, the middle
castes followed them.
And it’s only recently that people like Ram Saran Maurya [the
new pradhan, of a higher-middle caste] and his family, who have lived
outside, have begun to not discriminate against us. But they are the
exceptions. The other Mauryas will still not let the scheduled castes
touch their eating and drinking utensils. They will discriminate against
the scheduled castes even if we are now vegetarians and the Mauryas
themselves eat meat and drink alcohol! There is still such a chasm
between us. But to my knowledge, there are very few people amongst
the middle castes who are not poor. So in my understanding they
should get reservations. In the social environment here, middle castes
and scheduled castes are almost the same. There is sometimes only
a very slight difference.
Over the last 15 years or so, the scheduled and middle castes in

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Baba ka Gaon and Awadh have moved closer together, uniting against
the upper castes. The unity has been impelled in great part because
of a growing rift between the upper and middle castes. The upper
castes (including such rich cultivating castes as the Jats and Tyagis)
now view the middle castes as challengers to their domination of UP
politics as well as competitors for prized government and public

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252 • Words i.iki: i ritdom

sector jobs. In UP, reservations for the middle castes in government
jobs and m education were begun during the tenure of the fi rst middle
caste chief minister, Ram Naresh Yadav, in 1977, and were then
expanded in the 1990s under Mulayam Singh Yadav."
Shrinath says: The upper castes clidn 7 want to give reservations
to the middle castes despite the middle castes supporting them. And
when Mulayam Singh Yadav came to power, the Thakurs and Brah
mins started getting worried that the middle castes were taking over
UP. The middle castes have become aware of this, that they cannot

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become upper castes and that the upper castes don 7 want them to

progress. And they have to find some ally, because even though their
population is large they haven 7 had sufficient progress. Our interests
are the same and that's why more of them are coming together with
the scheduled castes.
In the foreseeable future, one dominant factor shaping UP’s politics
will be the relationship between the scheduled and middle castes. How
far the outcome will benefit the scheduled castes, as the numerically
weaker group, is an imponderable, though the experience of India’s
peninsular provinces, where the middle-caste movement is far in
advance of the north, shows that the needs of the scheduled castes
are almost always swamped by the more advanced groups.

I

The upper castes’ appeal to Hindu nationalism
The BJP, an almost exclusively upper-caste grouping, has since the
decline of the Congress emerged as the single largest party in UP,

winning one-third of the votes in assembly and parliamentary elec
tions since 1991. In an attempt to increase its share of the vote, the
BJP has sought to unite all Hindus, including the scheduled castes,
through appealing to a resurgent Hindu nationalism. A central part
of this emotive appeal is the demonizing of Muslims, who are accused
of having ruined Hindu India through their centuries of conquest and
rule. At the end of 1992, while in power in UP, the BJP and its allies
attacked and demolished a medieval mosque in Faizabad, roughly
150 km from Baba ka Gaon. They claimed that the mosque stood on

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Why political democracy has not led to economic democracy • 253

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the site of an ancient temple, marking the birth-place of the Hindu
god Ram, which had been razed by the Muslims in the 16th century.
The Hindu nationalist appeal made little headway with the scheduled
castes, as did the BJP strategem of attempting to portray Ambedkar
as a Hindu leader.12 For the scheduled castes, the BJP is the party of
the people whose ancestors invented the caste system and who still
try to hold them in this bondage today. They are also inherently
suspicious of the BJP’s motives and ideology, a legacy of their ancient
hatred of Hindu orthodoxy.
Ram Dass says: The BJP, the Shiv Sena, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad
- they are all stoking the religious divides. These people are not
religious, their motives are different. In the name of religion they are
just destroying and not constructing anything. They want to conquer
everything through violence. Does one need to build a temple to take
the name of God?
One Thakur and a Brahmin said to me, ‘You are a devotee, so why
don't you come to Ayodhya? ’ and I said, 'What are we to do? ’ and they
said, ‘We are to break the mosque and to build a temple in its place. ’
Andlsaid 'What is the point ofbreaking anyone 'sreligion, allreligions
say the same things, and I will not go. ’ So they said, ‘At least on this
day, at this time, say “Ram, Ram”. ’ To which I said, ‘You say “Ram,
Ram”, because you never say it otherwise! I say “Ram, Ram” all the
time. You people encourage violence and never pray! God is within you
and you shottld keep your sanctity because this is where God resides. ’
And after I said this, theyjust went away and never spoke to me again.
But the morefoolish ofthe scheduled castes went with them, though
none were from Baba ka Gaon. And it was these poor people who got
killed, not the leaders. The lower castes were used. This has happened
from time immemorial. When the upper castes need to fight against
someone they start saying that we scheduled-caste people are Hindus!
They are then willing to call you friend, brother, father, but when the
battle is over they won ’ t even recognize you and will say ‘Get out, idiot! ’
And it’s the same for the Muslims: their leaders start the battles
but the ones who get killed are the poor. Those who are sitting in the
big homes never lose, it s the ones living in the slums who suffer.

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254 • Words like freedom

Durbhe says: The BJP people came to my college and asked us
to come to Ayodhya. 1 told them, ‘Why should 1 come with you? ’ They
said, ‘You should come to liberate the mosque which was built by
Muslims and to build a Ram Janambhoomi temple [a temple for
Ram’s birthplace]. ’ And so I retorted, ‘The Muslims ruled here for
hundreds ofyears, so will you break everything they built? Why don 7
you also tear down the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort? Why don’t you
tear down the\ whole country because they ruled over it for such a
long time? Why don't you also break what the British made?’
The Brahmins and Thakurs were supporting the BJP and Vishwa
Hindu Parishad during the Ayodhyaproblem. But at that time Mulayam
Singh Yadav and Kanshi Ram [leaders of the Samajwadi and Bahujan
Samaj Parties respectively] had an agreement. At our college the BJP
people would shout slogans insulting Yadav and Kanshi Ram for
joiningforces. So we would shout back at them, ‘Mulayam and Kanshi
Ram have got together and the platform of Jai Shri Ram [literally,
glory be to Lord Ram] has been destroyed! ’
There is very little support for the BJP amongst our castes. Some
of our people did give them some money but that’s only because so
many of their people come to your house and start pressuring you that
you get embarrassed and can’t refuse. All the BJP local officials here
just made a lot ofmoneyfrom the contributionsfor building the temple
and then went and built nice houses for themselves. They make suckers
out of all the people, in every way!

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Conclusion:
The Perpetuation of Mass Poverty

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FOR Ram Dass’s family, the past has been brutally harsh, the present
is precarious, and the future shows no hope of being better. The limited
improvements in their economic and social situation add up to very
little. When evaluated by the experience of the many million poor
families who have fared worse than Ram Dass’s, are still destitute or
absolutely poor, and will almost inevitably remain so, the only conclu
sion can be condemnation of independent India’s development record.
Judged by conditions in 1997, the fiftieth year of India’s independ
ence and self-rule, there is little likelihood that Ram Dass’s or the
millions of families poorer than his will find material or social eman
cipation in the foreseeable future. India’s political economy today is
such that even small, incremental gains that would add up to a sub
stantial reduction in the number of the poor cannot be expected, for
the very reasons that such gains have failed to emerge since Independ
ence. There is even less probability of the sweeping redistributive
change that was in principle possible at the time of Independence.

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256 • Words I.IKI-' IRIJJJOM

Nevertheless, despite these bleak prospects, through the 1990s
India s leaders continued to promise the poor a quick end to poverty.
I his repeated the vow that has been uttered in every decade of
independent India’s history. In the heady first decade of Independ
ence, Nehru pledged-to the ‘naked, hungry mass’ that they would
quickly be freed - because colonial rule had been ended, the princely
states and the zamindari system abolished, and a ‘socialist pattern of
society’ was in the making. With poverty not having diminished one
whit, in the 1960s Nehru and his successors promised to take land
from the rich and to redistribute it to the poor and landless. In the
1970s, Mrs Gandhi pledged nothing less than Garibi Hatao! - to
eradicate poverty. For the 1980s, the far less radical offering from
both her and her son, Rajiv Gandhi, was a massive array of poverty
alleviation programmes. In the 1990s, the poor were told that their
poverty would soon vanish because India’s economy was poised for
take-off, for unprecedentedly rapid growth.
The hype surrounding this new elixir reached a peak in 1997, when
the world joined India in celebrating her golden jubilee. According to
the celebrants, India’s prospects had never looked rosier. The sustained
economic reforms of the past half-decade marked a new epoch in
independent India’s economic history: the repudiation of Nehruvian
state planning and socialist self-reliance. With the confining super
structure of state control and planning on the way out, India’s boundless
potential couId come to fruition, said the celebrants. The biggest market
in the world, with a purported middle class of some 250 million, was
ready to boom. The rapid economic growth rates that would result
would quickly double or triple average income, and would offer
enormous scope for ameliorating poverty, the celebrants pronounced.
The lives of India s one billion people would shortly be transformed.
Some part of the celebrants’ vision is certainly realizable: fast
economic growth. But the growth is likely to make India an increas
ingly dualistic society and economy, much like Brazil in the 1960s
and 1970s, when rapid economic growth barely reduced poverty.
However, the growth will not transform the lives of the mass of
India’s people, unlike the achievements of China and the east Asian

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Conclusion: the perpetuation of mass poverty • 257

