Work, Word and the World: Essays on Habitat, Culture and Environment 9789354359613, 9789354353819

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For Meera, Sandhya and Mallika, and to the memory of their grandmothers Mariam Paul (1918–2013) and Rajam Viswanathan (1925–2021)

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Acknowledgements My grateful thanks to my daughters Meera, Sandhya and Mallika for making my frequent fieldwork trips and visits to libraries possible. Jawaharlal Nehru University made teaching and research easy. I could not have written this book but for the support of the University Grants Commission (UGC) Capacity Build Up Grant. My grateful thanks to my teachers Prof. T.K. Oommen and Prof. Nandu Ram, who actively engaged with new questions relating to occupations and life chances. In Coonoor, I must thank my cousin James Kuriappan and his family who provided me with security and friendship in new territory and made their home available to me. I owe much to my aunt, Asha Elizabeth Kuruvilla, and my paternal uncle, K. Kuruvilla, for interpreting so much of Kerala’s social reality to me through conversations. I must also thank Thomas George, who left us too soon, and his beautiful family in Kuruvillangad and Palakkad. Without his help, I could not have begun my organic agriculture work in Kerala. Many thanks to Swapna James and her family in Cherpulassery, Palakkad; to Arun Venkatraman and his family in Tiruvannamalai for letting me into their professional and personal lives as educationists and ecologists. In Ladakh, the sustained friendship of Tashi Lundup and Deskid Dolma opened many doors for me. I thank Sumera Shafi, Rebecca Norman, Sonam Wangchuk, Harjit Singh, Suresh Babu and Renoj J. Thayyen. Ravi Nandan Singh very kindly allowed me to excerpt sections from his PhD thesis ‘Representations of Death in Benaras’ making the complex questions of water cleansing scientifically easier to read. Bharat Jhunjhunwala abstracted various reports and not just made them accessible but also interrogated them. Amita Singh drew me into various conferences and research trips and introduced me to Disaster Management experts from various countries. Ishwar Modi was charm personified and invited me to contribute to his festschrift volume for Prof. Yogendra Singh, who had educated generations of scholars with his versatility and adaptability to new motivations in writing Sociology. xiii

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I owe a deep debt to all these people. Samit Kar was certain that I could inform the college and monastery audiences in Kolkata by giving a keynote address. Renoj J. Thayyen, George Thomas, Ishwar Modi, Yogendra Singh, Satish and Edie Saberwal, A.P. Barnabas and Samit Kar have moved on, but before their deaths, they left behind a buoyant aura about the significance of new and interdisciplinary notations in cultural studies necessary to imagine the 21st century. Chitra Harshvardhan, Alka Grover, Radhika Singha, Nandini Sundar, Sucheta Mahajan, Taisha Abraham, Renny Thomas, Sandhya Raman, Ratna Raman and S.R. Iyer, Asha and K. Kuruvilla, Jeanette and Jiju James, Esther and Suresh Pillai have been my support group, and for them, my gratitude is huge. Rajam Viswanathan, my mother-in-law, was always supportive of my work, and I am grateful to her and my mother, Mariam Paul, that in their lifetime, I could sustain my intellectual interests in various ways. Their courage and love have been a great support to me. My granddaughters, Uttara and Nandita Tewari, made life easy with their affection, and though interactions remained mainly conducted in cyberspace, I am deeply grateful to them for their company. I could never thank my friends Jayati Ghosh, Avijit Sen, Smita Gupta, Praveen Jha, Neeladri Bhattacharya, Chitra Joshi, Asha and D.S. Rawat, Vijaya Ramaswamy and Krishnan enough for the support they provided me with in the first decade of the 21st century when I was coping with severe ill health. My heartfelt gratitude to the anonymous reviewer who made the publication of this book with Bloomsbury India possible. My friends at Sri Ramanasramam, Dr C.N. Srinivasa Murthy, Michael Highburgher, K.S. Kannan and J. Jayaraman, will always be remembered by me for their courtesy and solidarity in all circumstances of my frequent visits to Ramanasramam for 25 years. K.V. Subrahmonyan and V.S. Mani have been friends too as has been Abhitha Arunagiri, all of whose various intellectual and spiritual journeys I sought to understand. I am immensely grateful to Shiv Visvanathan and Saagar Tewari for access to many valuable books in their personal collections and their familial concern. I would also like to thank Mini Shivkumar Menon, Sonam Wangchuk and Becky Norman, late Devinder Singh, Namgyal Dorjay, Rinchen Dolkar, Sunil Meka, Sreeja Govindan, Rani Philip, Gitika De, Ravindra Karnena, Debanjana Das, Mallarika Sinha Roy, Saswati Bhattacharya,

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G. Arunima, A.R. Anupama, Lam Khan Piang, Vineeta Menon, Colonel Venugopal and Girija, M.P. Joseph, Sian Miles, Molly and P.K. Hormis Tharakan, Ezhupunna P.H. Hormis Tharakan and Aniruddh Menon. Nehru Memorial Library, Delhi; SOAS Archives, London; Queen’s University, Belfast; and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla, had important resources that I used for writing essays in the 1990s and the 21st century; I extend my grateful thanks to Ashok Sharma and archivists and librarians of IIAS, Shimla. Bettina Baumer was extremely helpful when I visited the library at IIAS, as we shared interests in the dialogue of religions for many decades. I would also like to thank Jaya Ravindran for her great kindness in helping me use the National Archives, Delhi. I must also acknowledge the contributions of Istvan Perczel, Vlad Naumescu, Triloki Pandey, Annapurna Pandey, Huma Ahmed Ghosh, Annie Paul, Neena Paul, Christoph Wulf, Stephanos Stephanides, Tamer Soyler, Boike Rehbein, Saskia Lange, Ari Sitas, Gilles Tarabout, Catherine Clemont, Denis Matringe, Roland Lardinois, Nicolas Porret Blanc, Geetha Ganapathy Dore, Bruce and Adele King, Lars Eklund, Linda Hiltmann and Anna Lindberg for fellowship and solidarity, which allowed me access to libraries and journals in their cities. Thanks too, to late Gispert Sauch (SJ), T.K. John (SJ), late George Keerankeri (SJ), Pius Malekandathil, Yann Vaneaux, Chandrika Grover, Martin Stokes, Hastings Donan, Suzel Reily, Katy Radford, Anil Nauriya, Mallika Shakya, Sukh Pamra, Devyani Jayaswal, Karen Koelho, Kanta Soni, Mukta and R. Manu, Siddharth Iyer, Smriti Iyer, Veena Das, J.P.S. Uberoi, Andre Beteille, Ravinder Jain, Shobhita Jain, Frederique Marglin, Jyoti and Jane Sahi, Pratiksha Baxi, Carsten Wilkes, Anandi Shanmugam, Becky Holland, Mahesh Rangarajan, Sasanka Perera, Peter DeSouza, late A.P. Barnabas (Indian Institute of Public Administration), late Ravinder Kumar (Nehru Memorial Museum and Library) and Mrinal Miri. My editor at Bloomsbury India, Chandra Sekhar, and his team have been immensely supportive. I am deeply grateful to the Central European University, Budapest for awarding me the Research Excellence Award, 2018, and to my friends Maja Skalar, Erika Belko, Esther Holbrook, Benedik Zsigmond, Marie Koves, Adam Bethlenfalvy, Klara Trencsenyi, Ute Falasche and Ildiko Markuz for making me feel at home in their city. Thanks to Spitting Image, Bengaluru for help with the typescript and collation of photographs.

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Some of the essays in this volume are pre-published works. I am grateful to the publishers for their kind permission to include them in this volume. ‘Sacred Rivers: Energy Resources and People’s Power’ was previously published in Politics and Religion Journal (1), 2013 and in Land, Leadership and Local Resource Management, edited by Rabindranath Bhattacharya and Ahmad Martada Mohamed, Delhi: Mittal Publications, 2016, written as a keynote address to the Network of Asia Pacific Schools and Institutes of Public Administration and Governance (NAPSIPAG) Conference, 2013, in Dehradun. ‘Ladakh and the Creative Greening of the Desert: The Life Work of Sonam Wangchuk and Rebecca Norman through Alternative Practices in Education and Farming’, was published in Society and Culture in South Asia, 7 (2): 211–231, Delhi, 2021. ‘A Time Known to All: Stephanos Stephanides and Ari Sitas’ was published in Transcience, 11 (2): 171–181, Berlin, 2020. ‘Detachment and Faith’, in Religion and Society, edited by Samit Kar. Kolkata: Monoshakti, 2016; it was the keynote address in seminar proceedings in collaboration with the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), Bose Institute, Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University and Directed Initiative. ‘Kalpathy Heritage Village: Sacred and Modern’, in Education, Religion and Creativity, edited by Ishwar Modi, 138–163, Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2013. ‘Alternative School Education and the Standardisation of Right to Education Debate’, in Ideas, Institutions, Processes: Essays in Memory of Satish Saberwal, edited by N. Jayaram, 171–200. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2014. ‘The Labyrinth of Covid-19’, in Paragrana, 30 (2), Berlin: Freie University, 2021.

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Introduction One of the key problems that this book has tried to handle is how contemporary sociologists build bridges with historians, students of literature and all those who communicate the resilience of ideas. Interdisciplinarity has always been important to those of us who work with tradition and modernity. Hackneyed though these latter terms may be, they are still integral to the social sciences. What we need to do is to spatially interlock it with globalism to see how alive the world becomes when our analyses seek to understand reality as the people experience it! This book attempts to understand this connection between past and present as a problem of interlocution, where narrative production is based on the understanding of a prism, where there is a continual reflection on how the continuity of symbols manifests itself in world cultures. As India moves into new forms of globalisation, where digital mediation becomes ever more insistent, the craft of reading narratives becomes a significant methodological tool for literary studies, comparative sociology and cultural studies. I now provide the reader with a summarised introduction to each essay. Chapter 1, ‘Sacred Rivers: Energy Resources and People’s Power’, looks at the comparative literature on the debate on dams, focusing on how the interrelationship of activists and intellectuals creates a swathe of materials to help us interpret peoples’ movements and water distribution. By chronicling the way in which dissent appears as a life force, I show how science and community interests are often intertwined. We can only understand the Greens Movements in terms of why letting rivers remain rivers, becomes essential for understanding the survival of riverine civilisations. By following the course of the Ganga as described by Ravi Nandan Singh’s path-breaking doctoral thesis, the role of phagi is placed in detail through the dialogue with scientific reports in relation to the cleaning and maintenance of rivers. In the hierarchy of wants, sustainable agriculture during climate change 1

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is seen to be a necessary variable in understanding the fate of rivers. In 2013, I was collating materials for a conference arranged by the Disaster Studies Programme in the Centre for Law and Governance, and Amita Singh invited me to give the keynote address for their meeting in Dehra Dun. As it happened, the terrible Uttarkashi floods happened during the days of the seminar. The team went to the conference from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in four taxis despite the news of the flood, but being ill, I stayed home. It was summer; the international delegates had arrived, the team lodged in a hotel, where from their windows they could see dead bodies floating in the river. The long traffic jams on their return from the conference held them captive for hours, at obscure places—in one instance, for eighteen hours as people fled the hills in whatever mode of transport they could find. My role as an ethnographer and collater of materials has led me to various places, and I have always been informed by the contentious ways in which social events explain themselves through varied ideologies and circumstantial friendships. Chapter 2 is titled ‘Ladakh and the Creative Greening of the Desert’. The Union Territory of Ladakh, which till recently was integrated into the State of Jammu and Kashmir, in India is an inhabited zone in the Himalayas with a strong military base, which contests borders with China and Pakistan. Ladakh offers us new ways of thinking about organic farming, and I describe the contributions made by two charismatic figures towards the questions of education and water management. As a husband–wife team in Leh, Sonam Wangchuk and Rebecca Norman have received much attention for their work, comprising farming as a form of husbandry, where earth and its care has taken on nuances that are of significant pedagogic importance. We need to analyse through the reading of their methods how arid land is converted into fertile agricultural soil, and why training students for 20 and more years has contributed substantially to taking forward their pioneering methods. They were building on what Wendell Berry calls an intrinsic ‘awareness’ of the earth, where there was already a practice of frugality and respect (Berry 2012: 11). The data for this paper was collected in 2013 and 2015, but this was also written up while I was in the Central European University, Budapest, in 2018. While I had gone to conferences in Leh

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and Badrawah in 2013 and 2014, organised by my colleague Suresh Babu from the Zakir Hussain Centre for Education in JNU, I did not have the opportunity to write up my field notes for the interviews conducted later in 2015. In the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) school, I had been surrounded by young students, activists and the young and professional administrators of the school. I condensed the interactions into some nucleated descriptions but could not communicate the immense vitality that the founders Sonam Wangchuk, Rebecca Norman and the young teachers and delegates represented. Again, in the guest house in the Central European University at Budapest named after Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish activist against Nazi fascism, I was immersed in thinking about and writing my data on riverine communities. Somewhere, these debates are so intermeshed in the questions about industrialised agriculture and development that any stand alternativists may take is pedagogically informed. This is why schooling is such an important element in the socialisation of sustainable agriculture methods. The intensity of work patterns and austerity of consumption patterns in these obscure villages make us look askance at how electricity consumption is so profligate in the cities. Here, whether it is malls, shopping arcades or domestic spaces, the extravagant way in which people use electricity in metropolitan cities leaves one amazed. Mountains are ceaselessly punctured, tunnels created for commerce, people lose their cultivated and fallow lands, forests are eroded, floods happen, but the city-dweller eats up electricity as if there is no tomorrow. Chapter 3, ‘The Territorialisation of Water’, attempts to understand the way in which issues of water concern us in the 21st century. I use data from South India collected by ethnographic methods between 2006 and 2018 spanning the Western Ghats and the Annamalais to understand how certain horticultural practices have developed, and the problems that are faced by a new generation of farmers who see their occupation to be defined by their genealogies and migration patterns. The concern is with foregrounding the water debates in much the way those who have been working with issues on dams and rights to forest produce have done, by further analysing, ethnographically, the problems raised by settlers. Today, with the shift in the timing of seasons and climate

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change, settlers have new problems to face. I also presume that the geomorphology of the Western Ghats has to be understood through occupation and community identity. Thus, quite often, these hillside towns represent an amalgam of local and regional identities, which cross over easily between neighbouring states, namely Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. By using the discursive methods of Comparative Sociology, I link the ongoing debates on water with the empirical topographical preoccupations that concern us, as ever-changing, in the times of climate change. This essay was written in Budapest in 2018 as an intervention to the debates on water and as my contribution in terms of work done as Professional Excellence Award Fellow, an award which I had received in affiliation with the Departments of Sociology and Mediterranean Studies, CEU, Budapest. My colleagues Istvan Perczel and Vlad Naumescu made hospitable arrangements for my stay at the Institute of Advanced Study in the Raoul Wallenberg Guesthouse. I was left to myself to read, write and think for three months, and I was deeply grateful to my colleagues for giving me this opportunity to write up the data which I had collected over many years. As ethnographers keen to find new voices that challenge existing theory and throw up new puzzles for others to decipher, I was drawn into the reforestation and alternative education debates. This essay, therefore, looks at the ways in which the questions of borders and boundaries are constantly blurred, and why people often travel across them with occupational intent. Water becomes one of the symbols by which we can understand the resilience of communities and farming and allied occupations. The essay also looks at how the floods in Kerala in 2018 affected the life chances of local communities. As someone present in Kerala in the first week of August both in 2018 and 2019, I was able to chronicle the impact of the opening of 35 dams right across the state in 2018. My real aim in using newspaper accounts was to corroborate the experiences of the people during climate change. We need to understand the repetitive nature of survival strategies and the manner in which cyber networks will become the real occupational strategies of Keralites in post-deluge and post-Covid-19 stages. While the data is collected in mosaics of time or by the ‘patchwork’ of data collection as young researchers today refer to it, most sociologists who work on social movements know

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that a tapestry of events makes up the whole. Every year, the people’s movements look different. With climate change, we never know how the future will look. Farming communities generally accommodate themselves to the circumstances they find themselves in, and life in camps, death, crop destruction are pervasively present, with no idea as to what will happen next, given rising seas and shifts in the earth’s axis. Chapter 4, titled ‘A Time Known to All’, looks at the verse and prose of Stephanos Stephanides in relation to a fellow Cypriot, Ari Sitas. The attempt is to highlight their work referring to their identities as travellers who have made their mark in the literary world, as activists of language and translation. This ‘translation’ presumes their globalised and cosmopolitan persona, which have been well recognised, internationally, by state and society. In their minds, they are both sons of the soil and the Sea of Marmara, while living and working in many different countries across the globe, because the vision of their ‘belongingness’ always returns them to Cyprus. In this essay, I use both verse and prose as fragments to help us understand key concepts in the organisation of time and space in the mnemonics of nostalgia. I look at the work of two eminent poets with diverse skills to understand how cosmopolitan cultures always look back at the past, however painful and riddled with things the body longs to forget. I wrote this essay for a conference arranged in honour of Stephanos Stephanides, which I had attended as a delegate while at the Central European University (CEU), Budapest, in 2018. Time at CEU, helped me compose this essay, as I could not only engage with my basic interests in diaspora and its variegated longing in different situations but I could also juxtapose the work of two very successful litterateurs who were bonded in their love for their home country and were frequent visitors to JNU. While foregrounding Stephanos Stephanides, in whose honour the seminar was held, I thought by bringing in the verse of Ari Sitas, a trade unionist and activist, I could highlight the term nostos more accurately. These were two poets who were unafraid of the past, who dwelt on it, whose very ethos involved drawing in all that could not be otherwise spoken about. Rather than absence, what they conferred was the informed love for the entanglements of desire and longing, unsuppressed. Like the oranges of Larnaca, I found their abandonment to privileges gleaned

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from travelling and homecoming to Cyprus and the bonds they held so dear, very healing. I take these theoretical questions forward in the essay as I look at biographies as a narrative resource for understanding nostalgia as an evocative and useful way of thinking about ‘belonging’. Chapter 5, ‘Detachment and Faith’, tries to understand the relationship between work and the world, where a certain obsessiveness is defined as the hallmark of involvement. By the euphoria that calls towards enlightenment, the worker is entranced by his/her preoccupations. This in a sense changes the Sisyphian task into something else, a certain tranquillity follows, and with it, transcendence. By using the work of Paul Ricoeur, I wish to enhance the way in which the illusion of eternity, rather than confounding us, allows us to work with reality and belief systems so that we are calmed into acceptance of our everyday routines. I wrote this essay at the invitation of Samit Kar, a very well-known scholar–activist for colleges and mystical communities in Kolkata, who had strong links with the Ramakrishna Mission. He was visually handicapped, immensely charming and volatile, and persuaded me to write a paper for the anniversary of Sister Nivedita or Mother, as she was known. I wrote it in 2015 December while occupying my parents’ house in Alappuzha, Kerala, for the first time after my mother’s death in 2013. I was alone, the house was comforting, I saw no one for a month, except to go out to shop, or daily walks to the beach. It was a true ‘writers’ retreat’ and I could write the paper which had to pass the test of the intellectual audience of the Ramakrishna Mission monks in Kolkata. Samit Kar’s easy confidence, that I was up to the task of writing this paper, led me to solitary confinement and the knowledge that return to the comforts of the past was peopled by memories of my parents, their close kin and the ever-present ‘aloneness’ that follows us when we return to our youth, as we become elders in reality. Books keep us company when we no longer quite remember who is alive or who is dead in times of severe internment. In Chapter 6, ‘Songs of Solomon’ and Adi Shankara’s ‘Soundarya Lahari’, written on the invitation of Istvan Perczel while being a Visiting Professor at the CEU, in 2018, I go back to the literary questions that have irked me since I was a young woman. What is faith? Do we understand the longing that people have for the presence of God?

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In this essay, I juxtapose the collated work of two great persona, mythical or historical, King Solomon and Adi Shankara, separated by millennia, but whose verse is still precious to contemporary readers, communicating that they were interesting to readers along the ages. The passion for words, the contexts of travel and the certitude of their faith transcend boundaries, geographical as well as historical. It is here that I am concerned with how plural realities are created, where love is ruled by the essence of words and their meanings. Is there a certitude to these sentiments? Verses can have multiple meanings, which is why interpreters use pluriverse as a way of thinking of myriad contexts. In this paper, I look at the ways in which verses can typify both the conquest of space and the conquest of the body. By placing celibacy and polygamy together in comparison, I argue that both mendicant and king are chiselling away at their own desires, but the gravity of verse and the divine nature of poetry command that they, singularly, come away empty-handed. Chapter 7, ‘Kalpathy Heritage Village’, looks at a village known to be an important pilgrim site in Kerala for those who look to preserve mortuary rituals traditionally associated with Benaras. In Kalpathy, two kilometres from the Ollavakod railway station in Palakkad, an agraharam of Brahmins from the 14th century still exists. They were given the right to live and earn their living by ritual means, including the use of traditional medicine, music and mathematics. The community continues to face the exigencies of postmodern globalised economies in their own way. My essay tries to capture their lives through the maintenance of field notes across the period of a decade to show how time is fleeting and changes are so rapid that oral histories give us a sense of the constancy of ritual grammars. Circumstances change but certain traditions, such as those associated with festival practices, begin to evolve new commercial and aesthetic avenues. The fate of the holy Kalpathy river, which in microcosm represents the Ganga, becomes a corollary of rapid transformations that involve sand mining and the pervasive appearance of flatted urban geographies as a result of the return of the Tamil Brahmin diaspora during ritual occasions and as returnees to a heritage village. I started visiting Kalpathy in 2006 at the invitation of my friend and colleague Vijaya Ramaswamy of the Centre

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for Historical Studies, JNU. She was an authority on medieval histories in which I had a great interest, and on weaving cultures of textiles as well as oral narratives. Over the years, I managed to watch Palakkad change before my very eyes, and my notes became a testimony to the relation between tradition, orthodoxy and postmodernism. Much of this book is about the surreal quality of the ethnographic present. The past is quixotic; it seems interred in the constancy of values, but people know how to balance their present interests and motivations and the aesthetic balance that they maintain with their traditions. Chapter 8, ‘Alternative School Education and the Standardisation of the Right to Education Debate’, is an attempt to look at the fascinating relationship between ecological practices and schooling. In 2006, I had finished my book on Sri Ramana Maharshi of Tiruvannamalai published as The Children of Nature (2010). I had found myself following the lives and work of devotees of the sacred mountain and Ramana followers or devotees as they are called. Over several years, I could see a pattern emerging where the teachers involved in alternative schooling were qualified professionals with a deep commitment to networking amongst themselves and crossing boundaries seamlessly over the states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka. In 2012, I organised a conference in the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU, where I invited nineteen participants with the help of funds raised by the Vice Chancellor, JNU, New Delhi. The conference went a long way in bringing schoolteachers from South India to the university to meet academics who were involved in the participatory nature of education that ‘The Right to Education Bill’ had brought about. The essay that I wrote was published by N. Jayaram in a festschrift dedicated to my former teacher from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Satish Saberwal, who was a well-known authority on bureaucracy and social change. Activists set up new channels of enquiry, and as cultural analysts, our preoccupation with oral histories allows us to place wedges in the debates that may currently hold sway. In Chapter 9, ‘The Abyss: Covid-19 and Its Implications’, I attempt three things. First, I try to understand the nature of the abyss into which Covid-19 has drawn Homo sapiens. It segregated us, and yet our life chances became neutralised as the mutant gene could affect the lives

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of men, women, children and was equally regardless of age and gender, healthy or previously diseased. I ask basic questions about the nature of this segregation and describe the condition of the landless labourers and the wage labour that comes to the city. My basic preoccupation is with the nature of survival and, consequently, I go on to question why we need to analyse the phenomenon of affliction in cultural terms. The third segment of the essay looks at my experience of being a patient in a Covid ward in a general hospital in New Delhi. I am keen to find out whether I can use a subjective account (my own) of pain and the trauma of other patients to explicate some of the terms I dealt with theoretically. The essay was written in fragments on the independent requests of Christoph Wulf and K.V. Cybil and appears in a varied form as the Covid mutations kept escalating and the debates kept up alongside. In Chapter 10 titled ‘Diaspora and Memory’, I attempt to understand why Indians use nostalgia as the premise on which they plan their holidays or their return to their native land. Whether Hindus, Christians or Muslims, or of any other religion, they assert their regional or religious identity as primary, thus creating boundaries within themselves in terms of how they practise their religion, according to denomination or creed or secular practice. They may also, by being purists or fundamentalists, separate themselves off from people of other religions, or from those who do not live as they do. The reterritorialisation of space and emotions go hand in hand as the world becomes increasingly conflict-prone. Since identities are gelled by circumstances, the diaspora uses its religious symbols and affiliations to define how different they are from the host community. On their return home, for brief periods during their tenure as workers in the Gulf, the ‘States’ (USA) or the UK, they communicate their pleasure in everyday outings to meet relatives, eat local foods and participate in ritual events. Old people who have been left to their own resources or in the care of old-age homes are equally pleased to see their offspring. The logic is that propelling a new generation forward and being responsible for them is the sole criteria for staying aloof from their adult children when the parents themselves become elderly. As migrants for work, they are destined to return to the family plot, and horticulture is a

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necessary aspect of the economic sustenance of the family. Kitchen gardening as an aspect of organic farming, in fact, has a huge potential today as later essays in this collection will show. I wrote this essay for a conference at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla, organised by Peter DeSouza and Yogesh Snehi. The institute was always supportive of scholars writing on themes of religion and culture. As an Honorary Fellow from 1990 to 1995, I had published a book from IIAS on a French Benedictine monk, Henri Le Saux, who had contributed to our understanding of inter-religious dialogue, by focusing his studies on Ramana Maharshi of Tiruvannamalai. I had also contributed to the Religion and Culture Network Bibliography spearheaded by its director in the early 1990s. The opportunity to speak on what was most intimately known to me, the contexts of the lived experience of St Thomas Christians in Kerala and their neighbours, Hindus and Muslims, was something more difficult to do. Sociologists work with data as plenitude of received information; however, my task here was not to collate information but generalise it, knowing that the dangers involved were of simplifying that which is held most dear. When we speak of marriage or death, we are dealing with intense community emotions, which are stylised and safeguarded. These emotions are even more deeply ingrained when we come to community rituals, which have a special grammar memorised over hundreds of years. In this essay, I was looking at why ecological issues of sacred rivers are integrated into the vocabulary of rapid urbanisation and demographic changes, which are in turn translated into questions of heritage sites, conservation of urban spatial topography and people’s ‘matter of fact’ or practical responses to these.

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Environmental Concerns 1. Sacred Rivers: Energy Resources and People’s Power 2. Ladakh and the Creative Greening of the Desert: The Life Work of Sonam Wangchuk and Rebecca Norman through Alternative Practices in Education and Farming 3. The Territorialisation of Water

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Environmental Concerns 1. Sacred Rivers: Energy Resources and People’s Power 2. Ladakh and the Creative Greening of the Desert: The Life Work of Sonam Wangchuk and Rebecca Norman through Alternative Practices in Education and Farming 3. The Territorialisation of Water

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Sacred Rivers: Energy Resources and People’s Power This essay is concerned with the way energy requirements in the last three decades have seen a response from local communities who wish to express their love and longing for traditional occupations. Agriculture is a multifaceted representation, and riverine civilisations have epitomised the relation between land, labour and production not just as a relation with technology and culture but also in terms of the symbols of the sacred. With large-scale over-utilisation of resources and a lack of vision, the rivers are polluted. People’s movements draw on the work of scientists and those working in the Arts, including the Humanities and the Social Sciences, to draw attention to the way in which petitions and protests communicate that politics is not merely about imposing ‘the good vision from above’ but an interplay between the political, the legal, the socio-religious, the secular and the economic. In a democracy, politics is essentially about dialogue, and the rate of industrialisation may well be mediated by the power of the greens and environment movements, which have learnt their lessons from the genocide of peasantry and tribal communities and the mass exploitation of the resources of nature. The questions of water and land have become politically the most sensitive questions today. Rivers are recognised to be ancient embodiments of the gods as well as sites of civilisation. The last hundred years have transformed the way we think about rivers and embankments. In Kerala, the Mullaperiyar, with its source in the border of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which was once called the Madras Presidency, faced many public battles regarding not just the use of the water but the age and viability of the dam. The Malayalis have seen apocalypse in the eroding dam and have led processions and marches till they received assurance that the 19th-century Mullaperiyar would be repaired and a new dam built further downstream by their own state government. Anand Pandian writes of a colonial engineer called Major 13

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John Pennycuick, who built the dam and to whom a Tamil ode has been written, extolling his virtues in changing the drylands of Madurai into a silken quilt of green, where women, who were previously used to famines, now bedeck themselves and dance like peacocks and swans. Major Pennycuick, who invested his own money in the building of the dam and requisitioned finances from local people, is also thought to have thrown his second wife, pregnant with child, into a crack to seal the dam. There is a famous tantric tradition of sacrificing human life to stabilise a new building, which the colonist seems to be implicated in, and by which he becomes the cultic embodiment of the artificially created fertility of a once dry area. Is this to say that no sacrifice is sufficient when it comes to the building of dams? Pandian writes: The severe famine of 1876–78 temporarily suspended any administrative attention to the project, but the Famine Commission constituted in its wake specifically recommended the plan to help secure grain production in the hard-hit plains of Madurai. Major John Pennycuick was ordered to assume full responsibility to the proposed project in 1882, and in the same year he submitted a detailed plan that was ultimately sanctioned. The plan called for a thick rubble masonry dam that would eventually rise 176 feet above the riverbed to impound its waters in a large reservoir—water held here would be led through a tributary stream-bed to a mile-long tunnel blasted through the granite mass of the Western ghats, emerging east to tumble down to the plains of Madura. An agreement was signed with the Government of Travancore to lease the necessary lands in 1886, and work on the dam commenced in 1887. The first waters passed out of the tunnel in 1895. (cited in Baviskar 2003: 14)

Interestingly, this is very close to the time the Vice-Regal Lodge in Shimla was electrified after much debate since the question of coal and gas was being discussed, and electricity was seen to be an urgent substitute (Visvanathan 2010a). Anand Pandian uses A.T. Mackenzie’s History of the Periyar Project (1899) to describe the making of the dam. There were tropical forests, wild animals and leeches, half the year was monsoon, and malaria and cholera killed off thousands of workers who found working at 3,000 feet tiring enough. ‘Hundreds of these

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labourers perished due to accidents, contagious diseases and climatic exposure—camp hospital registers tell only part of this story as many sick workers went back to their native villages never to appear again at the construction site’ (ibid.: 14, 15). Pandian comments that the British commemorated their own dead with gravestones, but the Indian workers’ graveyard remains unmarked and overgrown with scrub. Ecologically, it is significant that many lower-caste communities buried their dead in the land allowing for the earth to rejuvenate. British ideas of sedentarisation of agriculture in Chingleput have been well discussed by Eugene Irschick in Dialogue and History (1994), where he suggests for Chingelput that a rural population was created in order to put in place the idea of village society for taxation purposes in the eighteenth century, where the temple festivals were supported in order to make way for a cooperative and mutually supportive village society (Irschick 1994: 79). Dams would have a similar place in modern India, except that, displacement would be the key symbol of reorganisation of society for the creation of the modern metropolis as the hub of political decisionmaking, where a pampered middle class would be led to believe that they were the beneficiaries of the policies of the nation-state, and the rest of the population silent witnesses to transformation. In 1964, Yashoda, the family maidservant, told me that they buried dead ancestors in the yam gardens, and I thought, then, from an eight-year-old’s perspective that that was great proximity indeed! A family member laughingly said that our jackfruit tree produced such excellent fruit because it was fed by the water of not just the Pamba which flowed by our field but also by the trapped rainwater that passed the adjacent graveyard, the land which had been gifted out of my grandfather’s property to the church. This contiguity to river and water is what makes farmers’ families so alert to the warp and weft of life and death, to subsistence and continuity, which are such essential tropes in green movements. India has never stated the problem ideologically as ‘agriculture vs industrialisation’ till very recently for Gandhi’s influence in Nehruvian realpolitik is very well-known. Secularism had its own enchanted spaces. Nehru’s fascination for Buddha and Advaitism in the same breath is worthy of analysis. Diana Eck quotes Nehru:

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My desire to have a handful of ashes thrown into the Ganga at Allahabad has no religious significance, so far as I am concerned. I have no religious sentiment in the matter. I have been attached to the Ganga and the Jumna rivers in Allahabad ever since my childhood and, as I have grown older, the attachment has also grown. I have watched their varying moods as the seasons changed, and have often thought of the history and myth and tradition and song and story that have become attached to them through the long ages and become part of their flowing waters. The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of India’s age-long culture and civilisation, ever-changing, everflowing, and yet ever the same Ganga. She reminds me of the snowcovered peaks and the deep valleys of the Himalayas, which I have loved so much, and of the rich and vast plains below, where my life and work have been cast. (cited in Baviskar 2003: 30, 31)

In Benaras, the questions raised about river pollution have been steadfast. Sacred concerns and scientific ones are mutually supportive, and the activists and human rights petitioners have shared resources to fight their battle. The question of Narmada too has always been read as a political and spiritual battle: There has been no conflict in understanding the support that believers receive from secular intellectuals (Baviskar 1995). Amita Baviskar (1995) has posed very significant problems of the nation-state bias towards industrialisation and the productivity of tribals and peasants vis-à-vis the assumption that poverty rules by using agricultural statistics as markers of grain production and self-reliance. This data is then juxtaposed with the substitution of the Red Revolutions of the 1950s to 1970s, by the Green Movements in the 1990s, as a symbol of middle-class activist preoccupation with the survival of the tribal and peasant communities. Milind Ghatwai, on the other hand, writes that protest movements delay the projects and quotes M.N. Buch: ‘He [Buch] says the “jholawala brigade” opposes everything from nuclear to hydel to thermal power projects’. [Buch also says that] ‘those who benefit should be made to share the spoils with those who are displaced or deprived of their livelihoods, but projects must go on’ (2012).

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Ghatwai writes, ‘What started as a struggle against the Sardar Sarovar Project in the 1980s now encompasses every dam on the Narmada in Madhya Pradesh’ (2012: 9). Speaking on behalf of people’s right to life and work, on the other hand, are Suvrat Raju and M.V. Ramana: Contempt for democracy is as old as democracy itself. The British liberal, John Locke, wrote in 1695 that for ‘day-labourers and tradesmen, the spinsters and dairymaids … hearing plain commands, is the sure and only course to bring them to obedience and practice. The greatest part cannot know, and therefore they must believe’. The Indian ruling classes have evidently taken these medieval ideas to heart. They are simply unable to acknowledge anywhere in India, that farmers and working class people may have a valid and independent perspective on infrastructural projects that must be respected. (2012: 10)

Ideologically, the plank of development as an industrial representation of so-called ‘dead villages’ being replaced by the metaphors of spatial reorganisation is well captured by Village Matters (2010) edited by Diane P. Mines and Nicolas Yazgi. Here, several authors show that traditional systems of irrigation or the preoccupation with small dams are the right of the peasantry, insomuch as these have been creative spaces where they are able to live their lives in harmony with nature. David Harvey (2001), the Marxist geographer, who sees the relationship to Nature as a problematic of theory as ideology, writes: I’ve spent a lot of time trying to persuade engineers that they should take the idea that knowledge, including their own technical ingenuity, is still socially constructed. But when I argue with people from the humanities, I find myself having to point out to them that when a sewage system doesn’t work, you don’t ring up the postmodernists, you call in the engineers—as it happens, my department has been incredibly creative in sewage disposal. (Harvey 2001: 18)

The petition accompanying the protest, the inscribed voice of the human rights activist, has been one of the most important ways in which the battle over the future of India with regard to waterways has been fought. Along with this are people’s meetings, confrontations with banks, including the World Bank, and representatives of the nation-

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state. The use of internet technology and the impact of personalised or collective web dissemination through the blog has been considerable. Clearly, the penultimate forum is the court and the belief that petitions can be formalised and submitted to the judges for coming to a resolution. The Ganga has always been a site of myth and riverine subcultures, its reach so phenomenal, that even its tributaries are considered sacrosanct. Diana Eck, in her classic work on Benaras, wrote compellingly about the myths of the Ganga, showing that these myths evolve because of love and attention that people give to the river, and that nature worship integrates the indigenous yaksha and naga traditions. It is a view in which the universe, and by extension the land of India, is alive with interconnections and meanings and is likened to a living organism. There is no nature ‘worship’ here, but a sacramental natural ontology. (Eck in Baviskar 2003: 33)

However, the enthusiasm with which pilgrims throw plastic into the river or factories their effluents is perhaps the greatest detriment to river-cleaning efforts. In their report Emerging Contaminants in Ganga River Basin with Special Emphasis on Pesticides, Manoj Babu et al. argue that, The active ingredients in a number of PCPs (personal care products) are considered bioactive chemicals. This implies that they have the potential to affect the flora and fauna of soil and aquatic receiving environments. In some cases, bioactive ingredients are first subject to metabolism by the consumer and the excreted metabolites and parent components are then subject to further transformation in the receiving environment. Personal care products differ from pharmaceuticals in that large quantities can be directly introduced into receiving environments (air, surface and groundwater, sewage, sludge and bio-solids, landfills, soils) through regular use, such as showering, bathing, spraying, excretion or disposal of expired or used products. Because of this uncontrolled release, they can bypass possible treatment systems. As a result, PCPs are referred to as pseudo-persistent contaminants. (Barceló and Petrovic [2007], cited in pg. 3 of J. Manoj Babu’s report)

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The authors also detect steroids in the municipal wastewaters and streams that flow into the river. On a visit to Mathura in 1994, my daughters and I were astounded to see the filth that flowed through the drains into the sacred river. Two pundits accompanied us; one of them jumped into the boat that we took and casually took water for us to drink with a cupped palm, filled though it was with ash and sludge. It turned out that he was one of the petitioners in a court case demanding the cleaning of the river in Mathura. All over India, there are people who petition the court to hear their case over the most dramatic of cases, and the spirituality of these places is never denied, though the law is secular. Bharat Jhunjhunwala of the Ganga Mukti Andolan, a former Professor at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), was attacked for petitioning against damming the Ganges; his activist colleague Vimalbhai has carried out protests through digital means, including building a dedicated website. In Kerala, sand river mining has become so acute that the rivers are drying up and the reclaimed land is silting up rapidly with foliage and trees; people used to bathing and worshipping at the sarpu kavus or snake groves now find that they are literally without a river in the summer months. That rivers have holy value is a visible aspect of our geo-morphology. People of all religions accept this quality, and their own stories of origin are related to the sacred river. The St Thomas Christians of Kerala have many stories of floods, floating crosses, and establishment of churches and Christian hamlets wherever such holy emblems were found, as in the case of Niranam where St Thomas is supposed to have made his first Brahmin convert. Farming communities have a long history of living in contiguity with each other regardless of their religious differences. Kalpathy, a sacred river to the Hindus in Kerala and a tributary of the Nila and Bharatapuzha, has an annual festival where Muslim and Christian traders have been setting up shops for several centuries. Sacred rivers are not only physical manifestations of the divine spirit cleansing people of all castes and religions, for the flowing water does not carry the weight of distinctions, but it also reproduces on its embankments the architecture of its mythic representation.