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‘tigers’, where radical land reform and sustained investments in health
and education laid the foundations for widely shared growth.2
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In India, it is a certainty that the top one-tenth to one-quarter of
the population, huge numbers in themselves, will benefit enormously
in the near future, as the bulk of them have already done from the
faster growth of the past two decades. But what of the vast ranks of
the poor, still an overwhelming majority of the country’s people?
Though unlikely, it cannot be ruled out that poverty might indeed
worsen despite accelerated economic growth. This is a possibility if
the Indian government further reduces public spending, particularly
on agriculture, infrastructure and the social sectors. The risks to the
poor will be even greater if the government further loosens land
ceiling laws, as is being demanded by the rural rich and the many
votaries of economic liberalization.
It is most likely, however, that in the inevitable absence of redistri
bution, the poor will neither participate in the economy’s growth nor
receive the gains of growth on anything like the scale required appre
ciably to reduce mass poverty. Ram Dass’s family and the many
millions of poorer ones are barred from participating in economic
growth, whatever its pace, because of a myriad disabilities: illiteracy
and lack of employable skills, ill-health, gender inequity, social dis
crimination, political subjugation, and the lack ofeconomic assets such
as cultivable land. For much the same reasons, the gains of growth
barely trickle down to them. To enable the poor to participate and
benefit from economic growth, the Indian government would need to
undertake widespread land reform, promote good healthcare and schools,
foster gender equity, and encourage local democracy. It has not done so
for 50 years. The reasons for that tragic inaction remain unchanged. In
the future, as in the half-century past and in centuries earlier, India is
destined to remain the land of hunger, want and suffering.

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Notes and References

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All quotes from Nehru are from 1989.
'S

Chapter 1
1.

The international comparison is from Shiva Kumar, 1991 pp 23435; see aiso Dreze & Sen, .996, figures for fidonesiX Z

Ravalhon & Datt, 1996, p. 2480.
2.
The middle castes - the former Shudras or servant castes who come
ea Zse"a e 7“
8roUP
“PPer. ‘twice-born’
econo,;
“
and
diSPara,e 8r0UP’ Their
^tus and
economic well-being varies greatly. The nomenclature used to
pture this diversity has expanded enormously, so much so that
it defies comprehension by all but experts. To avoid confusion, only
middle caste is used here, generally qualified by whether they are
towards the higher or lower side of the spectrum. For the small
numbei of castes in UP that are not upper castes but were histori
cally not considered Shudras nor suffered caste disabilities - such
as the fats, Bhumihars and Tyagis - the term ‘elite cultivating
castes is used in this book. For details see, Shah, 1991 n 607Ramaiah, 1992, p. 1203.
’ P’
. 3. On the occupational and regional distribution of the poor see
Harnss et al., 1992; Mendelsohn & Vicziany, 1994 pn 79-83Dandekar & Rath, 1971, pp. 11-17.
’

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Notes and references *259

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Chapter 2
1.
2.

3.
4.
5.
6.
7.

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9.

For an overview of India’s experience see Frankel, 1996, p. 483.
The discussion of pre-British agrarian systems and the changes
introduced by the British are based on the following sources:
Reeves, 1991; Neale, 1962; Nigam, 1987; Kumar (ed), 1984, pp.
36-86; Pandey, 1982, pp. 143-97; Siddiqui, 1978; Dhanagare,
1983; Sarkar, 1983.
Quoted in Reeves, 1991, p. 51.
Siddiqui, 1978, p. 86.
Neale, 1962, p. 205.
Kumar, 1984, p. 66.

Siddiqui, 1978, p. 15, citing Irwin, The Garden of India; or Chap
ters on Oudh History and Affairs, London, 1880.
The description of untouchability is based on the following sources:
Beteille, 1972, especially p. 413; Blunt, 1969; Mendelsohn &
Vicziany, 1994, p. 69; Singh, 1993, pp. 1070-80.
Figures are from Saxena, 1985. The analysis of the linkages be

tween caste and agrarian structures is based on: Beteille, 1972;
Dhanagare, 1983; Siddiqui, 1978; Omvedt, 1995.
10. Frankel, 1996, p. 494.
11. The section on the revolt and its failure is based almost entirely on
Siddiqui’s (1978) extensive work and Pandey’s (1982) ‘subaltern’
reinterpretation of his research. Consequently, they are not attrib
uted further in this section.

12. Reeves, 1991, p. 220, citing Pannikar, K.M. (ed) & Pershad A., The
Voice of Freedom, The Speeches of Pandit Motilal Nehnr, Bombay,
1961, pp. 512-3.
13. Both points are made by Frankel, 1996, p. 495.
14. Siddiqui, 1978, p. 193.
15. Details of landholding structure in 1947 are from Neale, 1962, pp.
270 1; Kumar, 1984, p. 86.

16. The analysis of India’s impoverishment under colonial rule is based
on Dantwala, 1973.
17. All Figures are for British India, Dantwala, 1973, pp. 23-4.

18.

♦1
i

Liddle & Joshi 1986, p. 25.

*
<

260 • Words i.ikf. i-ri-edom

I

Chapter 3
1.

All adjustments to prices and incomes in the book are based on the

1

index numbers from CMIE, 1994.

. Chapter 4
■!

There are no firm estimates of how many people benefited or how

much land was transferred. These estimates are from a personal
interview with N.C. Saxena, a senior Indian government official,
2 April 1997.
2.

3.
4.

On the importance of land ownership to the rural poor, see:
Mendelsohn and Vicziany, 1994, pp. 101-3; Agarwal, 1994, p. 480;
Herring, 1983, p. 87. On the inverse relationship between farm size
and productivity, Saxena, 1985, p. 13.
Nehru, 1989, p. 113.
Reeves, 1991, p. 307, quoting the National Herald, 18 April 1946,
p. 6. This analysis is based largely on the following three sources,

r

and only quotes and other essential attribution is cited after this

5.
6.
7.

(other references are cited where necessary): Reeves, 1991, espe
cially p. 27; Herring, 1983; Neale, 1962. For legal details see
Maurya, 1994.
Reeves, 1991, p. 228.
Herring, 1983, p. 87.

Reeves, 1991, p. 211.
8.
Nehru, 1989, pp.'534-5.
9.
Ibid.
10. Reeves, 1991, p. 220.
11. Nehru, 1989, p. 58. The conclusions are my own. They are based,

i

first, on the land-holding data from Neale (1962), who analyses the

12.
13.

UP Zamindari Abolition Committee’s data, pp. 270-78. The second
data set I have used is Reeve’s (1991) analysis of occupational
categories, p. 27.
Reeves, 1991, pp. 220-32.
Quoted in ibid., p. 227.

14.

Hiro, 1976, p. 83.

15.
16.

Quoted in Reeves, 1991, p. 289.
Ibid., p. 286.

z1

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t

Notes and references • 261

17. Quoted in Herring, 1983, p. 154.
18. Saxena. 1985.
19. Uttar Pradesh Government, 1987, p. 108.
20. Brass, 1983.
21. The analysis is based on Kohli, 1987, pp. 52-80.
22.

Sarkar, 1983.

23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.

Frankel, 1978, p. 81.
Kohli, 1987, p. 62.
Ibid., p. 70.
Saxena, 1985, pp. 16-17.
Kohli, 1987, p. 64
Ibid., p. 227

Chapter 5
'“t

1.

2.
3.

I

S-1 ‘‘'4® it

ii'f’
1''
a

■

■

;•

\

,

Economic and Political Weekly Foundation, 1993, Table 1,
pp. 1754-63.
Nambissan, 1996, Table 2, p. 1014. Much of the analysis is also
from Nambissan.
Mendelsohn & Vicziany, 1994, p. 489; Zelliot, 1972, p. 79. This
analysis is based on the following works, though specific reference
is given where necessary: Ambedkar, 1943; Mendelsohn &
Vicziany, 1994; Mahar, 1972, various chapters by different authors;
Omvedt, 1995; Frankel, 1996.
Spear, 1965; Brass, 1994; Sarkar, 1983.
Zelliot, 1972, p. 69.
Mendelsohn & Vicziany, 1994, p. 108.

4.
5.
6.
7. Zelliot. 1972, p. 90.
8. Frankel, 1996, pp. 492, 497.
9. Dushkin, 1972, p. 215.
10. Quoted in Mendelsohn & Vicziany, 1994, p. 76.,
11. Frankel, 1996, p. 491; Mendelsohn & Vicziany, 1-994, p. 76.
12. Omvedt, 1995, p. 47.
'
13. Rao, 1996, p. 11.
i’ <
■■ Ip4"
14. Mendelsohn & Vicziany, 1994, p. 102.
15.. Galanter, 1972, p. 242.

262 • Words i.iki-; freedom

16. Lynch, 1972, p. 103.

17. Quoted in Zelliot, 1966, p. 199.
18. Fiske, 1972, p. I 16.
19. The section on Ambedkar’s views on Buddhism as well as the
conversions since then is based on Mahar, Fiske and Zelliot in
Mahar, 1972.
20. Lynch in Mahar, 1972, p. 105.

I*

• j

Chapter 6 !
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.

10.

11.
12.
13.
14.

Herring, 1983, p. 32.
Veit, 1976, Table 2.13, p. 81.
Frankel, 1978, p. 204.
Reeves, 1991, p. 323.
Zoya Hasan in Frankel & Rao, 1996, pp. 161-2.
Herring, 1983, p. 135; Dandekar & Rath, 1971, p. 77.
Herring, 1983, p. 135.
Reeves, 1991, p. 306.
Dandekar & Rath,' 1971, p. 79.
Figures are from Dandekar & Rath, 1971, p. 72; Hasan in Frankel
& Rao, 1996, p. 162.
Cited in Veit, 1976, p. 248.
This paragraph is based on Varshney, 1995, p. 28.
Patnaik & Hasan, 1995, p. 276.
Kohli, 1987, p. 74.

15. This interpretation of the Green Revolution - for the following three
paragraphs — is based on Kohli, 1987, pp. 73—9; and on Brass, 1994,
pp. 277-80 and 309-20.
16. By the mid-1980s, foodgrain production per person was just 7.4 per
cent higher than at the beginning of the 1960s. Patnaik & Hasan,
1995, p. 281.
17. Bhalla & Tyagi, 1989, pp. 128-31.
18. Whitcombe, 1980, pp. 156-79.
19. Brass, 1994, p. 326.
20. This section is based on Dandekar & Rath, 1971, p. 137.
21. See Tendulkar, 1992, p. 46; Veit, 1976, p. 233; Kohli, 1987, p. 243.

Ii

NoTiiS and references • 263

Chapter 7
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.

17.

Hiro, 1976, p. 75.
Ibid., pp. 68, 76, 81.
Hardgrave, 1980, p. 231.
Ibid., p. 159.
Vaidyanathan, 1995, p. 334.
Hardgrave, 1980, p. 159.
Frankel & Rao, 1996, p. 506.
Hardgrave, 1980, p. 159.
Brass, 1994, p. 295.
Ibid.
Herring, 1983, pp. 135-8.
Frankel & Rao, 1996, p. 501.
Veit, 1976, p. 247, quoting The Times ofIndia, Oct/Nov 1972 series
on land reform.
Kohli, 1987, p. 215.
Punekar, 1977: see ‘Prime Minister’s Broadcast’ and ‘The 20-Point
Programme’.
Hiro, 1976, p. 271.
This account is from two sources: Hiro, 1976, pp. 271-3; Sims,
1994, pp. 103-36.

18. Sims, 1994, p. 125.
19. Ibid.
20. Hiro, 1976, p. 273. The Turkman Gate incident is from Hardgrave,

21.

22.

23.
24.

1980, p. 171.
Election results are from Kohli, 1987, p. 193; Hardgrave, 1980, pp.
175-7 and 231.
The section on the Janata is from: Kohli, 1987, pp. 189-222;
Franda, 1979, p. 223.
Kohli, 1987, p. 215.
The details on poverty in the 1970s are from: Ravallion & Daft,
1996, p. 2480; Nayyar, 1991, p. 31.

Chapter 8

There is broad agreement about the magnitude of the decline though
analysts differ on the initial and final points. Sec especially, Sen,

I

11
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264 • Words i.iki: i ri:i:d()m

J.

4.
5.

6.

7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.

13.
14.
15.

16.
17.
18.
19.
20.

1996, pp. 2459-61, Table I, p. 2460 and 'Table 7, p. 2466;
Minhas, 1991; Ravallion & Datt, 1996, 'Table I, p. 2480.
Sen, 1996, p. 2473.
Kohli, 1987, pp. 309-11.
Nayyar, 199 I, p. 85.
Saxena, 1997. However, in some western states, particularly
Maharashtra, the rural employment programmes did have an impact
in curbing the severity of poverty. Economic and Political Weekly
Foundation, 1996, p. 2475.
Kohli, 1987, p. 31 I.
Vaidyanathan, 1995, p. 336.
This paragraph is based on Kohli, 1987, p. 351.
Bhatia, 1997.
Saxena, 1985.
Cited in Chambers, 1989, p. 231.
Need about 12 kg per month for an adult, according to government
estimates, ‘Starvation Scheme’, The Times of India, 21 January
1997. p. 10.
Nambissan, 1996, p. 1015.
The figure is for rural and urban combined. Dreze & Saran, 1993,
p. 35, footnote 36.
Data and many of the insights in this section are from Dreze &
Saran, 1993, and this source is not cited further.
Veit, 1976, p. 58; Hiro, 1976, p. 84.
Tilak, 1996, p. 363. .
Dreze & Saran, 1993.
Tan & Mingat, 1992, p. 145.
Tilak, 1996.
Mendelsohn & Vicziany, 1994, p. 82.

Chapter 9
1.

All the data and analysis of the higher education systems failures are
from several articles in Chitnis & Altbach (eds), 1993. See espe
cially, Indiresan, J., ‘Quest for Quality,’ and Chitnis, S., ‘Gearing a
Colonial System of Education to Take Independent India Towards
Development’. Data cited here are from pp. 310, 401 and 314.

I
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II

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1

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Notes and references • 265

I

y.

i

5-

2.

Statistical Outline of India, 1994-95, Tata Services Ltd., Bombay,
p. 151.

3.

Tendulkar, 1992, pp. 28-31.

4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

Statistical Outline of India, p. 147.
Zelliot, 1972, p. 188; Mendelsohn & Vicziany, 1994, p. 98.
Ravallion & Datt, 1996, pp. 2481-4.
Ibid.; Sen, 1996, pp. 2463, 2476.
Saxena, 1985.
Ravallion & Datt, 1995, p. 2.
Statistics from Food and Agricultural Organization, 1997; Franda,
1979, p. 96.
11. Tendulkar, 1992, pp. 40-1.

Chapter 10

1.
2.
3.

4.
5.
6.

7.
8.
9.
10.
11.

Agarwal, 1994, p. 345.
Dreze, 1990, p. 58; Agarwal, 1994, p. 343.
Sharma, 1980, p. 52; Agarwal, 1994, pp. 135-8.
Dreze, 1990, p. 63.
Chatterjee, 1990, p. 24.
Bennet, 1.992, pp. 45, 87.
Sims, 1994, pp. 105-6.

Dreze & Sen, 1990, p. 12.
Sims, 1994, pp. 105-6

Bennet, 1992, p. 14.
Dreze, 1990, p. 124, notes an opposite'trend in Bengal, where the
upper castes are viewed with contempt and their practices have not
been adopted, and consequently women in general are better off.
12. Chatterjee, 1990, pp. 9-10.

Chapter 13
1.

2.
3.
4.

CMIE, 1996; Ravallion & Datt, 1996; Sen, 1996, p. 2459 and Table
7, p. 2466.
Editorial, The Economic Times, 10 December 1996.
CMIE, 1996; the figure for 1993 is Rs 230.
These are identified as risk factors by Dandekar & Rath, 1971, pp.
11-17.

I

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tI
1

■

If
266 • Words i.iKi- i ri:i:i)()m

II

5.

This section on widows is adapted front Dreze, 1990, and so is not
footnoted further.
6. Dreze, 1990, p. 96.
7. Ibid.
8. Jain & Visaria (eds), 1988, p. 64.
9. Ibid, p. 24.
10. This section is from World Bank, 1997.
11. Uttar Pradesh Government, 1996, p. 4.

'/i* *

i

Chapter 14
1.

2.

3.
4.

5.
6.

7.

J

In the area around Baba ka Gaon, an acre of decent land currently
sells for roughly Rs 40,000.
This data is based on interviews with senior UP officials. Also
Vishaarad, 1974.
Ibid.
Harriss, 1992; Copestoke, 1992, p. 218; Herring, 1983, p. 269, who
argues that the changes in land-holding since Independence are
more ‘apparent’ than ‘real’.
Copestoke, 1992, p. 218.
Ibid., p. 219; Bandyopadhyaya, 1986; Bandyopadhyaya, 1995.
Nair, 1996; Saxena. 1997, pp. 7, 12-13.

(

Chapter 15
1.
2,

Mendelsohn & Vicziany, 1994, pp. 90, 107.
Ibid., p. 93.

Chapter 16

2.
3.

4.
5.
6.

7.

One advocate of this view is amongst India’s most eminent lawyers
Palkhivala, 1997,
Kohli, 1987, p. 60.
Points in this and the paragraph below are from: Kohli, 1987, pp.
43-5; Saxena, 1985; Frankel & Rao, 1996, p. 501.
Mahar, 1972, p. 426.
Mendelsohn & Vicziany, 1994, p. 97.
Ramaseshan, 1995, p.- 73.
Chandra & Parmar, 1997, p. 217.

i

'■ i : -

> i«i *1 ■< i»-' ,• -t t

Notes and references • 267

■j

Ii!

8.
9.

1

I

Ramaseshan, 1995, p. 75.
Twenty-seven per cent of the posts were reserved for the middle
castes (Other Backward Classes) and 22.5 per cent for the scheduled
castes and tribes, and also 33 per cent for women. Under the central
government’s pcmchayati raj act, while reservations for scheduled
castes are mandatory, state governments decide whether to exercise
reservations for the middle castes. The pradhan's post in each
panchayat area will sequentially be reserved for the middle castes,
scheduled castes and women, with only once in every four elections
thrown open to ‘general’ candidates.
10. Quoted in Ramaseshan, 1995, p. 74.
11. Hasan, 1996, p. 185.
12. Muralidharan, 1995, p. 75; Chandra & Parmar, 1997, p. 217.

"vWNM

>

Chapter 17
1.

2.