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So, Kalpathy temple in Palakkad, Kerala, recreates the steps of Benaras because the origin of the temple is from the 14th century when it is believed, a Brahmin widow walked to Kashi with her husband’s ashes and brought back a stone lingam from there; she received the king’s patronage for establishing a temple at the site where she placed the lingam. Kalpathy, which is now a heritage village (with laws regarding repair and renovation of its streets and houses), is a settlement of Smartha Brahmins who lived by their traditional occupations of astrology, ayurveda, accounting, temple management, music and mathematics, Vedas and its dissemination and a very rich food culture. They were not tillers of the soil; so, when the land distribution occurred in Kerala in the 1950s, they lost much of their wealth and property, and since they had been the backbone of the colonial clerical and bureaucratic structures in the presidency towns, they were able to enter the professional enclaves of modern India very early. One of the fearsome aspects of the river is that since it dries in summer when the Mallapuram dam is shut, and water is released for farmers every three days, sand mining is frequently seen as not just predatory but criminal by the residents who are afraid to speak out, as threats of murder then follow. Cementing, creating barrages, sand mining, glacier melt can very often lead to devastating floods in hilly terrain as we have seen in Tehri in February 2021.

The Case of the Tehri Dam For the farmer, however, the sacred river stands for agricultural prosperity. An activist has summarised the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) Report of 2005 (and has made it available to me on personal request) to say that, the Tehri dam ‘is also likely to capture around 65% of the total sediment carried by Ganga at present’. In his summary, the report is thought to valorise the quality of the water for a specific utilitarian purpose without taking into account how the destruction of algae and phage occurs. I now provide the summary of the NEERI Report by Dr Bharat Jhunjhunwala.

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Twenty sampling points were identified in the stretches from Gomukh to Rishikesh and from Badrinath to Devprayag. Maximum five sets of samples were collected from identified sampling points of the rivers (Bhagirathi, Bhilangana, Alaknanda, Mandakini and Ganga) during September 2002 to August 2003 for assessment of different abiotic, biotic and microbiological parameters. Application of water quality index (WQI), which is based on nine parameters, viz. DO, pH, BOD, temperature, total solids, turbidity, total-P, NO3 and faecal coliform, at various stretches of the river water revealed that water quality of the river between Tapovan and downstream of Uttarkashi was good (index value 70–90) throughout the period of study, while water samples of other areas were ranging medium and good during the same period. An exercise further revealed that WQI values would have been excellent (90–100) throughout the study area, if faecal coliform values were eliminated from the 9 parameters used for WQI calculations.

Based on the irrigation water quality classification, water quality of all the sites of the entire stretch was determined and found to fall under the desired category of C1S1 . The irrigation quality of water having C1S1 category is beneficial for growing plants like Eucalyptus robusta, Acacia nilotica, Casuarina sp., Prosopis tuliflora, Dalbergia sissoo, Azadirachta indica, etc. It has been observed that water samples from different rivers contained specific types of phages. Different types of hosts were required for their detection. The experimentation done at NEERI revealed that Ganga/ Bhagirathi sediment has the capability to absorb coliphages and induce their proliferation. The coliphages adsorbed to the sediment appear to be responsible for predating coliforms in the overlying water column when the sediment and water co-exist in a container under static conditions. The Bhagirathi water to be stored in a dam mimics such static condition and, therefore, shall in no way deteriorate the water quality of the river downstream of the Tehri dam. The release of copper and chromium under static conditions and the synergistic effect of chromium on the bacteriostatic/bacteriocidal property of copper appear to be the factors that keep the water free from coliforms and other bacteria responsible for putrefaction of water when left for a long time under static condition.

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Quantification of U3O8, ThO2 and percent K in sediment samples and comparison of these parameters with those present in other river sediment samples and freshwater lake sediment samples show that Bhagirathi/Ganga sediments collected between Gomukh and Rishikesh are more radioactive than others though it could not be established as to whether the radioactivity observed could be bacteriocidal. However, possibility of existence of synergistic effect of radioactivity on the antibacteriocidal activity of Cu and Cr, in combination, cannot be ruled out. It can be concluded now that the uniqueness of river Bhagirathi/ Ganga lies in its sediment content which is more radioactive compared to other river and lakewater sediments, can release Cu and Cr which have bactericidal properties and can harbour and cause proliferation (under static conditions) of coliphages that reduce and ultimately eliminate coliforms from the overlying water column. This is possible as the dam is going to retain practically all the sediment load of Bhagirathi as particles of the size of >0.01 mm are likely to be retained in the dam. Thus, the Tehri dam is not likely to affect the quality or self-preservation property of the river Bhagirathi/Ganga, as it mimics a static container which is conducive for conditions responsible to maintain the water quality. The NEERI study has honed in on coliphage as the source of the self-purifying capacity of River Ganga. There are two types of bacteria in the river water—coliform are harmful bacteria while coliphage destroy the coliform and are beneficial bacteria. Usually a particular species of coliphage destroys one particular species of coliform. There are innumerable species of both coliphage and coliform. The speciality of Ganga lies in the fact that the coliphage are ‘wide-spectrum’—one coliphage destroys many species of coliform.1 This helps the river self-purify itself more easily.

Bharat Jhunjhunwala’s comment on the NEERI report is useful as the terms of discourse are based on the phagi: The coliphage are absorbed in the sediments after having been created. They lie dormant in the sediments—even for many years— 1 This was mentioned by scientists of NEERI during personal discussion with Dr Jhunjhunwala at NEERI on 18 February 2010. This is not mentioned explicitly in the two NEERI reports.

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and get revived when coliform enter the water. NEERI has found that coliphage are present in the river water downstream of Tehri Dam up to Rishikesh. Moreover, NEERI has assessed that 10 percent release of sediments from Tehri Dam, plus sediments being added by the Alaknanda River at Dev Prayag, will be sufficient to supply the sediments required for the coliphage to survive and multiply, hence there is no negative impact of Tehri Dam on the self-purifying capacity of the Ganga. The special quality of Ganga waters is also due to minute (but high) levels of thorium, which is radioactive, and high levels of copper and chromium in its waters. It can be concluded now that the uniqueness of River Bhagirathi/ Ganga lies in its sediments content which is comparatively more radioactive compared to other rivers and lake water sediments investigated, and can release Cu and Cr which have a bactericidal property and can harbour and cause proliferation (under static condition) of coliphages which reduce and ultimately eliminate coliforms from the overlying water column (NEERI 2004: 107). These beneficial elements—thorium, copper and chromium—enter the river water from the rocks against which the water rubs during flow: The metal ions, originally derived from the breaking of rocks, are controlled by several river valley conditions—physical as well as chemical (NEERI 2004: 74; NEERI 2011: iii). This absorption takes place in two ways—chemical and mechanical weathering. Rain water contains minuscule amounts of acid. This acid breaks the rocks and loosens the metals therein which then flow into the river. This is called chemical weathering. Secondly, metals are directly absorbed in the river water as the water dashes against the rocks containing these metals. The difference in metal composition of the river is said to be due to this difference in the weathering regime: The striking feature of the radium isotope data is the distinct difference in the 228Ra and 226Ra abundances between the highland and lowland rivers. The lowland waters are enriched in 228Ra, while the highland waters contain more 226Ra. This difference mainly results from the differences in their weathering regimes (NEERI 2011: 169). The problem is that if the upstream river is diverted into tunnels for the generation of hydropower then the water will not rub against

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the stones and not absorb the beneficent metals. It is to be noted that bumper-to-bumper dams have already been made upstream of Tehri Dam except the uppermost 135 km; and are planned on the entire 300 km flow of Alaknanda except the lowest 30 km stretch. Thus it is likely that the coliphages will be deprived of the sediments on which they survive. The metals loosened by chemical weathering due to the rains may seep into the dry riverbed and also not get carried by the river. The conclusion is that the single project of Tehri Dam may not adversely affect the sediments because the sediments have already been created during the upstream flow or are being added from other rivers. However, a cascade of projects which prevents weathering in upstream reaches will prevent absorption of the beneficent elements in water and remove the base on which the coliphages survive. The conclusion that Tehri Dam will not affect the self-purifying capacity of Ganga waters may possibly be correct on a stand-alone basis, but this cannot be extrapolated to other projects especially when a cascade is being built which will almost totally divert the upstream river waters into tunnels and prevent weathering. Creation of coliphages The NEERI study does not give any indication of the reasons for the creation of the wide-spectrum coliphages. There is an oblique suggestion that this may be due to the minuscule amounts of beneficent radioactivity on the river water. However, this is not substantiated. If this were so, it should be possible to replicate their creation under laboratory conditions by exposing water of other rivers to the same small levels of radioactivity. NEERI agreed to this suggestion for further research but expressed inability to undertake this in absence of another sponsored project (NEERI 2010). It is possible that the vibrations of sages in the area may be leading to the creation of these coliphages. Or a unique combination of flow velocity, weathering, algae, temperature etc. may be leading to their creation. It is wise to apply the ‘precautionary principle’ until we know the precise conditions under which these special coliphages are created. It is best to leave the river in its pristine conditions till then. Algae River water has small micro-organisms that are food for bacteria. These are called ‘phytoplankton’. The quality of aquatic life substantially

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depends upon the availability of a variety of phytoplankton. NEERI has calculated the diversity indices of phytoplankton in Ganga waters. These are reproduced below: Table: Average Density, Diversity and Composition of Phytoplankton at different Sampling Points of the Rivers/Tributaries in the Study Area (September 2002 to August 2003) Sl No

Sampling Location

Counts/ml

Shannon Weiner Diversity Index (SWI)

Palmer’s Index

7

Tehri upstream (Bhagirathi)

0

0

0

8

Tehri upstream (Bhilangana)

46

1.55

2.0

9

Tehri downstream (Bhagirathi)

22.75

0.68

0.75

Source: Table 17, NEERI 2004.

A reading of the above table shows that the Tehri upstream shows a complete absence of phytoplankton and a diversity index of 0. This may be due to upstream hydropower projects which cause almost all the water of the river to flow through tunnels, deprive micro-organisms of sunlight and air that are necessary for their development. The table also shows a major decline in the count as well as the diversity index between upstream Tehri (Bhilangana) and downstream Tehri (Bhagirathi). These data indicate a negative impact of Tehri Dam on micro-organisms. NEERI has not assessed the implications of this decline.

(All material indented here is from Dr Bharat Jhunjhunwala's summary of the NEERI report and has been used with his permission)

The Phage in Ganga Interestingly, the role of the phage as available in sediment is the most emphatic aspect of a river’s life and sustenance. Ravi Nandan

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Singh, in his very lucid work on Benaras and the river Ganga, Representation of Death in Benaras (doctoral thesis submitted to JNU 2010), writes of these phages as disappearing because of the irrevocability of plastic, both as reality and as a metaphor, which replaces the theological idea of the immortal soul. Singh writes that the Ganga Action Plan was set up in the domain of a particular affectual politics where Rajiv Gandhi saw his role as expiatory after the assassination of his mother in 1984. The extent of the river’s pollution cannot be gauged by the abstract quantified measures of scientific results of chemical experiments or moral-religious damning of the people. The extent of the pollution can be properly estimated by locating how people’s lives have been failed by liberal democracy in certain domains, water being one major component of it, but not the only one. Badiou similarly does not consider the liberal humanitarian capitalistic democracy itself to be evil. He argues that what is evil is that it is posed as the greatest possible Good. He also argues that Evil could only be conveyed when Good is clearly represented. Thus it would be useful to locate both these idioms in Badiou’s own words. In delineating Good he poses event, fidelity and truth to be the three registers: The event, which brings to pass something other than the situation, opinions, instituted knowledge; the event is a hazardous, (hazardeux) unpredictable supplement, which vanishes as soon as it appears; the fidelity, which is the name of the process; it amounts to a sustained investigation of the situation, under the imperative of the event itself; it is an immanent and continuing break; the truth as such, that is, the multiple, internal to the situation, that the fidelity constructs, bit by bit, it is what the fidelity gathers together and produces. (Badiou 2001: 67–68, cited in Singh 2010: 181)

Singh uses the work of Veer Bhadra Mishra, the mahant, who combines his religious belief with scientific principles to clean the Ganga. Singh writes that: He (the mahant) observes that the machinery installed at the ghats do not work, so the only way to ‘save’ Ganga would be to apply a plan which runs without electricity. In his plan of ‘Integrated Wastewater

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Oxidation Pond System’ based on ‘biological control’ it is a ‘return to the bacteria’. (Singh 2010: 214)

Singh traces the history of the discovery of autophage to Felix D’Herelle and others, such as Ernest Hanbury Hankin and Frederick Twort (Singh 2010: 220). Singh quotes D’Herelle’s 1921 work: The difficulties of exposition of the subject will readily be comprehended if we realize that up to the present time Bacteriology has been considered as a ‘problem of two bodies’, bacterium and medium, whether the medium be the organism parasitized or a culture fluid. And this problem of the two bodies has been indeed complex. But it is of necessity much less complicated than the ‘problem of three bodies’ with which we must now be concerned, where we must recognize the interactions between the medium-culture medium or organism parasitized—the bacterium parasitizing this medium, and the ultramicrobial bacteriophage parasitizing the bacterium. (D’Herelle 1921: 6, cited in Singh 2010: 221)

The interesting problem for the sociologist is of course that the relationship of the state to its people has changed dramatically. T.K. Oommen’s work From Mobilisation to Institutionalisation (1985) was concerned essentially with the way in which land reforms could make a difference to how the poor benefitted or did not benefit as much as was hoped, from the bhoodan movement and redistribution. The problem of land displacement has been foremost in the minds of social scientists for the last several decades. For the generation that grew up with the idea of dams as the symbol of secular and rational citizenship, the real problems came with the problematic questions around the latter (Baviskar 1995). Rashid C.A. has in his Mphil dissertation titled ‘Industrial Pollution and People’s Struggle: A Case Study of Eloor, Kerala’ (JNU 2010) argued forcefully for riverine rehabilitation. In a note he prepared for private circulation, he says that: For the past two decades, social anthropological research on environmental issues has been part of a broad public sphere that has witnessed a sharp increase in environmental decay like contamination

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of groundwater, degradation of flora and fauna, genetical disordering and livelihood problems, e.g. decline of fishing wealth and the fertility of agricultural land, on the banks of the Periyar river due to large-scale emission or affluence of manufacturing, biochemical industries. The associated people’s struggle and industrial and state discourses attract sociological investigation. (mimeo. n.d.)

Sustainable development is the basis of the people’s movements on the banks of the Periyar in Kerala, and following the pioneering work of T.K. Oommen, Rashid C.A. believes that people’s movements are essentially innovative and creative. My work on the fisher people in Alappuzha in the 1990s showed that river and sea movements were becoming linked across India, as they believed that they had the right to protect the earth: Tom Kocherry and the nuns and priests of the radical liberation theology movements essentially believed that they would link up with Medha Patkar to provide a catalyst to the ecological movements of the 1990s to give a framework, within which grassroots leaders could represent the occupational choices of men and women in the country (Visvanathan 1994, 2000). David Harvey in the Spaces of Capital (2001) argues that ideology defines the way in which space is transformed in the relationship established by migration between town and country. He writes: The history of cities and of thinking about cities has periodically been marked by an intense interest in the transformative role of urban social movements and communal action. Such movements get variously interpreted, however, depending upon historical and geographical conditions. The Christian reformism culminating in the social control argument of Robert Park and the Chicago School of Urban Sociology (evolved during the inter-war years in the United States and exported around the world in the post-war years as standard fare for urban sociologists) contrast, for example with both the pluralist ‘interest group’ model of urban governance favoured by Robert Dahl and the more radical and revolutionary interpretations arrived at (mainly in Europe and Latin America) during the 1960s and the 1970s (culminating in Castell’s magnum opus on The City and the Grassroots). (Harvey 2001: 188)

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Harvey suggests that ‘the sense of possibility and desire for change in political and intellectual circles, often expressed as utopian dreams of alternative city forms on the one hand and the need to identify political agents—such as proletariat or urban social movements— capable of realizing such dreams on the other represent potential points of disjunction’ (2001: 189). While the bourgeoisie represents Commonwealth Games and Walmart as the symbol of their consistent desire to be westernised, the farmers’ movements have essentially located the earth and their articulate position on it, in the use of symbols, as their anchoring point. When Khandwa farmers immersed themselves in their inundated fields for a fortnight in April 2015 till their MPs (Members of Parliament) and chief minister responded, we see such heroism, unrelenting, because farming was their life. Similar long-standing protests from Punjab farmers have captured media attention. Gandhi wrote in the 1920s and 1930s in Young India that the poor are committed to India because they have nowhere else to go. Patriotism then becomes the very lifeblood of such movements. While Germany and Japan have said ‘No!’ to nuclear energy, the Indian nation-state pulverises the survivors of the tsunami in Kudankoolam, but the protest of the fisher people is essentially about water, pollution and the right to life and work. Whether it is the 48 rivers that flow into the sea in Kerala or the state of the Coovam as it represents the sludge of Chennai, activists have made rivers the essence of existence for both town and country. The rivers are the veins of the cosmic egg, the seas, the inner waters, as Diana Eck reminds us. Was citizenship a basic human right? The difference between the rhetoric of the 50s and the loss of dialogue in the 21st century is because there has been a radical shift away from the redistribution model to the idea of the liberal economy, where the bourgeoisie get to make the rules, regardless of a political party. The obstacle to a shining India or the development paradigm are the farmers, the rural stakeholders in agriculture. The state’s interest in agriculture then, unfortunately for such people as farmers with small landholdings, becomes represented as food security, scientific temper, industrialisation of agriculture, technology. The ideology of capitalism then locates itself in the questions of ruling the masses, the so-called 80 per cent of our population, which

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now is drawn into the cities as cheap labour during floods, famines and drought. The riverine economies which are ancient and self-sustaining are now problematised as essentially out of sync with the real ambition of Indians, which is the colonisation of extraterrestrial space and missile warfare, as the art of hoarding, self-defence and power-mongering.

In a talk given at the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, on 14 September 2012 at the Sarvepalli Gopal Memorial Lecture, Christopher Bayly spoke of the friends of Nehru who influenced him; they were G.B. Pant, A.R. Gadgil, P.C. Mahalanobis and S. Radhakrishnan. Pant brought the sense of village India, influenced as he was by Madan Mohan Malaviya and Gopal Krishna Gokhale; A.R. Gadgil believed that cooperatives were a midway towards industrialisation and differed in this from Gandhi, who believed that rural development was an end in itself; Mahalanobis was concerned with the ethnographic role of the state, and Radhakrishnan thought that Vedanta could bring people appreciably closer. There is another map, though, I wish to argue, and that is the way in which we understand how the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) in the 1930s brought about a great dialectic in the way we think about peasantry. This was essentially to use associations and the printing press during colonialism to actually work a new map of rights and duties for the farmers, which would include wages, prices and consumption. These kisan sabhas, as Acharya Narendra Dev saw it, were an integral part of the vision of how the peasantry would define its own place in the birth of the nation. In a paper written for presentation at the Benaras Hindu University at the Exclusion and Inclusion Cell in 2009, I argued that today, the farmers need to define their orientation to land, water resources and food in terms of the debates which make them representative stakeholders, in how India is perceived by them (Visvanathan 2009b). The theoretical premises which were discarded in the tension that arose between the CSP and the Congress during the freedom movement have to be re-visited. An ‘intelligentsia of the people’, which is essentially what activists are, have to present the very terms of the argument in terms of the practicality of their world views. Freire encourages scientists to learn from the people (Freire and Freire 1994).

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The right to life and the right to speech are some of the key areas that the activists who fight for Gangaji (the personification of the river Ganga) and the free flow of her waters, define as the primary aspect of their struggle. However, given the vested interests of the MPs, MLAs, traders and their goons, the activists who wish to oppose the building of dams for hydroelectricity have a very hard task. When Bharat Jhunjhunwala was attacked in his home, the activist Vimalbhai sent out a petition on 26 June 2012. His first language is Hindi, in which his blogs are written, but for the benefit of English speakers who do not read Hindi, he wrote as follows, using English as bhasha: Dear friends, As you know about the attack on Bharatji by goons of [the] dam company. Many of us are active and doing something in different ways. Now, I think there is need of a coordinated effort. or we divide the work. I have some thoughts in my mind which I am sharing with you. Petition to NHRC on the roll of state govt (we need to make a draft, I am trying to find out possibilities from lawyer) Mass letter writing to CM and to PM, my letter is with you, English translation can be done. Delegation to power Ministry – demanding black list[ing] the company and contractor Delegation to MOEF asking them to follow their own rules and committee recommendations. (On the larger issue related to dams on Gangaji: we can work on that) Letter or a Delegation to PM as he is the chairman of NRGBA with all the member[s] of NRGBA Statements from different districts of Uttarakhand (I am doing that and some other groups are also active) Best, Vimalbhai

Their blog matuganga.blogspot communicated the urgency of the matter. In 1942, when Gandhiji came out of jail, he communicated that the cotton farmer could survive only if he/she learnt to multi-task (Visvanathan 2009a). They would have to be spinners, weavers, dyers and also learn to sell their cloth. The activists of the river protection communities are essentially learning that if their concern with holistic

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living is to be the signature of their life and work, they would have to be visible, not just numerous. The interesting aspect of the bourgeoisie is that they cannot see the people, except as functionally in servitude to them. Popular movements dispel the idea of the invisibility of the masses, as the peasants of Khandwa and the fisher people of Tamil Nadu have shown with regard to nuclear energy, which potentially and vehemently changes the horizon of their daily lives. The Gandhian prerogative of ‘doing without’ becomes the leitmotif of these movements—it is a choice they make, and as citizens, they have a right to those choices. Americareturned and state-decorated Dr Jhunjhunwala, a former faculty member of the IIM, who chooses to live in a village in Uttarakhand, writes to intellectuals, petitioning for support; On 7 April 2012, he says: Many dams on Ganga River have been held up because the Supreme Court has asked for a study of the cumulative impacts of dams on river ecology. Now Ministry of Environment and Forests has given a study to IIT Roorkee. Our study indicates that this study will be a whitewash. We have written a note on the topic which is attached for your kind perusal. We intend to circulate it widely among all faculty members of IIT Roorkee, and more. We have sent a similar note to the Ministry of Environment and Forests already. We would be very happy if you would endorse this petition and also help us obtain endorsements by academicians—past and present—and persons who can help us.

J.P. Debral, one of the intellectuals who was asked to mediate between World Bank officials and the activists’ opposition, wrote in a collective web chain email (personal communication) on 7 April 2012: Come what may. We will have to accept reality. RR issues will remain the most important issue for the affected people. This is also sure that once they get the money many of them will not oppose the dam. But then they have nothing to lose if they oppose the dam after getting the compensation. Let us keep this opportunity open. Let them say what damage has happened or is likely to happen after taking the compensation. We cannot be choosers at this stage. We will have to continue to fight at every front. Those who are opposing the dam at the

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ground should be encouraged to do so. The dam authorities or the government must face resistance from every quarter. We cannot be selective here. If Bharat Bhai wants to interact at the policy level we must encourage and support him. He is doing it at the levels of Rajya Sabha, Planning Commission, Courts, WB and Government. I think Vimal Bhai, Madhu Kishwar, Bharat Bhai and Thariyalji have already made their positions clear. Let us respect their commitments. I do not want to pitch the wisdom of one against that of the other. Together we can think of bringing change. A few inches gained by each of them will make a feet of progress. What is important is that in the end the policy changes. Regards J.P. Dabral

Activists have their perspectives which arise from their orientations and training. Biographically, they may have points of departure. The energy that one person has is a result of many hundreds of people in the movement, providing him/her with a stabilising position. Weber’s theory of charisma as a form of social action is useful for us to understand since activism often depends on the power of the collectivity to recognise this individual as a catalyst for social change. The networks that form may run in a period of decades, as in the case of Tehri, including in its fold, new members according to context. On 10 December 2011, an activist wrote that: We had filed a Writ Petition in Uttarakhand High Court, regarding the Dhari Devi Temple, which is to be uplifted for the Srinagar project. The High Court asked us to approach the Archaeological Survey of India. If ASI fails to protect the monument then we may approach the HC again. The temple is not currently protected under the Ancient Monuments Act. Please let me know if you know someone in ASI who can help.

Elsewhere, in my work The Children of Nature (2010a), I have shown how secular scholars and devout believers have engaged with the question of the greening of the Annamalais and specifically the Holy Mountain, called Agnisthal or Arunachala, in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil

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Nadu. The Madras High Court has accepted petitions on behalf of Arunachala, thought to be the embodiment of Shiva and Parvati in unison. So also, the concern that believers have shown in the protection of Ganga is allied with the concern of ecologists, scientists and activists of various political hues. When Bharat Jhunjhunwala was attacked, the noted activist Vimalbhai sent a letter on email: Dear friends, You might know on 22 June 2012, a mob of about 40 people including employees and contractors of JVK, a company building a large hydropower dam in Uttarakhand, India, barged into the house of Environmentalist Dr Bharat Jhunjhunwala and threatened him to withdraw his legal representations against the dam. This is a breach of personal safety, freedom of speech and democracy. The Government of Uttarakhand must ensure that perpetrators of this attack are brought to courts and tried. The administration so far has taken no initiative to arrest them. Law and order in the state remain at the mercy of political leaders and powerful police officers. The daughter of Dr Bharat Jhunjhunwala started an online petition to gather support for his right to lead. The attack against Bharatji is not only against that particular individual but in fact, this is an attack to suppress the voice of the people in favor of the environment and people’s rights by the dam builders. The attack shows the attitude of total disregard of environmental issues and people’s rights and the dam builders want to construct the dam with any hook and crook. (blog)

The whole process of building opinion to save sacred rivers takes time, energy, money, and involves legal help and publicity. Yet, those who care about the legacy of a five-thousand-year civilisation often feel they have the time and the commitment of the people who dwell in these riverine communities. In that sense, they are optimistic, because their notion of time is not apocalyptic, it is essentially ordered by their faith either in the divine or in the rational secular order of the Constitution as it is enshrined in the common knowledge of ordinary people. Activists seek to rewrite the contexts of modern geography by the play of interstices in how cartography becomes an emotional space for these actors. To the reified space of maps as authoritatively represented as an idiom of the

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nation-state, they use local grammars and everyday practice to rewrite the plans of the centralised government. This affectivity is seen to be essentially problematic and is voiced or represented by partisans of the nation-state and local communities in different ways. ‘Do you think development will not happen,’ asks one side acerbically, ‘just because the jholawallas (carriers of ethnic bags signifying local community interests and crafts) do not want it?’ On the other hand, intellectuals who are concerned with the rights of peasants and tribals to speak out in postmodern democracy will continue to write on the behalf of local communities. Maps are therefore not just artistic productions (Baviskar 1995) explaining where places are, their contiguity to forests, lakes, mountains and railway lines, but as Dodge, Kitchin and Perkins argue in their book Rethinking Maps (2009): Maps do not then emerge in the same way for all individuals. Rather they emerge in contexts and through a mix of creative, reflexive, playful, tactile and habitual practices, affected by the knowledge, experience and skill of the individual to perform mappings and apply them in the world. This applies as much to mapmaking as map reading. As such, the map does not represent the world or make the world, it is a co-constitutive production between inscription, individual and world; a production that is constantly in motion, always seeking to appear ontologically secure. Conceiving maps in this way reveals that they are never fully formed but emerge in process and mutable (they are re-made as opposed to mis-made, mis-used or mis-read). (21)

Jane Beckett (2001), while describing the transformation of the rural landscape in the 19th century in the Netherlands, through industrialisation, shows that its museumisation was an ongoing process. She writes that the transformation involved both the diversification of agriculture under capitalism as well as the use of fertilisers and pesticides replacing animal manure. Potatoes replaced the small-scale garden, where vegetable production and dairying had previously been standard livelihood practices. In Kerala today, where small dams have been accepted by the people, the state government has made it very

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clear that the people must have recourse to agriculture even though the lands lie fallow due to migration for work in Gulf countries, Europe or America. Shaju Philip writes, Last week saw politicians up in arms over a suggestion by Planning Board Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia that Kerala [should] not worry about food security but instead focus on cash crops. His suggestion must have been prompted by the large tracks of paddy fields lying uncultivated in the state for years because of lack of labour hands—both outward migration from middle-class agri-families and shift from food crops to cash crops hit the fields. (2012: 20)

The Kerala politicians however know that the state’s interest in organic farming as expressed in the success of Ezhimayur in Palakkad has to be reduplicated in other parts of Kerala (Visvanathan 2009a). The political position represented by all parties, including the ruling Congress party, that the state is not ready to hand over to monopolists is a legitimate claim to make. Beckett writes that ‘Michel Foucault has noted that “a whole history remains to be written of spaces—which would at the same time be the history of power … from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of habitat’ (2001: 64). The moral claims that people make to the past may involve geological and mythic time as well as the way in which industrialisation can make a famine-struck, drought-prone, waterlogged in the monsoon, desert-like Barmer in Rajasthan suddenly turn into an oil field with luxury hotels and modern roads, farmers rapidly selling off their lands or conversely, mythographers continuing to search for the River Saraswati. The polemics of industrialisation may suddenly replace the mythological impetus, and this is something that sociologists urgently need to work on since their task is essentially that of documentation and analyses.

Bibliography Babu, J. Manoj, Shamal Mandal, Bandana Mahto and Sudha Goel. Emerging Contaminants in Ganga River Basin with Special Emphasis on Pesticides (internet report www.researchgate, accessed on 12 March 2022). Baviskar, Amita. 1995. In the Belly of the River. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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———. 2003. Waterlines. Delhi: Penguin Books. Beckett, Jane. 2001. In the Bleaching Field: Gender, Landscape and Modernity in the Netherlands 1880–1920 in Gendering Landscape Art, edited by Steven Adams and Anna Gruetzner Robins. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Dodge, Martin, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins. 2009. Rethinking Maps. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Eck, Diana. 2003. ‘The Goddess Ganges in Hindu Sacred Geography’. In Waterlines, edited by Amita Baviskar. Delhi: Penguin Books. Freire, Paulo and A.M.A. Freire. 1994. Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Continuum. Ghatwai, Milind. 2012. ‘The Means to Block or Release a Dam’. The Indian Express, 19 September. Harvey, David. 2001. Spaces of Capital, Towards a Critical Geography. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Indian Express,The New Refineries Likely in Barmer, 30 August. Irschick, Eugene F. 1994. Dialogue and History, Constructing South India, 1795–1895. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mines, P. Diane and Nicolas Yazgi. 2010. Village Matters: Relocating Villages in the Contemporary Anthropology of India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Oommen, T.K. 1984. From Mobilisation to Institutionalisation: Dynamics of Agrarian Movement in Twentieth-Century Kerala. Bombay: Popular Prakashan Pandian, Anand. 2003. ‘An Ode to an Engineer’. In Waterlines, edited by Amita Baviskar. Delhi: Penguin Books. Philip, Shaju. 2012. ‘Why FDI Retail No-Go in State That Earns Well, Spends Better’. The Indian Express, 19 September. Raju, Suvrat and M.V. Ramana. 2012. ‘Where the Mind is Full of Fear’. The Hindu, 19 September. Rashid, C.A. 2010. ‘Industrial Pollution and People’s Struggle: A Case Study of Eloor Kerala’, unpublished MPhil dissertation, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Singh, Ravi Nandan. 2010. ‘Representations of Death in Benaras’, PhD thesis submitted to Jawaharlal Nehru University. Visvanathan, Susan. 1994. ‘The Fishing Struggle in India’, Seminar, November. ———. 2000. ‘Workers of the Sea’, Seminar, Annual, January. ———. 2009a. ‘Foresters and New Orientations to Survival’. Indian Journal of Human Development 3 (1), January–June. ———. 2009b. www.peasants need our consideration, TOI/TNN/Feb 13 2009, 13 February 2009. Susan Visvanathan’s keynote address on Narendra Dev at Centre for Exclusion and Inclusion, BHU in Times of India, Varanasi (accessed on 23 September 2021).

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———. 2010a. The Children of Nature: The Life and Legacy of Ramana Maharshi. New Delhi: Roli Lotus Press. ———. 2010b. Forestation and New Educational Practices in Living Together, Symposium on Intercultural Dialogues: Problem Posed by Ramin Jahanbegloo, published in Seminar, (610) June. ———. 2010c. ‘Summer Hill: The Building of Vice Regal Lodge’. In Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, edited by Manas Ray. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study. ———. 2012. Reading Marx, Weber and Durkheim Today. Delhi: Palm Leaf Publication.

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2

Ladakh and the Creative Greening of the Desert: The Life Work of Sonam Wangchuk and Rebecca Norman through Alternative Practices in Education and Farming

Fig. 2a and 2b: SECMOL (The Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh) is an alternative school which tutors pre-college students in practical and allied arts. These young people all enjoy their skill-learning environment, whether it is working with horticulture, food preservation, solar energy management or quilting crafts. Secmol School, Leh, 2015. Copyright: Author.

In this chapter, I will attempt to look at the mnemonics of daily life in terms of topographical features and their connection to everyday concerns of an institution that serves to integrate members of local 39

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communities into everyday duties. Activities create new palimpsests of events, which carry forward age sets of young people into familiar tasks. There is a need to describe these as they inform the rejuvenating practices of agricultural communities through their relationship with the earth and the previous generations while interlocking with new occupations and new settlers. Tourism and the presence of the Indian Army in Ladakh has been of central importance to the understanding of agrarian practices, and now with mighty aircraft carriers which take produce to the Tata Trusts (www.Himmotthan, Leh Livelihood Initiative) and Ram Baba’s organic therapeutic industries, new forms of commerce are entering into the practice of agriculture. Wendell Berry writes very powerfully in The Art of the Commonplace (2012) of how there has been a great change in the traditional occupations of farmers geared towards feeding local communities and harnessing them to the earth in a just balance of love and nurture coexisting with industrial concerns that are closely related to conspicuous consumption. Food security and industrialised farming lie at the very root of wresting from the earth, where the first casualties of the exploitative revolution are character and community. When those fundamental integrities are devalued and broken, then perhaps it is inevitable that food will be looked at as a weapon, just as it is inevitable that the earth will be looked upon as fuel and people as numbers or machines. But (character and community) that is, culture in the broadest, richest sense—constitute, just as much as nature, the source of food. (ibid.: 40)

Food security without equitable distribution will result in the severest of inequalities and the confirmation of the inegalitarian policies of the state. The Ladakh case shows us the presence of both market gardening for purposes of local tourism as well as the necessity of the export of fragile commodities to laboratories in other parts of India. Between waste of perishable natural and organic fruits and vegetables and societal resistance to intrusive tourist practices, lies a whole gamut of cultural indexes, of which socialisation of young people is a necessary axiom. Paul Hawken, in The Ecology of Commerce (1993), writes that the charm of the market as a meeting point, while being intermeshed with global

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processes, is what engages us. At one level, there is the local market and at the other, the processes by which cost of production, transportation and the adjustment of prices, use and abuse and the interlocking of supply with demand is dealt with (Hawken 1993: 76). It is towards this that the alternative schooling practices of Sonam Wangchuk and Becky Norman have borne great success. One must recall that Ladakh is a cold desert, and the greening practices initiated by the army by planting trees has created a visible change in the landscape. The architecture of houses and monasteries is conducive to a frozen desert, but tree plantations have brought about rainfall, and what follows directly is interest in market gardening as the soil is extremely alluvial. Rene Dubos, while writing about landscapes, which were described as forests in ancient literature, shows how these become denuded by human activity. Then, new literature evolves around these deserts, which become oriented towards the description of scarce resources and continual feuding, as with the Greeks. However, reforestation occurs in the need for agricultural and pastoral land, making the desert disappear (Dubos 1980: 4). In this present scenario, we have a landscape where agriculturists become foresters, a process which I have earlier described for the Annamalais (Visvanathan 2009). Dubos (1980) argues that the planet Earth goes through many transformations, and often agricultural practices transform lands once thought to be barren or forested. The push was to create new ecological systems in lands that had degraded soils. These, for him, are artificial environments (ibid.: 104). The central problem here is where does nature start or stop, and how do these environmental transformations affect the livelihood of people? As James Lovelock (2006) writes in The Revenge of Gaia, climate change has been in process for a long time, and the earth undergoes transformation in its temperature and organic composition. Fifty-five million years ago when carbon entered the atmosphere at the same rate as it does now, the heating lasted 200,000 years, and the temperature went up by 8 degrees in the northern hemisphere and 5 degrees in the tropics (Lovelock 2006: 35). El Nino has meant that the monsoon has changed its trajectory and volume, and Ladakh’s vulnerability to rain, given that it is a cold desert with melting snowcaps, has alarming consequences.

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Joshi and Sharma have written for the Sundarbans in West Bengal, which also experiences sudden landslides and floods with heavy rain, that the quantum of rain can affect not just agriculture but also every detail of life, including schools, tourism, bureaucracy and trade (Joshi and Sharma 2019: 96). Tourism involves rapid urban development, and the only way in which local communities can handle the morass of garbage and waste that visitors produce is to be self-aware and proactive in enriching urban commons and supporting recycling and social consciousness through education and planning (Baviskar 2020: 30). In Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo, Marcel Mauss (1950) proved that modes of social classification will explain to us cultures dependent on frugality, which explain the link between occupation and seasons to define the nature of time and work. Alternative education has been the mainstay of many individuals, such as Sonam and Rebecca, who wish to keep the traditions of their community while promoting development ideals. Now that the prime minister of India in the Independence Day speech on 15 August 2020 has spoken of Ladakh as a carbon-neutral territory promoting organic farming, the state is set for the processing and sale of fruits and vegetables; but for the produce to reach Chandigarh or Delhi, trucks will further increase the icecap melt at an accelerated rate. This is unavoidable since trucks arrived anyway from Chandigarh to bring fresh fruits and vegetables during the Covid-19 and Galwan crises. After the Galwan border skirmish in August 2020, it stands to reason that Ladakh will become more of a military base for urgent combat against the Chinese, should there be cause. As Pankaj Sekhsaria (2016) rightly argues in Islands in Flux, secrecy is the norm when there is military reconnaissance in fragile military zones, and the threat to flora and fauna is a natural consequence of military presence (ibid.: 160).