Many elements of this view are shared with: Kohli, 1987, p. 12;
Dreze & Sen, 1996, Chapter 8.
For an illuminating contrast between Brazil and the participatory
pattern of growth in east Asian ‘tigers’ like South Korea, see Dreze
& Sen, 1996, Chapter 8.

i!
!1

is

I

J

f

•f

Glossary

Bazaar
Banyaan
Bedakhli
Bagar

market-place
vest, often worn in place of a shirt
eviction of a tenant farmer or sharecropper
forced - sometimes unpaid - labour
Benami
illegal — literally without name — implying that its
ownership is disguised
Charpai
a rough wood-and-rope bed
Chawl
tenement
Garibi Hatao Abolish Poverty; a campaign slogan of Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi in the early 1970s
Ghat
steps built along the river for bathing
Hari
forced - sometimes unpaid - labour, specifically
referring to ploughing
Harijan
God’s People, a term popularized in the 1930s by
Mahatma Gandhi to refer to the ‘untouchable’ castes.
Scheduled castes is the term preferred by the former
untouchables.
Khadi
hand loomed cotton
Kisan
peasantKisan Sabhas peasants’ associations
Kshatriya
a broad category comprising numerous upper castes

I

I

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I

9

I•!
Glossary • 269

Kucha
■

Lekhpal
Lungi

Maurya
Mela
Nasbandhi
Nazrana
Pallu
!■

Panchayat

Pasi
Palwari
Pradhan
Pncca
Shikmi

Swaraj
Taluqadar

Yadav
Zamindar

of dried mud, usually applicable to makeshift huts
and roads, opp. of pucca
village land-record keeper
a loose cloth tied around the waist by men as a lower
garment; more common in southern India
an upper-middle caste of northern India
village fair
vasectomy or male sterilization
a levy imposed by landlords on tenants when they
wanted to renew or begin leases on agricultural land
an end of the saree that is often used by women to
veil their head and face
village councils; in independent India, panchayat
members are chosen by universal adult suffrage every
five years
a scheduled caste, historically considered ‘untouchable’
Same as lekhpal
head of the panchayat or elected village council;
traditionally, village head
proper or solid;pucca road means a paved, good road
the process of giving sub-tenants ownership as part
of zamindari abolition
freedom, independence or self-rule
a Persian term for a range of revenue-collecting
intermediaries between the rulerand cultivator; under
the British became synonymous with landlord
a middle caste of northern India
like taluqadar, a Persian term for a range of revenue
collecting intermediaries between the ruler and
cultivator; under the British became synonymous with
landlord

Zctmindari

5'

as a system, refers to the landlord-centred agrarian
system introduced by the British

i

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r.
•i

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r

' ?!
'■7

!

■r

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274 • Words like i-reidom
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I

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: il
RaVSectoralc& Da,,; G' (l"5) ‘H°W ,mPOrtant ,ndia’S P°Or is
Sectoral Compos,tton of Economic Growth’, Policy Research
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Ravalhon, M & Datt, 0. (|996)
h

' 1'1

tlV
Pi

I" I'6" LeSS°nS f°r FUtUre?’’

Political Weekly, Bombay, Special Number, September.
‘
Landlords and Governments in Uttar Pradesh - A

UnlrX

Zam‘^ nation, Oxford

Sarkar, S. (1983) Modern India 1885-1947, Macmillan, Madras
Saxena N.c. (1985)
and Zamindari
Zamindari Abolition in U P ’
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Caste and
Mainstream, 15 June
’
SaX iXC- XX ctanCeS °f S°me anti-p°°r 8O~‘ policies
report

’

C°mm'“'on, Government of India, unpublished

■ Sen Abhijit (1996) ‘Economic Reforms, Employment and Poverty-

IXX-"’—- ““

■*3

Shah G. (1991) ‘Social Backwardness and Politics of Reservations’
Economc and Political IVeekly, March, Annual Number
“ftvisX Undon^'”6'’'
PrOpmy ‘n North

Shiva Kumar,
(1991) ‘UNDP’s Human Development Index’
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Q. ,/coriomic and Political Weekly, 12 October
S.dd^u,, M.H (loys) Agrarlan Unresl jn

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BouMer.6 '
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S'nl’elhiN ('

' :’ W1
1

II
'"■JI
p-1

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1
I'I
wl
f»'i
ii

-Hil

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Hii

’Us

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I

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ne ScheduledCas,es- Oxford University Press, New

Spear, P. (1965) A History of India, Penguin, Baltimore.

11 " *' i

I

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I
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'■iT

Bibliography • 275

Is

-

Statistical Outline of India, 1994-95, Tata Services Ltd., Bombay.
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i

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I

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i

Tendulkar, S. (1992) ‘Economic Growth and Productivity’, Poverty in

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I

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of Arizona Press, Tucson.

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Index

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4

Absentee landlords, 42
Absolute poverty, 19, 106
families, 194-195
Administration
Thakurs’ control over, 24
Agra, 19, 26
Agrarian
British policy, 33
Congress policy, 59-62
Janata government’s policy on,
121
Nehru’s programme, 60
unsettling reform issues, 98
Agricultural Extension, 103
Agricultural land, ceilings on, 98,
217
Agriculture
change in the policy of, 6
Congress’s policy, 68
worsening condition of, 43
criticism of Mrs. Gandhi’s
approach, 104-105
fertilizers, use of, 106
green revolution impact on, 105
stagnation in, 42
wheat production increases, 105
Ahmed, Akbar (Dumpy), 216

Ahmedabad district, 50
Akhilesh, 151
Allahabad, 2, 19, 37, 47, 97, 140,
149, 151, 152, 219, 233
electricity problem, 154
Allahabad city, 2
Ambedkar, Babasaheb, 83, 156,241,
253
and Gandhi compared, 88-90
as a statesman, 86
birth of, 86
conversion, 93
death of, 80-85
complex relationships between
scheduled and middle class,
249-252
differences with Nehru, 93
education, 86
head of the committee drafting
the Constitution, 92
historian accounts of, 86-87
India’s first law minister in
Nehru Cabinet, 92
public meetings, 85
resign from the law ministry, 93
true leader of the untouchables,
83-84

A

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278 • Words like freedom

Amethi, 10, 16, 17
grand railway station, 19
growth of, 19
colleges, 19, 151
profile of, 18-19
Amethi Constituency
millions of money pour into 9
135-136
’ ’
profile, 135
Amethi landlord
profile of, 35
titles to, 35
Amethi, raja of, 28, 72
land ceiling cases, 215-216
• ••■Anni village, 218
Army
position in the world, 4
Assam, 179
Ateha, 10
houses of, 17-18
mosque, 18
Ateha
road, 18
Awadh, 19
annexation by British East India
Company, 26-27
British administrator describes
the condition of the poor
30-31

’

estates, emergence of, 28
Nehru’s description about, 26
peasantry condition of, 29
paradise for landlords, 28
see also peasant or Kisan
movement
Awadh landlords
pre-British condition of, 29
titles from British, 29

Baba Ka Gaon, 7

I

J
air of immutability about, 15
1955 panchayat election 226
247-248
bazaars, 17-18
bonded serfs, 34
Brahmins, 12
buffaloes and bullocks, 12
change in the environment,
16-17, 22, 183
change in women’s role, 171—173
current population, 10
electricity in, 16
Gandhi’s first programme of
non-violence in, 19
government bus line, 17
handicapped, 202-203
health condition, 211
high-yielding grain varieties
106-107
household possessions, 14
houses, 12
impoverished families, 125
land ceilings, 114
landlords, families of, 224
location of, 10
little land for every one in, 195
lower-caste widows in, 196-199
middle castes, 13
middle-caste families still
impoverished, 194-195
number of poor huts, 34
orphans in, 203-207’
Basis’ profession, 32
pond, 114
population, 34
poverty, 34
present environment of, 15
prosperity in, 213
Ram Dass case exception, 125
relationships between the middle

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Index • 279

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Bombay, 7, 43
and scheduled castes, 251
life in, 83-85
road, 16-17
poverty in, 52-53
road route, 10
population, 47
Scheduled caste and scheduled
temples, 54
tribe, 13
zoo, 53, 54
Shrinath’s impact on the
Bombay Union Dyeing Mills, .., .
scheduled caste families, 125
83-84
temples, 13
profile of, 79-80
terror and violence, 231-238
Bonda, Ram Dass’s younger
Thakurs, 12, 224
sister, 9
houses of, 34
Bonded labour, 4
tractors and jeeps, 13
Brahmins, 12, 31, 33, 82, 136,
trees, 12, 114
137, 214, 223
television facilities, 17
and sterlization programme, 118
untouchables’ houses, 34
number of families, 13
upper-caste families number, 13
prosperous families, 213
wage rate, 234, 237
support to BJP on Ayodhya
women’s dress, 14
issue, 254
Baba ka Mandir, 13
total number of families, 194
Babri mosque demolition, 252—254
television facility in, 17
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), 243,
Brazil economy, 256
244, 245, 252-253
Bribery, 16, 97, 175, 197, 236,
Banias, 212
248
Bansi, Shambu’s son
British Crown, 27, 43, 58
handicapped and his condition,
Buddhism, 93
202-203
Bullock can, use of, 17, 162
Bansraj
Burial ground
Shrinath’s second son, 138
Thakurs’ control over, 234
Bapu Inter-College, 150
Businessmen
Barber
farm houses of, 216
denial of service to landlords, 36
Butler, Harcourt, GovernorBedakhli, practice of, 35
General of the province, 29
Begar, practice, 30, 35, 63, 74,
warning to peasants, 37
92, 225
Bengal, 26
Calcutta, 43
Bicycles, 17
Capitalism
cost of, 16
emergence of, 29, 33
Bihar, 26, 39-40
Caste discrimination, examples of,
Birla, G.D., 86
229-231
Bodh temple, 95

280 • Words like freedom
Caste system, 6

defeat in 1977 elections, 119

and class, 33
ban on marriage, 33 ■
division of labour,'33
Cattle fairs, 97-98

share of vote in UP in 1977, 1 19
leftist .groups fight against Patel,
68

'

Census of 1961, 93 •
Census of 1971, 116
Century Mill, 79
Chamars, 219
Champa, Ramesh Pasi’s daughter

example of violence and rape,
232-233
Chandrashekar, 216
Chawl
discussion of, 77-78
Chedi Lal-Ji, 127
Children

dress, 14

eye-infections, 14
visibly sick, 14

China
achievements in, 256
living standards in, 4

Cholera, 208, 209
Chowpatty
Ram Dass’s visit to, 54
Communists, 240
and land reform, 244
Community Development, 103
Congress government’s rule,
economic policies, 98
record of, 198
Congress manifesto, 62, 110
Congress one-party rule in India,
disapproval of, 110, 120
Congress Party, 6

and poverty, 4
. ...and zamindari abolition, 56,
" 68-69

Conservative control over, 68, 240

i

peasant rift, 38-39

scheduled castes, support to, 243
socialist pattern of society
resolution, 241
Congress Socialist
and zamindari abolition, 67-68
Congress, split, 1 I 0
Congress Syndicate, 110
Constituent Assembly, 87

Constitution, 62-63, 68, 115
Conversion movement, 93-94
Cooperative farming,

poor performance of, 103
Corruption, 132, 134-135,
140-141, 156, 164, 198, 211
Daroga

upper-caste man, 226
Daryaganj, 190
Debt, 47, 81, 96, 140, 152, 164,
194, 211, 225
Dehra Dun, 9, 16, 19, 174, 178,
182, 190

Delhi, 46, 190
Delhi’s Turkman Gate
episode, 1 18-119
Desai, Morarji, 110
Devaluation, 109

Devapur School
Shrinath’s education, 126-127

Diarrhoeal infection, 210
Disease, 43
District Magistrate of Rae Bareli
237
Divorce, 166
prohibition of, 167

*

T
Index • 281

I
1

Doctors

people afraid of visiting, 209
Dowry, 169, 172
Draupadi
wife of Shrinath, 138
Durbhe
and Babri masjid demolition, 254
comment on potable water to all
villagers, 133-134
corruption in panchayat funds,
135
on discrimination between upper
castes and lower castes, 230
profile of an orphan, 203-207

East India Company, 26-27, 43
Eating vessels
prohibition on lower castes
touching, 31
Economic crisis, 192
Economic growth, 4, 106, 111, 256
Economic planning
Nehruvian initiative, 69
Economic reforms, 217, 256
Economy
boasting of, 4
devaluation of the rupee, 109
Education
family of, 154-155
India’s dismal role in, 146
discrimination with scheduled
caste students, 151
maltreatment with untouchable
students, 82
Ram Dass’s emphasis on, 83
reservation policy for middle
class, 252
scheduled caste elites benefit
from, 245
Scheduled castes’ reservation

seats in schools, 91
Scheduled castes’ women,
171-172
upper castes, discrimination
towards lower castes, 31
upper caste, domination in
school, 145
UP’s dismal performance in,
143-145
Elections of 1952, 239
rout of landlords’ Praja Party in,
101
Elections of 1967
rout of Congress in, 109-110
Elections of 1977
announcement of, 119
Mrs Gandhi’s defeat, 119
Elections of 1989
BSP seats in parliament, 243
Elections of 1971
Mrs Gandhi’s victory, 1 10-11 1
Election of 1991
UP Congress’s decline in, 252
Electricity
bribery in getting connections,
175
problem of, 16, 227, 154
Elite of landlords see zamindars
Emergency (1975), 115, 119
Employment
kind of job, 20
prospects of, 20
Epidemics, 4
Epilepsy, 202
Essential commodities
shortage of, 108
Estates
emergence of, 28
C

Faizabad, 38

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282 • Words i.iki- freedom
Family Planning Programmes or
Sterlization, 115—118, 137
careless surgery and deaths, 118
■ criticism of, 118-119
quota fixed, 1 17
police firing and Killing, 118
Ram Dass’s view, 118'
rural and urban poor’s views, 1 IS
scene in Baba Ka Gaon, 1 18
villages raided, 118
Famine, 4, 43-44, 103, 108
Faridabad, 9, 187, 190
Farm houses, 216
Feudalism
emergence of, 29, 33
Film stars

farms and orchards of, 216
Finlays Mill, 79
Five Year Plan, Janata designed
121
Foodgrains
spiralling prices of, 106
Foodgrain production, 102-103
fall in, 43

shortage of, 103, 108, 190
Food for Work Programme, 130

Foiest land (Madhya Pradesh)
leased out to, a private orchard
business, 217

Gandhi, Indira, 20, 22, 98, 119,
129, 132, 234
assassination of, 109, 131
broadcast to the nation, 115
court ruling countermanding
1971 elections in parliament
114-115
defeat in 1977 elections, 119
economic policies of, 109-1 10
emergence of, 109

I

Garibi Hatao slogan, 110-111,
1 13-1 14, 130, 256

land ceiling programme of, 217
land given to the poor by, 245
poverty alleviation programmes
130-131
populist programmes of, 109-110
return to power in 1980, 130
socialism promised by, 123
strategy of, 103-104
victory in 1971 elections, 110-111
visit to Dehra Dun, 182
Gandhi, Mahatma, 19, 22-23 31,
37-38, 86
and Ambedkar compared, 88-90
and kisan agitation, 38, 39
and zamindari abolition, 67
leader of the upper caste
allegation, 87-88
relationship with urban
labourers, 40
Gandhi, Rajiv, 18, 20, 22, 133,
182, 247, 256
and millions of rupees poured
into the Amethi constituency
135-136
funds not reaching the people
they were intended to assist
134
Gandhi, Sanjay, 20, 115, 116
119, 135
Gandhi, Sonia, 135
Gandhis, 216
Ganga-Jal
sprinkling of, 229
Garibi Hatao slogans, 110-111,
113-114,130,256
Gauriganj, 9, 10, 47
profile of, 18-19
Government jobs

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Index • 283
!

examination for government
jobs, 151
preparation for the Lower
Division Service, 151-152
school leaving degree from
Bapu Inter-College, 150
teachers discrimination with
scheduled castes students, 150 .
uneducated wife, 151
unemployed, 152, 154
Hari duty, 30, 74
Harijans, 31, 212
Hathyara due, 30
Haig, Sir Harry, Governor, 62
Health
Handicapped
government and GDP expenditure'
description of, 202—203
on, 210
pension for. 203
improvement in the condition of
Handpumps
poor, 207-208
scarcity of, 16
Heavy .industry
Harbanswallah, estate, profile of,
Nehruvian initiative, 69
175, 179
Hinduism, 33, 90
Hansraj, 129. 140, 146
Ambedkar’s comment on, 87,
Allahabad house, 152-153
90-95
appear for PCS examination, 151
Harijan Sevak Sangh, 89, 90
birth, 149
Hirjee Mills, 49
changed atmosphere in the
Home Rule propaganda, 3
village, 228-229
Horses
children, 151
uses of, 17
dress, 152
Hoshiarpur, 190
education problem, 150
House
family planning, 151
middle castes, 13
fees problem, 150 .
scheduled castes and scheduled
first scheduled caste person in
tribes, 13
Baba ka Gaon to have a
Thakurs, 13
Bachelor’s degree, 138
Human welfare
first son of Shrinath, 138
India and Latin America
graduate,7 i 51
O
compared, 4
lives in Allahabad, 149
India’s record on raising of, 4
marriage, 150
Hunger, 43, 103
narrates family’s difficulties, 149
level of, 4
preparation lor entrance

corruption, 156-157
middle class reservation, 252
reservation for scheduled castes,
91, 140-141, 156
Green Revolution, 120, 130
landlords prosper with, 102-106
Ghodawan dues, 30
Gowda, H.D. Deve, 193, 217
Gushannath, 17
Gwalior bullocks
good-quality of, 97

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284 • Words i.iki-: freedom

Illiteracy, 4, 22, 43, 82
among women, 168
Immunization programme, 209-210
Indian National Congress, 19, 36
1955 session and resolution, 70
Indo-Pak conflict,'68 •
Indonesia
poverty in, 4
Industrial growth
. ... pattern of, 6
Industrial monopolies
curbs on, 110
Industrial sector, 4
Industrial workers agitation, 108
Industrialists
prosperity of, 108
Inheritance rights, 167, 169, 198
Irrigation
lack of facility of, 24
improvement in, 103
private, 112
Jagdish, 202

Jan Sangh (Bharatiya Janata
Party), 101
Janata Dal, 243
Janata Government in UP,
consequences of, 120-121
differences between Congress
to
rule and, 120
first non-upper caste-chief
minister, 120
Janata Party, 120
Jats, 251
Jawahar Rozgar Yojana, 135
Jhari Ram, 174, 175, 177, 188, 189
as casual labour in tea
plantation, 178
Jinnah, 250
Jhoku, Ram Dass’s son, 9, 10, 15,