Schooling of Young People as a Tool towards Bringing about Change One of the interesting ways of living on Earth is to think of the future here. In a desert society, people are aware that their delicate ecology is balanced by their needs and the way in which tourism has become the new metaphor of modernism. As a result, Ladakh has opened up to this sector of economic profit-seeking by using the ‘greens movement’

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as its open-door initiative. Organic farming, the sustained use of solar energy to propagate it and the manifesto of an integrated politics, which is inclusive, transcending the traditional Buddhist/Muslim divide is the way it proceeds towards its goal. Schooling, therefore, becomes an interesting tool in socialising young people towards a model society. In this paper, I will present the case of SECMOL (the Students Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh) as it transforms itself over two decades and democratises ‘traditional education’ through ‘government school’ training, substituting in its place integrated or holistic education as a lifestyle practice for young people. It then spearheads a campaign for a change in schoolbooks in Ladakh as well as emphasising active political life as a basic human right. The move to transform learning in the upper Himalayas focused on school education in the 1990s, and the method used to inculcate awareness was the promotion of a newslettercum-magazine called Ladags Melong or Mirror of Ladakh. A letter to the editors, by Rinzing Sorphel, in the Summer issue of 1995 suggests that in the Zangzibar subdivision, there are 40 primary schools for a population of 1,00,000 and only five middle schools and two high schools. Each has a minimum number of teachers—in fact only a single teacher in each primary school. The teachers are from local communities; they are inexperienced, newly recruited and when they leave for any time, the school remains shut. Rinzing Sorphel, a resident of Phey, Ladakh, argues that there is only one zonal officer for the entire area; laboratories and other facilities are not available for older students, and there is a dependence on personal tutors which many cannot afford. The editorial board members of this influential magazine were Tashi Rabgais, Rev. E.S. Gergen, A.G. Sheikh and the Magsaysay 2018 awardwinner, Sonam Wangchuk, who replied to the young student, Rinzing; the latter wrote them a letter in 1995 that ‘all the problems you describe are faced throughout Ladakh’.

Political Mobilisation for Social and Political Transformation Both Sonam and his wife, Rebecca (Becky Norman, as she is popularly known), were actively concerned with institutionally responding to

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the problem at hand, which was to question why were children being educated in a way, which was context-independent and culturally alien. Alongside was the orientation of the Ladakhis to the new political environment. Michel Maffeosoli (1996) writes that it is imperative that we understand the hold that ideals have over us, the creation of community and the possible upturning of previously held values about existence itself (42). He calls it ‘keeping warm together’ when a community comes together to assert its modes of adaptation to new ideologies and opportunities. Ravina Aggarwal (2002) writes of the ways in which Ladakhi development was affected by the 1962 war with China when large numbers of soldiers were stationed in Ladakh, and road transport and communications were developed (Aggarwal in Saunders 2002: 76). Helena Norberg-Hodges’ sustained interest in sustainable development became one of the markers of women’s development strategies in Ladakh. Her classic Ancient Futures (1991) became a reader for understanding the place of Ladakh in modern times and was translated into 40 languages. Sumera Shafi writes that the syncretistic culture of Ladakh was a result of the rich trade relations that existed between Central Asia, Kashmir, Punjab and Tibet as a result of the intermingling of merchants speaking different languages and having different faiths. When Pakistan occupied Gilgit and Baltistan, and China took Zinjiang and Tibet, this trade came to an end. The Indian Army’s constant presence in Ladakh created a dependency relationship with the army for jobs, supply of goods and construction of roads (Shafi 2011: 79). With the coming of the autonomous councils, there was renewed hope that there would be greater participation by local communities in relation to strategic participation and budgeting, while the state government continued to control them. With the segregation of Ladakh from Jammu and Kashmir by the Indian Government, it was made a Union Territory on 31 October 2019 by an act of Parliament. With this, the danger of Chinese intrusion became more pronounced. Sonam Wangchuk became very vocal about the danger that the Chinese posed for Ladakhis and asked for a ban on Chinese goods, as we can see in his 2020 YouTube videos. Let us look at the Ladags Melong’s writings that Sonam presented as a democratic impulse, as there were political conflicts between different parties even in the 1990s (Srinivas 1998: 30).

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The Constitution of the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Council brought much hope, as the editors wrote in the Summer 1995 issue. They believed that the journals and platforms for open discussion would lead to greater democratic initiatives. Yet, they were disappointed by the theoretical concerns of various associations which discussed ecological priorities in protecting the environment, but could do nothing about the uncontrolled and growing pollution in Leh town (Ladags Melong 1995: 2). The concern with preparing a new generation of Ladakhis to the rigours of the tourist trade and the onset of modernisation was uppermost in the mind of Sonam Wangchuk and Becky Norman when they set up SECMOL. Some of the key responsibilities that the Hill Council was concerned with were preservation of the environment and ecology of the area, local road transport and its development, fisheries, small-scale and cottage industries and non-conventional energy. The last was of specific interest to Sonam, who set up solar-energy batteries and mirror reflectors at the school and residences on his campus and trained young people in the use and maintenance of these. He believed that a college for adolescents could be built on monastery land, which would be essentially powered by solar energy. By publishing excerpts from the act, the editors were able to communicate to its new generation of readers that the tasks at hand were urgent and required total responsibility involving horticulture, manure, water distribution, electricity harnessing and managing resources that were pertinent to the tourist industry. On 13 September 2015, in an interview, the councillor from Zanskar, Namgyal Dorjay, said to me: When I came as a leader to Zanskar the pass percentage in the government schools was 48 percent. Within three years, it became 100 percent. My contribution was that I gave each teacher a room to himself or herself, and provided digital and internet access. I gave the teacher dignity, and a sense of responsibility towards self and the other. Education can only proceed with these values.

One of the contributions to ecological development through education, as the councillor told me, was to propagate pit latrines all over Ladakh.

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Manure production by the curing of human faeces was a well-known method and is used in the SECMOL campus. In Ladakh, the tradition of organic farming grows from the traditional pit latrines and represents the way in which human excreta is converted into compost after lying dormant in closed latrines for one year. As one latrine gets full (built with local bricks as a structure with two rooms one on top of the other), the inhabitants of the villages close it and begin using another one built in readiness for that purpose. The Minister of Tourism, Shafi Lasu, suggested in an interview on 5 September 2015 that since Ladakh presents itself as totally dependent on organic agriculture, the manure from goats and varieties of bovine animals are further aggregated with human waste. Thus, the Ministry of Tourism has suggested that pit latrines be constructed for tourists all the way from Leh to Nubra valley. Clearly, tourism is dependent on the ideology that visitors will accept the cultural traditions and be regulated by the mores of this ancient civilisation. In the SECMOL school, all the children, volunteers and guests use the pit latrines since there is no alternative. Flush latrines are seen to be the greatest despoiler to the environment and, of course, the wastage of water is not permissible. In every toilet, children read in English and Ladakhi, with artist’s images, of how the circular process of eating, defecating, composting and growing are maintained. The nitrogen cycle of plants is recreated here, in the first-floor toilets, set apart from the rest of the buildings, but close to the bathrooms, water taps and solar hot water taps. Solar energy is essentially the root of SECMOL’s innovation at 3,200 metres, where both electricity, running water and internet connections are limited. The Indus river flows close by and is harnessed for electricity and watering the trees since it has not yet joined with the zinc-ridden Zanskar river. However, in effect, the drinking and bathing water is from a newly dug bore well. The water is sweet and is also used for watering vegetables. Water in the desert is, of course, the key activator to the new agricultural impulses in Ladakh. Sonam Wangchuk, recipient of the Rolex Award (2016) and the Ramon Magsaysay Award (2018), is an extremely interesting entrepreneur in the question of water management. His ‘ice stupa’, which was a successful experiment, was conducted with the support of his students

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at SECMOL. Essentially, it consisted of laying out pipes underground and allowing the water to come down the mountain, and then sending it up again, where it could jet forth like a fountain which would freeze in winter and melt slowly in summer, allowing for farmers to harness the water for irrigation. The monastery at Phey, two kilometres from his alternative school, supported his work and provided the land for his experiment. Five thousand saplings were planted by the students in the land, which had been watered by the melting of ice from an artificial glacier. The community felt that his work was important, and while there were mistakes and accidents, such as the water pipes freezing and breaking in the winter, the new pipes which were placed in February 2015, were functional and got the experiment successfully underway. Wangchuk’s ambition to start a new township with the support of the Phey monastery is also supported by the Ladakh Students’ Movement. He believed that the College for Alternative Energy should be supported by the community and be at the Centre of the township. Further, by making it wholly solar-energy supported, it will become a nucleus around which entrepreneurs can be self-sustaining and begin urban development with an agricultural hinterland, which is in keeping with the Ladakhis’ desire to maintain their traditional lifestyles, built around pastoralism, orchard and market gardening and the protection of the domesticated bison. This new city will take the pressure off Leh, which has become traffic-jam- and pollution-ridden. While taking on the problem of climate change, successful organic farmers, both in Kerala and Ladakh, show us that while living in the present, the process of active involvement with nature is healing in itself. Malayali farmers are shifting the responsibility from the state to the self or individual families. With gardening on terraces of their urban homes as a hobby, turned into a vocation, even families living in cities are ready to put vegetables on the table which have been harvested by their own efforts. In Ladakh, the motivation towards market gardening has come from people’s acceptance of their situation in an army-surrounded environment. Since the army protects Ladakhis from Chinese encroachment and is an employer of local communities, farmers have a positive relationship with them (unlike in Kashmir), selling them their products without hesitation. Market gardening and

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subsistence farming are interlinked by a world view, which is intensely pragmatic; so, since goods are perishable, the farmers are only too keen to offload their produce. Now, the new takers are Tata Trusts and also the religious association and medical industry identified with Baba Ramdev. Transport of perishable items such as apricots is assured by these two commercial groups. However, when the farmer cannot sell his produce, he recycles it into the land as organic manure. The real question of garbage continues to have a deeper significance, whether it is petrol emission from the army and tourist vehicles, alcohol bottles left behind by tourists or lack of motorable roads to facilitate the farmers in places such as Changthung and Zanskar, leading to isolation and poverty, as experienced by them when they get cut off. The story of agriculture can be quite painful, for it is not just the introduction of GM (genetically modified) crops but also the burning of stubble/hay, the Indian state’s support to industrial farming, the cohort of corporates who support industrial farming for profit motives and the circle of debts and seed dependence imposed on local farmers rather than the state supporting the traditional archiving of seeds (Ladags Melong, Winter 2003: 10). Sonam Wangchuk, who looks to an organic and pollution-free Ladakh, says that the new form of entrepreneurship will have its university at the heart of the new town planned at Phey. The ice stupa, which will support organic farming, will have success only if the people support it. Entrepreneurship is dependent on the motivation of people and crowdfunding, and the township will be the same. In Delhi, only those who get 100 per cent marks in the boards get admission to college, creating an educational void for young people who live in distant rural areas and cannot compete. Sonam Wangchuk says in an interview with me on 10 September 2015: In our school only those who fail the Central School Examination can get admission. As the Ladakh schools show better and better pass percentages, the need for SECMOL school in its present form might decline. For us, the students who do not pass school in the traditional way, by writing exams qualify as survivors and victors. One of our students, who failed school, became an important film maker. Kids

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need attention, and if you give them attention, they do what toppers cannot. What we generally try to do is to make them feel respected for what they are. We try to unshackle their minds and trust them to carry out their duties. We trust them. It is just natural or true, that young people have a lot of talents, but we don’t trust them. They are just made to follow. If you take leaders and treat them like dummies, they will behave like teenagers. The children in SECMOL make the boundaries, they set the discipline. They are not just labour, but it’s a democracy. Our main project was to improve government schools in the villages. If we succeed in that, we won’t get failures, and that would be the way we prepare a launching pad. This year, we took all applicants. Our project twenty years ago was to stop children from being beaten, the books were not applicable, teachers were not trained. We used to have 95% failures in the whole of Ladakh. People thought it was normal. The Project with which I started to change things was so successful that politicians got together to stop me. They made it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. I made a statement that I will go into politics if people stop me from doing what has to be done. So, in 2007. they called me a Chinese spy, land grabber, and that SECMOL was outside the School movement. Today young people are steering the Educational Movement.

His success with young people encouraged him to innovate further. The ice stupa which Sonam Wangchuk created for the villagers of Phey to establish the ground for the new township is a testimony to the solidarity that the monastery, the spiritual leaders and the local community experience. The ice stupa was constructed with the help of the Indian Army, the SECMOL students and the villagers. It is an innovation in scientific principles and assures that water harvesting will be made possible every spring and summer, extending the irrigation potentialities of mountain spring water, which otherwise gets wasted in the Indus river. It may be noted that Sonam Wangchuk’s efforts at alternative schooling are well known to the world as what inspired the making of the film Three Idiots. The film, using parody, describes engineering colleges with their conventional stress-related inequities and highlights

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the role of autobiography and innovation in understanding change. SECMOL has been a far-reaching and successful experiment, and in the next section, I will highlight the daily routines of school children who have been housed there. With the current tensions which have been exacerbated by China’s continual illegal presence on the Indian border, the past becomes an abstraction from which we construct our reading of the future.

Daily Routines at SECMOL SECMOL is set on a hill, overlooking high mountains. SECMOL is located in a desert with the arid blue-black mountains visible on the horizon, where Indian Air Force planes can be seen conducting frequent sorties, while the dust blows about. SECMOL is dependent on a crew of recognised visitors and volunteers of various ages and dispositions from as many as 26 given countries at a given time. Each person comes with a skill in electronics, tourismrelated activities, academic subjects ranging from mathematics, science and humanities and the arts. The cosmopolitan nature of the working community leads to the socialisation of young people who come from remote villages to learn new trades. One of these, which young people are initiated into, is Solar Energy. SECMOL, in September 2015, has set up a solar heater, which is large enough to provide lights to the buildings; it is made of rammed bricks and houses 36 students from remote villages, some of who hope to go to college. The students are each given ‘duties’ or ‘responsibilities’, and they have to carry them out for two months and then make a public presentation to the class. SECMOL grows its own vegetables, including brinjals, potatoes, leeks, carrots, cauliflowers, cabbage, and has an orchard of apple and apricot trees. The method of composting is the same as everywhere else in Ladakh, following the Fukuoka method of night soil utilisation. This, however, as I have shown, is sent through the long process of composting for a year before it is used. The vegetables which are to be dried for winter are placed in solar heaters. The fresh vegetables for daily kitchen use are also brought

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from Leh town. The women farmers who often utilise traditional occupation of monastery land, sell fresh vegetables, such as spinach and spring onions, plums, tomatoes, asparagus, celery, carrots, onions, chillies, strawberries and apricots, and these are purchased by the older students on the way back from college and stored in a cool underground room, which has a refrigeration system in place. Sacks are placed in water and are pulled up to the roof, and a fan cools the jute fabric, maintaining the temperature for the stored vegetables at a maximum of 17 degrees centigrade and a minimum of 7 degrees centigrade. A former engineering student, Sunil Meka, who is a guide to students and tourists at SECMOL, explains to me the process of the pulleys that make the cooling system work in an interview on 10 September 2015. Over the years, he has learned valuable skills as a cheesemaker, which was his ambition. The students are busy with classes the whole day and are at ease with one another. Often, they are to be found studying in the orchard or in the rooms which have large windows, opening to the view of mountains and trees, which have grown to a good height on the campus. A favourite place for tutoring is the dining room, where guests often arrive to see the children at work. There is a framed photograph with names collated on the wall above the door so that volunteers can learn the names of students rapidly. The volunteers coach them in the subjects they have to pass in the open school or regular board exams conducted by the central government. Two of the volunteers are organic farmers in Bengaluru and are intent on spending some years in Leh, learning cheesemaking and processing vegetables and fruits for long winters. Here, organic farming is an essential aspect of everyday life. Much of Rudolph Steiner’s methods involved the questions of capability for the working class, where their food needs would be adequately met, by selfreliance. Alternative education has focused on this as a necessary aspect of the education of young people (Visvanathan in Michaels and Wulf 2020). The solitude of the organic farmer putting in long hours of work is intrinsic to the task. Informal learning and being politically aware are necessary parts of SECMOL training. The educators accept that these young people have to be integrated into the larger world as tourism is an economic

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necessity. After dinner, the students listen to the news in Ladakhi, which is then translated into English. They were individually chosen to do this, and each retold the event in a phrase or two. Then, a student tells the gathering about his specific village, interlacing his experience of life at home with his life at school. In this way, the students become familiar with the map of Ladakh, and the brief biography of the scholar helps the others understand the context of his/her life or his/her experiences which mutually enriches them, creating intimacy and familiarity. The notice board has a list of duties for every student, which they must accomplish morning and evening. Some of the older students who were Open School students here, previously, now go to college in Leh. They leave by bus at 10 a.m. In the winter, when they have holidays for two months, they contribute to the running of the school. In winter, the school is not heated, but a thick plastic curtain completely sheathes the building. It is rolled down ceremoniously at the end of November. Sonam Wangchuk believes that it successfully traps the heat, so none of the rooms requires artificial heating. The virtues of rammed earth bricks are described in detail on the net, as being common to both Ladakh and California, where the desert decides the vocabulary of builders and the materials indigenous people use. Dorun is one of the students who helped Sonam with the ice stupa. The stupa is a variant, he says, of the artificial glacier (interview, 2 September 2015). Water is dammed; it freezes in winter and melts in April to provide water for the fields. The ice stupa, however, carries water in underground pipes, emerges as a fountain and then freezes in winter. The surrounding desert can be transformed by the water when it melts and flows. Dorun says they worked in November 2014, but the pipes cracked, so they had to start again. In February 2015, they got fresh pipes from a Jain trader, running for one and a half kilometres, and they worked all night to put it in place. Only one stupa formed in March, but in 2015, they planned to have at least six stupas in all. They planted 5,300 trees, and when the single stupa melted, there was water till July. Five thousand of the trees survived. Dorun discovered that he was physically strong and had the fortitude to survive the grim nature of the work. The loyalty of the students of SECMOL to their teacher Sonam has resulted in an army of volunteers who were

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able to give him the required support, even while canvassing in the general elections of 2014. Sonam stood as an independent candidate but lost his vote bank to the BJP candidate who had greater financial resources at hand. The search for supplying clear water has been a focused plan for Sonam. Tsering Dolkar, in an essay on ‘Water Management: Challenges and Impact’ (Stuwa, August 2015), interviews Tsering Angcho from Gompa village. He said, ‘The Municipal Committee alone cannot be held responsible for keeping these water bodies clear. That is only possible when each of us takes responsibility for keeping the rivers and streams clear.’ He said that in his village, women’s self-help groups have started organising cleanliness drives regularly, which has helped reduce some of the pollution of these water bodies. According to the 2011 census, the population of Leh town is 46,671. The total number of functioning public water amenities is 585 taps and 72 hand pumps. Though the provision of house-water connection has reduced the challenge of queuing to access water, these indoor taps only function in the summer. In winter, these tap connections are frozen, which forces residents to depend on water tankers and public outlets. Furthermore, the water tanker remains irregular and there are instances of it not supplying water in some areas for several days. In these cases, residents have been forced to buy water at exorbitant prices (Stuwa, 2015: 4). Sonam tells me the single pipe that was set up will diversify into several more ice stupas. So what had been desert will now become green. He wants students to be trained for developing Ladakh (interview, 3 September 2015). Rinchen Dolkar, the Director who trained at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, communicated the same thing—love for Ladakh, love for India. Maintaining a daily routine and a logbook are taken very seriously. It is both practice as well as verbalisation in the commercial language of English, which is needed to deal with international tourists, who have been visiting since Ladakh opened up to tourists in 1974. The students are generally conversant with Hindi and deal with Indian tourists and Army personnel, which includes officers and their families with their routine service staff, with great elan.

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The bell rings for school and David, a volunteer, tutors the SECMOL College students, on the aspect of ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, which is part of their public examination. He has no book, nor do the students, but depending on memory, he has an excellent meeting at 7 a.m. Children of shepherds and fruit farmers are first-generation learners, who have been educated in Ladakhi, and when sitting for the school-leaving exams, encounter the English language. Officially, they are called ‘dropouts’, but Sonam and Rebecca engage them in life skills, which they believe are more important to first-generation learners than rote learning or mastering a commercial language. SECMOL time is daylight saving, and the children wake up at 5 a.m., but actually, by the clock, it’s 4 a.m. The students work in separate well-organised groups, each one knowing where to go and what to do. Furthermore, other than cleaning, sweeping and baths, there are community responsibilities, such as milking the cow, watering the plants and tending the canals, cooking, cleaning, attending to visitors. These are coordinated by the supervisors who are older students having been in SECMOL for more than a year and engage with new students in a vocabulary of mastering familiar routines. There are different job descriptions or postings, and the fresh elections to the student council are held regularly. The new duties are posted on the board for two months per student. This way, each student learns a new skill. The college students, having finished school from SECMOL, have a bus that leaves at 9 a.m. IST or 10 a.m. SECMOL time. Before leaving, they have to finish chores with the school children, such as milking, cleaning the mirrors of the solar panel, checking on the batteries in the electricity hut, cooking and eating breakfast, washing bathrooms and toilets, gardening, watering, sweeping and dusting. The work is done energetically and completed as dawn breaks. Apples and apricots are collected, the water is sent into the gardens and groves, and at 6 a.m. (7 a.m. SECMOL time), they all gather in the large hall for their collective meeting before classes begin. The concern with establishing organic farming, not as niche agriculture but a way of life, is made very sharply by Shafi Lasu, who is an advocate and was the Congress Representative Councillor

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in the Ladakh Autonomous Council. He tells me in an interview on 5 September 2015: Organic farming is of the greatest importance. In Takmachuk, 130 km from Leh we have set up an organic farm. This is a pure organic farm. All villages are expected to be organic villages, but they may not be fully so. The Ladakh Autonomous Council now has a policy on tourism, and they have passed the Plan, as to how funds are to be spent. The Cabinet of the Council, with the Secretary, has one meeting every month, which looks to the benefit of the villages. For instance, in the last five years, public conveniences, dry latrines, have been built by local panchayats on the way to Nubra, and the compost is being utilised by the villagers. The isolation of the tourist organic village is necessary, as in Takmachuk. On one side is the Indus, a small monastery, a gathering place. Here they are growing a second crop, in May and August (as well as in March and April) of Cha and Deo, which are nutritious millets. The problem with climate change and unseasonal rains are that there is vast destruction and loss. In the 2011 floods, many people came to see the situation, and we got a lot of attention. Rehabilitation was so quick. The Council has no money, the Relief has to come from the State and the Centre. It can only coordinate. However, the people are not ready to make changes. I was in charge of Sharah village in Nei. In Phuktse, there was a small quantum of flood. One of the houses was partially damaged. The question was ‘How many times?’ The answer was ‘Three times.’ I told him to shift or allow us to dig a channel. The man said, ‘I have only this field.’ After a few days, it was totally flooded out, and the house swept away. I told him, ‘We will allot you land on the other side with the permission of the Sarpanch and Councillor. Under the Indira Awaz Yojana, you will receive 75,000 rupees, and while you are waiting for it, we will allot you 50,000 rupees from the Council.’ The Border people need to be secure, only then, can the country be prosperous. With the 2015 floods which were much worse, than the 2011 floods, there was no attention from media or the Government, though it was widespread covering all of Ladakh. Deaths were few, but the losses to farmers were huge. There has to be some accounting, particularly since the people make so many sacrifices. The UPA

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opened a route to Merceimeila in the Pangong area. A policy was initiated, PWDS 12. The Border people got tents, shoes, repair of houses, feed banks for cattle, donkeys and goats, in ice-locked areas. The Border is osmotic for the Chinese, because they treat it like that. They allow people to cross from either side, which the Indian Army does not. The Indian Army regulates border crossing. In winter, the Chinese cross the Pangong Lake on ice, with their herds, and they take over lands, and settle there.

It is with these harsh realities that the Ladakhi school children lived. Essentially, SECMOL brings to children and teachers a close relationship, bonding and friendship—solidarities based on mutual interests in learning. The students see their year-long stay at the school as an opportunity to do the board examination for 10 and 12 which they had previously failed. They are hopeful that with close supervision they will be able to relearn and practise their lessons. Their problem is that they have no training in English skills; all their previous training is in the mother tongue, in which they are proficient. However, they have to write their exams in English. Some of the students come from the remote pastoral villages and are from yak-herder families; others are from equally far-flung places, a day’s journey by road from Leh. They come from farmers’ families, growing barley, and now with climate change, potatoes, peas, tomatoes, apples and apricots. SECMOL has 26 different skills taught to students who are between 15 and 19 years old. These are drip irrigation, solar panels for cooking, batteries and their maintenance, gardening, orchard and vegetable preservation, jam-making, garbage recycling, shop management, shopping from wholesale markets for the week, food storage, bedding management, cleaning of toilets, greeting and information management for visitors (they constantly arrive around the year, as there is a military station close by with families visiting, and also trekkers and motorcyclists) library management, digging of canals, general cleanliness and care of tools. SECMOL puts great store on cleaning; so every day, batches of students are out in the gardens, sweeping. They do the same in all the rooms, dusting the same cupboards and nooks carefully. The enjoyment comes from working together. They have very

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specific evening chores, which are coordinated by the student secretary, who is appointed to give out duties. The young people also maintain a daily diary, which is checked by the volunteers, who correct each line and have a one-to-one relationship with the student. Part of the pleasure of learning, here, is to get over the disappointment of the past and work in an integrated way. Once the students know their duties, they do them instinctively. The norm is the following of the rule. The volunteers are also in the same mould. They do not let physical unease stop them from working hard with the young people, and the pressure to excel is sometimes writ large. The textbooks used are conventional ones brought from the market. The lesson is repeated until the student understands the lesson. Since the young people are goal-oriented (far away from home, in order to be individually tutored), they do not hesitate to approach each teacher personally. In the month of September, there were three volunteers from the USA, one from Italy, two from Japan, five from India, one from Canada and one from Switzerland. On average, in September 2015, there are 8 volunteers for 36 board or school-leaving, and 17 college students. Of course, the roster for volunteers and the countries they represent changes every month. The 7 a.m. (SECMOL time) meeting is the most important one as the students gather to meditate (introspect) for five minutes and listen to a speaker. These may be diverse topics—‘Learning Grammar’, ‘Loosen your Muscles for General Well Being’, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ or ‘Reading the Past in Relation to the Global’. The students are looking to understand their spatial context in an economy that is dependent on the army as well as the aeroplanes that bring in newspapers, eggs, chickens and bananas every morning. The menu in the school is vegetarian with occasionally boiled or scrambled eggs for breakfast. The staple is rice for two meals, and barley and wheat for one. Lentils appear twice a day, morning and evening, and the most preferred dal is broken chickpeas or what is popularly known as channe ki dal. Steamed dough in small flat round shapes with patterns on top and stuffed with cabbage, called momos, is a very common breakfast food, eaten with lentils. The characteristic pattern in SECMOL is classroom interaction with intense coaching on a one-to-one basis at any time of the day when

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student and teacher are both free. The radio in the kitchen is always on loudly, as meals are cooked by the students and volunteers turn up to help. Simultaneously, students practise on the guitar, play chess or Scrabble and engage with the three cats, Thomas Mao, Abi Nakno and Naktik. Since the cats sleep a lot, they are thought to be reincarnationally useless idlers. Hard work is prioritised, and both student and teacher work seemingly endlessly at studies and tasks. The rooms are cleaned, and the kitchen space polished after each meal. Even the leaves of plants are dusted on the staircase once a week. Since SECMOL is located in a farmed desert, adjacent to the grey-green swiftly flowing Indus river, the swirling dust and the cold are intense. Sonam and his wife Rebecca have reiterated the value of the greening of the campus over 20 years. Students in charge of the garden, orchard, vegetable patch and forests complain of the paucity of water, the difficulty in maintaining the drains, and the weeding that is constantly required. Under the trees, where stone benches are placed in circles, the temperature is cool, oxygen is freely available, as the air is otherwise thin and dusty, and the white-hot glare of the sun is mellowed. Sunil Meka, a typical volunteer, is an organic farmer from Karnataka, 200 kilometres from Bengaluru. He says that back home, his mango crop is sold to the fruit juice companies, who send scouts looking for good mangoes. He extolls the works of Raghava of Aikanthika, who has regenerated the desert by allowing the land to proliferate naturally, using the Fukuoka method which involves the use of human night soil that has been adequately composted. He says that people do not understand the value of farming and tend to prioritise professional or white-collar jobs. Sunil believes that SECMOL provides volunteers like him with an opportunity to learn new things; he is now an established cheesemaker for the school (interview, 9 September 2015). One of the students is from Takmachik, the village Shafi Lasu, the then Minister of Tourism, had described to me previously. It is a rustic village consisting of farmers who have given up pesticides. Renzing and his parents speak to us, show us around and offer their best apricots for tasting. Baba Ramdev has asked for 20 tonnes of their apricots at 5 rupees a kg, while the Tatas want 10,000 kg of their best quality apricots with stones intact. The contractors have sent samples to the Tatas and

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will aggregate the apricots, which are easily damaged, in one place and airlift them to Delhi and Mumbai. The village has compost heaps, and in fact, a lot of the fruits, such as, apples and apricots, are naturally composted as they rot because of the excessive heat arising from the mountains during climate change. The farmers divide the apricots in terms of quality, and the first-grade apricots are immensely sweet and have white seeds; the others are firmer and less sweet but with a fresh delicate taste and brown seeds. They are sold with the stone, and the seeds are used for the oil or the kernel extracted as a type of almond. The wealth of apricots, late in the season, lie all over the village, drying on roof tops, on tables, in shelves, now protected by metal gauze that the scouts have brought as an anticipatory token from the Tatas. Renzing has a kinsman who has a hot house, which is tarpaulin-covered, close to the Indus. The route takes us past other farmers’ houses. He points to a green pile of dried bushes, attached to beans which are now thought to be extinct in the food chain. They are cylindrical and when dry, turn black. In the shaded grove, near the river, the kinsman is drying the apricots with an electric pedestal fan. They have to be protected from direct heat because if they are exposed, they will turn dark and leathery. I asked a student who studies at SECMOL as to why his village had been chosen as an eco-tourist village. He says it is because the village was ‘small, clean and beautiful’. It is true for there have been no changes in the village to accommodate the postmodern needs of tourists and the 65 households are happy to provide weekly dances during the tourist season. The Ladakhis are proud of their culture, they love their land and do what they can to preserve their heritage. I will now turn to a description of Becky Norman, who has supported Sonam Wangchuk in his venture to provide education and occupational avenues for young people. Like many organic farmers, their motivation comes from working as a couple. Rebecca Norman came to Ladakh as an intern with Helena Norberg in the early 1990s. She met Sonam Wangchuk who was inspiring everyone with his new ideas on solar energy and earth bricks. SECMOL, at that time, was functioning from a rented house in Leh. Sonam was intent on greening the desert, that is, planting trees and starting an environmentfriendly school. So they shifted, to Phey village, and the plan to tutor

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select children then began to morph in the 1990s, to running a hostel for children who had failed school. Basically, if they were to run a school, they would require different kinds of qualifications. So, the tuitions had extended to holiday camps and by 2000, they had their own place with volunteers coming in to help the children. Becky (as she is called by the children) and Sonam felt that if they provided holistic education, then it was not just the pass percentage for Ladakh (which had 84 per cent fail) which would improve but also the skills that children learnt which would help them later in life. Solar energy, travel agency management, photography, construction work, tourism, farming, cooking, food preservation—these were all life-enhancing skills. Becky’s work continues in the kitchen gardens through the Himalayan winter as they successfully grow vegetables in the school’s greenhouses. Sonam’s popularity and his contributions made him the choice of the youth movement in Ladakh to stand for elections in the autumn of 2015 in Leh for the post of the Head of the Ladakh Autonomous Council (the post he lost as the BJP was active in Ladakh with all manner of incitement). Becky feels that Sonam standing for elections placed him between the National Conference, Congress and BJP as an independent and that he would find coordinating between strategies somewhat difficult as a politician. His exile to Nepal from 2007 to 2014 was because of the local politicians and the Congress trying to reduce his popularity. Becky sees herself as the ‘thread of continuity’ with the running of SECMOL, although over 20 years, she has never been the director. They always had students who were formerly at SECMOL come in as staff members as they were familiar with the system. Scientist and technologist though he is, and now active in politics, Sonam Wangchuk is optimistic and proud that the Ladakh he nurtures is embedded in the dream of organic farming and solar energy, the integration of intellectuals and labourers and the reworking of educational practice. By doing away with the opposition between science and tradition, he uses Buddhist legacies on frugality and nurture, to socialise young people into an ethic that promotes hard work and frugality. Now, with the Chinese encroachment into Galwan, Sonam has become even more politically active, warning the Centre of

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the dangers of Chinese cultural proximity to India, and asking for the ban of cultural and imported materials. To conclude, many people believe that growing food for the table is a choice that helps individuals, families and collectivities to engage in primary face-to-face relations, embed themselves in joint work and finally, believe in the resilience they have in facing a future, which allows them to hope rather than despair.

Bibliography Aggarwal, Ravina. 2002. ‘Trails of Turquoise: Feminist Enquiry and Counterdevelopment in Ladakh, India’. In Feminist Post-Development Thought, edited by Kriemid Saunders. Delhi, London and New York: Zubaan and Zed Books. Bahga, Sarbjeet. 2018. ‘WWW.TERRA Awarded SECMOL school in Leh is Epitome of Rammed Earth and Passive Solar Architecture’. Available at: www India Architecture News, 29 November (accessed on 14 July 2020). Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Wasted Lives, Modernity and its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity. Baviskar, Amita. 2020. Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and the Commons in Delhi. Delhi: Sage and Yoda Press. Berry, Wendell. 2012. The Art of the Commonplace. Indore: Banyan Tree. Dubos, Rene. 1980. The Wooing of Earth. New York: Charles Scribners Sons. Hawken, Paul. 1993. The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability. New York: HarperCollins. Joshi, P.C. and Kalindi Sharma. 2019. ‘Cyclone Aila and Its Impact on Livelihood’. In Chronology and Events: The Sociological Landscape of Changing Concepts, edited by Susan Visvanathan and Vineetha Menon. Winshield Press. Lovelock, James. 2006. The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity. New York: Basic Books. Lundup, Tashi. 2017. ‘The Interface between Tourism and Religion in Ladakh: A Study of Lamayuru Village’. PhD dissertation submitted to Jawaharlal Nehru University, Centre for the Study of Social Systems. Maffeosoli, Michel. 1996. The Time of the Tribes. London: Sage. Mauss, Marcel and Henri Beauchat. 1950. Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mendes, Jose Manuel. 2015. ‘Catastrophes, the Imaginary and Citizenship’. In Hazardous Future, edited by Isabel Capeloa Gil and Christoph Wulf. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Michels, Axel and Christoph Wulf. 2020. Science and Scientification in South Asia and Europe. New Delhi: Routledge. Norberg-Hodge, Helena. 1991. Ancient Futures, Learning from Ladakh. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Shafi, Sumera. 2011. ‘The Sacred and the Secular: Interplay of Religion and Politics in the Ladakh Region of Jammu and Kashmir’. Unpublished MPhil Thesis, Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Sekhsaria, Pankaj, 2016. Islands in Flux. Delhi: Harper Litmus. Srinivas, Smriti. 1998. The Mouths of People, the Voice of God. Delhi: Oxford University Press, Visvanathan, Shiv. 1997. A Carnival for Science: Essays on Science, Technology and Development. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2009. ‘Foresters and New Orientations to Survival’. Indian Journal of Human Development 3 (1): 77–97. ———. 2010. ‘Summer Hill: The Building of Vice-Regal Lodge’. In Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, 192–211, Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study. ———. 2011. Reading Marx, Weber and Durkheim Today. Delhi: Palm Leaf Press. ———. 2014. ‘Alternative School Education and the Right to Education’. In Ideas, Institutions, Processes: Essays in Memory of Satish Saberwal, edited by N. Jayaram. Delhi: Orient Blackswan. ———. 2020. ‘Thinking about Agriculture in an Industrialising Economy: An Essay’. In Science and Scientification in South Asia and Europe, edited by Axel Michaels and Christoph Wulf. New Delhi: Routledge.

Websites ‘DRDO Ties Up with Ramdev to Market Supplements, Food Products’. Available at: www.Indiatimes.com, Anil Raina, 24 August 2015 (accessed on 16 August 2020). ‘Galwan Valley: Sattelite Images Show China Structures on Indian Borders’. Available at: BBCNEWS.com, 25 June 2020 (accessed on 16 August 2020). ‘Just Like Sikkim Became 100% organic, Ladakh to Become Carbon-Neutral: PM Modi, Independence Day Speech’, 15 August 2020. Available at: https:// www.ndtv.com/india-news/just-like-sikkim-became-100-organic-ladakhto-become-carbon-neutral-pm-narendra-modi-2279900 (accessed on 16 August 2020). ‘Leh Livelihood Initiative’. Available at: www.Tatatrusts.org (accessed on 21 August 2020).

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‘Ice Stupa Project Founder Sonam Wangchuk’. Available at: https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Ice_Stupa (accessed on 27 September 2021). ‘The Made in China Trap’, 12 June 2020. Available at: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=bKYjZsi97tU video Sonam Wangchuk (accessed on 16 August 2020). ‘Terra Awarded Secmol School in Leh’, 28 November 2018. Available at: https world architecture.org (accessed on 12 August 2020).

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Fig. 3a: Agricultural Research Scientist and the President of the Kerala Organic Farmers Association visit a local farmer in a Palakkad village who has pioneered integrated organic farming methods and hydroponic agriculture. Kannadi Village, Palakkad, Kerala, 2009. Copyright: Author.

Fig. 3b: This is a tree trunk, part of which has been hollowed and which collects clean spring water for local use by Mullukarma tribal community members of Wayanad, Kerala. It is called ‘Kenni’. Elephants also stop by to drink the water. Mullukarma remove their slippers before approaching the water, as they are extremely respectful of local resources. Wayanad, Kerala, 2018. Copyright: Author.

In this chapter, I will be looking at the question of borders and boundaries, migration histories, varieties of art practice (in its visual as well as auditory preoccupations) and the orientation of methodologies that look at time and place as catalysts to our understanding of colonialism (as implicated in our individual or collective representations of the past). For this purpose, comparative literature, as well as the variety of mnemonics embedded in our many landscapes would be of immense significance in unravelling contemporary narratives. This further facilitates the techniques of those who wish to integrate past and present, as entry points into the contemporary understanding of climate change. 64

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The relation between digital knowledge, museumisation and archival resources would also provide an inroad into our mutual concern with preserving planet Earth for future generations. The resources that we bring together from various subject positions of research would help us understand the key ecological issues regarding climate change, denuded land, disappearing forests, drying rivers and rising sea levels. It encourages us to provide maps, through theatre and narrative, for reuniting the earth as a common frame where the human and animal worlds are in a sacred and rejuvenating space of mutual recognition. When we think of water, we might sometimes begin with a chant, such as sung by the Tikopia, The wind in the south is fierce The canoe is driven, carrying My brothers who Are wailing on the deck of the vessel. They run to weep together towards the stern They go to him (their father) O! O! There they bow their heads into the hull Floating birds who will be cast up Riele, riele On the crest of the foam They will stand. Separate me a paddle And set up the sail firm. (Firth 1963: 175) In this dirge, the Tikopia weep for those who are lost. Firth is essentially concerned with the fact that the song is a taunt to companions of the voyage, who did not go to the help of those who were in trouble and who sank to their death. The fate of ordinary people is always in question, and pastoralists, fishers, horticulturalists and farmers are now besieged by climate change. In this essay, I attempt to understand the manner in which water is the chief idiom by which we understand the questions of topography and occupation in the Western Ghats. I wish to explain how borders inform the relationship between communities, and while occupation

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becomes a symbol of differing engagements on a daily basis, access to water is of great significance. People have crossed from one state to another over long periods, and each catalytic moment marked by war, drought or colonialism brings about changes in topography. In this sense, Coonoor and Palakkad give us some idea of why organic farming becomes a site of reconnaissance for understanding niche cultures in the Western Ghats, and why Kerala, when faced with flooding, becomes a landscape of new forms of social engineering, where excess recreates the direct experience of nullification. Drought and flood become experiential ways in which societies think about survival. In an age of cataclysm, we are forced to think about interstate catastrophes as ways of thinking about border relations, where colonial interventions, law court and media interpretations define how communities think about their survival. As Mihir Shah and P.S. Vijayshankar write, it is now crucial to look at urban sites of water and waste management (Shah and Vijayshankar 2016: 20). My essay attempts to look at hinterland sites of horticultural and tourist investment, which would be affected by droughts and floods in times of seasonal disequilibrium. Marcus Moench argues that we are crucially interested in how rural areas, agricultural practices and urban needs are interlocked (Moench in Shah and Vijayshankar 2016: 105). The ‘great dams’ debates have raised our interest not just in terms of post-colonial periods or World Bank interventions in rural areas, millions displaced and the logistics of these but also why small dams have proliferated in Kerala in the belief that they would cause less damage. However, the late and simultaneous opening of flood gates in 2018, as electricity was being harnessed, caused untold damage. Interest in crop patterns and innovations in Kerala has been recorded as early as 1867 by William Logan for Malabar. Concern with wars, conquests and revenue assessments made the boundaries between kingdoms flexible, and people crossed over from one chiefdom to another (Logan 2009: 626). There was always interest in the exploitation of resources, be it timber or forest produce, before plantation culture took over (D’Souza in Shah and Vijayshankar 2016: 220). As Susan E. Cayleff describes it, the preoccupation with naturopathic healing was one of the greatest symbols of medical interventions in the 19th

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century (Cayleff 2016). Today, the Western Ghats continue to provide rare herbs and common spices to the organic and natural medicines industry, including honey and pepper for the tourist trade. Water is one of the most demanded commodities today, and the buying of drinking water and the laying down of pipes for hotels and recreational spaces come with their own trajectory of costs, which include court cases between neighbouring states (Bakker 2011; D’Souza 2006). As Lyla Mehta argues, scarcity has become an all-pervasive phenomenon (Mehta 2011). Within this framework, we recognise that farming has now taken on a new dimension which is that of love for the land or as Rene Dubos called it, following Tagore, The Wooing of the Earth (Dubos 1980). Of course, this is not just about production, water harvesting and alertness to the variations in seasons; it is about survival where an ideology of care and nurture pervades. It is what Wendell Berry calls The Art of the Commonplace (Berry 2012). Can the people, who make a living by growing things and exporting to the tourist market or local groceries (market gardening) or coalescing their products in cooperative farming, stand up against industrial agriculture and the might of capitalists venturing into organic farming? Can we call two consecutive floods an aspect of ‘climate change’ or should we use ‘global warming’ as a more comprehensive term? Sulocahana Gadgil and Siddharth Gadgil’s essay on the variability of the monsoon and its impact on agriculture was published first in the Economic and Political Weekly in 2006 (Gadgil and Gadgil in Shah and Vijayshankar 2016: 424). What happens in flood or drought years brings us to new questions which can affect the way people think about livelihood and life chances. When we look at the Western Ghats, much has been written, particularly in terms of the loss of identity, and the ways in which we think of postmodern cultures, where tourism and conspicuous consumption are essential ways of thinking about the extinction of flora and fauna, lifestyles and modes of perceiving the world. As industrialisation proceeds, the world changes, and development is thought to be the ultimate good. The working class is absorbed into construction and manual labour, and for this, networking with contractors is required, as well as the means and mobility, by which

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urban livelihoods are achieved. This is dependent on minimum education, for purposes of travel and banking. Privatising education excludes vast populations from accessing clerical jobs. When one looks at the working class, it draws from both kinship networks as well as conjugal stability. Much of the debates around indentured labour, as Prabhu Mahapatra (1995) has shown us are centred around the way in which workers would take their wives to the West Indies, but often women would be murdered out of sexual jealousy. Amitav Ghosh’s novelistic works describe how deeply entrenched indentured workers were in the sense of their own loss and abnegation. C.F. Andrews and Willie Pearson communicated in the 20th century that until the British stopped the traffic in what were conditions of slavery, the world could not accept Christianity to be anything other than an exploitative religion (Nauriya 2020). The political conditions of the working class in 21st-century India have always been tied up with the complexities of crossing over from one party to another, as the fate and life chances of workers depend on the patronage of these parties. If caste is read back in terms of the dominant communities merging through Hindutva, then their antipathy towards Muslims, Christians, Dalits and tribal communities is a foregone conclusion. Tribal people, who have not been assimilated to Hinduism, would be seen as the most degraded of people. Their way of life would be problematised as wanderers who have no home. Their occupations as beekeepers, herbalists, foragers, gatherers, horticulturists, etc., would be seen as ultimately out of the borders of the modern. Since tribal communities cross over the borders of states, their identity is merged with those whom they recognise as being similar to them. So they would exist as Malayali Kurumbas, Kannadiga and Tamil Kurumbas, for instance. As honey-gatherers, they move according to their work locations. Thus, their identity also fuses with the other identities they collect on the way, such as being occupied as tea- and coffee-plantation workers. When activists, such as those belonging to the Keystone Foundation, Kotagiri, are involved in the support of workers, whether in forests or reservations, their profiles as members of tribal communities begin to have a positive appeal, as they are emblems of significance in the health foods and tourism industry. ‘Pure Honey’

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becomes that product that is essentially coveted and sold to tourists at the price that they can afford and is valuable for Ayurveda practitioners and organic food and healthy food outlets. The profits from the sale are fed back into healthcare and medical benefits for the ‘honey hunters’, as the Keystone Foundation in Kotagiri, Tamil Nadu, describes them. The foundation has essentially tried to interconnect the needs of the local tribal communities in terms of their traditional patterns, including supporting their horticultural activities, supporting the growing of ragi and other millets. Intensive farming promotes a dietary balance, which allows them the cultivation of their favoured crops simultaneously along with vegetables. Compared to this, a wandering emaciated tribal youth, living alone and mentally disturbed, from Attappadi, Palakkad, gets killed, because he is hungry, his mind is wandering and he cannot explain himself. He had been found with a packet of chilli powder and some small items of groceries. O.V. Vijayan (2008) in The Legends of Khasak created Killi, the unspoilt ‘village idiot’, who is so dramatically different from Madhu, who died tragically in Attapaddi. In the undisputed tyranny of the development rhetoric of the modern age, the non-assimilated tribal youth and the mentally deficient are seen to be ‘useless eaters’. The Attappadi case shows that by excluding them from development, they have not only become alienated, but they see themselves as completely marginalised. Integrating Dalit and tribal communities into the nation-state is a long-drawn-out process. We have enough evidence from Bastar that Maoism was a route that foresters took to escape the disastrous consequences of the mining and timber mafia. In Kerala, settlers and communist workers too believed that tribal people were inconsequential. What foresters want and revere is their own way of life. Forced industrialisation places on local people the sense both of white-collar mobility now being accessible, which is a privilege as well as the fear that their idea of the real or that which is valuable will be taken away from them. White-collar professionalism is an aim, not a legacy for the working class. As a result, it places on them a terrible sense of urgency as well as defeat. This brings about a huge sense of lapse and moral insufficiency. There is also a gap between traditional values and the rights associated with freedom

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and mobility. The contradiction between these leads to working-class communities presenting hierarchies of status as given or ascribed. The rancour that arises from these, including inaccessibility to food, water, medical health and education, brings about class-based violence in many instances, which suppressed creates a huge reservoir of mutual enmity. The border always comes with a baggage. The British found it impossible to control the northeast and northwest territories, the Nagas holding out the longest. Essentially, we understand that the memories of land and territory were different for them. Much as we imagine that terrorism is a political term, we know that freedom and rights are essentially at risk for all those who occupy the borders. The call to war is continuous, and the fear that ordinary people face is, that the oligarchy, consisting of those who own the most in terms of real estate, are the ones making the decisions. For pacifists, the way forward is to create dialogue through music, literature, poetry and the arts with people across borders and within them. It is unfair to typecast all people with the same qualities of venom, death, evil. Durkheim (1969) in the conclusion of Elementary Forms of the Religious Life asked and attempted to understand the pure and the impure as two varieties of the same class. ‘The pure is made out of the impure, and reciprocally. It is in the possibility of these transmutations that the ambiguity of the sacred exists’ (ibid.: 458). He goes on to ask, ‘How does it happen that the powers of evil have the same intensity and contagiousness as the other?’ He had lost his son and most of his students in the trenches of the First World War. Every time, war beckons, we know that the call to arms includes everyone equally. However, with press-button technology, individual death is only part of the story where nuclear arsenals exist. The survival of the forester is placed very sharply in terms of existence itself. As the Attapadi murder showed, the settlers have very clear ideas of what is normal and why they would see tribal people as essentially outside the pale of their existence. Assimilation thus becomes imposed as ‘Be like us, or die’. Sadly, malnutrition and lack of proximity to water make tribal and lower-caste communities extremely vulnerable.

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Industrialisation would bring about a common parameter of similarity. Everything in industrialised societies would begin to look alike. When the intelligentsia leaves a carbon trail in the first decades of the 21st century, much like computer executives did in the last decade of the previous century, we may ask, how does consumerism affect the architectural experience of being a traveller in the skies? Each airport looks the same, and with the appropriation by the working class too into air travel, the symbols of assimilation with the middle class becomes more than apparent. Masons on the way to Srinagar in Kashmir or Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu or as construction labour in the Himalayas or the Western Ghats, whether coming from Malda in West Bengal or Patna in Bihar, sport expensive watches, buy decoction coffee and carry their worth to the company they represent with great composure. The trickle-down effect of capitalism comes into play, where the possibility of wearing branded clothing or carrying flashy mobiles, defines the commonality of the acceptance of the branded logo, whether Nike or Samsung. The intelligentsia no longer responds to the clamping down of workers in factories because they too are absorbed by the unity of this seemingly equalising world. Fit bodies, smart clothes, stylised haircuts seem sufficient to suggest that there is mobility among the working class. The real story of poverty, everyday hunger, thus gets sidelined. When there is drought or famine, the contractors can marshall more of the poor and hungry to come to work in the city. It does not matter which political party controls the offices of the state, as the ideological machinery of capitalism is impervious to these issues. The question of water becomes paramount as people have to subsist in situations where rainfall is not sufficient, and the urban consumer has aggrandised water and electricity in such a way that they become immensely dependent on civic supplies or illegal routing of these. Tourism is another way by which we understand both the getting away from the city for the urban consumer as well as the drought situations that former rural and pastoral localities face. The traditional face of rural societies attracts the well-heeled urban consumer, but this countryside is problematised by its own water shortages.

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Land, Water and Agricultural Practices in a Globalising World We are often preoccupied with how we want to live and the choice we must make about our food and habitat orientations. Much of the work by water conservationists and ecologists was essentially about preservation. However, we are also besieged by the personal and political: the reasons why we choose, as humans, to live in one part of the world or the other. Migration histories are particularly relevant as we engage with this question of space as lived in and occupied by humans. The idiom of water as free-flowing, ever-present, providing us with our basic necessities is now open to question. I am interested in looking at two problems: one is the question of hinterlands, the other is the problem of rapid urbanisation. Within this, I will communicate my interest in what seems to be relic forms of tradition, specifically, organic farming and territorialisation by natural morphological conditions of environmental subsistence. This may include fishing, farming, forestry, foraging and market gardening across the subcontinent. While the method may seem eclectic, it is important to remember that the comparative collection of data over a span of two decades has been accompanied by the general literature that contextualises each of these events or phenomena. Wars make people flee, but so does flood, drought or famine. The past becomes understood then in terms of generational depth. How do we analyse the experience of those who have occupied certain areas because their circumstances were such that they had to leave their original homes, travel vast distances and then settle down in new places? What did they bring to these new places in terms of language and food and cultural practices? Since caste histories were important, these people carried the legends of their ancestors forward through endogamy, exogamy and commensality. The rules of behaviour were clearly compounded by their religious persuasions. Co-existence was, in traditional India, foregrounded by their ability to accept the rules of their host society. Not surprisingly, territorial assignment of land and values were also packaged in terms of these dominant motifs of whether one was an outsider or an original inhabitant. The idea of the ‘original

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inhabitant’ became a myth of increasing superfluity as the inhabitants and tribal people, who had worked the land previously, were always seen by the dominant castes to be superfluous. Turning them into slaves was the way in which they generally took care of the problem. Peasantry evolved through the ability to survive these various invasions or incursions. Settler cultures have always drawn our attention to political mobilisation, types of hierarchy and the ways in which their resources were manipulated by varieties of oligarchies. Marcus Moench (1990) writes of encroachment into forest land through the complicity of the state and political parties which permit the slow adaptation to territories that were legally described as forest or ‘wastelands’. The real problem of making these lands available to those who had no inheritance rights on family property in Travancore or to landless labour is represented when floods become the reason for their uprooting in the floods of 2018 and 2019. Settler communities then come in for criticism from the state, which had first settled them there in the 1950s to mitigate the crises brought about by food shortages. In doctoral work in 1990 from the University of California, Berkeley, titled ‘From Forest to Agroforest: Land Use Dynamics and Crop Succession in the Western Ghats of Kerala’, Moench writes about the complex process of adaptation that brought settlers to the ‘High Ranges’ as the Western Ghats was referred to so that the border demography became changed allowing Malayali farmers, who then represented the interests of Kerala in relationship to Tamils from Tamil Nadu. Cultivation of cash crops such as tea, coffee, pepper, cardamom and its distribution thus became marked by ethnic superiority between farmers and unionised landless labour about work and land use (Moench 1991). The survival mechanisms of those who tilled were inbuilt in terms of definite processes involving the struggle with land, predators, water and climate. Sundarbans in West Bengal, India, is a case in point. Migrants had their stories to tell—how they coped with defeat and heroism. We know that settler cultures through colonialism made this belt active through intervention, but over several decades, the population increased by migration, adaptation and a certain resilience towards intermittent cyclones and flooding. That history is not relevant to the poor who till the land because, for them, survival is a daily

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business, involving sending out individuals for work to other parts of the country for manual labour. As cultural anthropologists, however, we can see why in a tenuous piece of extended land, the contemporary historian is on call to see how people occupy and farm the land, which routinely and famously disappears into the sea. Much has been written about it, and of course for tourists, this constantly recreating history of coastal boundaries is eminently important. The borderline between Bangladesh and India is made too tenuous as people migrate from across the border into India, spending decades in another part of the newly adopted country, becoming acclimatised to a new identity before they finally move to a terrain familiar to them. Similarly, we need to understand migration histories that arise from land redistribution. When the state becomes reorganised for purposes of political convenience, the old borders are defined not only in terms of familiarity, geomorphology and human relationships but in terms of governmentality from which a new vocabulary begins to emerge. There are striations of previous histories, where the gazettes and legends inform us of events that may have occurred hundreds of years ago. It is in this respect that the Madras Presidency becomes increasingly significant as a marker for understanding the relationship between agriculture, water and land use. Palakkad, for instance, while being merged with Kerala after Independence, still had a cultural similarity with Tamil Nadu. Enclaves of people, who had settled in the 14th century under the patronage of the Palakkad king, established a mirror relation with Mailaduthura, Tamil Nadu, from where their ancestors had originally arrived. Thus, legends and local histories give us a very important entry point for understanding how topography and people are connected. Hockings, for the Western Ghats, describes how immensely powerful these legends are as a metaphor, as well as descriptions of topography, for why people engage in specific occupations or become associated with land usage, even as nomads (Hockings 2013). Nomadic groups often cross over interstate borders because that is their tradition. Where rivers are sources of debate because of their point of origin and their different political interpretations by federal authorities, many communities then become prisoners of their own histories.

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Water as a Symbol of Political Action and Governmentality Radha D’Souza (2006) in Interstate Disputes over Krishna Waters: Law, Science and Imperialism writes: Interstate agreements in colonial India were between the Indian States and the presidencies or the central government. The 1892 Agreement was the first interstate agreement on water in the Indian subcontinent in the modern sense. Underlying the agreement was the idea that two states could determine through a formal treaty-making process the extent of autonomy that the populations within the respective state territories had in respect of water use. In pre-colonial times water use was primarily considered a prerogative of agriculturists analogous to the way taxation was the prerogative of the state. Under the legal system then in force, taxation was on the total produce (crop); the village and not individual was the unit of taxation; and regulation of land, water, and natural resources were left to the village, tribal and caste panchayats (councils). (161)

D’Souza further argues that what enforced this agreement was the idea that the colonial state had authority over the ruling kings in principalities. Irschick’s work, Dialogue and History (1994), on sedenterisation of agriculture in Tamil Nadu, further proves that the British were indeed concerned with the stabilising of local populations so that they would settle down in one place rather than moving rapidly either in search of water or cultivable lands. Accompanying this is of course systems of taxation as well as British policy on the temple and its lands. Farhat Naz (2014) showed us that in Gujarat, the idea that water could be privatised through tube-well deployment essentially led to a massive depletion in the water table. She describes succinctly that the Green Revolution diverted water from its original runways to support the cause of farming communities, who were well versed in state policy and monetary benefits and tax-free services having to do with electricity use and seed policy for farmers in that belt. Social revolutions that followed were essentially to demand the rights that farmers with

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small landholdings had in traditional society before capitalist farming had become rampant. A lot of the water debates thus zoned in on the large and small dams debate, since it was here that community access to water for irrigation purposes could be sharply focused. Small dams were associated with towns where agricultural and urban dwellers’ needs could be conjointly served. These were then an aspect of the 20th century, where the dam would be employed to provide irrigation for fields and generate electricity for small towns while providing it with piped water as well. They would have seasonal variations for instance, so that pre-monsoon, the level of water would drop and the town dwellers would be prioritised over the farmer. In Palakkad, people in the city were considered to be of primary importance, and water from the Malampuzha Dam, just seven kilometres from the Ollavakode railway station, would reach the farmer every three days, causing grave distress to local farming communities. Built of mortar and cement, the needs of the town would be adequately calculated for a certain historical time. When the town expanded due to new industries or service facilities, such as hospitals or educational institutions, the question of water would immediately be significant. How can we understand scarcity when none existed before? The interlacing of small dams in relationship to large dams brings us back to the questions of how water is diverted and for what purpose. It is in this context that the Idukki and Mullaperiyar dams become linked in terms of not just their heights but also the seasons, and the fragility of both rainfall patterns as well as the stability of the dam itself is understood in a normal frame. This debate is closely linked to landscape and demography and the idea that the rivers cannot be understood in isolation. The second important problem is the extinction of the rivers themselves because of climate change, industrial pollution, non-weeding of grasses and hyacinths, which clog the free-flowing rivers and cause mismanagement of resources, including continual exploitation of riverbeds by sand mining. Fortunately, with the steady rain which fell in Kerala in the monsoon of 2017 (although it did not match the average rainfall requirement, particularly in the North of Kerala), the river began to flow and take

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with it the morass of water weeds and pollution brought by human waste.

Small Towns in the Western Ghats and Water Scarcity In Coonoor, Tamil Nadu, the farmers have been dependent on the rivulets from which they get their water supply, but whose names they cannot remember because they are generally referred to as puzha, ‘that river’. One of the interesting things about postmodern market economies, where there is a blend of the traditional and the global is the total loss of linking or connecting ideas between events or institutions. Segmentalisation is so total that people cannot provide information on anything, be it the name of the town from where their raw material is brought or where a finished agricultural product goes. As a result, they live in the here and now, which is considered to be sufficient. Because their children are keen to get professional education, a new generation is even less conversant, although they do support their parents, or help them in agricultural work. Coonoor town suffered extreme water shortages before 2018 as the Rallia dam dried out. Water became available for sale to the wealthy, who would spend anything from 500 rupees a day to 1,000 rupees every alternate day. Middle class and lower-income group people were dependent on the water that came from the municipality in their taps at home. The water would be collected in tanks by the government and fed into one tank. From there, it would be distributed through the town’s line to every house only every 17 days. The idea of water tankers coming to every street was discontinued as there was too much water wastage while collecting individually in buckets. On the day, or rather, the night, that water comes (from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m.), clothes are washed, Syntex tanks filled and that water lasts them for 17 days! Coonoor residents have got used to this and actually manage with the water they store. As Manoj, a coffee and teashop owner states in an interview with me on 25 April 2017, ‘We have become so used to this, that we now see it as a form of water conservation. We believe that if we can be served water in our houses even every ten days, now possible because

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the heavy rains have filled the dam, and the wells and ponds, it would be fine.’ Manoj however, buys water for his teashop business. He says that climate change and drought have been hardest on the women, who have to work twice as hard to collect water during the night and also to conserve it, and use it sparingly for their domestic purposes. Nitin, who teaches labourer’s children as a hobby and is an IT professional, says that the British gave them railways, roads and horticultural spaces, including the cultivation of cash crops. He says to me in an interview on 22 December 2017 that the real beauty of Coonoor lies in that the people have worked hard to maintain this as Coonoor is pollution-free, and there are, in fact, no dermatologists, as people do not have skin allergies. He feels that the greatest problem is water. The wealthy are able to fill their Syntex tanks as they can afford to pay a thousand or two thousand rupees every couple of days. The poor find it hard as there is no water in Coonoor. The heavy rains which came in September 2017 arrived, according to him, after 25 years. The frightening aspect is that the Rallia Dam has anachronistic pipes which cannot provide water to the city. Politicians’ promises that they would repair the pipe is now postponed because the dam is filled with water, and in the monsoon, they cannot fix the pipes. Worse, contractors are robbing the water and selling it in trucks. Varghese, who makes chocolates with his wife on specific orders during tourist season or for visiting family members, says that the Rallia dam, which had been built for a population of 10,000 in 2017 serves 10,00,000 people (ten lakh or one million). The problem is that the waste disposal in Coonoor is so terrible that everything is thrown into the canals as there is never any water. Now the Clean Coonoor project (www. cleancoonoor) has made substantial inroads into urban development.With the rain, the dam provides the town with water which has been treated. Yet, the real question of how to treat waste has not been solved. Waste bins have been moved and people are throwing waste everywhere. No collection happens, and the crows, pigs, cats and dogs take over the city as the waste accumulates. However, the real regret is that a tourist town should have been so uncared for as water and garbage continue to be the main issues. They never drink the local water or drink tea from wayside shops. Vijayan, a former employee with

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the State Bank of India, says that the town has one drain into which the garbage is flung. As for traffic jams, these are continual now since the roads are too narrow to take the present density of cars and buses and trucks. Road widening has meant that the trees often have to be cut down. With climate change, what has happened is that the animals in Coonoor have been forced out of the forests and have started wandering into the town. A honeymooning couple was gored to death as they posed for selfies in the early morning with the kattu erumai (the Indian Gaur or the forest bison), which they thought were peaceful bovines. This happened in Sim’s Park. Wild pigs leave their hoof marks in residential areas and the housewives wake up to find their vegetable patch completely eroded. Bears have taken to the tea gardens as a site for wandering, causing anxiety to local communities. Local farmers have photographs of wild animals wandering into their gardens and bisons jumping fences to feed on organic produce meant for the tourist market. Renee Borges in her essay on fragmented landscapes writes that deer mice often make no distinctions between differences in forest lands where gardens have been created (Borgess in Saberwal and Rangarajan 2005: 62) In Kotagiri, Anita Varghese, the Deputy Director of the Keystone Foundation says in an interview with me on 23 December 2017 that ecologically speaking, the most important issues relate to the interaction between forests and local communities. While people are quick to close off the debate by accepting policy reports as the final word, trained ecologists wish to swivel the argument in a different direction. She was interested in the interface between forest and people. She wanted to know how the actual use of trees by local communities, such as the Irula and Kurumbas, led to species preservation in the forest. She believes that sealing off the forest from the people is an error because it is through human involvement that the forest produce has value and the trees are protected. She says that the local people take great care and prohibit the takeover of particular weeds like lantana which can destroy the local ecology. Anita feels that my question to her about the survival of local communities, development and museumisation are what she is centrally

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involved with and that this is where she has finally arrived after 25 years of close involvement with tribal communities. However, the relation between organic produce, tourism, marketing and interaction between them as managers and tribal communities is still an ongoing process. Students from American universities come to spend a semester with the Keystone Foundation to learn about forest practice and the methods of water conservation. Biodiversity is the only possible way that local communities can now survive, moving away from plantation culture to reforestation and seed preservation for sustenance. Michael Lewis writes that: Some scientists within Germany, Britain, and the US, however, were beginning to develop observational practices that were based on natural history but attempted to apply more rigorous standards of observation and explanation. One of the signature themes in their approach was a focus upon the interactions between plants, animals and their environments. An early figure Ernest Haekel named this type of study as ‘oecology’ in the 1890s. German biologists were largely uninterested in the term, though, and it was unused until after American scientists transformed it to ‘ecology’ in the 1890s. Ecology did not necessarily break down the botany-zoology divide. Botanists still studied plants; zoologists still studied animals. (2003: 41)

The forest remained a site of undisturbed ecological preservation till colonial exploitation of natural resources to further development and urbanism, and the migrations of large numbers of people affected the local demographic pattern. Lewis goes on to show us that the question of animal migrations for sustenance when food and water become scarce is an important focus for those concerned with issues of natural habitat and questions of hybridisation of species. What happens when foraging and pastoral communities encroach into parks that have been set up for the specific purpose of keeping humans and domesticated animals out? The debate has its highest interface with regard to the Nilgiris as the response to the Kasturi Rangan Report has made more than evident. Local communities, particularly settler communities who have been domesticating the surrounding forests and turning them into agricultural hinterlands for border towns, have been very vociferous. In

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the case of Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary, Lewis has some fascinating data with regard to how cows, villagers, park sentinels interacted, often with some conflagrationist issue dividing them. He describes how much policy can be influenced by intellectual interests, scientific or social. He writes: Even had the exclusion of humans and their livestock from the park been effective in maintaining the park’s avian diversity, it further illustrates the divide between the internationally connected and politically powerful ecologists and conservationists—those who made and advocated the laws—and the relatively powerless rural villagers surrounding the park. The exclusion of human influence from Bharatpur was advocated by the Indian scientists of the BNHS, was made possible by the Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act, and was enforced at the insistence of the Indira Gandhi-led Indian Board for Wildlife. The Indian National Park system corresponded to a US model, with the preference for large areas, cleared of people, with no livestock and ‘natural management’. Its application in India, though, was not due to an imposition of US will on an Indian subject. Instead, the US national park model corresponded to the conservation beliefs and values of an Indian urban conservation elite (including Indian royalty who used similar types of management policies for their hunting reserves, politicians such as Indira Gandhi, and scientists such as Ali). They then imposed this policy upon rural Indians living in and around declared national parks and wildlife reserves. The irony of the futility of this imposition in actually preserving avian biodiversity makes even worse the reality of the violence done to rural Indians, and accepted, if not ordered by Indian elites in the name of environmental preservation. (Lewis 2003: 312)

Human–Animal Interface Becomes Problematic in Coonoor, a Tourist Town in the Western Ghats How to keep marauding forest animals out of parks and domestic gardens or tea estates has been a puzzle for residents in Coonoor, who routinely discuss the destruction waged by the kattu eruma and wild pigs on land, which have been carefully domesticated for more than 100 years. Colonial policy with regard to the nature–culture debates has to

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be re-engaged with, with specific reference to water usage and forest management, particularly where the memory of the forest is apparent only in the habits of wild animals, who traverse a given area in terms of their familiarity and need for water and food. Lewis suggests that carnivorous animals in sanctuaries do not make a distinction between wild and domesticated cattle. The bison in Sim’s Park in Coonoor by fatally goring two honeymooners showed that the bison did not notice fences and steps or distinguish between forest and urban development. Coonoor presents itself with a startling sense of order and physical comfort. A hillside town, the relics of British architecture and parks are still available for view. Tourists, particularly honeymooners, come from all parts of the country. Sim’s Park is a valuable horticultural site, where the British planted trees from all over India and the world, especially for recreational purposes. The garden is laid out in such a way that it has all the appearances of miniaturisation. There are landscaped lawns, shrubs and flowering plants. There is a greenhouse and also a small pond for boating, as well as a children’s park. Tourists find the display of flowers in spring and summer enjoyable for colour and versatility. Many of them have travelled long distances in transport buses from Coimbatore and adjoining villages. Some even come from as far away as Chennai, which is a night’s journey. The idea that these small towns provide access to gardens and water is probably their greatest attraction. The local population provides homestays and also a well-advertised hotel network for residential tourist needs. Interestingly, Karen Bakker writes that the preoccupation with personal hygiene in the 19th century was the reason that the regulation of water became a major preoccupation as the washbasin and toilet, unknown to previous generations, now became common. To provide the water needed for domestic uses, both sewage removal, as well as water sourcing, became of ultimate significance. Consequently, she writes: In the West, the role of water as a resource, and aesthetic and cultural views of its place in society changed dramatically during the nineteenth century: water use practices became a source of sensual pleasure, the object of new, water-intensive personal hygiene routines, and a marker

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of civilization. In the twentieth century, dams and reservoirs were symbolic of the twin projects of modernization and nation-building. (Bakker 2011: 14)

Following this, modernisation was accompanied not only by the forms of water mobilisation as a problem of economic vantage points but also central to public health management and for purposes of evacuating large volumes of effluents (ibid.: 55).

Large Dams versus Small Dams: The Efficacy of the Latter in Independent India In Vocabulary of the Commons (2011), the editors attempt to understand how naming or labelling becomes the way in which domination over the erstwhile commons occurs. The ‘order of capitalism’, as Manuel Castells describes it in The Urban Question (1977), is imposed by the state on local communities and the commons lying as a hinterland to small towns, where indigenous people are told, ‘We are all one’, and their resources are then pulled into the industrial hub. In the second stage, the indigenous community is told, ‘Let us define your rights’. By this, their control over natural resources, specifically water, is taken away. Thirdly, residual rights are taken away and invested in the state, and in the fourth stage, all rights become gifts that become voluntary or in time taken away. In Kerala, small dams were associated with towns where agricultural and urban dwellers’ needs could be conjointly served. Bettina Weiz argues that villagers see the breakdown of community relations as leading to the degradation of water sources (Weiz in Mines and Yazgi 2010: 144). These were then an aspect of the 20th century, where the dam would be employed to provide irrigation for fields and generate electricity for small towns, while providing it with piped water as well. My data collected in 2006 in Kerala showed how Palakkad town prioritised water for local inhabitants over farmers in summer, closing off pipes for three days at a time, leaving farmers distraught. Lisa Bjorkman in Pipe Politics, Contested Waters (2015) shows how the actual map of practices enjoined in accessing water does not quite

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match the administrative maps provided by engineers and bureaucrats: ‘Getting water to come out of municipal pipes is an activity that requires continuous attention, a measure of stealth, and intimate knowledge of a complex and dynamic hydraulic, political and social system’ (Bjorkman 2015: 138). The interlacing of small dams in relationship to large dams, a typical characteristic of a state which has 81 dams and 44 rivers, brings us back to the questions of how water is diverted and for what purpose. It is in this context that the Idukki and the Mullaperiyar dams become linked in terms of not just their heights but also in relation to the seasons and the fragility of both rainfall patterns as well as the stability of the dam itself. Being colonial dams, the mortar and cement composition comes under constant scrutiny, and the law court cases deal with the tensions that arise from the questions of maintenance of the dam and its source, which are cross-cutting neighbouring states in terms of their locations. This debate is closely linked to landscape and demography and the idea that the rivers cannot be understood in isolation. The second important problem in the reorganisation of dams is the extinction of the rivers themselves because of climate change, industrial pollution, the proliferation of grasses and hyacinths that clog the freeflowing rivers. This causes mismanagement of resources, including continual exploitation of riverbeds by sand mining. With the steady rain which fell in Kerala in the monsoon of 2018, the river began to flow and take with it the morass of water weeds and pollution brought by human waste. In the next section, I will look at the way in which tea and coffee plantations are located in the hinterland of small colonial towns which predispose the way we understand how borders are viewed between Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, as this affects inhabitants in relation to tourism and market towns. David Quammen in The Song of the Dodo (1996) shows us how ancient geological markers become important when we try to understand diffusionist histories of migration. Colonialism took away the rights of local communities to their land, including flora and fauna and water in ways which led to their imminent extinction. The Western Ghats have to be viewed in terms of how natural boundaries fulfil the role of providing not

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necessarily borders but permeable zones allowing people to cross over for occupational purposes. The question of water remains paramount as floods and drought intermittently affect the local populace. Water harvesting in the hills remains the most important question as dams cannot be easily built, and water drains away. India turned toward large dams as the answer to its problems relating to irrigation of fields and the production of electricity for industrialisation. As a result, the disarray of displaced people that followed each decade of dam building was analysed substantially, and with each representative position, there were further developments in the argument, both historically and polemically. In Kerala, small dams were seen as essentially contributing to the agricultural stability of the farmer with small landholdings, and the provision of electricity to small towns. Settler culture and indigenous communities faced each other in various respects, and conventionally, it eroded into master– slave relations. Wage labour was seen to be both the prerogative of tribal and lower-caste communities, while cash-crop agriculture and rice cultivation in North Malabar was an aspect of how younger sons were settled to continue family traditions in appropriate surroundings (Varghese 2009). Analysis of global cultural surrealism is what James Clifford (1988) in The Predicament of Culture calls the necessity of our times. He writes that: Anthropological humanism and ethnographic surrealism need not be seen as mutually exclusive; they are perhaps best understood as antinomies set within a transient historical and cultural predicament. To state the contrast schematically, anthropological humanism begins with the difference and renders it through naming; ethnographic surrealist practice, by contrast, attacks the familiar, provoking the irruption of otherness—the unexpected. The two attitudes presuppose each other; both are elements within a complex process that generates cultural meanings, definitions of self and other. This process—a permanent ironic play of similarity and difference, the familiar and the strange, the here and the elsewhere—is I have argued, characteristic of global modernity. (Clifford 1988: 145–146)

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Collage is thus legitimised by this method, as well as those elements which cannot be integrated within the ethnographer’s own model. The relation between agricultural communities and their use of technology or electricity is a case in point. Rural people have members of the family who work ‘abroad’. As a result, they are familiar with computers and do use them with a certain finesse for purposes of networking. They find the acceptance of revolutions in their workspaces even more creditable when they can share or discuss them. Social media becomes a catalytic space for redefining their world. Skype allows them to interact not only with their children but is also a way by which they make statements about their submersion in new postmodern occupations, such as tourism and facilities, allowing their integration in these, such as orchid cultivation or organic farming and beekeeping. Clifford refers to the concept of affinities that reorder time with regard to cultural representation. One can put together things that are remote from each other, in terms of time or evolution and then see the similarities between them, such as abstract art and primaeval representations of material culture in contemporary societies. Should one see these as part of an evolutionary moment, inexorably drawing us to market and consumer culture? Many of the debates around the production of weaves or objects made as curios or metal objects would be drawn into this frame (ibid.: 200). The hinterland thus becomes integrated through trade and reciprocity with the urban conglomerations which are of varying density and heterogeneity. Bakker sees the problem of water as central to urban studies since the hinterland gives us an idea of how water resources are brought into the aspect of commodity rather than a natural phenomenon. Following the work of James Scott and David Harvey, she suggests that one should look at the city not only in terms of residences and green spaces but in terms of ‘the material flows—such as excreta, water, wastes— that move through the city, and the different governance processes, power relations, infrastructures, and subjectivities via which these are mediated’ (Bakker 2011: 9). Privatisation of water, where redistribution shifts from the state to individuals and multinational corporations, must define, in the first place, practical matters such as labour and environmental standards, politics,

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tariffs and taxes; but for Bakker, what is more significant, once this is done, is to map the ideological debate over which water supply takes places through private agencies. Government, state policies and people’s dependence on legal and illegal arrangements thus become indexes of how we think of water management, which occupies the fate and fortunes of millions of people. At the start of the twentieth century, Bakker maintains that global water usage totalled 580 km, and by the end of that century, it was 4,000 km a year (ibid.: 57). Thinking about water as a scarce resource thus occupied administrators, politicians, intellectuals and local communities equally. Comparative sociology shows us that different regions access water sources in specific ways which are marked by traditional relationships. One of the interesting problems of rural water management can be understood with reference to Ladakh (Lundup 2017: 72–151). Where water is scarce, as, in the cold deserts of the Himalayas, the people have devised ways of rationing water with strict management provided by the households themselves. Families take turns to utilise the waterways which draw from a common source, and the members of the families responsible for each night’s sharing of the resource, be it pond or tank or river, spend the night on the location, while the water is being diverted to fields. In the case of cities, the problem is managed through political parties and dominant families, since during elections, the water is diverted to slums where votes are to be got, and memories are manipulated for specific reasons. The tension between agricultural use, hydroelectricity, waste disposal and water for consumption is acute. It would be further complicated by the case in Haryana, where caste politics is rampant, and the dominant caste might use the politics of crowd mobilisation to refuse channelising of water from their river sources to the city of New Delhi until their request for educational privileges and reservations of seats in universities is fulfilled. India Today reports on 20 January 2016 on its digital site that the ‘Delhi Government Moves Supreme Court as Water Crisis Looms Large’: The Arvind Kejriwal led-AAP government sought a direction to the Centre to intervene and ensure water supply to the national capital from Munak Canal in neighbouring Haryana which has been affected by the stir…. The supply sources of water feeding 7 water treatment

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plants in Delhi completely dried up and the plants had to be shut down after protesters broke the gates of Munak canal in Haryana. West Delhi, North-West, Central, South and North Delhi were severely affected.