140, 146, 163
birth, 77, 86
children, 190
army exam and disqualified
because of height, 187
differences with wife, 188
drinking and gambling habit,
186-189
earnings of, 190
education of, 125, 187
job in Faridabad, 167
in bad company, 187-188
in Dehra Dun, 186
visit to Bombay, 77
visit to Punjab, 190
run away from home, 187-188
spoilt child, 187
weighing at birth, 186
well-dressed, 189
work in Delhi, 190
Juggu, Samar Bahadur’s father
and Samar Bahadur
atrocity story, 235-236
Jumna ghats, 2
Jute
stagnation in the production of, 42

Kaalu, 9, 107, 169, 187, 190
Kachwahan ka Purwa village
profile of, 234-235
Samar Bahadur episode, 235-235
wage rate in, 237
Kachwahan Thakurs, 234

I
I

Kahar caste, 199

Kalakankar, raja of, 28, 72
land ceiling cases, 215-216
Kamal Dyeing Factory, 84
closure of, 78, 96
profile of, 75-76
Kanpur, 79

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Index • 285
Karachi, 47, 48
Karunesh, 151
Kaswen pasis, 162
Kataria school, 150
Khan, Noor, 17
Kheri bullocks, 97
Khiljee Mills, Bombay, 9
Kisan Congress, 36

Kisan sabhas, 35-36
Koeri, caste, 136
i

Samar Bahadur atrocity episode,
235-236
Kshatriya caste, 10, 33
Kusauli school
description of, 141-142
monthly fees, 145
upper-caste principal, 145
Shrinath’s comment on the
principal of, 145
Lal, Babu, 136
Lal, Brij
suffering from post-polio
paralysis, 202-203
Land
little notion of private
ownerships of, 27
Land Acquisition Act, 69
Land baron
oppose nationalist movement, 69
and owner of private land, 42
Land ceilings, I 1 1-1 12

opposition to, 113
Ram Dass’s views, 113-114
Larid Ceiling Act of 1960, 113

families benefited, 1 13
poor implementation of, 113
weaknesses of, 101-102
Land ceiling cases, 215
Land ceiling laws, 100

disregard for, 216
Land grabbing, 115
Land ownership, 6
inequality of, 42, 99
Land reforms
and Congress policy, 62, 98-99
and the*role of political parties,
244
and politicians, 245
criticism of, 134
efforts for, 6
failure of, 217
issues of, 7
middle-caste elite, 245
recommendations, 117
scheduled-caste elite benefit, 245
Rae Bareli District Magistrate
recounts his experience with,
221
UP Janata Government policy
on, 121
Land Reforms Act, 63
Landlords
see zam 'mdars

Lekhpal
bribery practice among, 197
upper caste men, 226
Life expectancy, 43, 209, 210
Literacy
UP’s dismal performance in,
143-144
Living standards
in India and China compared, 4
Loans
taking of, 225
Lower chste
and kisan movement, 36
and upper castes, discrimination
between, 31-32, 229-231
land problem, 234

286 • Words like freedom
maltreatment of, 226-227
Lucknow, 10, 37, 42, 46, 74 I 13,
204, 219, 233
Ludhiana, 190, 204

Madhavbagh Temple
Ram Dass’s visit to, 53-59
Maharaja title, 29
Malaria
control over, 269
Malnutrition, 208-211
Manikpur temple, 170
Marriage, 177
customs of, 15
discrimination between lower
castes and upper castes, 231
Mauryas, 219, 247, 251
and zamindari abolition, 71
Mayawati
first woman chief minister of
UP, 244

Measles, 210
Mechanized or sugarcane farms
exemptions for, 112
Media baron {India Today)
farm house of, 216-217
Medical Services
expansion of, 209-210
Medicines
costs of, 21 1
Middle castes, 13
and scheduled castes, complex
relationship between, 249-252
and poverty, 212
• -enough land, 114
financial problem, 194
television, 17
Migration, 20
Migratory birds
population of, 14

Military science, 151
Morarjee Mill, 79
Morality, 4, 116-1 17, 208, 210
Mumbadevi temple,
Ram Dass’s visit to, 53-54, 75
Muslims
Congress support declining
from, 110
demand for a separate homeland
for, 19-20
land owned by, 34
population of, 34
Mussoorie, 2, 190

Nai caste, 219
Nanda, H.P., 216
Nationalist movement
land barpn opposition, 69
princes, opposition, 69
Nationalization of Banks, 110
Naxalite movement
in Andhra Pradesh and West
Bengal, 108
Nazrana practice, 30, 35
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 22, 36, 46, 57,
58, 70, 85, 86, 89, 108, 256
agrarian programme of, 60
and kisan agitation, 2-3 23
37-39,116
birthplace of, 19
broadcast on the eve of
Independence, 62
death of, 98, 103
differences with Gandhi on
zamindari system, 59-60
description of Awadh, 26
inauguration speech on
parliamentary democracy
239-240
socialism promised by, 123

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Index • 287

socialist pattern of society, 241
unchallengeable leader, 68
visit to Pratapgarh, 2-3, 23-24
Nehru, Motilal, 86-87
Oberoi hoteliers
land owned by, 216
Orphan
description of, 203-207

f
f

Pallu custom, 166, 177
Panchayat election in 1955, 226,
246-249
fight between scheduled castes
and Thakurs, 166, 247-248
pradhan posl, 247
violence and killings, 247
Panchayats
corruption in, 134-135
upper castes, domination, 132,
134-135
Paralysis, 9
Parliament
fundamental rights
abrogation, 115
suspension of, 115
grand landlords as members of, 223
reservation seats for
untouchables, 91
seats from UP, 20
Parliamentary democracy, 4
Nehru’s speech on, 239-240
Partition
violence and massacres, 49
Pasi, Karn Dass
Ambedkar’s impact on, 95
and garihi hatao's little impact,
111
and demolition of Babri mosque,
253

and 1952 election, 239
and panchayat elections of
1955, 248
and zamindari abolition in Baba
ka Gaon, 70-74
as sharecroppers, 97
believe in sanctity of life, 231
birth of, 7, 23
Bombay experience about
untouchables, 83-85
Bombay life, 49, 81
brothers and sisters, 9
buying and selling cattles, 97
change in his life, 81, 83-95
children, 10
children’s death, 81, 186, 208
children’s marriage and village
customs, 15
closure of Kamal Dyeing and
compensation to, 78
cycle purchased, 16
dress, 7 .
education, 82-83
elder sister’s birth, 7, 9
expenditure on food, 55
family land, 96
hazy memory of his parents’
participation in the revolt
against taluqadars and
zamindars, 23
his family hut, 14-15
his nani-Lal, 7
in search of job, 46-47
job in Bombay Union Dyeing
Mills, 79
land purchased by, 129, 139
leave for Bombay, 47
life at Bombay Union Dyeing,
78-80
knows Marathi language, 84

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288 • Words like freedom

knows reading and writing, 82, 83
living with uncle in Bombay,
... 49,-77-78
number of immediate family
members, 9
moves to Bombay, 40
number of years spent in
Bombay, 81
on poverty, 43-45
panchayat member and his
views, 134-135
Pasi caste of, 32
pays off father’s debt to zamindars,

visit to police station, 226
wages, 47
wife’s visit to Bombay, 55
work in Kamal Dyeing factory
75
work as a contractor to the
Western railways, 50-52
work at laying railway tracks
49-50
Pasi, Ramesh, 232
Pasi community, 32, 36, 204, 219
attendance at the police station
every day, 84
Patel, Vallabhbhai, 68
parents’ death, 9
Patwari
Prayaga Devi, wife of, 9
and zamindari abolition, 56
profile of, 7-22
treat the lower castes like a dog
remained improverished, 121-123
230
return from Bombay, 96
bribe among, 97
return to Bombay, 75
Pax Britannica, 27
salary of, 50, 76, 81
Primary Teachers Certificate
savings, 81
corruption and bribery example
second stay in Bombay, 75
156-158 .
sons, 9
Princely States
source of income of, 107
accession to Indian Union, 58
spending his life in Baba ka
Princes
Gaon after returning from
and private land by, 42
Bombay, 56
nationalist movement opposed
land cheating episode, 96-97
by, 69
Thakurs mock at, 82
Princes’s estates, 215
tyrannized by the village
Prince of Wales Museum, 53
landlords, 123
Privy purses, 58
under debt, 152
abolition of, 110
untouchable family, 7
Provincial Congress Governments
upper caste’s discriminating
and lack of commitment to land
attitude towards, 31-32
distribution, 100
vegetarian, 231
Public distribution system, 104
views about Thakurs, 215, 224
Public Sector
views on poverty alleviation
job reservation for scheduled
programmes, 133
castes in, 157

• I

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Index • 289

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Purdah system, 162, 169
Peasant/A/so/? movement or
Awadh revolt
attack on landlords’ property, 36
Baba Ramachandra’s arrest and
role, 36
background of, 35-36
beginning of, 1
burning and looting landlords’
crops, 37
clashes between landlords’
agents and, 37
Congress’s betrayal, 37-38
Congress’s rule, 36
Congress-peasant rift, 38, 39
demands of 1, 30-31
failure of, 37-40
Gandhi’s instructions to, 38
ghodawan dues, 30
grand mansion of rajas, 18
hathyana dues, 30
imposing numerous illegal dues,
30
in Bihar, 39-40
in Faizabad, 35
in Pratapgarh, 35
in Rae Bareli, 35
in Sultanpur, 35
leaders arrested, 40
local leaders’ role, 36
lack of basic municipal
facilities, 18
lower-middle and untouchables
participate in, 36
levy for a boil on the landlady’s
leg, 30
motorana dues, 30
nazrana dues, 30