On the fourth day of the protest, 33 army units were deployed and India Today reported on 21 January 2016 that 80 people had been admitted to hospital and several people were killed in police firing. The Jats were pushing for reservations, and Delhi was severely affected so much that schools were closed for a day. There was arson and violence affecting roadways and railways. Y.P. Singhal, the Deputy General of Police for Haryana, said their top priority was opening the water links to Delhi. The present condition of water famines striking most urban areas is also the lack of fit between colonial towns and present-day needs. Shimla or Alappuzha still manage with the facilities that these towns had in the 1930s. As a result, the dependence on wells increases as tourism is endemic. Karen Bakker says: Problems with water access, pollution, and control have existed throughout recorded history. But as environmental historian Ramachandra Guha has explained, the collective consciousness of environmental threats on a global scale—to water and a host of other resources—is historically unprecedented. Indeed, the urgency of this debate is often framed in terms of the global water crisis, in which a significant proportion of people in developing countries (over 1 billion people, according to most estimates) are without access to sufficient amounts of clean, safe water on a daily basis. Framed in this way, the urban water-supply crisis raises the questions about the limits—philosophical and political, discursive and economic, cognitive and material—of our models of resource exploitation and our instrumentalist approach to nature of which privatisation is only one element. (2011: 217)

In Sri Ramanasramam, Tiruvannamalai, the drought extended from January to August 2017 when unexpectedly the rains came on 13 August 2017, though it was not the season for rain then. Till 13 August 2017, Ramanasramam, which had a floating population of a couple of thousand people visiting and passing through daily in pre-Covid times,

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the problem was acute. Visitors were requested not to come to stay as there was no water in the ashram. The ashram procured anything from one to six trucks of 5,000 litres at 800 to 1,500 rupees a day. This covered the use of water for personal hygiene and for watering the gardens. For drinking water, they received water from the municipality, which they filtered by using carbon, earth and pebbles. This maintained the normal requirement of calcium, magnesium and potassium. For those individuals, who objected that filtering was not done through RO plastics, the asramam asked them to buy water for their personal drinking purposes. However, it must be remembered that the seven months of buying water was accompanied by not just a financial relationship with contractors but also anxiety about dependence on them. One could never be very sure as to where the water came from, though a specific source had been named. Further, there were often politics among procurers who had their own specific relationship to the field from which the aquifers supplied water. How was one to know about the origin of the water even though the representatives of the asramam would have checked out the site at the beginning when the arrangement for delivering water was arranged? Tiruvannamalai was supplied with water from the local Salter Dam from the 1990s. Earlier, although the dam was around since the 1960s and was supposed to supply Tindivanam and Tiruvannamalai, yet, since the latter was politically weak, it did not receive the quantum of water it should have. From the 1990s, Tiruvannamalai began an active water management drive, starting with Arunachala Reforestation (AR), a local NGO, which brought in townspeople and local communities as well as spiritualists and educationists. This improved rainfall patterns and the canal from the Salter Dam also provided the much-needed water. However, with the drought of 2016–2017, the dam also dried up, forcing the asramam to buy water. They were able to do so because the Asramam is financially sound due to the support of the devotees. While Puducherry (Pondicherry) and other asramams have a lot of land, Sri Ramanasramam manages its finances from the monetary contributions visitors make. For those who sell water and for those who buy it, water becomes a commodity like any other (interview with Rajamani, head of stores, Sri Ramanasramam, on 11 November 2017).

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When thinking of water, we know that major world religions define waterless places (marabhumi) as a way of thinking about death or hell. J. Jayaraman, the librarian at Sri Ramanasramam, asserts that language itself is a ritual and the compartmentalisations, which contribute to divisiveness, come into the way of it. Rituals form natural comparisons with the natural world. According to him, the water cycle is eminently a part of the cycles that rituals harness. It represents the inseparability of the individual from the whole. Jayaraman says: We are the River, the Ocean is the whole. The River thinks it is separate. That is the language we are familiar with. It can become bondage. Carrying the boat to the other shore becomes the language of excesses or unfulfilled longings. It is our inherent tendencies to carry on one’s individuality. Movement reflects choice. That choice is also ritual, which is disseminated through time. This is ego – History, Ritual, Time. Out of choice emerges result. Out of intentions, there are consequences. There are other forces such as Samudra, Aditya, Marutha … each concept is a limitation. (interview of 26 June 2018)

Jayaraman is essentially arguing that even if the river or the individual being is scorched or flows into another river and identity is lost, the ocean remains. Even without rivers, the oceans remain. Taken at a material level, 20 per cent of Chennai gets its drinking water recycled from the sea (YouTube 2018). Many of the ways we think about harnessing water for agricultural or urban use are entrenched in the debates about dams. These involve questions about whether these are colonial, post-Independence, large, medium or small; whether these have to do with the past or the present; whether they interconnect states or are defined by small landholdings or large acreage. One of the most interesting works on this subject is by Daniel Klingensmith (2007) in One Valley and a Thousand: Dams, Nationalism and Development, where he discusses the history of the Damodar valley and interrogates the materials pertaining to the dreams of industrialisation and the well-known scientist Meghnad Saha. Shiv Visvanathan (1985) had argued in Organising for Science that Saha, as one of the great planners of modern India, had used electricity consumption and production as

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the statistical index for development. Klingensmith now asks about the fate of the tribals who were displaced. He writes: As for the peasant cultivators who live in the basin, Adivasi and Bengali, Saha is completely silent. He has nothing to say on relocation policy (though the abbreviated project ultimately built officially displaced more than 93,000 people) or about how far the dams, with the necessary effects on both the river and the watershed, will affect the lives and livelihood of the valley’s inhabitants. The assumption presumably, is that they will benefit, but his project is framed in terms of its contributions to the nation as a whole; the actual people living along the river and its tributaries are invisible. (Klingensmith 2007: 128)

That the Damodar project had its nucleus in the motivation provided by the Tenessee Valley project is something that Klingensmith is keen to prove. Yet, we must remember that the colonial dam exists previously in terms of how urbanism and agricultural hinterlands are interlocked (ibid.: 124). In this context, the largeness of the dam becomes a relative issue as much as the question of maintenance of colonial dams which are built with mortar and cement. The life of the dam is also dependent on silting, and as I have argued in Sacred Rivers and Energy Resources, it is to be understood in terms of the lives of riverine populations who are dependent on the free flow of water for fishing, agriculture, domestic and ritual purposes (Visvanathan 2013). A lot of the questions raised in the past about the need for electricity for urban conglomerations and industrialisation is pertinent today too when the World Bank has a role to play in how we think about water management. Colonialism did not come without its antagonists, and the appearance of oligarchies of timber, mining mafia and state bureaucracies defending robber barons, have been the subject of much discussion. Peter Sahlins (1994) shows us that in the 18th century, mountaineers of the Ariege departments in France had a separate identity. They continued, however, a relationship with the villages of the plains, with whom they exchanged food, cattle and people for they represented a separate and complementary economy, social structure and culture. ‘Sheep go up, women go down’ was a well-known proverb of the region, perhaps

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referring at least, since the 19th century, to the tendency of women to migrate to the plain to work as wet nurses and servants. But the peasant communities that revolted in 1829 were those which shared a mode of production and way of life, combining agriculture and stock raising, centred around and in the forests (Sahlins 1994: 9). All mountainous or forester communities have to understand the encroaching nature of the agricultural impulse. Whether local trees are chopped to give way to commercial trees or grasslands burnt down, diminishing the rights of pastoralists, the relationship between pastoralists and farmers remained symbiotic. Sahlins writes: For without the forests, as many were to note during the war of the Demoiselles, stock raising would be impossible, and without livestock manure and income generated from raising cattle, the mountain peasantry would have been sooner forced to emigrate to the plain, as eventually was to happen after 1850. (ibid.: 12)

Land Rights and Local Communities in Coonoor and the Western Ghats The idea of the commons drew from charters dealing with ‘userights’ of the peasantry or droits d’usage as opposed to property rights; but for the peasantry, these were too complex to absorb, and they freely wandered across boundaries. One of the significant court cases being fought by a retired engineer, M. Bala Subramanium, in Coonoor is to do with the land rights held traditionally by the Badagas, a migrant peasant community from Karnataka in the 17th century or earlier, and the obstacles that the army has created in withholding their traditional rights to pastoral and agricultural movements. Vikram, who informs me about the court case and arranges a meeting with Bala Subramanium, is a contractor. He has built some of the best-known houses in Coonoor, and his phone is always ringing. He seems to be able to give his clients what they want. Vikram believes that the Badagas came over the hills, escaping Tipu Sultan. Others believe that they came in the 11th or

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13th centuries. Hocking has an interesting graph documenting the varying years of arrival as presented by Badagas in mission literature. The cosmopolitan new-age farmers whom I met in Coonoor, who grow oranges for the market as well as a vegetable called kushkush (chow chow squash) for Ayurvedic establishments in Kerala, say that they are refugees from the Rampur War. They are Muslim traders, Kutchi Memons, who are now engaged in organic farming. The two legends are not in themselves unusual because usually people do not know of their origins, but some amount of legendary histories are acceptable as ways by which the family establishes its presence. Whether it is Seema in her replica English country home, with rose gardens and hibiscus surrounding it, or Seth in his village residence, which was built a hundred years ago, they are irate by the wild pigs which run in and out of their lands, destroying whatever they have grown. And of course, in Seth’s gardens, the bison also roams in what was their natural territory previously, eating everything in sight. Tea gardens are now being carved up in order to provide opportunities for housing for an elite, which comes in for short periods during the summer or winter holidays. Badagas have migrated to the UK, Gulf and the USA for work and to find professional opportunities in keeping with lifestyle choices, which include the construction of mansions in tea gardens. Badagas, who are able to define their existence very specifically with regard to market gardening, have a different story. They essentially see farming opportunities as part of a long tradition, occupationally, as cultivating castes. Their origins are as Okalligas, and they can endure the cold as well as seasons of bright sunlight. The crops they produce are beans, tomatoes, carrots, cauliflowers, broccoli and potatoes. The truck comes every evening and collects the produce and takes it to Mettapalayam, where it is auctioned. As peasant communities, they see the fragmentation of land as something normal and natural. Consanguinity works in their favour, in terms of providing opportunities for shared labour. They help each other with gathering vegetables and packing them for the market. Since agnatically they live in close proximity without even boundaries between their fields, they look after each other’s children too. This closeness between relatives allows them

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to share a mutual code about residence, occupation and life chances. M. Bala Subramanium suggests that since they are exogamic, it is very important to know their gotra. They cannot break this rule of exogamy and are, in fact, interlocked in the traditional systems of knowledge about their origins and migration histories. The Badagas are a dominant caste, who have made their homes in all parts of India. Those who have stayed back, represent themselves in terms of a 400-year-old history of surviving various colonial authorities and melding with them in terms of bureaucracy, tea plantations and manners. One of the major problems they face today is asserting their identity in relation to the problems of modernity or rather postmodernity. They value their agrarian past, and they look to the questions of education and professionalisation as something that they do feel deeply about. Uppermiddle-class Badagas have been professional for three generations now. Their interest in the circumstances defining their culture is in the preservation of their customary rules, which distinguishes them from other communities. What is specifically unique about this region is its focused interest in preserving religious syncretism. Traditionally, all the gods are significant and equally worthy of respect. They, therefore, acknowledge Basavannana as being of utmost interest to them. However, Vaishnavism is a predominant aspect of religious life and Ramanujam is someone who is revered in the hills. Iyengar culture is overarching and subsumes within it certain ways of thinking about religious symbols as well as beliefs and practices. Badagas, especially wealthy and influential ones, say that they respect and worship all the gods—Christian, Hindu and Muslim. The town itself has temples from the 11th century onwards, with Sanskritic rituals and assertion of mighty feminine principles, as well as the attendant repertoire of gods and goddesses. It also has several churches, which redefine Christianity within the ambit of its theological interpretations. In this peaceful town, what one believes is one’s own business. The British always required getaway places. Shimla is the bestknown example as it was known as the summer capital. When the Summer Palace was built, it was best known for its pioneering use of electricity.

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Coonoor was colonised in 1819 by the collector, George Sullivan, who took over seven Badaga villages and one Toda village ostensibly for the purpose of building a sanatorium, but later for the use of the army. Eight hundred and seventy acres were given to the British at the rate of 500 rupees cash down, and 165 rupees paid annually for a 100year lease. The building up of the barracks began in 1820 and till 1958, the lease was honoured, after which the sum was paid lump sum as a 20-year advance. During the British period, the Badagas who were the prime owners of the land had access to their lands and rivulets. Once India became independent, the fencing of army territory meant that the villagers did not have the right to enter army land through the fencing, and the time commitments to be honoured were too difficult for the villagers. So the people tried to address the problem by going to the local courts to argue that the colonial agreement had lapsed and that they should be able to cultivate their lands. In the 1961 and 1970 judgements from the Ooty court, the people were told that the land was considered as sold because there was no proof of the lease. A Badaga intellectual and engineer, B. Balasubramanium, in order to help the villagers—since his natal village was Jagadalla, the point of origin of the colonial building up of Coonor in the 19th century—then approached the high court in Madras; he had located through the RTI (Right to Information Act) an officially stamped archival document from the Ooty Collector’s office, which provided the gist of the lease (personal communication 23 May 2017). It was officially recognised as a legal document, representative of the collector, the military representative and the Tamil Nadu government. Representative village heads wrote to the President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee, asking for the right of access to their traditional grounds for cultivation, harvesting and transporting and sale of horticultural and agricultural produce. They did not ask for the removal of the barracks, they asked only for access to their traditional lands, which 91 families during the British period had been signatories to leasing. Access to water in the Nilgiris is the most important for market gardeners. As it happens, the military overuses water wherever it is stationed. Even in small towns like Ranikhet, apple farmers have always complained that the military

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accesses 80 per cent of water for their personal use, including flush latrines, while the market gardeners are always starved of water supply. Nilgiri’s rivers are the source of the Cauvery. Unless tourism, urbanism and military stations that are guided by rules protecting the environment, the future of the rainshadow areas is bleak. The present court case depends on the acceptance of the fait accompli record that there was a lease, the gist of which has been provided as documentary evidence. Badagas have been a predominantly literate caste since the 1930s, and they consider the efforts of Rao Bahadur Bellie Gowder who insisted on education for all noteworthy. The Badaga presence in the Nilgiris goes back to the Vijayanagara empire with incursions by later groups as cultivating communities, for the purpose of tax cultivation even up to the time of Tipu Sultan. The British were quick to see the potential for tea plantations, and by the early 20th century, the borders of the Nilgiris were open to Malayalis, Tamils and Kannadigas, as traders, clerks and plantation labour. The cordite factory (to catalyse ammunition), a needle factory and a photography laboratory, were the key institutions during the British period allowing for further labour and occupational enclaves. The osmosis of communities was also made possible by the Lingayat theological orientations of Basavanna, of whom the Badagas were true followers. This allowed a certain openness of their worldview and the meeting of Saivite and Krishna theologies. When they first came into Coonoor (Jagathala), they were known as Okkaliga Badigas, but with the continual syncretism they practised, they dropped the Okkaliga from their names. They were accustomed to the Malayali traders who came in to provide consumer products to the soldiers, bureaucrats and clerks, and the plantation labour their necessities and also to the Irulas, Todas, Kotas and Kurumbas, so beloved of sociologists and historians. So, their battle with the Tamil Nadu bureaucracy rests on their argument that their rights to their ancestral property must be honoured as the colonial lease has long since expired. As with the Kerala issue of the right to repair colonial dams and share water, the people maintain that linguistic borders, post-Independence, depend on a certain dialogicity of mutual interests which must be sensitive to the right to life.

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Palakkad in the Western Ghats: Water Use for Sustainable Agriculture Similarly, the case of Palakkad provides us with interesting insights into settler culture, where land bought cheaply in the 1950s is divided when sons grow up and have to disperse. Kottayam saw the diffusion of Syrian Christian values northwards to Palakkad. Cherupallashery is an area that has dominant Syrian Christian families who moved to this area and started farming, bringing their family values and hard work, associated with clan and church. The case of Swapna James, who has received encouragement from the church and the parishes, as well as secular and political parties, as a woman farmer is particularly interesting (interview of 20 September 2017). When the peasant becomes a forester, new indexes are available for us to see how agricultural practices contribute to the domestication of forest land. Both in Wayanad as well as in Palakkad, the forest was reclaimed for political reasons. The Adivasis were marginalised, and both the communist state as well as the Christian settlers communicated that development was a necessary anvil for modernism.

The Star of Organic Farming in Palakkad: Family Labour and Work as Livelihood and Passion Swapna James is an award-winning farmer from a village 20 kilometres from Palakkad town. The bus to Cherupallasherry from Olavakode junction goes near her village, Kulakattikurusi, four kilometres forward on a country road, from the main road at Kadampazhipuram Hospital Junction. Journalists and government officials know her well, and her name goes out to the committees, which look to honouring farmers for the work they do. Her husband James is a successful rubber-plantation owner and latex dealer, who says that ‘Swapna looks after the krishi’, which includes organic rice cultivation, along with vegetables and fruits, coffee and spices. Since 2000, they have worked extremely hard, beginning their day at 5 a.m. and winding up their duties at midnight. They say that their profits

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actually come from the work they do as a couple and that if they were to delegate, not only would the costs be high but the efficiency would also be lower. They constantly reiterate that hard labour and ownership management allows them to do what they do: grow vegetables for the table, distribute organic vegetables to clan members and sell the excess to a neighbouring school, bringing in a steady income. Swapna has been recognised by the Kerala state and the local churches multiple times, and by the Pusa Agricultural Research Centre in New Delhi as a star woman farmer in 2020 because her output of fruit and vegetables is substantial. She has been able to generate an income of 10,000 to 12,000 rupees a month, has no expenses for fruit, vegetables, turmeric, ginger, spices, coffee, honey, tapioca, fish and rice. She harvests honey with the help of workers, who can squeeze it from the hives because they are familiar with the work. There is a new interest in Kerala in orchids and ornamental plants, so, she has been able to expand her garden in this direction. She buys the ornamental plants from nurseries and then multiplies them by growing them in optimum conditions using pebbles, tiles and coir for the base, then transplanting them onto tree trunks. School children, doing projects in Botany, often come to see her garden for their projects, assiduously taking down notes. Organic farming as an idea is an offspring of the Kerala scientists, who wanted to wean the population from chemically infused vegetables, fruits and horticulture (Visvanathan 2020). Its success has depended on the housewives and retired people of these small towns and their adjoining villages. Swapna and James are representative of the interest that the rubber-plantation-owners have in negotiating with traditional jaiva krishi or natural farming methods while growing cash crops and spices. They believe that coffee, for instance, can be interspersed with rubber trees, which is quite revolutionary, with nitrogen provided from runner beans, which are not used for the table. Swapna is deeply integrated into social media platforms and says that her exposure to ideas from other farmers comes from the posts they put up on their Facebook pages. The couple also travels widely over the state, visiting farms and nurseries, attending courses on

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organic farming and also reading the vast literature that is being generated by the government employees who are committed to this programme. One of the innovations they have put together on the farm is a tube well, without a motor. The well is 600 feet deep, and it requires no electricity to pump up water. The valve used here is a ‘foot valve’, similar to the one used in a motor device; once water comes up, shuts and does not allow it to go back. Much of these simple innovations and inexpensive ways of accessing water or good soil have appeared after much thought on their part. Swapna says that the earthworm count has gone down considerably because of pesticide use, and what one should strive for is a natural return to the soil, which harbours earthworms. For this, they have devised various compost heaps, which are state-sponsored in design and allow them to place a base of cow dung manure, and layer it with leaves, rotting materials, including dead farm animals; everything is organically broken down into fresh earth is fit for growing things in a matter of weeks. In these compost heaps, wooden frames like chicken coops are constructed with lattices that allow the compost to be aerated. They also use solar traps to catch beetles which arrive at night to destroy fruit, flowers and vegetables. In their spare time, as members of the Arts and Sports Club of Kadampazhipuram, they look after those villagers who are dying of cancer and provide palliative care for people who are old, sick and incapable of looking after themselves. They are now collecting money from friends and relatives for a hospice for those who are in the last stages of their life, and live alone without children or attendants, a common problem for Malayalis, generally, whose families work abroad or in other cities in India.

The Encroachment into Forest Land: Wayanad and Land Use As Sahlins (1994) clearly showed for the 18th and 19th centuries, in the French and Spanish territories which were essentially mountainous, the encroachment of the forest for growing crops was essential. Schama

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(1996), reading the materials for Lithuania, shows how the idea of Poland was constantly being rearranged to fit in with the political ambitions of Russia and the Baltic, and the bison became the symbol of the valour of the hunter, as well as the taking over of forest land. In Wayanad, Kerala, the question of forest versus settlers is captured in the problem of how development is viewed. For the M.S. Swaminathan Research station, at Kalpetta, Wayanad, the focus is on integrating sustainable agricultural practice with the needs of the settlers, where the ‘wild’ remains outside the purview of the scientists. The tribal people have been drawn out from the forests as their lands have now been given to agriculturists. They are now the unskilled labour of the construction companies. Rubber is the major cash crop in the dry zone of Wayanad. Of course, the term ‘dry zone’ is relatively speaking, as there is more rain in the region, closer to Idukki. Workers from Kerala have settled in the dry zone, and by Kerala, the scientists mean Travancore, which is referred to as Naad. The Western Ghats, and particularly the forests and remote regions away from the towns are still seen as outposts. There is a direct bus from Meppad in Wayanad to Kottayam, which ferries locals wishing to visit their ancestral lands, where close kin reside. The communists have tried to absorb the tribals, according to a scientist, working at the institute. They see NGOs as a parallel government and try to create spaces where tribals, who are drawn to non-governmental organisation (NGO) work, are pushed into communist party activity. NGO members see communists as essentially focusing on workingclass activities rather than promoting literacy and professionalisation. For the tribals, education has become the primary motive. They essentially believe that through education, they can be freed from bonded labour. In Wayanad, there was a market historically for the sale of slaves, in the 8th century, when Jains and Chettis from Karnataka were at the forefront of the slave trade. The M.S. Swaminathan Centre in Wayanad got 3.5 lakh from the central government for building a house and made proper houses from that fund. Ten such houses were built. But on the day the keys were to be delivered, the communist party workers in the locality held a

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study class, and everyone went there instead. The agricultural officers explained the local conservation practices. The manner of water conservation traditionally has been clay bunds, stone bunds, water trenches and kennis or hollowed trunks of trees, lodged in the ground, which naturally filter water. Water harvesting means that once the water is used or evaporates, there is no available water. The real concern is with replenishing groundwater. If one replenished groundwater, then it is possible that the future is assured (personal communication, Joseph, soil conservation officer, Swaminathan Centre, 23 May 2015). S.S. Chandrika is a novelist and left activist who was associated with tribal upliftment for a long time and is now at the Swaminathan Centre. She says to A.R. Anupama and me that while they are on the side of development, they are essentially concerned with integrating children through education: However, since tribals have been drawn into construction labour, the problems remain severe. The men are paid for their work not in money, but in alcohol, by the contractors. So their addiction is severe. They are very violent at home, and they have no understanding of how education can benefit their children. They are displaced, live in areas where they do not have water, so they can neither grow things nor can they forage or fish. As hunting is prohibited they do not have access to their customary proteins. Many of the ways in which development takes place are through socialization and education. (personal communication, 23 May 2018)

Joseph says that in earlier times, tribals would be able to interact with one another, but their nomadism has been replaced with the idea of reserves, where they are blocked off. According to the bureaucrats at the Soil Conservation Department with whom we spoke, the agrarian base of the district is cash crops. Mr Shaji, Mr Bhanu and Mr Das told us that (interview of 24 May 2018) at the end of the 19th century, massive deforestation occurred because of the British desire for the development of plantations of spices, tea and coffee. This also included crops such as rice, areca nuts and bananas, for the heart of Wayanad is a high-altitude valley that drains to the

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west. Hot winds blowing into Wayanad play a crucial role. The average rainfall is 2,246 mm. In the southwest corner, Vythiri gets heavy rain up to 4,000 mm (oral data confirmed by the net, www.Average Rainfall in Vythiri in monsoon). Two hundred years ago there were dense forests and innumerable streams. With deforestation came plantation culture. Tea, coffee, cardamom were the staple crops. There was no water shortage. When the migrants from Travancore started growing areca nut and bananas, they used channels that drained the water table. The viscosity of the soil and the level of the water table dropped. Traditionally, there had been no water shortages in Wayanad. For drinking purposes, there were 65,000 open wells. Kennis were found, although now only 50 still exist. These were palm or jackfruit hollowed trunks inserted into the soil, from which the crystal clean water oozed upwards. They were protected by tribal communities as sacred water sources. Out of the carbonated soil, water would be harvested. However, panchayats are recently facing a new problem, as villagers are asking for piped water. There is a severe drought in Pupally, where 50,000 acres are facing water shortage. Annual rainfall has decreased, and this is classified as the dry zone. Trees and canopy have decreased. Teak plantations absorb a lot of water, and the leaves also do so, increasing the heat levels. According to P.U. Das, the soil-conservation officer in Kalpetta, the first level of agricultural activity involved the shift from forest to a plantation. The second phase of cultivation was from paddy to bananas. The wetlands were transformed by the needs of the settlers. Lemongrass on the hillocks was substituted by tapioca for sustenance. Coffee was grown for trade, and when pepper became profitable, coffee trees were cut. Pepper does not need shade, so they cut the trees and biodiversity disappeared. Earth is a natural absorber of water. Water resources can only be replaced through biodiversity. Borewells can deplete the water table. Seventy-six per cent of Wayanad is served by Kabbini’s tributaries, including the Bharatapuzha. Dams cannot be constructed in the hillocks. Wells dug up to 25 metres remain empty. Cultural degradation leads to ecological degradation. Drainage density is excessive. Check dams helped in retaining the water, developing natural spring and flora

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and fauna, creating reservoirs through bunds and exercising water budgeting. The staccato nature of this information is supported by greening practices, organic farming, and the self-supported inroad into market gardening, which are the daily route of the soil-conservation and agricultural officers working in Wayanad. The farmers have small landholdings but are able to innovate with regard to how they organise their gardens, growing vegetables, fruits and spices for larger markets. A lot of interaction occurs between the lay community and the agricultural officers. Paolo Freire described it as the intellectuals of the grassroots who must now be taken seriously by the state and intelligentsia, including scientists. In Kerala, this has always been possible because of the efforts of the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP).

Glocal: Cybernetics and the Networks of Commerce The use of cybernetics in marketing goes back to the 1960s, where the reaction against Soviet Marxism and the ‘armageddon of workers in industrial sites’ in America led to the proliferation of alternatives, of which organic farming was one aspect (Turner 2008: 38). The Whole Earth Catalog was one of the offshoots of this. In 1966, Stewart Brand asked the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to release the satellite photo of the Earth as seen from space, thus offering a symbol of how the Earth would look to those who were seeking to bring new world-order-based communitas and socially equitable lifelines. This symbol of global belonging or longing became the way in which, commercially, the world became linked once more, where Nature would be presented as the iconic space through which humans could realise good health and bio-psychic rhythms integrating them back to the planet (‘Whole Earth Catalog’ 2018). Feminists like Carolyn Merchant in The Death of Nature (1980) have visualised this as a consequence of Baconian science, and a lot of the work of the re-enchantment of the world (as opposed to Max Weber’s

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description of rationality, industrialism and disenchantment) depended on accepting the symbiosis between the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’ one. Findhorn Garden in Scotland (www.findhorn.org) was founded in the early 1960s because the trustees were jobless, and as believing Christians, believed in god speaking to them directly. As a result, the voices would instruct them on what plant, vegetables and trees to grow. In the beginning, when they talked about their successes, they would only enlarge upon the virtues of composting. But over time, they became acknowledged as successful spiritualists, who had been able to harness information about organic farming methods from the ‘devas’ or nature spirits. Much of organic farming methods are specialised and require both knowledge and experimentation. Certification is an essential aspect, as, without it, it cannot enter the market. It involves an integration of the insect and animal and bird world, where the collaboration between species is essential. We all know that without the beneficence of birds, pollinators and seed carriers (through their abdominal processors), some plants have been rendered extinct. When there is large-scale extermination of certain birds through hunting, then certain plants also become extinct. This mutual synergy in the natural world is representative of the way in which the crow or monkey become icons in the postmodern world, equally, with the crocodile or lion. Our bodies, too, as symbolic systems, represent the way in which we become host to parasites. When we feel hungry, it is the multitude of microbes that drum up that experience of hunger. The first step towards an acceptance of this organicity, including our mortality, is to accept that we are part of the natural world, rather than distance ourselves from it (Robert Tindall, Apffel-Marglin and Shearer 2017).

The Catastrophe of Floods in Kerala: The Opening of the Shutters of Small Dams The August 2018 floods have enabled the revisioning of Kerala. What is involved is the acceptance that by degradation and loss, the Malayali must reinvent his/her/their world and accept that the government

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will provide the security required in the new formulations of how institutions work or how relations between hierarchically organised work worlds are constructed. The work of Russel Hardin (2004) is, in this sense, useful. Hardin looks at trust as embedded in social relations for individuals who are not merely pitted against one another but have expectations of each other. It is possible that we look at individual, group, community and nation-state interests as in some ways analogous. Working with a team, that involves co-participation in the writing of a text, Hardin, a student of Edward Shils, writes that we have to understand how categorisation or labelling works. Within this, we need to know how people view one another, and why distrust is an emblem of social relations, where there is a hierarchy of expectations and often a mutual disappointment. On behalf of the group, he defines collective paranoia as: hypervigilance in processing information, a tendency to dwell on negative readings of events (dysphoric rumination), a tendency to over attribute hostile intentions to others (the sinister attribution error), a tendency to organize one’s personal history in a self-serving way (biased punctuation of interactional history) and exaggerated perceptions of conspiracy. (ibid.: 17)

I shall now turn to the preoccupation of organic farming in Wayanad which has a pivot in cybernetic globalised interactions. P.J. Chackochan of the Vanmoolika.org, an Indian Organic Farmers’ Producer Company, says that organic pepper, teas and coffee, as well as ginger, honey, coconut and other herbal oils from Wayanad, do very well in the European markets. There are 435 farmers allied with his group. They sell organic produce which is certified as 100 per cent genuine. Each product consignment must be certified by the coffee, spices, coconut and tea boards. The reason for the gap between purchase price from the farmer and sale price to the international consumer is that the costs of packaging and certifying as well as transporting consignments are substantial. If they book one container for transporting goods out of Wayanad to Europe, they have to pay 1,00,000 rupees. While the tribal

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communities of Wayanad have submitted to modern machinery and cosmopolitisation of workspaces, they have suffered. The tragic aspect of the floods in Wayanad in August 2018, where roads disappeared and ravines split, is that it washed away the produce. So now, it is not just a question of placing trust in government organisations and hoping for compensation. The very nature of invoking the state becomes problematised by the fact that the loans that the government must now take depend on factors larger than biography or personal goals. Indebtedness to the World Bank in real terms or the philanthropy of the UN is only one part of the problem. The other facets include how do people survive on a daily basis? Local communities have for long believed that they own the right to life and occupation. When land is sold at cheap prices by the government, people often relocate, because where they are born, may not provide them with optimum chances of survival. It is because of this, that whole villages in Palakkad and Wayanad emerge as fully formed entities, with the same layout of streets, shops and residences as the hamlets the people originally came from. The settlers represent a new aristocracy, bringing with them the cultural ensemble of their previous homes and villages. They reduplicate the churches, temples, mosques and gardens as well as bakeries and restaurants that they are familiar with. As their gardens flourish and their stakes in cash crop farming increase, they become more affluent. They are able to participate in life-endorsing green activities which involve curtailment of desires, including accepting of veganism, organic farming or rearing of freerange chickens for the table. Between hobby, passion and occupation there is a thin line. As they succeed, they are able to encourage tourism in these small towns, based on their activities such as bottling passion fruit juice or growing organic red rice. Tourists descending in Wayanad or Palakkad thus provide impetus to new occupations such as kayaking festivals, tours into the higher ranges of the Western Ghats and enjoying the company of the local population. Bed-and-breakfast places mushroom, providing clean beds and toiletries to overnight guests who arrive in their SUVs and Land Rovers from neighbouring states or are most often Malayalis working in the Gulf. These individuals

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derive tremendous comfort from home-cooked meals and visits to the local sights such as rock temples and scientific institutions with allied gardens. The landlords of these rest houses have to have licences and if within the radius of a highway can sell liquor to tourists. Safety is provided by the security officers of private companies and local police, and the good manners of a new class of professional hosts.

Impact of the Floods in Kerala The rains came early in 2018 in April instead of June and raged without appeasement till August. Karkaddam is referred to as pattini massam (the hunger months) as fishing is prohibited because of dangerous waters and for the protection of spawning fish. What vegetables are available come through the Coimbatore Pass, loaded with chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Of course, tourists still arrive, as guest houses describe it as ‘non-season’ and lower their prices. Children continue to go to school, offices are open, housewives are at their wits’ end as to how to dry clothes and make houses free of that sepulchral damp that enters all homes in the monsoon season in India. When the rain does not stop for days on end, the dams fill and go beyond their safety point. Panic rises and administrators and politicians take time to think about what is the best policy before sending people into rehabilitation camps. Usually, poor people or first-generation settlers tend to live near the dams. Tribal communities are the first to be isolated and at risk since their dwelling of tin roof and cloth curtain cannot possibly withstand the velocity of continuous rain. When the sluice gates of smaller dams are first opened, the effect is immediate. When the Malampuzha and Idukki dams follow in opening their shutters, the settlers lose crops and property. In a larger context, the possibilities of famine follow as the rice, bananas, sugar, ginger, pepper, tea, coffee, cinnamon, vanilla, rubber, grown in the Western Ghats and its hinterland are part of a larger economy. Those who are able to get away do so in time, but for the rest, everything is left to chance. We don’t have a solution for natural disasters, but climatologists and planet-watchers and naturalists do

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give us advice. One of these is to keep riverbeds clear of construction; the other is to clean the beds of long-rooted grasses and windblown seeds that produce trees over time in the river. When artificial islands form as a result of sand mining and water hyacinths proliferate, thereby creating stagnant pools, the river is already showing signs of dying. When the dams are opened, the quantity of water dispersed per second is so voluminous that it clears out everything in its path. The larger the dam, the greater the damage to people and property. Animals, like humans, feel fear and die unwillingly. Every life lost is a calamity that money can never recompense. There are 44 rivers in Kerala, many of them lethal dumping grounds.

Contentious Borders and Social Change The border between Kerala and Tamil Nadu has always been osmotic. People crossed over, as did ideas, languages, crafts, food, currency and labour. The Mullaperiyar dam had been contested territory between the two states for several decades. On 1 August 2018, taxi drivers in Kochi were anxious about the Cheruthoni dam shutters releasing water. Since the rain had lessened a little, the dam did not release water on 2 August as administratively planned, and life went on normally with heavy rain at night, drizzles during the day, and the sky lighting up in the evening. Malayalis knew that they were up against the wall but did not expect a catastrophe. They could imagine it, but there were other pressing matters to be attended to, which included sending children to school, enjoying the company of those who had returned home for their holidays from abroad, and of course the care of old people, who run the farms and residences while their sons and daughters are away at work. In Kerala, the Mullaperiyar, with its source in the borders of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which was once called the Madras Presidency, faced many public battles regarding not just the use of the water, but the age and viability of the dam. The Malayalis have seen apocalypse in the eroding dam and have led processions and marches till they received assurance that the 19th-century Mullaperiyar would be repaired, and a new dam built further downstream by their own state government. The

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Idduki dam, when opened on 11 August 2018, did result in 23 deaths and render 54 lakh people homeless. But when the Mullaperiyar dam was opened by the Tamil Nadu Government on 15 August 2018, the death toll rose to 445, and 10,00,000 people had to be lodged in camps, waiting to return home. The Tamil farmers on social media have communicated that they were deprived of water while Kerala was flooded. The former understanding that Kerala had with Tamil Nadu was based on an 1866 contract when the Maharajah of Travancore and the Secretary of State for India agreed to share waters in the Madras Presidency. Now, the real terms of this colonial agreement are not acceptable anymore to the Kerala government as it disturbs the equilibrium of people and properties in the zone where the dam was built. Anand Pandian writes in an ‘Ode to a River’: The severe famine of 1876–1878 temporarily suspended any administrative attention to the project, but the Famine Commission constituted in its wake specifically recommended the plan to help secure grain production in the hard-hit plains of Madurai. Major John Pennycuick was ordered to assume full responsibility to the proposed project in 1882, and in the same year he submitted a detailed plan that was ultimately sanctioned. The plan called for a thick rubble masonry dam that would eventually rise 176 feet above the riverbed to impound its waters in a large reservoir—water held here would be led through a tributary stream-bed to a mile-long tunnel blasted through the granite mass of the Western Ghats, emerging east to tumble down to the plains of Madurai. An agreement was signed with the Government of Travancore to lease the necessary lands in 1886, and work on the dam commenced in1887. The first waters passed out of the tunnel in 1895. (Pandian in Baviskar 2003: 14)

Interestingly, this is very close to the time the viceregal lodge in Shimla was electrified after much debate since the question of coal and gas was being discussed, and electricity was seen to be an urgent substitute, as I have described in my essay ‘Summer Hill: The Building of Vice Regal Lodge’ (Visvanathan 2010). Anand Pandian uses A.T. Mackenzie’s History of the Periyar Project (1899) to describe the making of the Mullaperiyar dam. There were

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tropical forests, wild animals and leeches, half the year was monsoon, and malaria and cholera killed off thousands of workers, who found working at 3,000 feet, tiring enough. Pandian writes, ‘hundreds of these labourers perished due to accidents, contagious diseases and climatic exposure—camp hospital registers tell only part of this story as many sick workers went back to their native villages never to appear again at the construction site’ (Pandian in Baviskar 2003: 14–15). Pandian comments that the British commemorated their own dead with gravestones, but the Indian workers’ graveyard remains unmarked and overgrown with scrub. Ecologically, it is significant that many lower-caste communities buried their dead in the land without cementing gravesites and allowing for the earth to rejuvenate. The present floods in Kerala bring back the old debate about the rights of communities to live in reservations and parks, and the cordoning off of forest resources, banning mining and construction in specific ecological zones. What Donald McNeill suggests is that analysts should look at the role of the mayor in specific situations, to consider the mayor as an individual—as a personality who carries out specific roles in an institutional capacity (McNeill in Davidson and Martin 2014: 100). Further, Katharine Hankins and Deborah Martin have suggested that we look at strategic neighbouring, which looks at how people in different life situations may help those who have found themselves in new situations of immense deprivation (Hankins and Martin in Davidson and Martin 2014: 29). As a result of Covid-19, diaspora Malayalis have had to return home, and the state faces new challenges of recuperation and rehabilitation. The state government has emphasised its integration within a capitalist economy, and whether it is the rehabilitation from the floods of 2018 or the consequences of escalating numbers of affected people by disease or homelessness, the problem is well mediated through political processes and confidence in federal politics, whatever be the disappointment. Cyberspace becomes the solution to the crises of home internment and continuing employability across oceans. It is possible that we look at individual, group, community and nation-state interests as in some ways analogous. Mapping these vulnerable communities and people living on land which is so tenuous

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and made even more fragile by rock mining or settler plantations as in Wayanad, Kerala, becomes increasingly important. As the digital maps and photographs of flooded lands and dissolving earth produce huge amounts of emotion among the viewers, the very function of mapping undergoes a change (Dodge et al. 2009: 150). The invitation to domesticate the woods may be given by the political party occupying the state; similarly, jurisdictional and legal rights confirmed by activists and the Supreme Court might put aside for the time being the new demands made by the state on landless people. When natural disasters strike, then the relief camps become organised and the voluntary nature of relief work occupies the nation. Paul Gilroy suggests that life in the camps is organised in terms of identity: ‘How does the concept of identity provide a means to speak about social and political solidarity? How is the term ‘identity’ invoked in the summoning and binding of individual agents into groups that become social actors?’ (Gilroy 2004: 110). The wealthy always have the possibility of escape, the working class has to reorient its work world, and hope for habitats in safer places. As the topography of the earth is continually refashioned by human intervention, the reading of cultural practices is equally influenced by disasters and their consequences (Sassen 2016).

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Literary Encounters 4. A Time Known to All: Stephanos Stephanides and Ari Sitas 5. Detachment and Faith 6. Songs of Solomon and Adi Shankara’s Soundarya Lahari: A Comparison

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A Time Known to All: Stephanos Stephanides and Ari Sitas

Fig. 4a In Cyprus, the church dedicated to Saint Aiyos Iakovos, in Trikom, Cyprus. The Cypriot poet Stephanos Stephanides describes the Saint’s feast as being on 23rd October, and he is locally associated with healing the deaf, or curing children of ear ache. Now in the Turkish occupied part of Cyprus, the Church has a travel agent conducting his secular business there. Trikomo, Cyprus, 2018. Copyright: Author.

Fig. 4b The sea of Marmara, and encroaching Turkish presence is a constant reminder to the inhabitants of a besieged island. Nikosia communicates its closeness to the holy lands and constant sea crossings. Cypriots remember their home across generations and many distant archaeological remains, across centuries, which surface in the poetry and prose of the Cypriot poets Ari Sitas and Stephanos Stephanides. Nikosia, 2018. Copyright: Author.

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In this chapter, I shall look at the ethnographic, political and poetic writings of Stephanos Stephanides and Ari Sitas to understand how these two poets understand their lives in relation to space and time. As Cypriots, they have understood war, death, the map as ever complex and survived to tell its tale. What is truly interesting is the space that Stephanides sets up in terms of a global worldview where languages, values, symbols and artefacts fly across borders. For the purposes of this essay, I shall be drawing from Stephanides’ The Wind Under My Lips (2018) as the key text for understanding his work. I shall be analysing this voluminous work with the poetic work of another Cypriot poet, Ari Sitas, published as Slave Trades and an Artist’s Notebook (1999) and Rough Music: Selected Poems 1989–2013 (2013). I argue that both Stephanides and Sitas represent the worldview of travellers and in the coexistence of their experience in Africa, India and the Caribbean, they bring to the reader the same sensual delight in living and being in the world. My essay is concerned with how these two Cypriot poets look at their world over a period that encompasses their childhood, and with the way in which they perceive globalisation. They cannot be competitors; they are indeed dialogicians, who represent the truth of fragments. Both contribute to the disciplines of sociology and anthropology through literature, namely poetry and prose. While the study of autobiography presents us much in terms of the details of authors’ lives and the body of work identified with them, I will deal with how both come to terms with their sense of loss about their homeland, and how they will use this amputation of what they had known in childhood, to make sense of another space which they are intimate with, namely India. Their relationship to India is configured in the idea of home and homelessness, and the narrative of people as being imbued with not just practical aims, but with ideas of the surreal and the transcendent. Stephanides suggests in his writings that transculturation must be understood as the opening up of borders, but what is the role of the state in the regulation of osmosis? His poetry looks at the many ways in which memory is ruptured and how individual choices

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make people different. Childhood becomes a time of play against the authoritarianism of the state, and this tyranny is further underscored by his father taking him away to Britain without warning or explanation. It is indeed a form of kidnapping and as a small child, he has no way of handling the wrenching away of that which is so intimate and familiar. His recollection of childhood is essentially about joy and truncation— the way in which the nearness to earth and sea are brought to a close by his forced exile to England. He carries with him all his life, the memory of his childhood in the contradictory spaces set up by parents and grandparents, all of whom were strong-willed. He describes them, I may say, as caught up endlessly in rival games of the cat’s cradle, where the strings criss-cross and enclose in ever new patterns.

The Acts of Writing, Translating and Interlocution Alongside this natural compounding of multiple selves, which permits Stephanides as the global citizen to foreground himself with an ardour, which leaves the observer entranced and yet outside of it, is the vivid presence of the translator, where a relationship of trust is emphasised. It is this trust, which Stephanides demands of us as readers. His power of assimilation in the communities that he participates in, makes him one of them, his loyalties are with them, and he sets up mutual spaces of conversation, where the participants linger and explain themselves to the author as well as fellow participants. Similarly, Stephanides uses poetry as a mnemonic, where the sense of his own being is immersed in his experiences. He uses journeys as a way of reminding us that Hermes is ever-present and that our own will is squandered by the impulse to transcend. Fate for him is therefore a choice. How does the poet deal with the cards that fate delivers? The exquisite grace of words, of the double or triple bind of meanings, when living in a culture of ‘hybridization’ or ‘creolization’, or of the oscillations of nostos is innate in his writing. Nostos becomes the term by which nostalgia is given an accolade, where it is life-affirming. Rather than presuming that looking back is fatal or does not allow for the way

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forward, Stephanides uses nostos to replenish the vault of memory and love. In the poem Life’s Weight, he describes to us: In a faraway land In the gentle sway of the hammock And you hear a swish in your ribcage And your heart rises high above the canopy of the coconut trees And the coolie woman brings you a bowl of rice and dhal The cage door closes and the coconut drops with a thud As you hear the labor in her bare feet Resonate with your grandmother’s footsteps. (2018: 62)

Here, then, lies the juxtaposition of time and memory, where the essence of the past is ever-pervasive. The potency of nostos lies in its curative essence for it is never dismissed, but changes its value, according to a particular recollection it becomes prefixed or suffixed with. He writes of lying among the drying apricots and plums, of falling asleep too soon and missing the shower of stars, ancient skies and new mornings, punctuated by games, friends and rivalries (ibid.: 166–170). The game of hopscotch in the company of girls was much more entrancing than being with boys his age, and it influenced the writing of his autobiography (ibid.: 162). In the poem, ‘Nostalgia’, Stephanides writes: A divine disease Congealing longing In an excess of words A rehearsal for arrival An eternal repetition Of lives we have lived. (ibid.: 132)

I wish to understand in this essay the role of the public intellectual and the cultural ambassador, sharing ideas and gifts between borders and countries, and the savant who immerses himself in the question of human rights. Stephanides and Sitas whose work I describe separately, in order for the reader to view the beauty of their prose

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and poetry, are entrenched in the life of the university. The first poet is a linguist, translator, interpreter, teacher and the other is a trade unionist, university bureaucrat, teacher and activist sociologist, while immersed in the life of the theatre. Stephanos Stephanides presents the world through the prism of interlocked idioms of ‘universityuniverse-universality’, using translation as his mercurial sign. Like Ari Sitas, Stephanos Stephanides uses the gift of reason and the wisdom of being in the world and participating in public forums so that he may share his love for the cosmos and language. Public performances, meetings in street corners, representing unions and selection boards (Sitas was on the board of the International Sociological Association while Stephanides was on the Commonwealth Literature Selection Committee) are always presented on websites as very heady responsibilities. While Stephanos brings to the study of his beloved Nicosia and the larger trails of Cyprus (sea, cities, villages and mountains) a sense of the opaque through dream language and poetry, Ari Sitas brings to our view the sense of the putrid, the squalor, the offal, the suppressed desire of the body. It is not that Stephanos is not concerned with this, but he leaves it to the display of Negritude, as in the videos on Kali Puja in Guyana and New York published on YouTube, which tell us about the sense of syncretism and loss that comes from displacement. In a sense, he distances it from himself. That is the ethnographic challenge, as we very well know, where participating as the Other, becomes the way by which the documentary filmmaker can convey both intimacy and foreknowledge which research brings, and with it, an analytical distance. Stephanides is in the films, as Steve Baba, but on the other hand, he simply observes, without entering into the space of transcendence cinematically. Ari Sitas, as we shall see in his work Rough Music and Slave Trades later, in the fragments of poems presented in this essay, synoptically and illustratively, is much more violent in the images he produces because his sense of security comes from Africa, for he can identify with the slang, the hype, the rap. For him, words have a compelling authority, for they beat down on him, and therefore on us. Sometimes the sorrow that arises from witnessing defeated peoples has a surreal consequence,

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which is to laugh at them, be contemptuous of them, and yet remain intimate with them. He needs to define himself in relation to them but being displaced himself from his own home, from Cyprus, he can be symbiotic with displaced black peoples without loss of identity: To find my stolen heart to turn the world into a monstrous soul to turn my soul into a gangrenous leg to dream my visions of a brilliant port to pain with every other soul that pains to draft the one communal constitution scratched on the skin scaled by the brain—bled on a leaf, a page, a drum. (Sitas 2013: 48)

Stephanos Stephanides rises above his corporeality, representing his stunning sense of being one with the past. He uses language much more elegantly, his lyricism is enchanting, and yet, the coolie women are present in much the same way as with Ari Sitas. They dance, they are abandoned, their bodies are huge and absorbing, as we see in the video clips of dancers in Kali rituals in New York, diasporic communities from Guyana (Stephanides 2018: 276). It is the typical relationship of the colonised and displaced indentured labourers with the authoritative self of the anthropologist. The process of documentation recolonises mimetically the bodies and minds of those who have, in déjà vu relationships and without embarrassment, the authorised control of the exchange between different races. This master–slave relationship, reinvented by the proximity of different classes and represented through verse and prose, is haunted by intimacy and the overpowering need for contact, for touch, for reaching out.

Maps of Non-chronological Time, and the Fragrances of Memory Stephanides brings to us the metaphor of islands continually and the parallelisms that we seek are not merely geographical but are

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orchestrated by relationships and memories. There is Cyprus, redolent with memories of oranges and olives, of grandmothers, and his chessplaying and divinely beautiful mother. There is England, cold and distant with a language which was once foreign, but now the medium of his verse and spaces marked by the absence of intimate family and childhood friends. Guyana returns to him a sense of his inviolable freedom, which he thought was lost during his adolescence. This is made possible by his apprenticeship to the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon, which emerges from the loyalty of plantation workers to their cultic traditions as indentured labourers, who have now relocated to New York from Guyana. He follows, in verse, the goddess to Rajasthan: where he finds himself in a state of utter pathos, loss and ferment. There is dirt and sickness, but most of all, there is love which recognises his unity with the goddess (Stephanides 2018: 80). It is with immense agony that Stephanides remembers his father taking him away to England in 1957, and the continued absence of his mother as she leaves for the third island. Formosa seems an unintelligible space till he reaches adolescence, and the memory of his grandmothers in Cyprus remain vivid in his mind as he languishes in the chill and monotonous routines of school life. He describes the three islands, as so remote from each other in the South China Sea, the Northern Sea and the Middle Sea (ibid.: 50). Guyana has the ability to enclose him. It is the hammock, both cradle and caul, convoluting in his dreams with the cremation grounds of the devi. At home in Cyprus as a child, he was always welcome in his grandparents’ villages and always in familiar landscapes with people he knew and loved. He had never imagined that he would leave his home and travel to distant islands: Or perhaps these places were always already with us—implosions in our imagination, like islands exploding in the sea floating here and there (ibid.: 52). Here then, is for Stephanides, the dream of the mother, and more powerfully, the mother displaced. He believes that islands have their own relational topography symbolised by boats and travel, but biographically speaking, there is no recompense, only loss when the islands that each inhabits are cut off from one another. Photographs become the embodiment of this aloneness, and the theme of distanciation is further articulated by the act of witnessing. Each one

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knows of the other’s trauma but can do nothing about it. The record of history, of times past, of the brutalisation of the inhabitants, is captured in the story The Wind Under My Lips, which tells of Stephanos’ return to his childhood home in his village, in the Turkish-occupied part of the divided island. It is a movement to nothingness. The house has been taken over, by someone else, with a piano and books, after the Occupation. However, the villagers help him find the man who keeps the key to the house, who, in conversation, summons him to love at the moment of loss (Stephanides 2018: 48). Stephanos goes on to say: ‘I wondered away in my spectral reverie contemplating whether love might be just a rehearsal for departure to some unknown other place—a place we don’t know when love begins’ (ibid.). In ‘No Time For Prayers’, he beckons us to understand reincarnation, so he might visit again those places so near to him in memory, those places which are bound in his soul. The images he gives us are profoundly seaworthy involving the search for water, by digging stones, and the measure of oil, water and wine, carrying these in pitchers between orchards and cemeteries: dreams languishing in bosoms of sea anemones until dark when they lay in the dimness of paraffin lamps maternal pelvis sounding in the ceiling’s triumphant arch frail epiphany radiant in momentary conflagration the gift of incarnation. (ibid.: 104)

He remembers his native Trikomo in ‘Archaeology of a Tooth’ (ibid.: 96) through the blessing of his dentist Giorghos Taramides, who says, ‘May I not be the one who lives to pull them out.’ In the soddenness of dental work, when the gum rots, an abscess forms. Time begins to lacerate, as extractions work on a metalevel of childhood and adult time. Memories of his grandmother and father with their hollow gums appear. This physical suffering that memory brings shatters his brain in the manner of a tooth extracted. He writes: Where is memory anyway But in the shadow of a shadow?

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And where is memory’s beginning? Is it in fragmentation and deracination? In the labours of birth the throes of death? (Stephanides 2018: 96)

Both losing home and losing one’s mother remain within the agony of verse. It is in this sense that we have to understand that the poems which inform us about Ma, that is, manifestation as the divine Kali, with elements of shamanic practice and her ritual practice among Indian indentured labourers in Guayana, become a symbol of his life and verse. These idols and rituals are later taken up by migrant communities in New York where they are elaborately performed. Through the assimilation into this practice of absorbing Kali/Mariamman/Durga’s appearance and blessing, which are further swallowed up into the sea by idol immersion, the inertness of forgetting and loss is absorbed (ibid.: 88). The home finally becomes Kathy (his wife), Katerina (his daughter) and the Cyprus of mutual recognition. ‘Everywhere was nowhere,’ the Sybil tells him (ibid.: 328). For Stephanos Stephanides, his father remains the obscure figure, the handsome accountant who wooed his mother with such passion that the entire village remembered the incendiary nature of their love. Marriage brought with it all the questions that they had never asked of themselves. His mother’s independence became the wedge that would never dissolve their conjugal silence or ultimate enmity. There seems no solution to their each holding on to their autonomy (ibid.: 43). Stephanides is at first sent to his grandparents, visiting his mother on those occasions when she can have him with her. The animosity between his mother and his father’s mother is something that he remembers. She is lovely, recognised for her talent as a chess player and wilful. No one can deny her the right to make decisions, and so comes estrangement, and consequently, the departure of Stephanos and his father, to England. Poetry is perhaps born from these long silences, from Stephanos’ sense of exclusion from what was once home. ‘Larnaca Oranges’ is probably the most vehement of these secrets which we are told. His father’s mortuary symbols include sucking oranges peeled by his son, a reversal of roles, a frightening closure in prayer: your body abject becomes once more a rhythm in your mother’s womb

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while I pursue the (Stephanides 2018: 120)

taste

of

your

dislocated

oranges.

Cinematic as these images are, where a childhood lambent in pleasure with sea, sky and playmates, including absorption in girl gangs away from macho peer group bullies, Stephanos had perforce, been wrenched away by a Northern sea journey to Britain, to live with hitherto unknown relatives. Stephanides rests in these memories (ibid.: 54–56). But the whale that swallows him up never goes away. The remembrance of cold winters, alone with extended family in Britain, and away from all that he knows as childhood in a Cypriot village and his mother’s flat in town, is washed away like the taste of ‘plums on rooftop terraces’ (ibid.: 190). These plums, pomegranates, oranges, apricots, medlars become the landscape of his desire. In the mythos of his flagellating self, where new worlds meet the old, the essence of his poetry is a form of divination. It is the understanding of the self, through legends, festivals, family histories and biographies, where each fits into the other without murmuring as if the silences are distilled in verse that we can hear, only because he allows us to. Geological time welds with sunrise and moon appearances which take on a continental form; each continent, the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia begins to merge in the phraseology that defines their similarities and their differences. This animism is not clumsy; it is as old as the sea, in which he was floated as an infant (ibid.: 43). It devours the poet such that he trembles to the sound of the sea’s existence, and yet, in the comfort of words, of secret languages made public, he strives to make us feel at home in the world. For him, the separation of here and now, past and future, is not decipherable. His mind is osmotic, and the dragoman (who is a translator) appears to show him the way by presenting his androgynous self as the guide/visitor, who knows no fear. In ‘Rhapsody on the Dragoman’, Stephanides sets forth the syncretistic history of Cyprus. It is because the history of a fragmented isle continually represents the accident of birth, of wrenching and of new worlds to which new fealties are expressed, so that his world becomes circumscribed in ever new ways of seeing, never quite losing the chains of one’s loss:

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In the night I go under In company of dervishes and learn Why cyclamens sprout in pavement cracks And mutter promises, amidst the dust, Of the beautiful and the unseen. (Stephanides 2018: 332)

Unravelling Mythopoesis The Freudian fantasy of the love for the mother and the murder of the father is a result of observation, but we know that feminists are ideologically opposed to such non-linear readings. Stephanos, too, uses the tropes of the nature gods and the lust to return to the womb with startling effect. He knows the way forward is always towards death, but he is fearless, as the ancestor worship of remembrance allows him the calm to write verse. Words becalm, but they also make him dizzy. The longing for silence is the return to poetry. For Stephanides, it is the return to Dionysus, to the dervish dance, the appearance of the gods of the Greeks. The resplendence of the mother then begins life anew, through the division of the sugarcane with the cutlass, and the poet’s cleaving to the pen. The displacement is thus always foiled, for rather than seeing living in the past as a move towards decrepitude, Stephanos Stephanides understands it to be immensely healing. Sexuality is a language of rejuvenation, and the ode to the mother a way of legitimising fecundity in ever-real ways. In the powerful verse to his wife Kathy, he writes: Or I would invoke the wind that rattles And unhinges window panes To waft you away In full sail if only for a moment to be great among the great small among the small to be the poem that you are. (Stephanides 2018: 30)

In ‘Daughter’, he continues this theme of an extravagant love:

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As you watch me with the clear eye of a stranger Who had known me longer than my grandmother’s olive tree Before I fade away I await your revelations in sunshine and rainfall And in the mystery of the syllable KA. (Stephanides 2018: 134)

It is this orientation of the three times Ka (mother, wife and daughter) to the material body, past and present and future, that allows the complexity of the disruptions of catalytic events to be finally lulled. Stephanos writes: What monstrous figures lurk among the rubble? Have they become too lazy and inert they cannot Lift their weight? And why don’t they just take off And sail effortlessly across the plain and the sea Letting both Minaret and Cypress to move heavenward Fenced and yoked together in reconciliation by wire and Petromin. (ibid.: 302)

In the Creole culture of Guyana, where the descendants of Indian indentured labourers break their coconuts, Stephanides finds his community. His skill is at blending in as Steve Baba in New York, where he follows the diaspora in camera, what he has propelled through verse, and it becomes manifest as a documentary. What is available to us as viewers is the very moment of self-abnegation of the other, the death of the self, the surrender to affliction. Through this mimetic code, he surrounds himself with the tactile, with the acolyte, with the sense of being released through catharsis and a mutually inflicted violence. In ‘Cane Grove Moon 11 - Sky of the Heart’, Stephanides tells us: great Kali, my grief becomes your victory, Sky of the Heart Tree of oleander at the riverside Forever watching me. (ibid.: 280)

In ‘Rhapsody of the Dragoman’, Stephanides manipulates our conceptual vision to understand that time without compartments exists

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in our minds. The dragoman is androgynous and informs the body of the listener who, through silence and guile, makes his/her path with the ability of the courtesan who gives her body or whose eyes are plucked. The lust of the adventurer is blind. As the guide to the visitor of the city, the poet, intellectual, savant is alert, for indeed, the visitor makes the inhabitant understand the city differently. Every time is new, each is intense in the mutual discovery of the body placed in time, and yet pursuing the relics of past warriors and slaves who inhabited the city. The archaeology of the city is locked in its flora and fauna, its waterways and its shared poetry. The enchantment lies in detachment, and yet words create the veil of ardour that human beings find so necessary in order to live. There is a synthesis of both, he says, without discord: When heaven wants to speak it needs few words to open gateways here, there, and elsewhere. (Stephanides 2018: 334–337)

There is always for Stephanides the return to the cult, though it represents sickness and death. The image of Kali calls him, and in essence, he accepts the terrible nature of that apprenticeship. He knows he can die should he switch continents, or return to her but his knowledge of her attention is sufficient to let him live another day, ‘heart squeezed by history … firmly rooted in the universe like a star’ (ibid.: 284). This call to the body and the hushed nature of time (which Stephanides describes so comfortingly in his ode to his wife Kathy titled ‘If It Were Given’, and also in the ‘Badger’ and ‘Dwelling’ poems) transfers to us the sense of bliss and the world we own or know in our peaceful moments. He shares them with us, as a time known to all when the breeze opens both the gentle world of caresses and foreknowledge and the tumultuous world of being shaken and sailed away, ‘if only for a moment’ (ibid.: 30). For Stephanides, the lyrical nature of the sea, with its rush and its lambent tides, represents the relationship that he has with his grandparents and their memories. So this, in effect, reduces the agony of separation from them, and from his parents in his growing

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years. ‘Requiem for Trikomo’ revisits the journeys, the events which unwrap the characters of his ancestors, so that we know how interlaced their memories and legacies are: Without warning or farewells Only stories To carry with me Eleni retelling How she lured Stephanos of Alexandria With her swing song Bore him ten children Milled the wheat on the day he died Dissolved time in her longing (Stephanides 2018: 88)

Ari Sitas and the Fulcrum of Africa Ari Sitas and Stephanos Stephanides are visiting, through their verse and prose essays, the spaces of their childhood in different ways, and yet the linking of the imagination is made possible because of their radical understanding of petite bourgeoisie and working-class politics. Both of them revel in the intuitive understanding of the cultural locations from which they have been forcibly removed in childhood, but to which they continually return as public figures who have been associated with the arts and humanities. Their continual travels are only to popularise their discipline, and yet, implicity, are represented by them as pilgrimages. Sitas and Stephanides have spent long phases in India, meeting students and teaching their craft. Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi has been a popular bastion for their workshops. Ari Sitas, with T.K. Oommen, was the founder of the Global Studies Programme which has been annually hosted for 20 years, in the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU. Stephanides similarly has been a frequent Visiting Professor at the Centre of English Studies, in the School of Language, Literature and Cultural Studies, JNU. I have chosen to compare them for their fealty to the universe and their homelands, which are essentially maps of the mind.

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In his poems, Ari Sitas catches the depth of the abyss and makes it his own. As a migrant from Cyprus, the cadences of trains travelling, of the sound of waves becomes his very own. As travellers to Africa, a continent which they make their own, these people who offer the poet/protagonist their hospitality are much like him, occupying dusty shantytowns, where they give space to life, saying ‘my rags this side/ that side, thine’ (Sitas 2013: 24). This home-making is accompanied by such dread and continual violence that the everyday becomes imbued by the sacralisation of the image in the mirror, which mimics this very violence and shrouds it in the self-made mask which greets the person of the poet. As he describes it in ‘Barbarism’, there are the subterranean memories of exile and death of loved ones and the giving up of god (ibid.: 34). There is a terror of poverty, of shared childhoods, of the smell of occupational leavings, which subsist on the need to support a family, and becomes the lacquer of the corpse. Water does not cleanse it, nor does death, for the hacker of blubber the remembrance of codfish sticks in the brain like stains, which each stands for memory. The assault of the reader’s senses in ‘Crooning’ is what Sitas looks for, the pain of passage, desire and the accompanying demonisation as one seeks to escape (ibid.: 25). In Slave Trades, Sitas describes the mutual conflagration, which is both memory and time, the genetic predisposition that migrants have to remember the past and their origins. His protagonist recalls the lewdness of the daily rape of his mother, who sees this as the cost of her religiosity and the abandonment of all things familiar with her husband’s death. Each cadaverous space is explored through a child’s remembrance of death, and the fleeing thereafter, the countries all listed as possibilities of escape, Ethiopia and Natal being only abstract spaces in the itinerary. And yet, they arrive, and new histories are born. For Ari Sitas the Marxist, marriage is a bourgeois union and the woman, the slave. The woman who escapes is by definition, free, yet bound to her natal clan and the steps she takes are imprinted in time. She will not be bought with silks, food, or the profits made from the sale of guns, but will always look back and remember. Each relationship

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then becomes a sacred covenant of love and longing with the specialised skill of withdrawal and betrayal, where nothing promised, can bring the enchantment of the mutual gaze, which cannot atrophy, at least in memory: ‘Your obedience is final, total, bought’ (Sitas 1999: 62). The accusation of clan loyalty is preceded only by the consent to mutual freedom. In a memoir to Greeks, leaving their homes and encountering Ethiopians, Sitas, changing voices and genders, posing domination and enslavement in one narrative, cries for the past, hoping for new futures: ‘We shall go leave, we shall erase our stamen from history’s favourite haunts and colonise some territory that ploughs for the seeds of dreaming’ (ibid.: 165). Who is the slave, who is the master, and how does Africa prefigure in these journeys? Sitas has made his choices and travels with his dream companions, writers of letters which they once thought private. And the morphology of the island always beckons, and in the mind, provides succour from fear, for the nostos, as in Stephanides’ work, is for Sitas, the true memory of the lost (ibid.: 157). Both poets provide us with a sense of succour by reminding us that memory is both lament and celebration. Like sleep, it heals, while we remain alert to the dangers of the future. The dream time of poetry is essentially its austere truth. Words provide Sitas with the final balm, and through the voice of his protagonists, who, like the chorus, move from emotion to emotion, he continues his journey towards liberation: The past was never beautiful but through its knotted strings my ancestors speak to me with apocryphal gestures and languages you will never understand and dances that would strain your gait I hope still, therefore I am. (ibid.: 167)

This poem ends as an imaginary obituary for the traveller as the agent of age, whose recompense is poetry, the knowledge that when he dies, it

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is strangers who will wash his limbs, as the woman who loves him waits, austere and aware, that she has lost him: The men will gather to wash the body you never loved, stiffened by the retiring cells leathered by the worm that snapped its spine longing in my thoughts for you without your veils and cloth caressing the eyebrows clean of frown the pubis clean of rusted hair And you will weep. (Sitas 1999: 170)

But for the Cypriot, the sea is his/her/their mother and welcomes his/her/their body, which like hundreds of others may have been shot by impending armies in whichever country they were in (ibid.: 171). In ‘Rhythmskewed’, Ari Sitas dredges his memory to remind himself of his childhood, where his sense of catapulting to words is so violent that he knows how words formed and punctured his lungs and ripped his gullet and intestines ( Sitas 2013: 24). He remembers his father, the food they ate, the early morning revels of fishermen gathering before dawn at seaside cafes. The Greek heroes rose out of the sea, and so also, the howls of women who had lost them to war. And the Cypriots exulted because they were not Greeks. This very carnal sense of being, of lust, death, war and loss all reverberate in the present, as Sitas shows us that the same Greeks are to be found in the streets of his hometown; they can be recognised. He writes: …over there Mr Hesiod roasting corn cobs on hot coals and Euripides here, sweeping the streets and Sappho with a cigarette dangling at the soccer-tables and Aristides fighting with rows and rows of toy soldiers on the pavement and Epaminondas hollering out the numbers of the state lottery and the bank teller prophesying, a new oracle, that Euklos erred: no one will be born again to sing. (ibid.: 67)

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At home, the women remember their own prayers, devoid of myths, but scarred by their losses and loneliness. They mutter their prayers as they go about their household tasks, and their youth rises above, just like their household incense, to take on an incandescent aura of lost loves, beauty and good times. This everyday retrieval of a past which has flung them without mercy into a shrouded present, where their mourning clothes must inscribe their fate is what Sitas sees so clearly, much after he has edged into his own muscular middle age. Ari Sitas asks us, what are we, but the sum of our nightmares, how may we make sense of our childhoods which are torn from us by war, and we are expelled from the instinctual sorrows of our clan? For him, this memory is embedded in his psyche, and it encapsulates what are centuries of wandering legends, the source of battle and migrations. Everything is familiar because he has been there before, and the sea crossings have brought blood and descent, war and fecundity, which remain imprinted in his psyche. He remembers how his clan members would face new warriors returning and would quote Michaelides about the plough digging the earth, but becoming earth in time, destroyed by its own dredging (Sitas 2013: 69).

Conclusion So in their own way, Sitas and Stephanides, the Cypriot poets, who remember their childhood wherever they are, and the valour of their kin, bring back to us the tumult of the present and the risks of surviving the past. We read their verse knowing that the Quinquireme of Nineveh did land in Cyprus.

Bibliography Burckhardt, Jacob. 1963. History of Greek Culture. London: Constable. Cassirer, Ernst. 1979. Symbol, Myth and Culture. Yale: Yale University Press. Gavrilis, George. 2008. The Dynamics of Interstate Boundaries. New York: Grove Weidenfeld Paz, Octavio. 1985. The Labyrinth of Solitude. New York: Grove Weidenfeld.

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Stephanides, Stephanos. 2018. The Wind Under My Lips, translation in Greek by Despina Pirketti. Athens: To Rodakio. Sitas, Ari. 1999. Slave Trades and An Artist’s Diary. Cape Town: Deep South. ———. 2013. Rough Music. Cape Town: Deep South. Walcott Derek. 1994. Collected Poems (1948–1984). New York: The Noonday Press. Wittkower, Rudolf. 1977. Allegory and the Migration of Symbols. London: Thames. Documentary Films, YouTube Stephanos Stephanides with Stephen Nugent. 2012. Poets in No Man’s Land. Nikosia. Stephanos Stephanides with Gur Genec. 2005. Speaking of Water. Stephanos Stephanides. 2003. Kali in the Americas. Brooklyn. ———. Hail Mother Kali. (Film footage in the holdings of the Smithsonian Institution and reviewed in American Anthropologist June 1989.)

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5

Detachment and Faith Detachment and faith seem contradictory, and yet theologians know that every one of us lives parallel existences, contributing not to the dilemma of compulsory choice, but engaging with coexistence as a principle of rationality. This relativism is something that sociologists have accepted as compartmentalisation, and the debate goes back in Indian sociology, at least, to the work of M.N. Srinivas (1996) and Milton Singer (1972), foregrounded by Robert Redfield and his classic work on Mexico (1973). It was understood in the 1960s that when scientists went to the laboratory, they took off their traditional identities and put on their scientific roles, and nothing was lost. Renny Thomas, in a recent work, has argued that the scientists in India see no disjunction between their acceptance of religious beliefs or the practice of them, as these are cultural idioms of the society in which they live (Thomas 2015). Existentially, how do human beings live in disparate worlds and come to terms with the many different codes of culture, without creating schisms in themselves? I ask this question primarily because coexistence is accompanied by adaptation, but this adaptation is dependent on a mutual dialogue, which premises the understanding of one another’s vocabulary. The sociology of religion has always foregrounded comparative religion as its most important apparatus. It is not possible to understand religious behaviour unless one accepts the axiom of the existence of the religious. Experience is personal, and yet the vocabulary of believing assures us that there is the component of ritual and myth that accompanies it. This is the essential aspect of the religious. Monks and nuns practising transcendence still assure the laity that the text and the rite are part of the daily apparatus of the believing community. Silence is possible only to those who have accepted the ultimate space of the transcended, but to reach there, usually the path taken is of erudition or revelation, both 138

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of which are dependent on visual and verbal imagery. Auditory aspects are fundamentally significant where the participants share the domain of the heard and the experienced, and music is a part of this constantly changing scenario, using the voice or instruments to codify. Experience is the opening up of the mind, and religious people know that tourism elaborates the secular use of music, architecture, texts, drama and performance of ritual. Thus, they open up their holiest sights to the viewer without distinction. The Vashista Yoga (2005) is an important work that offers us insights into the nature of maya itself. Rather than seeing existence as a delusion, we are called upon to introspect. The mode of enquiry then foregrounds narratives not only as a source of spiritual sustenance, for it elaborates upon existence and the metalanguage of reconstruction. Because we tell stories, we understand these manifold worlds. Time, too, is enhanced by the coexistence of many worlds. The stories are told by the sage Vashista to Lord Rama, in order to communicate that boredom is unnecessary, and our call to duty is profoundly a form of ordering the world. To understand the world, then, we must allow our imagination freedom. What is the truth is less objectively defined, for this truth is also part of existence as a dream. What is reality is more elaborately configured. In order to enter the realm of this discourse, we must suspend belief or disbelief, we must enter the domain of existence, because words are our only reality, and action is a by-product of words. By understanding words, we may then disseminate them to others; by listening, we may proceed to a higher level of understanding. Jean Baudrillard in The Mirror of Production argues that: The logic of representation—of the duplication of its object—haunts all rational discursiveness. Every critical theory is haunted by this surreptitious religion, this desire bound up with the construction of its object, this negativity subtly haunted by the very form that it negates. (Baudrillard 1975: 50, 51)

Whether it is the utopia of equality or the subservience of the body to evolution and the mind/soul dichotomy, we are constantly facing abstraction as the way in which we approach the existence of theoretical paradigms. Social science deals with this not as ‘true’ or ‘false’, but as

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representation. The problem asserts itself only when we subscribe to these as articles of faith. Detachment then becomes the mystic’s zone of arrival at a goal, as much as that of the anthropologist. The art of documentation involves questions of bias as much as it does of suspension of belief. We choose to study something because we have a prior understanding of some of its elements. Rituals and communities of believers help us to locate ourselves within the axes of its reproduction through narrative or action. Demonstrably, time as memory and action is encoded within it. Just as space can be identified with specific moments of history, modified by events, so also memories are encapsulated within tradition as well as within the new orientations to postmodernism. This is what makes the present so kaleidoscopic since the time element is submerged in the immediacy of an everpresent significance, and the contemporaneous is commonly felt and known. Rama asks Vashista, ‘Lord, the infinite consciousness is transcendental; pray tell me how the universe exists in it.’ Vashista replied, ‘This universe exists in the infinite consciousness as waves exist in a calm sea; non-different in truth, but with the potentiality of an apparent difference. The infinite consciousness is unmanifest though omnipresent—even as the space, though existing everywhere is unmanifest.’ (Swami Venkatesananda 2005: 186)

Vashista tells Rama that just as clouds exist in the sky, so also reflections exist, and as light refracts, so too consciousness is manifested, and we understand existence through these. Seasons, time, space, events are all concealed and made apparent through this prism of consciousness, which is eternal. The body is the citadel and consciousness realises its goals through the body. The self that is enlightened then allows for the consciousness which is all-embracing to define itself. As the author of the Vashista Yoga says: The mind has no existence apart from the infinite consciousness: it did not exist in the beginning, it will not exist in the end, and so it does not exist now. One who thinks that it does exist holds sorrow in his hand. He who

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knows that world is the self in reality goes beyond that sorrow; this world gives him both joy and liberation. (Swami Venkatesananda 2005: 186)

In this discourse, the role of maya is significant, because that which is real appears as the unreal, and the unreal then, like the waves of the sea, represent the existence of Brahmin, self-limited by individualised consciousness (ibid.: 190). It is our desires that bring about birth, for ‘bondage is the craving for pleasure and its abandonment is liberation’ (ibid.: 185). It is boredom that brings Rama a teacher, and the teacher tells his father that he, Rama, has been born to defeat Ravana: Visvamitra asks that Dasratha should send Rama to him, and the king replies, ‘O Sage, Rama is not even sixteen years old, and is therefore not qualified to wage a war. He has not even seen a combat, except what goes on in the inner apartment of the palace. Command me and my vast army to accompany you to exterminate the demons. But I cannot part with Rama. Is it not natural for all living beings to love their young, do not even wise men engage themselves in extraordinary activities for the love of their children, and do not people abandon their happiness, their consorts and wealth rather than their children? No, I cannot part with Rama’.