Nehru’s experience, 2-3
Nehru’s views, 38-39

oppressive measures of the
army, 2, 40
petpiravan dues, 30
police firing, 37, 40
profile of, 18
Ram Dass’s family’s

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participation in, 22

social boycott of landlords, 36
violence, 35-36
zamindars empowerment, role
of, 30
Peepul tree, 10, 13
Petpiravan system, 30
Philippines
poverty in, 4
Pithi village, 232
Plague, 208-209
Planned economic development, 4
Planning Commission, 102
Pneumonia, 186, 210
Police, 25, 40, 234

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and Thakurs, nexus between,
226
comment on, 249
Police Station, 225, 226, 232,
236, 248
Politician

farms and orchards owned by,
216
siphon money, 132
looting and cheating the
common men, 244-245
Poor
British administrator’s comment
on, 30-31
fight for wages with Thakurs,
225-226
improvement of, 183—184
police’s careless attitude
towards, 225

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290 • Words 1.IKI: I'KEEDOM

UP Janata government’s
emphasis on, 121
Population, 116
Bombay, 4 7
during the British rule, 43
growth rate, 106
Muslims, 34
rural, 41, 57
upper castes, 34
untouchables, 34
Postal department
corruption in, 164
Postman
bribery practice, 197
Potable water (Amethi
Constituency), 133-134
Poverty
and Garibi Hatao slogan, 110-1 1 1
and land given to poor during
Mrs Gandhi’s time, 245
and Mrs Gandhi’s programmes,
109-110
anti-poverty programmes, 104—
112,242
Awadh revolt and Nehru’s little
attention, 116
. . ..British legacy, 42
causes of, 3-4, 42, 81, 106
Congress’s economic policies 4
98
Congress’s failure in handling
of, 117
Congress’s promises of welfare
of, 62-63
differences between the Janata
government and Congress
approaches, 121
examples of, 45
examples of expenses of a
family of five, 194

falsifying official estimates,
192- 193
in Bombay, 52-53
India and Indonesia compared, 4
middle castes, 212
national survey and studies, 81
perpetuation and analysis of,
255-257

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poorer families, 193

Prayaga Devi recalls, 164
Ram Dass’s views, 43-45, 214—
215
re-emergence of, 109
persistence of, 4-5
rural, 106
urban, 106
scale and complexity of, 6
Poverty alleviation programmes
130-133, 247
corruption examples, 132
Poverty line, 81, 113, 129
per child per month, 194
Prabha, Ram Dass’s eldest sister
9

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Pradhan
role of, 181

Thakurs’ hold over, 134
Prasad, Sir Jagdish, 59
Pratapgarh, 2-3, 10, 23, 35, 65,
97, 105, 174, 190, 233
Pratapgarh, raja, 28, 65, 72
and land ceiling cases, 215-216
Prayaga Devi, Ram Dass Pasi’s
wife, 9, 21
and panchayat election, 248
authority in the house, 170
beaten and tortured by Thakurs,
164-165
children, 163
children’s death, 163-164

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Index • 291

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dress, 162
emphasis of education, 171-172
face covering system, 162-163
family background of, 161
gauna ceremony, 161
improvement in the living
standard, 165
interest in politics, 170
land purchased, 164
marriage, 161
narrates about plague, 209
second visit to Bombay, 164
status in religious matters, 170
visit to temple, 170
vote cast in 1952 elections, 239
workers on daily wages, 107
Puttu, Ram Dass’s youngest sister, 9
alias ‘Sarju Devi’, 176-177
birth of, 174
children, 178
family background, 174
house, 175-176
Harbanswallah estate, 174
labourer in tea plantation, 176
marriage, 174, 177
pallu custom, 177
salary, 178
taking of annual and sick leave,
178
vote for MLA and MP, 182
widow, 179
work in tea plantation, 179

Rai Sahib title, 29
Rae Bareli, 37, 97, 213, 222, 234
and kisan movement, 35
millions of rupees poured into,
234
VIP constituency, 234
Railways

job reservation for scheduled
castes, 157
Ram Dass’s experience about
the functioning of, 51-52
Raja title, 29
Rajapur zamindar, 24, 35
description about, 218-221
Rakesh, younger brother of
Hansraj, 149, 150, 229
Ram, Kashi, 254
Ram Dass’s family
and benefit from zamindari
abolition, 57
emigration in search of work to
Bombay and Karachi, 48
impoverishment of, 255-257
participation in Awadh revolt,
22
police harassment of, 25
several deaths in, 76
subjected to poverty and
oppression for long, 23-26
uncle’s death, 78
Under debt, 194, 211
untouchable, house of, 34
untouchables and
impoverishment of, 31
views of independent India, 22
working as labourers, 21
zemindars beating and abusing

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of 25

Ram Dass’s father
death of, 9, 122
emigration to Bombay and
Karachi in search of job, 7, 48

work as a gardener in Rori, 49
return from Bombay, 47, 49
Ram Lakhan, 233
Ram Lal
narrates about sterilization

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programmes, 137
Ram Salawan
narration about Ranipur village,
136-137
Ramchandra, Baba
role of, 36, 40
Rampur zarrindar, 24, 35, 72
Rani ki Bagh, Zoo
Ram Dass’s visit, 53-54
Ranipur village, 7, 9, 136-137
sterilization programme, 137—
138
Rape, 231-234
Refugee movements, 68
Religion
discrimination in, 230-231

Reservation policy, 156-157
Road
improvement in the conditions
of, 17
Rori (now in Pakistan), 49
Round Table Conference, 88-89
Sai river, 17, 232
Samar, Bahadur
atrocity episode, 235-236
District Magistrate of Rae Bareli
comments on, 237-238
Samajwadi Party, 243-244
' Sanghipur, 127
Sanghipur hospital, 209
Sarkar, Sumit, 86
Sarme village
■profile of, 161

position of, 245-246
Scheduled castes, 13, 219
Ambedkar’s demand for a
separate electorate for, 242
and middle classes, complex
relationship between, 249-252
discrimination against, 229
land problem, 234
low levels of literacy amongst,
146-147
poverty among, 212
pradhan posts for, 246
reserve seats in government jobs
and seats in parliament, 91
reservation policy for jobs, 156—
157
Thakurs, discrimination with,
231
wells used by, 16
upper castes violence with, 231233
Scheduled-caste students
teachers discrimination, 150
Scheduled tribes, 13
Seditious Meetings Act, 40
Servants of the Untouchables
Society, 89
Shambu
profile and impoverished
example, 199-201
Shastri, Lal Bahadur, 20, 98, 103,
109
Shiv Sena, 253

Sati, 166

Shrinath, Ram Dass Pasi’s son, 9,
10, 15, 47, 107, 163

Scheduled caste elites beneficiary
in government job, 245-246
Scheduled caste officers in the
bureaucracy
BSP role in improving the

and female education, 172
as a primary teacher, 123, 125,
129, 140-142, 164
better student after studies in
Bombay, 127

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Index • 293
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Bombay education, 83
Champa’s raping, 231-232
comment on poverty alleviation
programmes funds, 132-133
corruption in panchayat funds,
135
difference of education in
Bombay and Baba ka Gaon,
77, 126-127
Draupadi, wife of, 138
dress of, 126
eldest daughter’s education, 123
financial burden, 140
his son recalls his impoverished
days, 129
expenditure on medicines, 211
family poverty, 227
house of, 137-138
land purchased by, 139
known as ‘Master)i’, 125
marriage, 138
monthly fees in the school, 127
on scheduled castes and middle
castes relation, 250
qualities of, 125-126
relations with Jhoku, 190-191
reservation policy, 252
salary, 129, 139, 194
sons, 138
study experience, 127-128
teachers training course, 129
under debt, 140
Singh, Abhay Pratap, 216
Singh, Dinesh, 216, 241
Singh, Om Prakash, 235
Singh, Prahlad, 233
Singh, Sanjay
criminal cases, 216
Singh, Vir Bhadra, 216
Singh, V.P., 20

Slum clearance, 115-119
Small farms
subsidized loans to, 130
Small-pox, 10, 186, 208
eradication of, 210
Social Justice
differences between the Janata
government and the Congress,
121
Mrs Gandhi’s commitment to,
112
Socialism, 68, 104
constitutional commitment to,
61
Nehru’s promise, 123
Soviet-style, 69
Socialist pattern of society, 256
Spear, Percival, 86
State Assembly
grand landlords as members of,
223
scheduled castes reservation
seats, 91
State Assembly Elections of 1991
UP Congress’s decline, 252
Steel plant
employment for outsiders, 138 .
Stridhana, 167
Strikes, 108
Sub-Saharan
human welfare condition in, 4
Sultanpur District, 7, 9, 10, 118
and kisan movement, 35
Supreme Court, 111
Swarajya, 39
Taluqadars, 2, 23

term of, 26
Tea plantation
English managers, 179

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in Bengal, UP and Bihar, 174
Indian managers, 179
labourers employed, 174
labourers management relations,
180

number of labourers, 180
Union role, 181

women labourers, 176, 180

women labourers, light against

Teachers
discrimination with scheduled

castes students, 150
persistent absenteeism by 144146
Tehel, Ram, Ram Dass’s brother
9, 169
death of, 76
Temples, 13
debarred for untouchables, 32 84
'

and Congress, 241
and lower caste relations, case
study of, 225-228, 229-231
and police, nexus between, 226

and sterilization, 118
and zamindari abolition
movement, 57, 71, 73
in armed services, 214
burial grounds, control