‘If it is the mighty demon Ravan who causes disturbance to your rite, nothing can be done to help you. Even the gods are powerless against him. Time and again, such powerful beings are born on this earth; and in time, they leave the stage of this world’. (ibid.: 7)

For Rama, time is the essential enemy, for it destroys everything. Time creates multiple universes, it does not come or go, it uses the sun and moon as its assets, and while creating the year and seasons, it remains hidden (ibid.: 17). Krtanta is the end of time, and with niyati, the laws of nature it subsumes human beings. What then is the time of the dream? This becomes the central problem. The dream involves in real time the sense of actors and of transcending space, time and the body. The preoccupation that Ramana Maharshi had with death as a time of dreaming is the real explanation of existence. We can only imagine the wandering soul, that identifies with the cosmic atma, but when its endless desire is to find a home, it chooses the body. Clement Rosset puts it elegantly:

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The recognition of self, which already implies a paradox (since it involves grasping that which is precisely impossible to grasp, and since ‘taking control’ of one-self resides paradoxically in renouncing that control) also necessarily implies an exorcism: it implies exorcising that double that poses an obstacle to the existence of the unique and demands that the unique be something other than simply itself and nothing but itself. (Rosset 2012: 60)

While theologies are culture-bound, the perspective of the Self and the Other becomes premised on the codes represented by each given theology. Secular theologies are in this sense interesting because the dictum may be the sacred charter as constructed by citizenry or the mores and rules and aphorisms ascribed to a savant. The sacred can be anything that stands apart from the everyday, mundane, routine activities of individuals and collectivities as Emile Durkheim pointed out 100 years ago. Therefore, our charters of human rights are universally important as signifiers of how war influenced the lives and minds of human beings in the 20th century. Thiruvalluvar in the Thirukkural writes that detachment is a virtue beyond all else. While abiding by the rule of conduct, the great are those who have abandoned all desire (Thiruvalluvar 1989: 7) Human rights is one of the key issues that we need to be concerned with, when we measure the degree of detachment with which we engage with questions of justice. Do our religious views influence our actions? Can we believe that what we do is a result of our faith and that this directs us to act in what may be termed as judicially negative? Some of the most important questions regarding politics and ethics may be placed here. Should we do things because we believe that we are religiously motivated, and others may not ask questions about their right to believe differently? Clearly, we are placed in situations where the dilemmas we face in our everyday life regarding justice or reason are placed in a strikingly ambiguous location. It is here, that we are called upon to act, not as representatives of institutions but in terms of the collective good. Yet, what if the people want fascism? Should we presume that what the people want is a democratic right?

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Resistance always creates for us so many of the spaces by which we rethink our contexts. Faith and reason are two sides of the same coin. When Durkheim wrote Moral Education (1973), he was faced with the Dreyfus case and the implications it had for all Jews living in France. Therefore, this work essentially posed questions about humanism, science, rationality and rights. The obligations that an individual had, drew from his or her position in the family, neighbourhood, school and university. The forms of socialisation were culturally given. How then can religious education be the hallmark of modernity or postmodernity? How can faith be an equalising force for all? The right to be secular, agnostic or atheistic is a given in the Indian Constitution, and we see that both Nehru and Ambedkar were oriented to Buddhism, in terms of the charter of conduct. This essentially meant that the dialogue of religions was implicit by the very codes of conduct given in justice and social interaction and the right to citizenship. For Durkheim, a ‘religion without God’ was expressed best in Buddhism, and yet for Indians, the sages were resplendent in their experience of nature and the oneness that human beings could experience in their understanding of purusha and shakti. The common language of experience was part of the process of refraction and naming, and Ramana Maharshi was most comforting in the ultimate theology of ‘be as you are’. The resilience of religious dialogue was thus placed in the accident of birth, and the right to conform, or possibly to adapt to another faith, should one feel the call to do so. Since conversion is one of the most discussed topics in the Indian continent, it is imperative that we look at the concept of metanoia. This means that the transformation of the heart is perhaps an experiential concept that goes beyond the statistics of conversion, and the matrix of forced conversions, ghar wapsi or money-motivated conversions. Faith is something that is essential to the survival of religions, but it cannot be forced; it has its own ambience and respect for one’s own religion and the religion of the other is something that is fostered. Many world religions practise a particular exclusiveness, and from the point of view of human rights, it can be very distressful if the other religion is abused. The freedom to worship is like the freedom to work. Marx devised the concept of labour as freedom, and within that, non-labour appears as

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the term by which fishing in the morning and attending a political meeting in the evening, is accompanied by a sense of self-worth, which could be applied equally to writing, scavenging and cooking. How do we reconcile this integrated notion of the body, and the breakdown of the distinction between manual and mental labour as a form of nonwork, or pleasure? It is the conditioning of the mind that allows for freedom. Play, freedom, transparency for Jean Baudrillard is still captured within the bourgeoisie ethics. To be freed of work is to enter the domain of work but in a different way. Does feminism reiterate the right to understanding, concupiscence, tragedy, tedium, weeping and tears and laughter? The contradictions of existence are now posed in the work involved to make the invisible visible. Work and non-work: here is a ‘revolutionary theme’. It is undoubtedly the most subtle form of the type of binary, structural opposition discussed above. The end of the end of exploitation by work is this reverse fascination with non-work, this reverse mirage of free time (forced time-free time, full time-empty time; another paradigm that fixes the hegemony of a temporal order which is always merely that of production). (Baudrillard 1975: 40)

Within this, he discusses the preoccupations of institutional structures and how individuals are placed within the frameworks of rules, labour, death and mortification. We may also view pilgrimage and therefore tourism too, as a show of non-work, which is essentially labourmagnified. The hardship of non-work, of all art forms as liberation, is similarly, creation and energy, which is typified as non-work. When the mind sees an architectural construction, such as a religious site or a landscape that has been prefigured by myth, legend and holiness, one presumes that it will be peaceful and life-generative. But essentially, the emotions that holy places garner may be of deep discord, dissent or violence and death. One of the most interesting works in this regard is Rodin’s (1965) illustrated manuscript on the churches of France. It was a diary kept on his travels to obscure villages and well-known medieval churches such as Rheims and Chartres. The manuscript was a symbol of the

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fear that he experienced, that with the bombing, all this would be lost. Memorabilia of nostalgia and vivid experiences, we are led into both text and illustration, as if into the double vault of cerebral spaces and the mnemonics of space and architecture. Very often, tourism highlights this dual experience of then and now as well as the hiding away, so necessary for conservation. Where Humayun’s mortuary remains truly lie is a secret known to the archaeologist and monument preserver: The tourist and the pilgrim only know the sarcophagus and the vault where pigeons are trapped high above the ground. It is not just the past that ties us down. It is the understanding that the present is necrophilia-oriented, and that we are constantly evading the shadow of war. Christoph Wulf and Isabel Gil Capeolea (2015) suggest that the great landscapes of destruction, both as a result of geological transformations, including climate change and man-made disasters, bring about momentum to new forms. How we adapt to change is often a mystery. Modernity is associated with optimism and the right to citizenship. Postmodernity is much more complex because new enclaves of metropolis and hinterland relations begin to develop. It would seem that the right to be an individual and the need to belong to communities begin to interconnect in different ways. Tradition, orthodoxy and modern lifestyles do not necessarily clash but may embellish one another in contradictory and interesting ways. When these become coercive or life-threatening, as in the case of dominant caste interlocutors, who appear as wealthy farmers denying human rights to their clan members and all the associated freedoms of citizenship and free choice, where then murder is the consequence (as for love marriages, daughters who rebel, etc.), the state and citizen’s groups do intervene. Religion and secularism are then dramatically posed against one another. The freedom to believe is not to take another’s life. Khap panchayats (the conglomerate of male agnates and male elders) are the new force in postmodernist India. They take over from constitutional and elected bodies, placing repressive law as the given moral good, in seemingly totalitarian perspectives. Like terrorists, who kill others in order to fulfil a personal and hegemonic dream, traditionalists here too, as in the forums of local caste politics and governance, khap panchayats, express

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their belief that religion and traditional customs are for total social good. Fundamentalism by any other name, murder as intent, ‘honour’ as an excuse, drag India back into segmentalisation and feudalism. Postmodernity has to deal with the question of hierarchy and tradition in a way that modernity did not. New media, both television and the internet, have played a substantial role in highlighting the parallel of ‘Talibanisation’ of religions other than Islam. Fearing the orthodoxy of other religions, the Hindu elders of Haryana have become a law unto themselves. In mimicry of feudal practices, women and men are murdered if they go against the customary laws of the clan. Maoists too have become similarly totalitarian in an area which politicians admit to being, now, one-third of India. Ideology becomes a total social fact, where there is no manoeuvrability for the ordinary citizen. He or she is not powerless, and standing by the constitution, the majority go to vote. Places like Kannur in Kerala, which have the greatest index of violent feuding in the country between the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Marxists have also the highest voting indexes (up to 70 per cent voter turnout in the country) (Visvanathan 2011: 169). The dialogue of religions asserts itself in every way in the most compelling circumstances. Part of the acts of forgiveness comes from the families who have lost their kin to annihilating acts of murder. The state may take a stand that is relevant to its political orientation, but the political party only occupies the machinery of the state, it is not the state. The constitutional rights consider the ‘right to believe’ and the ‘right not to believe’ as equivalent. These are not contestatory. Raimundo Panikker in the ‘Mantramanjari’ writes that: Modern Human is a secular Human, which does not mean that he/ she is not religious or that he/she has lost the sense of the sacred. The statement means only that his/her religiousness and even any sense of sacredness he/she may possess are both tinged with a secular attitude. ‘Secular attitude’ means a particular temporal awareness that invests time with a positive and a real character: the temporal world is seen as important and the temporal play of Man’s life and human interactions is taken seriously; the saeculum, the ayus, is in the foreground. Man can survive on earth, both as a species and as a person, only if he pays

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careful attention to everything secular. Otherwise he will be swallowed up by the machinery of modern society or the mechanism of cosmic processes. Secular man is the citizen of a temporal world. (Panikkar 1983: 18)

It is in this context of the blurring of culture that Raimundo Panikkar refers to the significance of the Vedas, as shruti and smrithi, carrying forward the poetry of traditions 3,000 years old, and signifying the manner in which translations globalise words in their new contexts. For Panikkar, translations liberate meaning and make them universal, from secrecy to shared wisdom. The utterance is the moment when the author is born by taking away the authorial space of the text to the existential moment when a language allows for new meanings, new contexts, and the universalisation of this experience is promised. Implicit is the need ‘to purify our relationship with the text and to avoid any kind of idolatory’ (ibid.: 12). He says: Any one of us is the author of the Vedas when we read, pray and understand them. Nobody is the author of living words except the one who utters them. The Vedas are living words, and the word is not an instrument of Man but his supreme form of expression. What has no author, according to the apaursya insight, is the relation between the word and its meaning or object. The relationship is not an artificial or extrinsic relation caused by somebody. There is no author to posit the type of relationship which exists between the word and its meaning. To do this, we would require another relationship and so on ad infinitum. When a word ceases to be a living word, when it ceases to convey meaning, when it is not a word for me, it is not Veda, it does not convey real or saving knowledge. (ibid.: 12, 13)

The central focus of this paper thus has been the dialectic between faith and human rights. How can we pursue our right to be believers (or as non-believers protect our spaces as atheists or agnostics) and how can we entrust our societies to the postmodern contexts of withdrawal of rights? Migration histories and climate change show us that we have no choice when it comes to the extreme situations in which we may find ourselves. This then forces us to consider our existential situations in terms of age and gender contexts in which we find ourselves. While

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ascription has its moments of closure, technological changes and digital resources make our understanding of the world so much more complex. This adaptability to the modern world, which simultaneously compresses and expands our worldview, is essential. We see the beauty of the world through digital photographs, just as we submit to its entropy. What could be more heartbreaking? Many of the resolutions that modern individuals make are to the safeguarding of Earth’s resources for future generations. The dictum that Christ gave in the Sermon on the Mount, so well known to the Gandhians was, ‘The meek shall inherit the Earth’. Within postmodern contexts, talking to plants and believing that they can hear us has become an essential scientific attribute of horticultural and farming technologies, leading to new survival strategies. One of the more successful experiments in practical wisdom with its empirical follow-up has been how Kerala has ushered in a domestic revolution with regard to growing vegetables and fruits for the table. Women were trained by the state in classes organised by their local agricultural departments or Krishi Bhavan. They learn about seedlings, manure, water harvesting, beekeeping and bio-diversity. Kochi, Ernakulam, Trivandrum, Palakkad, Wayanadu and Kasergode for some reason took to the social movement with great enthusiasm. Part of it also revolved around the resurgence of the indigenous cow as a fount of milk and organic manure. The religious undertones of this movement are not articulated except to communicate the love for mother Earth. The joy of growing things seems unanimous. It is not gender-specific as men and children also participate and share in the momentum of growing food for the table. Part of how we understand modernity is to engage with how tradition reinvents itself. When Logan’s Malabar famously recorded how Malayalis lived in their enclaves of gardens, lagoons and coconut groves, the attempt was to communicate the resilience of an ancient culture, which represented this humility, this ownership without partisan identity, this ability to renegotiate with cultural demands made multi-tongued by varieties of colonialism. Organic farmers, today, do not give up their spice gardens or rubber cultivation, they grow payr or beans as nitrogen fixers instead of chemical fertilisers, and thus protect their vegetable patches.

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Similarly, in Ladakh, the farmers have adapted to climate change by using tarpaulin greenhouses in the winter months to grow vegetables in the dry season, watering their produce with water that does not freeze as it runs in underground pipes. The work of the scientist and technologist Sonam Wangchuk and his wife Betty Norman is a compelling account of faith and reason. They run SECMOL (the Student’s Education and Cultural Movement of Ladakh), a school committed to ecological values, guided by their Buddhist faith. No story could be more enchanting than that of their committed dream to green the desert. The ice stupa, which is the formation of an artificial glacier that rises upwards, to melt slowly through the summer, providing water to the fields is a case in point of how science depends on teamwork, and on the detachment that allows failure to be followed by endless trials, till success is achieved. The mystical moment of ‘Eureka!’ is surely when the sense of surprise is compounded by reason and intuition coming together. In Remembering Sir J.C Bose (2009), one of the editors, V.A. Shepherd quotes Romain Rolland who wrote to J.C. Bose in 1927, ‘You have wrested from plants and stones, the key to their enigma … you made us hear their incessant monologue, that perpetual stream of soul, which flows through all beings from the humblest to the highest’ (cited in Sen Gupta et al. 2009: 107). Sociologists never attend to the truth-value of sentiments as much as they do to the fact of representation. Do plants hear the people who foster and eat them? The scientists of the Krishi Bhavan insomuch as they pushed forward populist agriculture, programmed their trainees to talk to their plants daily, water the plants every alternate day and provide amino acids one day a week (1 kg sardines in 1 kg jaggery, soaked for three weeks produced an effective distillation, which was to be watered down to 1/10 of a litre mix). The farmers say that the pleasure they get from the everyday tasks is huge. A woman with a vegetable patch among her roses and jasmines ran out to her yard while I was talking with her and said, ‘I’m going to check on my children’ (Jyan ende kunjukallue nokkan pogua). What more can one say about the inter-relatedness of the world or the nurturing ethic? In Alappuzha district, fisherwomen have now started vegetable gardening; wild spinach and beans are the most successful, they report, growing on sandy banks. They come into town to see what the price for a kilogramme of beans is because if they have

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a surplus after the household needs are completed, and if the friendly exchange of produce between neighbours and friends and kin is over, they may sell it in town. The success of the experiment depends on the time and ardour that people put into this venture. At Alathur, in Palakkad district, there is a complex interrelationship between state agriculture scientists and those who have been chosen to grow seeds for distribution among farmers. The best farmers are chosen, and they are monitored by rural officers to see that they grow these seeds without chemical interference from nearby fields. The seeds are hybrid, but not genetically modified, and are the outcome of the work of laboratory scientists, who then link up with farmers to proliferate good quality seeds. The basic assumption is that Malayalis should not be compulsorily tied up as thoughtless consumers, with chemical produce coming in from Tamil Nadu in truckloads through the Coimbatore pass. An award-winning vegetable gardener in Palakkad, Swapna James, says in an interview with me on 6 January 2016, that for three years they have not bought any vegetables, and that they receive an income of 2,000 rupees a week from the excess which they sell to a school in Palakkad. It is these successes that allow one to believe that work as a vocation is indeed a religious experience. The intensity of love that people feel for their work is tied up with the sense that their labour is accounted for and that they are wholly absorbed in it. This is the Marxist theme of ‘work, which is not work’. Feminists of course, while being hugely influenced by Marx and Engels, will not support the idea that love by itself is enough or that love and responsibility are values, which go beyond recognition. This is one of the most difficult mazes in the right to wages debate, and whether it is housewifisation or any other form of service, women do look for accountability in terms of the relation between giver and receiver. The gift is the paramount symbol of that which cannot be subsumed within reciprocal exchange, but at its outset, as Marcel Mauss (1974) would argue in his 1925 work, needs to be distinguished from loot and tax. Let me now close the argument by saying that for Simone Weil, the concept of dhyana or concentration was both religious and secular, absorbing both prayer and work. In the next chapter, I will show how abstraction turns mystical poetry into formulaic speech which is memorised, inscribed and passed on generation after generation for our constant meditative attention.

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Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean. 1975. The Mirror of Production. St Louis: Telos Press. Capeolea, Gil Isabel and Christoph Wulf. 2015. Hazardous Future. Berlin: De Gruyter. Dasgupta, Pannalal. 2012. Revolutionary Gandhi, edited and translated by K.V. Subrahmonyan. Calcutta: Earthcare Books. Durkheim, Emile. 1973. Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education. New York: Free Press. Mauss, Marcel. 1974. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Panikkar, Raimundo with N. Shanta, M. Rogers, B. Baumer and M. Bidoli. 1983. The Vedic Experience, Mantramanjari, An Anthology of the Vedas for Modern Man and Contemporary Celebration. Pondicherry: All India Books Patton, Laurie L. 2005. Bringing the Gods to Mind, Mantra and Ritual in Early Indian Sacrifice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Redfield, Robert. 1973. Tepoztlan, a Mexican Village. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rodin, Auguste. 1965. Cathedrals of France. London: Hamlyn. Rosset, Clement. 2012. The Real and Its Double. Calcutta: Seagull Books. Sen Gupta, D.P., M.H. Engineer and V.A. Shepherd. 2009. Remembering Sir J.C. Bose. Singapore: IISc Press and World Scientific Publishing. Singer, Milton. 1972. When a Great Tradition Modernizes. New York: Praeger. Srinivas, M.N., ed. 1996. Caste in Its Twentieth Century Avatar. Delhi: Penguin. Thiruvalluvar. 1989. Thirukkural, edited by Rev. W.H./Drew and Rev. John Lazarus. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services. Thomas, Renny. 2015. ‘Religious and Scientific Imagination: A Study of Religious Life of the Scientific Community in India’. Unpublished PhD thesis. New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru University. ———. 2022. Science and Religion In India: Beyond Disenchantment. Abingdon: Routledge. Venkatesananda, Swami. 2005. The Supreme Yoga: A New Translation of the Vashista Yoga. Delhi: New Age Books. Visvanathan, Susan. 2007. ‘Simone Weil’. In Friendship, Interiority and Mysticism: Essays in Dialogue. Delhi: Orient Blackswan. ———. 2011. Reading Marx, Weber and Durkheim Today. Delhi: Palmleaf Publications.

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6

Songs of Solomon and Adi Shankara’s Soundarya Lahari: A Comparison Words in themselves have magical power. They carry with themselves the sense of their immediate effect upon the mind. As a result, those reading or hearing these works, Songs of Solomon and Soundarya Lahiri of Adi Shankara, whether they fully understand them or not, are lulled into a state of willing acceptance. Gods/Goddesses exist, love exists, the complementarity of the male and female states must exist. Androgyny often becomes the site of multi-sitedness so that religious poetry carries with it the performative aspects of theatre, of the dramatic. There is often anxiety among practitioners of ritual, whether as priests or as devotees offering the oblations, that ritual must not be seen as drama or a play. They believe that it negates the sacrosanct aspect of ritual. Yet, when we look at the Greeks, we know that the power of the narrative, represented by the voice of the Sibyl appears most in the formulaic language of prophecy. Here, the poets are contented to describe the authenticity of their experience, the remembrance of states that surely the gods must know. This is the infallible function of mystical poetry. It is to circumscribe the truth value of that which cannot be described, that may not be approximated with many caveats as to what is being attempted. The dating of these two works ‘Song of Songs’ and Soundarya Lahari is not known and is sometimes seen to be placed between 1000 bce and 800 ce. However, the intentions of the text are known. Both compilations use female energy as the source of their syncretistic function. The images created by King Solomon and Adi Shankara, centre around the exquisite symbols of the weaving of the natural and the divine. I will locate, in this essay, the two texts as being within the function of erotic poetry, which compounds into mysticism or the state of bliss and its interlocution of a primaeval state of nature. Words, 152

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sounds, phrases and symbols all become carriers of the possibility of entering into a state of ecstasy. Should we then separate ourselves from the authorial voices of our poets, who may have been legion, before the compilation of the verses historically occurred? At what point may textual analysts, linguists by profession, demand that we see the interpolation as historically notated? However, today, the digital text actually appears as an extraction from the ‘original’ which would have traversed a multiplicity of sites, when travelling between the oral and the inscribed. There are many reasons for the use of digital texts because the reader may no longer be able to go into the variations in the narrative, for lack of training or access to resources. The digital text is superimposed for public viewing, through a work of continuous reflection and the varieties of the translation may be provided to us as footnotes to understand the origin of the given text (Rao 2017; Sarma n.d.). We find this occurring independently in other interpretative compilations such as Robert Alter and Frank Kermode’s The Literary Guide to the Bible (1987). Authors of essays on the Old Testament noted that translation is a continuous exercise and they were woeful about the erroneousness of earlier translations of the Hebrew Bible (ibid.: 21, 26). If time is such a fulcrum in the understanding of the sacred text, how may we legitimise juxtaposing two works, such as Songs of Solomon and Soundarya Lahari, both being literary works of such variety and effervescence? Even the time of translation of the two texts from Hebrew, Aramaic or Sanskrit may be separated by 500 and more years. Many of these textual problems about frequently circulated texts, from orality to writing, and the manner by which they acquire legitimation by becoming household texts, is well documented by Raziuddin Aquil and Partha Chatterjee, in their edited book History in the Vernacular (2010). Sanjay Subramanium and Velcheru, Narayana Rao in their essay ‘History and Politics in the Vernacular’, discussing the Kural of Valluvar show how the verses of the poet were frequently read in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. It was partially translated by Constantino Beschi, and Christian missionaries for many centuries thought that it was similar to Christian ideas, possibly due to the influence of St Thomas, friend and Apostle of Christ, on

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Thiruvalluvar himself. It was a work that the Malabarians (according to Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, writing in 1708) knew by heart and quoted very often. The language of transmission of the text thus becomes very important, and we can imagine the appropriation of other texts if the collation takes place over a long period of time (Rao and Subramanium 2010). The inscriber, whichever the epoch, becomes the utmost authority. Through his/her political ideologies (as in the verse of women poets who were followers of Basavanna) and dramatical interpolations, the detail of mundane descriptions in the narrative, the suppression of the problematic, the enhancement of the politically expedient and the engineering of silences are implicit within this exercise of passing down the text, as historians show (Rao et al. 1998; Ramaswamy 1997; Karkala 1985). In both ‘Song of Songs’ as well as the Soundarya Lahari of Adi Shankara, the preoccupation with extricating the self from the dangerousness of dualism is manifest. The lyrical aspect is bent upon the use of nature symbolism as always accessible in which the poet(s) provide us with images of fruition, flowers, bees, sunrise, light and dark, latticed windows, to encourage our looking in. Rurality as a maxim of simplicity is central to the assumption that over the centuries, these are continually recognisable, or at least imaginable, to readers. The danger of dualism is mitigated by love, erotic in the first instance, where images of the woman’s body bring about the fruition of a state which is one of excess, but recognisable by both men and women as the Mother’s body. In the Soundarya Lahiri, Adi Shankara writes verse 6, as translated by R.V.S.N. Sarma: 06 O! Daughter of the snow mountain! What to say about your blessings! Manmadha’s bow is sugarcane twig. Its string is made of beeline. His five arrows are flowers. Vasanta (spring season) is his friend and companion. Gentle (Malaya) mountain breeze is his chariot to wage his war. Thus, though all his instruments and associates are so inefficient, Ananga (Manmadha) triumphs over this entire world. Isn’t because of the compassionate glance from the corner of your eye? (Sharma n.d.: 2, verse 6)

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She is essentially the mother who entices, as verse 7 says: Let the Divine Mother dwell intimately in our hearts … with her tinkling filigree girdle, Her full bosom—akin to the frontal lobes of a young elephant—making her bend forward (reaching us), Her lean waist enhancing her beauty, Her face akin to the full autumnal moon. She sports in her palms a bow and arrow, a noose and a goad. I revere this Divine Mother who is the ‘I’ consciousness in the Lord, Parama Shiva. (ibid.)

This similitude of sister and wife and mother and wife also enact the nature of the sibling bond not necessarily incestuous, but of the primary enclosed fecundity of the recognition of the Mother. Whether it is in tantric rites, where the significance and correctness of the verse and its emblematic messages are prescribed; or the acceptance of the erotic in mysticism in the Semitic religions; the reader understands the homologous leap to the love for the mother country. Between the recognition of mother as Shakti as constantly desirable and the map of belonging transposed in nationalism to the mother country, the movement is linear. Solomon’s verse says: You are a garden locked up, my sister, my bride; you are a spring enclosed, a sealed fountain. Your plants are an orchard of pomegranates with choice fruits, with henna and nard, nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with every kind of incense tree, with myrrh and aloes and all the finest spices. You are a garden fountain, a well of flowing water, streaming down from Lebanon. (Song of Songs 4: 12–14)

Later in the poem, the Beloved answers: Under the apple tree I roused you; there your mother conceived you, there she who was in labor gave you birth. Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, the jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like a blazing fire, like a mighty flame. Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot wash it away. If one were to give all the wealth of his house for love it would be utterly scorned. (ibid. 8: 5–7)

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The spiritualism of the Songs of Solomon and the Soundarya Lahari is then transposed to a new vocabulary of longing and fear of losing the country before appropriating it. The long journeys that Adi Shankara makes and the enclosure in the fragrant moment of the one love, in the polygamous garden, by Solomon, are both poetic means to mark the ways in which the reader must accept the dangers that lie in this hunger for the manifest. Of course, the polysemy of the verse could also be read in a moment of lewdness, which Natalie Zemon Davis (1975) well argues in her essay ‘Proverbial Wisdom and Popular Errors’. She looks at the printed version of the Sayings of Solomon in the late 15th century in Paris. It was a popular work and circulated in Europe in its manuscript version. It was called ‘The Sayings of Solomon with the Answers of Marcolf ’. Zemon Davis writes: On the title page of one of them was a woodcut of a bookish, decorous king talking with a dishevelled, barefoot rustic. In the text Solomon gave forth rhymed proverbs of high moral tone; Marcolf then answered back in earthy verse, after redoing Solomon’s sayings in shrewd practical language or going him one better in a joke. Thus Solomon observes: ‘A load upon a mare May be silver or be brass Which one the beast won’t care.’ To which Marcolf responds: ‘The whore doesn’t care Which man jumps on her ass, To her it’s all one fare.’ (Zemon Davis 1975: 227)

Conquest is a term that defines pilgrimage, and marriages across borders as ways by which the poets bring about the stability of the discourse of territorialisation. Strangeness is domesticated and virility is propounded as the manner of the consecration of territory and the female body. Abhaya for Adi Shankara stands for Advaita. It is the pronouncement of fearlessness in the giving up of dualism. The danger of identification

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with Parmeswara is limited to the experience of similitude but cannot appropriate Shakti as wife. Yet, Soundarya Lahari is about the glances of Shakti even while she is absorbed in Shiva, resulting in the enticement of the sadhaka. It is through the metaphor of the body that the excess which results in mystical transcendence arises, and yet the goal is the achievement of the attributeless form of Parmeswara through Samadhi (Rao 2017: 15, 16). As the verses from the second part of the Soundarya Lahiri make clear, whatever the tenacity of the devotee, however great his power, Adi Shakti is enclosed within Shiva: O! Mother! Several great poets by virtue of their linguistic skills become dearer to Goddess Saraswati and are her loved ones. Somehow, with acquisition of wealth of all sorts, who does not become Lakshmi pati (lord of the goddess of wealth)? But, Mother, You are truly the Sati indeed! Your heart is only adored by Maha Deva. None can ever boast of being intimate to You—not even the inanimate Kuravaka (gorinta) tree. There is only one Parvati pati. (Sarma n.d.: 25, verse 96)

This theme of conquering the body of the mother country and consolidating it is implicit in the verses of Solomon. Solomon’s empire is established on the fratricide of his brother Adonijah as the latter promotes himself as king before his father is dead. Bathsheba, hearing of this, intervenes and demands kingship for her son Solomon on David’s deathbed, describing Adonijah’s premature triumphal march. Adonijah loses to Solomon because of Bathsheba’s assertiveness and David’s love for her, and the presence of the prophet Nathan, who argues in favour of Solomon. Solomon first releases Adonijah but then murders him because he believes his brother will wrest the kingdom from him by marrying David’s last-slave woman, who had been brought to warm the old King’s deathbed (1 Kings 1: 17–29, 1 Kings 2: 17–22). This complex story serves to inform the reader that Solomon fears for his kingdom, for himself, is loyal to the Lord whom he worships, but can never resolve the problem of his spiralling ambition, to protect the Kingdom of David. As successor to these many conquests, he understands the poignancy of the psalms. Those poems represent the continuous fear, anxiety, dread, terror which escalate, during times

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of war and plague and can only be concluded through a litany of repetition. However many women Solomon marries, however many concubines he has, he can never forget the danger to his property. This is the greatest divide between god and himself because the religions of the women he loves become his own religion, variously, as he sets up temples and sacrifices to them (1 Kings 1: 4, 11). ‘Song of Songs’ thus becomes the verse of conquest, How beautiful your sandaled feet, O prince’s daughter! Your graceful legs are like jewels, the work of a craftman’s hands. Your navel is a rounded goblet that never lacks blended wine. Your waist is a mound of wheat encircled by lilies. Your breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle. Your neck is like an ivory tower. Your eyes are the pools of Heshbon by the gate of Bath Rabbim. Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon looking toward Damascus. Your head crowns you like Mount Carmel. Your hair is like royal tapestry; the king is held captive by its tresses. (ibid. 7: 1–6)

The problem of borders and boundaries become concealed in the manner in which he promotes this cosmopolitan vocabulary of 1,500 songs and 3,000 proverbs. The proverb is formulaic verse; it compounds the wisdom of tradition with the language of power. The listener must hear the ‘discernment and wisdom’ that is captive in language. It is the manner in which Solomon is able to herald his presence through millennia, although the continuity of this preoccupation with the prostitute as the one central enemy of the believing subject is often announced. The subject/reader must remember that the harlot can waylay, can take the honourable man from his steadfast past. The servant, Abishag the Shunammite, who slept with the shepherd King David in his old age becomes the possible wife of his brother, who then claiming marriage with the queen/concubine/slave of David’s old age will hope to rule over Solomon and his principalities (Kings 1: 13– 25). Solomon has his brother murdered for fear of being overthrown from the kingdom his mother Bathsheba had procured for him from David.

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This terror is further propounded in Solomon’s first case of rule as King, where two prostitutes fight over a baby, and he rules that the baby must be sliced in two, and thus simply divided between the contestants. The real mother leaves the order suspended, as she wishes the child to live, and the false mother agrees to the division by two (Kings 3: 16). Hidden in these stories is the continual preoccupation with segmentalisation and freedom, loss and conquest. How may a King rule, and how may his judgments bring him fame so that people began to visit him from many places, his kingdom extending from Egypt to Babylonia. His marriage to an Egyptian princess is the first of these forays into marriage diplomacy, and the venue of trade, consumption and architectural wonders. And his fame spread to all the surrounding nations. He spoke three thousand proverbs, and his songs numbered a thousand and five. He described plant life, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of walls. He also taught about animals and birds, reptiles and fish. Men of all nations came to listen to Solomon’s wisdom, sent by all the kings of the world, who had heard of his wisdom. (1 Kings 4: 31–34).

His friendship with Hiram, King of Tyre, had a positive consequence because the latter became the procurer of cedars needed for the building of the Temple. ‘So give orders that cedars of Lebanon be cut for me. My men will work with yours and I will pay you for your men whatever wages you set’ ( 1 Kings 5: 6). The narrative continues: King Solomon conscripted laborers from all Israel – thirty thousand men. He sent them off to Lebanon in shifts of ten thousand a month, so that they spent one month in Lebanon and two months at home. Adoniram was in charge of forced labor. Solomon had seventy thousand carriers and eighty thousand stonecutters in the hills, as well as thirty-three hundred foremen who supervised the project and directed the workmen. At the king’s command they removed from the quarry large blocks of quality stone to provide a foundation of dressed stone for the temple. The craftsmen of Solomon and Hiram and the

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men of Gebal (that is Byblos) cut and prepared the timber and stone for the building of the temple. (1 Kings 5: 13–18)

The mystical poetry of the pleasure of gardens is thus the propitiation of god who had closed the doors of Eden, and the psalms of David were a fitting prelude to the premonition of danger that always lurked—that of exclusion or death. The temple that Solomon made was to fulfil the promise his father David had made. A tent for the lord and a palace for the King? David’s anguish had been communicated adequately to his people. He had bought Araunah the Jebisite’s threshing floor and constructed an altar (2 Samuel 24: 18–24). Solomon however said according to sacred history: Now I am about to build a temple for the Lord my God and to dedicate it to him for burning fragrant incense before him, for setting out the consecrated bread regularly and for making burnt offerings every morning and evening and on Sabbaths and New Moon and at the appointed feasts of the Lord our God.... The temple I am going to build will be great, because our God is greater than all other Gods. But who is able to build a temple for him, since the heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain him? Who then am I to build a temple for him, except as a place to burn sacrifices before him? (2 Chronicles: 4–6)

The palace he built for himself was even grander and the Songs of Solomon represent the garden as the site of consummation, where the women gather, where songs are sung. The garden, as opposed to devastation, warfare, desert, forest, which is cut down to build the temple, and the palace, become symbols of power and honour. Solomon decreed that he had not yet been devoured by the fate of his father, David, who had murdered his own son Absalom and whose poetry represented the songs of defeat, exile and enmity. The pastoral equanimity of the Songs is about this surcease of war, the stabilisation of the kingdom. But as Montefiore reminds us, ‘Yet Solomon’s own magnificence came first. He took seven years to finish the Temple, and thirteen to build his own palace, which was larger’ (Montefiore 2012: 33). Solomon took a census of all the aliens who were in Israel, after the census his father David had taken and they were found to be 1,53,600.