234

I

richest caste, 212, 213
support to BJP on Ayodhya
issue, 254
television facility, 17
total land of, 24

tractors and jeeps, 16, 17, 214
well episode, 230
Tiloi estate, 161
Tiloi raja, 161
Titles; 35
Tiwari, Pramod, 233, 241
Trade Union, 181-182

condition of, 43
Thakur
,

number of families, 13, 194
profile of, 213
powerful community 220-221
223, 224
pumps for irrigation, 214
Ram Dass’s comments on 9
12-13
’ ’

management, 179-182

episode, 230
Terror, 231-232
Textile Industry

m government job, 214
houses, 34, 213
land control by, 234
land owned by, 213

over,

callous attitude of, 31
cheating people, 97

control of the village, 23-24
control over land and land
owners, 28

elections, 182
Tube wells, 17
Tuberculosis, 9, 81, 209, 210
Twenty-point programmes, 115

Tyagis, 251
Umesh, Ram Dass’s grandson, 144
Unemployment, 140, 152, 154-155
in organized sector, 155-156

number of educated unemployed,
Universal franchise, 20
failure of, 240
Untouchability,; 175, 229, 249
stigma of, 32
Nehru-Ambedkar

90-91

approaches,
i

Index • 295

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Untouchability (Offences) Act, 92
Untouchables, 26, 31, 32, 49, 82,
236
Ambedkar true leader of, 83-84
Kisan agitation, 36
barred from attending schools,
82
huts of, 14
land reform benefit to, 92
population, 34
Ram Dass’s Bombay experience,
83-85
separate electorates for, 91
Upadhaya, Ram Dev, 127
Upper caste
change in the attitudes of, 228
discrimination between lower
castes, case study, 31-32, 229231
domination over land ownership,
224
holding high position in
government and
administration, 228
land owned by, 34
power and position, 224
relations with lower castes, 33,
225-229
UP
absolute poverty, 19
BSP government’s tenure in,
246
central rule, 243, 244
children’s death in, 116
Hindi-speaking belt, 19
prime ministers from, 20
nationalist struggle, 19
parliament seats from, 20
population of, 19
Samajwadi Party government’s

tenure in, 246
UP agrarian order
oppressive inequalities of, 64.. .
UP Assembly
communists’s strength in, 244
UP chief minister, first scheduled
caste as, 243
Mayawati as first woman chief
minister, 244
UP Congress’s decline of, 243
high castes’ control over, 100
urban upper castes and landed
elite domination, 39
victory in 1937 election, 61-62
UP election of 1937
Congress victory, 61—62
UP Zamindari Abolition Act of
1951, 63
lacuna in, 63-64
urban income and property
ceilings on, 110
Vaishya castes, 33
Varanasi, 10, 42
Vishwa Hindu Parishad, 253
Vizianagaram, Maharaj Kumar of
zamindari abolition, 58
Violence, 35, 36, 231-238, 247
examples of, 231-233
Samar Bahadur case study, 234238

Wages, 47.. 107, 227, 234, 236,
237
fight for, 225-226
Washermen
denial of services to landlords, 36
Water
lower castes not allowed to
serve, 3 I

I

296 • Words LIKE FREEDOM

Water taps
scarcity of, 16
Wells, 16
lower castes not
i
allowed, 32
Widows, 179, 196-200
impoverished condition of,
197
lower-caste, 198
number of, 197
upper-caste, 197—198
Widow’s pension, 198
Widow remarriage, 166-169
Women
anti-female bias, 167-168
authority, 176-177
change in the situation of the
lower caste, 171
deteriorating situation of lowercaste, 172-173
health care coverage, 168
illiteracy among, 168
inheritance rights, 167, 169, 198
lower and upper castes
compared, 164-169
mortality rates, 168
Thakur and Brahmin life, 166
violence against, 169
working in tea plantations, 180
education, 171-172
Yadav, Mulayani Singh, 245, 254
Yadav, Ram Naresh, 120, 252
Yadavs, 219
and zamindari abolition, 71
Yashodara
on Puttu, 177

Zamindari abolition
and Congress Party, 56-57, 68-69
and Congress manifesto, 62
and petty tenants, 57

Baba ka Gaon, 70-74
background of, 57
beneficiaries of, 66
bonanza for landlords, 64-66
compensation, 63, 72, 105
Congress socialist pledges, 67
Congress pre-independence
promises, 67
efforts for, 40
failure of, 57
Gandhi-Nehru differences, 59-60
legal abolition of, 57
Thakurs upset, 57
UP Congress’s efforts, 40
Zamindari Abolition Act 64-66
72
and Congress leadership, 68-69
and inequality in land
ownerships, 99
criticism of, 66, 68-69
implementation of, 72
Z^wz^r/landlords or elite
landlords or grand landlords ‘
and patwari role, 56
barber services denial to, 36
beating and torture of lower
caste people, 25
control over private land, 41
dress, 34
houses, 34
during the British rule, 26-29
^ucation and government jobs,

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empowerment of, 29
estates of, 42
home farms of, 42
land control, 34
lands, 212-213
Nehru’s critical comment on
60-61

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Index 1 29'7

Nehru’s distinction between
others and, 61
members of, 61
number of houses, 212
members of Parliament and
Legislative Assemblies, 223
peasant and landless labourers
fight against, 1
Persian term of, 26
position under the British rule, 31

Ram Dass’s parents’ revolt
against the exploitive rule of,
23
semi-feudal system, 29
social boycott during the kisan
movement, 36
violence against the poor, 7
washermen’s services denial to,
36

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NEW TITLES IN REFERENCE BOOKS
THE ENQUIRE DICTIONARY
TJS George

The first of its kind in India,-T//e Enquire Dictionary
provides answers to questions arcane and everyday
in a minute, explains concepts, ideas and issues
lucidly and succinctly and is the perfect companion
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NEW TITLES IN NON-FICTION
THE PATHOLOGY OF CORRUPTION

S.S. Gill
Corruption has ravaged civilizations, destroyed
empires and ruined several regimes. Upstaging
communalism, it is being perceived as the greatest
threat to the Indian state. It has therefore, become
essential to examine and understand the systemic
and other weaknesses in our polity which have led
to this situation. This is what The Pathology of
Corruption seeks to do.
The first part of the book explores the cultural,
historical and structural factors which have shaped
the Indian approach to bribery and venality. The
first four chapters of the next section deal with the
growth of corruption during the tenures of
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P V Narasimha Rao - the only Indian prime
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office. Then follow four chapters on corruption in
the bureaucracy, corporate sector, politics, and
criminalization of politics. A chapter on the control
of corruption and an overview round off this study.

I

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The author has pulled no punches in dealing with
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and the treatment is fair, objective and balanced'
This is, perhaps, the most comprehensive and
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NEW TITLES IN NON-FICTION

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THE MAKING OF A NATION

11

India's Road to Independence

J
I

B.R. Nanda
Few Historians of Modern India have written so
extensively, penetratingly and engagingly as B.R.
Nanda. His distinguished and widely read
biographies of Mahatma Gandhi, G.K. Gokhale and
the Nehrus have become classics. Drawing upon his
work in the last four decades, he has produced in
this volume, an outline history of the struggle for
Indian freedom. Spanning the century between the
Great Revolt of 1857 and the establishment of the
Indian republic, it covers the early years of political
awakening, the Moderate Era, the conflict between
the Moderates and the Extremists, the advent of
Gandhi on the Indian scene, the satyagraha
struggles, the internal tensions within the
Nationalist movement and the circumstances
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Gandhi once described the Indian freedom struggle
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imperialism. Congress nationalism and Muslim
separatism. It is on this contest that the book
concentrates. It illuminates key issues and
outstanding personalities: its narrative is infused
with those special attributes that are Nanda's
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original resources, insightful analysis and personal
witness to the times.
The book, a valuable memento of the Golden Jubilee
of India's independence, will be enjoyed both by the
general reader and the scholar.

NEW TITLES IN NON-FICTION
COUNTDOWN TO PARTITION
The Final Days
Ajit Bhattacharjea
August 14, 1947, was the day a free nation was
born
and a country stood divided. On the day
that freedom dawned, eyewitnesses say, there was
a rainbow in the sky, but it was overshadowed by
the black cloud of partition. This was not the
freedom for which the people of India had fought.

Spanning the last three months before that fateful
day. Countdown to Partition reveals the behind-thescenes activities that went on at the time: how the
Congress functioned independently of Gandhi; how
Jinnah was told by Mountbatten to perform a
charade in public, and how India's leaders were
given only 73 days to sort out the administrative
measures to be taken after partition. "Speed and
acceleration, contends Ajit Bhattacharjea, was the
strategy that enabled Mountbatten "to confuse
terms to the Indian leaders. The pace had to be
maintained lest the British run administration
collapsed before the responsibility of governance
was transferred to Indian and Pakistani hands."
In a detailed and insightful analysis of the politics
behind partition, the book also takes into account
the price paid by the common people of India for
the freedom for which they had fought.

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