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He assigned 70,000 of them to be carriers and 80,000 to be stonecutters in the hills, with 3,600 foremen over them to keep the people working’ (Chronicles 2: 12–17). This power over conquered people contributed to his grandiloquence and pride leading to his ultimate downfall. The lord became angry with Solomon for his love of foreign wives and his building of temples to the gods of alien people. The Lord said, ‘Since this is your attitude and you have not kept my covenant and my decrees which I commanded you, I will most certainly tear the kingdom away from you and give it to one of your subordinates’ (Kings 1: 11–12). It was not done during his lifetime, and even after the dispersion into 10 tribes of Israel, one tribe remained in the name of David, whose lineage would always burn a lamp in the name of God (1 Kings 1: 34–36). Montefiore suggests that Solomon’s grandeur may be overemphasised, ‘but his decline rings only too true: the king of wisdom became an unpopular tyrant who handed his monumental extravagances through high taxes and the “chastisement of whips”’ (Montefiore 2012: 35). Five hundred years after escaping the Pharaohs, the King of Israel was the one who moved away from monotheism so beloved to the Jews, married the Pharaoh’s daughter and cracked the whip on slaves. ‘Song of Songs’ thus becomes an act of mapmaking, where the boundaries and actors keep changing, where the whore and the beloved may not change places, but the very artefacts of war become sites of conquest on the physical body of the beloved. Towers, mountains, valleys, far-off lands still to be won, the singer of the songs is confident that the dialogue between him and the beloved will be comprehended by her friends. Kingship itself is domesticated by the garden, the dream and the tendrils of vines. Chris Perkins says, in Playing with Maps, that map-making tells us a lot about intended journeys: There is an assemblage of actants. The analogies with play are obvious here: a progressive sense of ‘map skill acquisition’ leading to serious map use; playing with maps as a kind of precursor to adult mapping; power and competition in the mapping—who is in control of the map; notions of identity—preconceptions of who reads best; playing as embodied practice; and the active role of the artefact in the process and also the fun of using the map. (Perkins 2009: 174)

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The drama of loss and the beloved’s response to the dream are frightening to read for the intensity evoked for sleeping long, and missing the call of the beloved. Solomon describes the sleep which is so deep, that the inability to waken, throw the covers, dispense with the aromatic oils to open the door, result in the lover disappearing into the night. Poetry calls to us, the heart is opened, it remembers the possibility of loss. Solomon’s verse beckons the spiritualist heart of prayer into the bliss of connubium. That is its only purpose for the sadhaka or spiritual aspirant. Boredom and/or fear of death are foreclosed in the need to write abstract verse. ‘Song of Songs’ in the modern Bible follow the lamentations of Job, which is a significantly powerful poem about the trickster angel challenging god, and the need for god to prove his power over Job who, in this debate over virtue, is reduced to sackcloth, skin diseases and ashes. The angel is excluded too and becomes a competitor to god, over the sin of pride. His/Her/Their beauty substitutes for Venus and becomes the symbol of the Morning Star, which is also simultaneously the brightest of all the night stars. The terribleness of the verse and the misfortune that accompanies this game between the adversary and god brings to us the foreknowledge that it is time that recognises the true worth of humans. It is in the intermeshing of events which are identified as the play between god and the adversary (who is thought to be the angel who wanders the Earth, looking at the choices that humans make) that Job’s responses are collated, particularly in responses to his friends (Greenberg 1989: 286). The origin of good and evil, however these are recognised, are representational forms of its very source. If God created everything, then the evil that arises in humans is a god-given test, but choice or the will to choose is what makes humans unique. What the Soundarya Lahari and the ‘Song of Songs’ do is assert the awfulness of Shiva/Yehovah within the origin of existence itself. The expulsion from paradise, which is the myth of Adam and Eve from Eden, is also thought to be collated by poets who experienced this sending away from home. The psalmist’s preoccupation with war, disease, treachery, sorrow, solitude, lost homes and the simplicity of pastoralism are inscribed in these songs which are a shadow play of the

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uses of pleasure in ‘Song of Songs’. Should we then say that Solomon’s Songs represent the stability of the discourse, where the lover and the beloved prove the certainty of their destiny in a known garden? For Adi Shankara, the cosmos must be interlinked with Devi, every element of existence is an aspect of Prakriti, within which Purush is engaged, elementally as well as symbolically ( Rao 2017: verses 42–45). Gregory Bateson, in his conversations with his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson, refers to the certainty of this presence, undivided in the garden and in the journey as Pleroma, where the map may point to us the nature of territory, where the very symbols of evolution are forged (Bateson and Bateson 1988: 20). This homology between the united body of lovers, whether in the mortal garden or the terrestrial landscape, where Shiva and Parvati reign, is the map we traverse in a vicarious way as readers. It is a tapestry in verse, abundant in images and words, which creates a surreal space where everything is conjoined, the real and the abstract, and we begin to focus our minds in the very synthesis that the poet of both works long for, which is of all the senses. The compounding of the senses is what Adi Shankara describes in Soundarya Lahari as the essence of Abhaya, the woman who engages in philosophical discussion and is non-judgmental in her pursuits and is seen to be Advaita itself. It is necessary for Adi Shankara through the verse to domesticate, and then deify her. The sadhaka is never absent in erotic poetry and merges the presence of lotus and bees in the same breath. When will the goddess turn jealous or angry? She is merged in Parmeswara (Rao: verses 34, 57, 61). One of the most interesting articulations of spiritual love is the essay ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance’ by Joan Kelly (1977), who explained that the mystical love that the knight represented for the lady, was in essence, unattainable. She belonged to someone else, but it was the ardour that he felt for her which caused some of the most beautiful verses to be written. No wonder then, that Mariology provided the epiphenomenon of the Virgin Mother adored by medieval priests. She became theologically the culmination of desires, prayer, accessibility, in truth, the church. Combined with this, were questions of adoration, companionate love, access to the body or its repudiation by both, and the questions raised by the aristocracy in Europe about the right of women

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to both sexuality and property. Adultery then was not as much sin, or illegitimacy of children, if the husband’s absence made the lady agree to courtship by the knight in terms of abstract or corporeal transactions. Valour in times of war, as during the crusades, made the currency of love and longing much more potent than questions of coinciding patriarchy with ownership of the woman’s body or territories controlled by her. It is in this sense that prostitution again becomes a deadly risk, as Solomon refutes the tenderness toward the Shulammite, his father’s last slave mistress. ‘Why would you gaze on the Shulammite as on the dance of Mahanaim?’ (‘Song of Songs’ King Solomon, Old Testament 6: 582). The Soundarya Lahiri Advaita is about clarity and love for the simplicity of truth. The dualism of jnana and bhakti are transcended by the love for Amba (Rao 2017: verse 27). In the later verses of the Soundarya Lahiri, Adi Shankara becomes essentially absorbed in the physical beauty of the goddess within whom the attributes of Nature are all-encompassing, but implicit in the gazing is the act of chastity. As one acts and performs dynamic service firmly embedded in total dedication, then that bestows ‘sukham’ or enjoyment; indeed there cannot be such happiness without dedicated service backed up by ‘nishtha’ and ‘shraddha’. This happiness is certainly not in reference to material context, which is tantamount to endless craving and flimsily fleeting! The joy that is under reference is most hard-earned as a result of a long chain of variables starting from speech-enabled by strong knowledge of appropriate nature, clean mind, strong will, thought, meditation, understanding, physical energy-based up by good food and water of suitable heat and relief space, good memory, aspiration, vital energy, truthfulness, thinking capacity and mental sharpness, faith, determination, nishkama karma! Indeed it was that kind of Happiness that a Sadhaka ought to aspire for! (ibid.: 72)

Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1985) puts it sharply as the embrace, the two-headed love which is the return to the mother. ‘In this companionable incest, everything is suspended; time, laws, prohibition; nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted; all desires are abolished, for they were definitively fulfilled’ (ibid.: 105). The garden

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and its beauties, its fruit and flowers, its shade and light, its seasons, embraces and songs are about the fetishisation of these for they have touched the lovers or vice versa. Memoryscapes of these and the colours red, pink, white, green become like ribbons that have entangled the lovers, who will survive time’s ravages (Barthes 1985: 173). The continual appearance of lilies and lotus, bees and forest and trees are a reminder of these. As Carsten Wilkes reminds us, there is a fluidity in the movement between wilderness (encompassing forest and desert), the court and palace, the vineyard and the city (2017: 35). The dialectic between the crystallisation of the garden, and the construction of the temple and palace is well maintained in the Songs of Solomon as the relation to the felling of the forest from which the timber must be brought. The Tamil poems of the Sangam era are a clear representation of the different voices that appear in each, defining the landscapes of exteriority and interiority in the territorialisation of landscapes represented as lovers meet, by the mediation of friends, obfuscating hierarchies between princes, hunters and agrarian communities (Wolf 2006). The rituals of affirmation that echo through both poems or songs involve what is also the fading out, in Barthes terms, the image of the mother and death, the possibility of no return. Anticipation of this loss is completed through deification, where connubial bliss is the legitimation for that which will never be lost in memory. Barthes says: The voice supports, evinces, and so to speak performs the disappearance of the loved being, for it is characteristic of the voice to die. What constitutes the voice is what, within it, lacerates me by dint of having to die, as if it were at once and never could be anything but memory. (ibid.: 114)

It is the bridge built between the sounds of lovers and the meanings that are then embellished as a meta-language of verse that can be transposed according to need. Soundarya Lahari exults in verdant sexuality, where the games played between Parmeswara and Shakti, including power play, concealing, hierarchy and power are transferred to the reader through verse (Rao 2017: verse 22). As Rao interprets it, there can never be equality between the godhead and the devotee.

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Though Vaishnavism does not speak of Nirguna Advaita nor accept as a part of the system, it has a concept according to which, an individual, on his being liberated, attains the state of Saguna Maha Vishnu; he will have all the qualities of Vishnu, all the godliness, except that of being the husband of Lakshmi. Non-dualist Shaivism too says that on his liberation a man will become Parameshvara but he will not have the status of being the husband of Uma/Parvati. Vaishnavas and others unlike us the Advaitis who on liberation have only one entity and no attributes. (Rao 2017: 62)

Both ‘Song of Songs’ and Soundarya Lahari intensely describe the beauty of the world, giving to the form and biography of women the splendour of the morning sun, the colours of the world and the primaevality of touch. Yet, because polygamy and celibacy are mirror opposites, king and renunciant are both left empty-handed. It is this inability to transcend the tactile, which creates verse, words and legitimation of their absence. They want us to believe they exist, but in reality, they are not there other than how time transposes them as legendary or historical figures, who cannot be pinned down as authors or persons. Similar to Rama in the Vashishta Yoga, who, after he returns from many journeys, cannot find meaning in things, Solomon’s great work, Ecclesiastes, announces that everything is meaningless (Venkatesananda 2005: 8). It is through the search for meaning that readers are then initiated into the discourses of wisdom, where the transformation from boredom to enlightenment is accompanied by such grievous costs that epics are born. In the end, both poetic texts carry what George Steiner refers to as ambiguities and silences in text: ‘He does not exhaust the possible responses of the reader’s own imagining, but delights in the fact that we fill in from our own lives, from resources of memory and desire proper to ourselves the contours he has drawn’ (Steiner 1998: 74). The poet imbibes this divine revelation, and Adi Shankara uses the images of great bounty on all poets and those meditating on the universe. The apsaras or visions of great female beauty are allowed entry into the world, and redemption is made possible. There is no competition here; it is the supremacy of the androgynous form that is sought in Advaita. By renouncing the commerce of the body, the integration of male and female takes place without death. This is the

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sustenance sought by the poet, the ceasing of desire. At the same time, the dedication of the devotee as ever passive in the face of this divine aradhaneswara figure is conjoined. In the acceptance of the fusion of nature and divinity, the world is ever confounded: O! Daughter of the snow mountain! The best of poets such as Virinchi (Brahma) and others are unable to compare, at least somehow or other, your beauty (with anything they know of). Out of their ardent curiosity to witness your glory, the celestial women (apsaras) enter the Lord Shiva’s mind through contemplation and total surrender. O! This experience is impossible even by any rigorous penance. (Sarma n.d.: 4, verse 12)

Bibliography Alter, Robert and Frank Kermode. 1987. The Literary Guide to the Bible. Toronto: Fontana. Aquil, Raziuddin and Partha Chatterjee. 2010. History in the Vernacular. Delhi: Permanent Black. Barthes, Roland. 1985. A Lover’s Discourse. Toronto: Farar, Strauss and Giroux. Bateson, Gregory and Mary Catherine Bateson. 1988. Angels Fear, Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. Toronto: Bantam. Dodge, Martin, Rob Kitchin, and Chris Perkins, eds. 2009. Rethinking Maps. Routledge, London and New York: Taylor and Frances. Greenberg, Moshe. 1989. ‘Job’. In The Literary Guide to the Bible, edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. London: Fontana. Holy Bible. 1987. New International Version. Chennai: India Bible Literature. Karkala, John. B. Alphonso. 1985. ‘A Comparative View: Gita Govinda and Song of Songs’. Indian Literature 28 (3), May–June: 95–102. Available at: www.SahityaAcademy (accessed jstor on 23 March 2020). Kelly-Gadol, Joan. 1977. ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ Reprinted from Becoming Visible : Women in European History, edited by Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz and Houghton Mifflin (extracted with permission) accessed on 4 January 2021. Landy, Francis. 1989. ‘The Song of Songs’. In The Literary Guide to the Bible, edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. Toronto: Fontana. Montefiore, Simon Sebag. 2012. Jerusalem, The Biography. London: Wedenfeld and Nichols; Orion and Hachette.

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Noegell, B. Scott and Gary A. Rendsberg. 2009. Solomon’s Vineyard, Literary and Linguistic Studies in the Song of Songs. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. Perkins, Chris. 2009. ‘Playing with Maps’. In Rethinking Maps, edited by Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Ramaswamy, Vijaya. 1997. Walking Naked: Women, Spirituality, South India, Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Rao, V.D.N. ed. ‘Quintessence of Soundarya Lahari’ (Bliss and Beauty Waves of Flood). Available at: https://www.kamakoti.org/kamakoti/books/ Quintessence-Soundarya-Lahari.pdf (accessed on 1 January 2021, entire text, paraphrased and cited in text). ‘Essence of Soundarya Lahiri’, 2017 (accessed 25 January 2021). Rao, Velcheru Narayana, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. 2004. Symbols of Substance. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rao, Velcheru Narayana and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. 2010. ‘History and Politics in the Vernacular; Reflections on Medieval and Early Modern South India’. In History in the Vernacular, edited by Raziuddin Aquil and Partha Chatterjee. Delhi and Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Sarma, R.V.S.N. n.d. The Soundarya Lahiri (accessed 25 January 2021). Steiner, George. 1998. Language and Silence. Yale: Yale University Press. Venkatesananda, Swami. 2005. The Supreme Yoga, Vol. 1. New Delhi: New Age Books. Wilke, Carsten L. 2017. Farewell to Shulamit: Spatial and Social Diversity in the Song of Songs. Berlin: Gruyter. Wolf, Richard. 2006. The Black Cow’s Footprint. Delhi and Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Zemon Davis, Natalie. 1975. ‘Proverbial Wisdom and Popular Errors’. In Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Habitat and Culture   7. Kalpathy Heritage Village: Sacred and Modern   8. Alternative School Education and the Standardisation of Right to Education Debate   9. The Abyss: Covid-19 and Its Implications 10. Diaspora and Memory

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7

Kalpathy Heritage Village: Sacred and Modern Palghat, or Palakkad as the Malayalis call it, is a town that is associated with music, dance, drama and Ayurveda. It is across the blue line of hills that separates it from Coimbatore and the village of Kalpathy is associated with heaven itself. The popular saying goes, ‘Bathe in its river, and you will go to heaven.’ The temples of Kalpathy are famous for their rath festivals. The guide books describe it as a melting point for all the people of Kerala during the period of the Rath Utsavam or temple car festival. Kalpathy is a Brahmin enclave. The Brahmins are Tamil Brahmins. They are said to have arrived there 600 years ago. To avert famine and illness which was raging among his people, the Palakkad Rajav (king) asked his astrologers what he should do. They told him to build a temple. But then, the Rajav could not cooperate with his Namboodri priests or control them, so he invited the Tamil Brahmins. They came from Mayavaram near Tanjavore. Eighteen villages were set up in Palakkad, and the temples were identical to those of Tamil Nadu, except that the gopuram of the Tamil temples is missing. In these temples, the devan is important, while in Kerala, it is the devi who is usually emphasised. A woman from Kalpathy called Lakshmi Ammal went to Varanasi on pilgrimage and got the stone, that is the original stone or shiva lingam, dedicated here in the Kalpathy Viswanathaswamy temple. The Kalpathy village is now a heritage site. For residents like Lakshmi Narayanan, Kalpathy is their home, associated with the temples and the tradition of music. ‘Veda and music are like railway tracks,’ he says, running parallel to each other. He mentions Challakudi Narayan, Mridunga Subbier and Palakkad Mani Iyer. I have already visited the residence of the kinsman of Palakkad Mani Iyer. That gentleman has a large portrait in his house of the famous mridangam player, and when I ask him the history of 171

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the community, he tells me that he has a website! All the details on the website provide the description of Kalpathy, its history and its environs, including the five temples, for every ward has its own temple, and also lies adjacent to the river which forms the boundary of the village. So I have found my local historian. Kalpathy temples are a tourist destination, for their beauty and their cultural vitality. In November, every year, the inner lanes of Kalpathy become packed with residents, visitors and tourists, all of whom are excited by the rituals and the market that springs up for the rath festivals. The huge raths lie in the street otherwise, testimony to the grandness of ritual. Kalpathy consists of a community of Brahmins who are now Malayalis by virtue of their residence, but their original Tamil Brahmin identity is well asserted. They were once agriculturists, but the enclave is associated with pathshala or teaching work, accountancy, Veda specialisation as in chanting and publishing and all fields of education such as literature, music and science. Families have been associated with clerical work as much as with more powerful roles in administration. Residents believe in caste for that is their heritage and their capital, but they do not believe in communalism. Caste, they say, is the classification of actions and duties. They are impoverished by modernism, and yet the poor Brahmin is the icon of hard work and integrity. How do they cope? One of the residents, Ram Narain, tells me that ‘In Kali Yuga, one must be silent and observe.’ He tells me that Hinduism is about meditation, trance, vision, knowledge and the inner voice. Maybe this is why music is such a strong part of the vocabulary of the young and the old in Kalpathy. In the evening, one can hear singing coming from almost every street, and many young children can be seen carrying violins. For Ram Narain’s son, there are four gods who must be worshipped: they are the parents, the village deity, the family deity and the ishta deva (the god of one’s choice). This gentle world was disrupted by the offer of a ‘heritage site’ by the state government, but the residents say that it was not an offer—it was imposed on them without warning. Lakshminarayan says it is the ‘culture of the people’ which is the heritage, and any insensitive display of political power, which does not take community representatives into consultation, will always create problems for residents. As this

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is a highly literate and informed community, many of whom are bureaucrats, clerks and administrative heads, Eldersveld et al. (1968) write in their pioneering classic The Citizen and the Administrator in a Developing Democracy that ‘The greatest pockets of actual, potential, discontent or alienation seem to be in certain social categories of the urban populace and among residents in the large villages which are undergoing a modernization process.’ This is in keeping with an index they have developed, which is the relation between high confidence of the community and low support to policies that are against their interest (ibid.: 52). Roads in Kalpathy were dug up; the open sewage system, which was previously community responsibility, was cemented so that the blockages and general inconvenience are now frequent and cannot be cleared. The government had offered the families 3,00,000 rupees as renovation money, but then said that they would have to move out to accommodate tourists. ‘Who would agree to that?’ Before the heritage papers could be cleared in official quarters, people started selling their houses to builders. So, Kalpathy lost its quaintness and accommodated outsiders in a volume that the water and sewage capacities could not handle. So much of urban planning was done without consulting the residents, who were completely ignored as if they had no will or intelligence, that it leaves the sociologist quite baffled. A heritage site should be protected and conserved, not redone in an untidy slipshod manner with crumbling cement over original granite. There was no interaction between the tourist and the electricity, tourist and water departments. For the inhabitants of Kalpathy, tourism and modernism have meant the suggestion by the state government that their houses be mortgaged for ‘improvement’ (when they love their traditional homes and reside in them), and then given over to the state for use as tourist homes in four or five years! This is so absurd a suggestion that people are left aghast at the idea of a heritage site. A.R. Venkatachalapathy writes that reminiscence of those days are usually about how Brahmins spent their time listening to the Ramayana, Mahabharatham, Bhagavatham and the Puranams, ‘when women’s education was uncommon when villagers were resourceful, stout-hearted and well built’ when women were controlled by their

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in-laws, when Tamil numerals were in use, when transport was not freely available, when snacks such as bread or biscuits were not available (Venkatachalapathy 2009: 40, 41). The significance of engal oor, he says, cannot be minimised. ‘Those days’ and ‘these days’ are often contrasted, and these terms, antha kalam and intha kalam are on the lips of the diaspora Tamils. The concept of home, native place, village, town, city, people of the town, region, hometown all interchange according to the context. The idea of engal oor according to him is of a place which is spatially and geographically present but only exists in memory, for everything has in reality changed. People left their oor in search of work, and then settled down in other towns and cities to earn. What remained was like a sediment, but according to literary writers who documented this, such as Kalki, it was more like a passion, not merely nostalgia (ibid.: 42, 43). Venkatachalapathy comments: Visits to the oor were often limited to making annual trips for temple festivals, to meet ageing parents, sending wives for childbirth or packing off bored children during annual school vacation. The more they were caught in the vortex of urban living, the more accentuated was the feeling of losing their oor and its sense of belonging. In a way it was a double loss, not only was the oor lost because of migration, but also the oor in itself was lost due to social transformation which tended to stare at them starkly during their increasingly infrequent visits (ibid.: 43).

In Ram Narain’s youth, spatial maps were a symbol of the close interaction between neighbours for there was a continuity between the houses. On festival days, the plantain leaves for community feasting would be spread in a single line, and everyone would eat together. The car festival is a replica of rituals performed in the original hamlet, Malayadathura (also called Mayavaram) in Tanjavore. All the gods are celebrated in Kalpathy. There are no boundaries between castes in the Rath Ullsavam. Muslims and Christians have been traditionally present as shopkeepers. The music festival is a national festival that brings thousands into Kalpathy. It is known as the Kalpathy Sangeetha Ullsavam.

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I was in Kalpathy on 14 April 2007. It was Tamil New Year. In Kalpathy, the sense of jubilation was evident in the evening. Because of the temples in every street and the row of shops near the Shiva-Parvati temple, there was a sense of bustling joy. The houses are arranged in this grammam or village in a concentration, a nucleated village, as in Mylapore, or any traditional Tamil town with a temple. Each room leads to another, and in the evenings, the occupants sit on the ledge or even on the road. The afternoons are very hot. That year (2007), the temperature was unusual, but it also rained quite miraculously. The Kalpathy river rushes along at the edge of the agraharam, as the settlement of Brahmins is called. From 4 a.m. onwards, bathers arrive, wash their clothes on the steps, have their baths, and then with towels tied on their head, the women make obeisance at the Bhagyavathi temple. There are two temples side by side on the edge of the river, one to Bhagyavathi, the patron goddess of Kerala, and the other to that constant visitor who never discriminates, Krishna. I ask Lakshminarayan, and his wife, who is the elected councillor for Kalpathy, whether there is a Palakkad Rajav anymore; they reply that ‘Vamsham ondu, Rajav Illa!’ (There is a lineage, but no king.) Fifteenth April is Vishu, the Malayalam New Year, and the culmination of the harvest. There is an honouring of fruits and leaves and flowers. The Malayalis burst crackers continuously since early morning. They bathe at the crack of dawn and go to the temple wearing new clothes, flowers in their hair and are generally jubilant and adorned. Mr K.N. Lakshminarayan, the local historian, who is an elder, believes that the downfall of the Vijaya Nagar empire was accompanied by the north-Indian invasion, a Muslim invasion that caused the Tanjore Brahmins to migrate. ‘The Palakkad Rajav was pleased to see them for this reason, since he, a Royal family member, had a liaison with a tribal woman, therefore, the Namboodiris refused to serve in the temple. The migrants from Mayavaram served in their place.’ Since they were well versed in the Vedic tradition, including mathematics and the scriptural arts, they were welcomed. Mr Krishnan, an eminent lawyer living in Ooty (whose son Dayan practises in the Supreme Court, and who visits the Kalpathy Viswam

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temple, in thanksgiving, when his son was born), says that the Tamil Brahmins who came from Mayavaram were ‘hydraulic victims’. The drought had made them leave their natal territories and being ritual specialists trained in the Vedas, they were welcomed by the King. Legend has it that when crossing Tamil Country they were given Kanji (Gruel) at the border now known as Kanjikode. This suggests they were penniless refugees…. Can these agraharams be settlements of refugees who were unsettled in their native land or was it a planned migration…. How did they bring masons and carpenters to duplicate their villages when the only means of transport must have been a bullock cart? (Krishnan 2010: 58, 59)

The Palakkad Brahmins became well known for the Tamil they evolved with a mixture of Malayalam words, for their cuisine and their contribution to society in every sphere, particularly in government, literature and music. Though they showed their remarkable brilliance in many fields, it was Carnatic music in which they excelled. Chambai Vaidhiyanantha Bhagawathat, Kalpathy Ramanathan, Palakkad Mani Iyer, Mridhingam Raghu, K.V. Narayana Swami to mention a few. Kalpathy has its own Thiagaraja Sabha and it is for over a hundred years conducting Music Festival…. It was said even if you throw an ‘Ammi’ in Kalpathy River (grinding stone) it will float, if you kick a boy, he will sing. This gives an idea of their love for swimming and music. (ibid.: 60)

They were litterateurs and more than sufficient readers. Tamil magazines Kalki and Ananda Viketan sold more copies in Palakkad than in Coimbatore. Strangely only women took to reading Kalki and Ananda Niketan. There was not even an agent for Malayala Manorama, which has a Palakkad edition now. Hardly anyone knew to write Tamil, but almost all knew to read. They wrote Tamil letters in Malayalam script. Kalpathy has its own Book Publisher R.S Vathiyar and Sons. (ibid.)

Since this is a heritage village, there are tourist potentialities that include ritual, music, astrology and Ayurveda.

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Mr K.N. Lakshminarayan, the Elder, says the music festival in Kalpathy was started in 1986. Gigi Thompson was the Collector, and he helped in setting it up. Mr Narayan and Mr Thompson collected money, and the latter was the Chairman of the first committee. T.V.S. Sundaram was the coordinator. Later the government and then the tourism promotion board got involved.

21 May 2008 Before one’s eyes, the landscape changes. Everywhere modernisation brings its own story. It effaces the past without a murmur, or so it seems; the old changes and gives way to the new. The new is sometimes very brash. In New Kalpathy, the old houses in the hamlet are being demolished and new cement and florid paint come in its stead. The street changes its face from month to month. Some people say, explaining the rapid transformation, ‘Only Old Kalpathy is a heritage site.’ Old shops are replaced by new ones. The old people in the agraharam sit outside their porches, looking like the ancient scribes, recording the past in memory. The ancient snake circle near the river has gone. Ancient stones under the peepal tree representing Shiva, Shakti, faceless gods and goddesses as well, snakes and flat stones, are now replaced with a brand new Ganesha. Only three stones remain of the many in the circle, Shiva, Shakti and one cobra. The street is quiet during the day. No one comes out. The agraharam is silent like a ghost town. In the evening, visitors to the temples begin filling the streets, standing at the rims of the temples, worshipping the gods. The shopkeepers are well-stocked traditional grocers. They now keep eggs along with bakery bread. In Kalpathy, traditionally, no one could keep non-vegetarian foods. The bakery sells excellent fresh bread. The most popular place for food is the small shop in the middle of the agraharam, Easwarya Mess, where breakfast and ‘tiffin’, which means savouries at tea time, are served. An old woman sitting in the enclosed verandah of her house smiles toothlessly at me. I stop to talk to her. She makes me think of Michael Ignatieff ’s reminiscence of King Lear from Shakespeare. How dost, my boy? Art cold? I am cold myself

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Where is this straw, my fellow? The art of our necessities is strange, That can make vile things precious. (Shakespeare cited in Ignatief 1984: 41)

‘Has your fever gone?’ the old lady asks me. I smile and say, ‘Yes,’ knowing she has mistaken me for someone else. ‘And are you well? (Sukam anno?)’ I ask her. ‘What well-being can I have at this age?’ she says. ‘I just exist. Whatever comfort I have (sukam) is in my mind. What about you?’ she says to me. ‘Shantam aa.’ (I am at peace.) ‘So how many days?’ ‘Just today and tomorrow.’ We part, with me saying, ‘I’m happy to have met you.’ Diaspora communities recognise the stranger not as alien but as someone familiar, someone passing by, someone who is recognised as different. This difference is celebrated rather than derided. Ghettoisation does not necessarily, in these circumstances, create the stranger as someone to be wary of or keep at a distance. Rather, the person is integrated by virtue of his or her difference. He or she however has the status of a passer-by. In Britain, the foreigner is often brought into society by virtue of his/her ability to contribute to such a society. In such cases, new emigrants are inducted into time-share arrangements, where the care of old people is made a voluntary engagement in return for benefits such as spending time with an older inhabitant and interacting with them for purposes of being part of a community. Posting a letter may receive the gift of repartee and joke, a meal, a language skill interaction, etc. Taking a house guest might mean an enhancement of these in various ways, of which currency exchange is only one aspect. Globalisation has led to new facets of land and capital transactions. The sale of land while regulated has yet resulted in advertising for upmarket flatted housing since Palakkad during the first decade of the 21st century has experienced a promise of boom economy with the establishment of an Indian Institute of Technology and a large eye hospital. Zygmunt Bauman writes:

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Where family and communal businesses were once able and willing to absorb, employ and support all newly born humans, and at most times secure their survival, the surrender to global pressures and the laying of their own territory open to the unfettered circulation of capital and commodities made them unviable. Only now do the newcomers to the company of moderns experience that separation of business from the household which the pioneers of modernity went through hundreds of years ago, with all its attendant social upheavals and human misery but also with the luxury of global solutions to locally produced problems— an abundance of ‘empty’ and ‘no man’s lands’ that could easily be used to deposit the surplus population no longer absorbed by the economy emancipated from familial and no communal constraints: a luxury not available to the latecomers. (Bauman 2004: 72)

There is great poverty in some of these traditional houses, many are derelict. Many are being rebuilt in modern fashion, with cement and kaleidoscopic paint. Love for tradition and love for the past are not abstractions in the face of rapid change of the face of the street in New Kalpathy. Freshly ground coffee, a valued commodity, in this neighbourhood, for instance, is sold by Coffee Day, a modern enterprise. I spoke to the grand old man, Dikshitar. He is the best known and most respected of the vidvans or scholars of Kalpathy. He has milky blue eyes, a top knot and diamonds in his ears. He must be 80 years and more. ‘I wish to write a book on Kalpathy.’ He points to the ledge, adjacent to him, beckoning me to sit. ‘What about?’ ‘It’s history. Can I speak with you?’ ‘You need to talk to old people who know. It’s an old history that goes back and back.’ He makes whorls with his hands, indicating spirals. ‘I’m a sociologist—we record, we inscribe. Everything is changing very fast, so we must describe it. Whatever you tell me, wish to tell me, I will write it down.’ ‘I have no time,’ Dikshitar says. I take his leave and go away. He is a very great scholar, and when we see each other every day, we wave to one another.

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I ask the priest who has come to circumambulate the peepal tree near the Kalpathy river where the snake circle was, and he says, ‘All gone, only three left.’ The guard at the apartments, where I stay, tells me an insane man came and broke the ringed lamp as well as the stones. He crushed the stones with a heavy stone. He damaged the ancient stones at the Shiva temple as well. The treasurer of the block of flats adjoining the river Kalpathy says that Indra Nooyi, the PepsiCo chief, is a Kalpathy girl and has donated to the making of a gyanamandiram or meditation chamber. Nooyi’s grandfather Justice Narayanan was from Kalpathy, so her mother gave 3,00,000 rupees and a plaque which is inscribed in his name. Mr K.N. Lakshminarayan runs a kiosk for telephones and a courier service and is the local historian with a website, kalpathyviswam.com. He is on the managing committee of the music festival in Kalpathy, which is an annual feature, taking place during the Ter or Car festival in November, when the village becomes the centre of attraction for pilgrims and tourists. He says: For the last two years, we have had only Carnatic Music, no dance performances, though, in the early years, we did have dance as well. As you know, dance and music are temple arts. The Car Festival is not yet a National Festival. Puri, Jagannath Temple has achieved national festival status, so has Trichur Guruvayoor. They are conducted on a larger scale. Here it is smaller, but I would say, three lakhs visit in ten days. The decorated cars of our temples come together. The decoration is done with paper pulp, The main car is pushed by an elephant. The people put all their strength, but the elephant necessary for the car is too big.

The festival is associated with commercial activity, and this meets the needs of the villages. For four or five centuries, Tamil Nadu merchants have been coming with cloth, vessels, pulses and return with spices. Now the marketing system has changed, and everything is available everywhere. So the festival provides a market which provides glittering things, which the villagers look forward to—ribbons, vessels, women’s items like bangles and bead necklaces. The Ter festival (Rath or Car) takes place on the last ten days of the Tamil month of Epishi. The rituals

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echo the ones which were typical of Mayavaram (Malayadathura), the original place from which the Kalpathy residents come. Some people continue to visit the ancestral place for every house has a kuladevam, and since rituals to the kuladevam continue, they do return to villages in Tamil Nadu. Some have property there, some have marriage relations. But this is an individual relationship with Tanjore, one cannot generalise. Regarding the music festival, Mr K.N. Lakshminarayan says that committees are formed in June and July. Shamianas (pandals or tents) are constructed in Chatapura. An auditorium named after Palakkad Mani Iyer is a little away from the village. The music festival is a costly business, musicians are invited, but the cost is heavy, and the committee pays 8,00,000–10,00,000 rupees for the 10-day festival. Mr K.N. Lakshminarayan escorts me to the Viswanatha temple. I have never been inside before. He takes me around, where tourists and non-Hindus may go. ‘You have to enter a valley,’ he says. We go down a flight of steps. Everything is in a process of dismantling and construction. The kumbha abhishekam has just been completed. The thatched shamiana has been dismantled, so have the makeshift altars built for the purpose. Huge stainless steel pillars have come up, light pink tiles compose the roof of the building, and ornate woodwork with the images of gods and devotees are to be seen. ‘A lot of work remains to be done,’ Mr K.N. Lakshminarayan tells me. ‘We have spent one crore rupees.’ I’m not a modernist, so I feel a sense of loss that old carvings have been substituted by new ones. Irschick has an interesting discussion on temple renovation, and the inability of Brahmins to engage in farming while hiring others to work on their lands (1994: 80). The inhabitants of Kalpathy believe in change and transformation, Mr K.N. Lakshminarayan is happy and proud of the new temple, and his website (kalviviswam.org/kalpathy) says that a temple according to the shastras must be renovated every 12 years. It is more than 25 years since the last time it was improved upon. There are some old carvings, with wood piled in the corner; there are ancient stone carvings of snakes and gods under a stone pillar. They may be reintegrated later. The carpenters are at work. The temple priests are inside, tending to devotees.

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Interestingly, despite heritage status in Kalpathy, the residents knock down their houses and watch neighbours doing the same. One man sitting outside his house fanning himself in the still evening, the sky still fiercely blue and cloudless, laughed when I said to him, ‘I heard this settlement is 700 years old.’ ‘Is that what they told you?’ Then, very reasonably, he said, ‘Maybe there were people who lived here 700 years ago. These houses are not more than 150 years old, in fact, probably renovated much later, and very frequently. Old houses were made of mud, the living conditions were very bad, there was no air or light, they were like guhas or caves.’ He likes the new houses, says they are convenient and have light and air. A. Satish, in his article on the website newindpress.com (4 April 2008), writes of Heritage Village Turning Nightmare for Resident’s: The restriction imposed on the repairs and alterations of the houses in Kalpathy agraharam as part of it being declared a heritage site was turning out to be a bane for the residents. No one in the Heritage village can construct or modify without a go-ahead from the Municipality in consultation with the Art and Heritage Commission in Thiruvanathapuram. However, the subsidy of 25 percent offered by the Tourism department will be made available only to those who are providing homestays.

The report says that the inhabitants of Kalpathy who find maintenance of their traditional homes expensive are disturbed by their applications for renovation lying for long periods in municipality offices. Kerala now depends on tourism as a non-polluting industry. Much of the beauty of the natural landscape has depended on craft, agriculture, fishing and now information technology, functioning from laboratories. Heritage sites need protection, but so do inhabitants. My own data, as well as A. Satish’s, show that the large amounts of money that have been spent on Kalpathy are not seen as helping the villagers. It is time that inhabitants are taken on as representatives of government committees and collectively have a say about what their future is.

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27 June 2009 The local historian Mr K.N. Lakshminarayan has promised to take me inside the Kalpathy Viswanathaswamy temple since I cannot, as a Syrian Christian, access its interiors without permission. He says that I can circle the interior of the temple like tourists do, but not present myself before the sanctum since that is not permitted. We go inside the temple precincts, which has a shopping area. This, as we have been told, is open to anyone. Inside, there are some residences on either side of the temple (‘squatters!’ according to the trustee, since that is where the Tamil and Malayali divide becomes most obvious) as well as a tailor’s shop and another which sells holy pictures, oil and beads. Rajan Narayanan, a priest doing rituals for the dead, says that Lakshmi Ammal, a widow, had returned from Benaras, given coins to the temple and left the stone there. The stone is a lingam, about six feet tall. It had inscriptions, but now these are gone. ‘We have photographs of the inscriptions,’ a temple spokesman says comfortingly. Since Kerala has a wood tradition, it is possible that the medieval script was not seen as significant by the asari, who polished the stone. On the other hand, it could be that the inscription on the relic stone and the oral history clash. (This would be for epigraphists to find out.) Kalpathy websites discuss the legends about the origins of the temple and its historical dating. Itty Komban Achen, the Palakkad king, was a trustee to the widow Lakshmi Ammal’s wishes that a temple should be supported as a memorial of her visit to Benaras. Kalpathy is the place where Lakshmi Ammal established the lingam from Benaras, and so it is called the Benaras of the South; those who cannot take ashes to Benaras may visit Kalpathy Viswanathaswamy temple for the mortuary ceremonies of their kinfolk. The connection with Benaras continues and Lakshminarayan tells us that in Vishwanath Swamy temple in Benaras, every evening, rituals and songs support the Tamil pilgrims under the umbrella of the Shankaracharya of Kanchi. We walk around the renovated Kalpathy temple. Mr K.N. Lakshminarayan is very proud of the changes, and old ladies coming

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for evening worship congratulate him on the continuous work of modernisation. Every 12 years, it is renovated (or should be) according to him. Only one rafter of the old temple has been incorporated into the new structure. The rest have been built back into the wooden portals of a building like a shed with an aluminium roof at the rear courtyard. They are pretty wood carvings with simple motifs of flowers. Surrounding this, facing the river, is a small sacred garden that is kept scrupulously clean by the old attendant. The snake stones are venerated here. Mr K.N. Lakshminarayan tells me that Kalpathy is a convenient ritual site for many families in Kerala to carry out their funerary rituals. The priests are called Shivacharyas and are trained in the agamams. Originally, they were from Mayavaram, but now some come from Coimbatore. They must be trained in the scriptures, recognised or accepted by the serving priests. The Smartha Iyers, who live in Kalpathy, are not equipped to deal with mortuary rituals. However, they are very learned in scriptures, and there are some very well known Dikshitar families. Nicholas B. Dirks writes: Although there is a general consensus that caste is a retrograde force, there is also widespread acceptance of the social fact that caste is the natural focus of political mobilization and economic redistribution, as well as the somewhat illicit marker of cultural identity and traditional pleasure. Indeed, caste identification is a form of pleasure that negotiates the contradictory faultlines between embarrassment in the face of colonial criticism and nostalgia over the comforts of home. (2008: 293)

We walk towards the river. It is stagnant despite the myth surrounding it, that to bathe in Kalpathy is to know heaven. The river is blocked, silted up, crammed with weeds, sludge and water hyacinths. Who will clean the river? Sand mining is creating a block. Further up, three small dams further obstruct the river’s flow. About the sand miners, Mr K.N. Lakshminarayan only says, ‘One cannot say anything! That is how they make a living.’ I read later in the newspapers that there have been death threats to those who obstruct the miners. Akber Ayub in his web column has written an interesting account ‘Swansong of the Nila’

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which refers to Kalpathy village concerning the problem of a dying river. The Hindu webpage under the title ‘Alternatives to Riversand’ describes the escalating costs of construction and the dying of the Bharatapuzha of which Nila is one tributary (21 April 2007). Further up, garbage blows into the river. After the election, no one has come forward to help with river maintenance. This is unlike Rajasthan, where water debates are always foregrounded.

29 June 2009 I have been buying needles, shampoo and other things from one of those ubiquitous stores in Kerala which are called ‘Fancy Stores’. They have everything from soap and washing powder to artificial jewellery, buttons and baubles and toys. The owner is a man called Sethu Madhavan, who worked in Palakkad station for decades. It is a success story that Kerala knows so well, for he came to Palakkad for work, bought a house and settled down. His son-in-law Achutanandan Prasad is an accountant with an eye for antiques. The house is beautifully embellished with old things, each lovingly carved from wood, bought from demolished Kalpathy houses, from shops and stores in New Bazaar. Prasad used to come to bathe in Kalpathy river when he was a boy and studied in the local school. Each of the objects he has bought, costs a great deal. Sethu Madhavan is extremely proud of his new house, constructed with tiled roofs, marble floor and his son-in-law’s good taste in antiques. They have been written about in a well-known Malayalam magazine. Prasad, the antique collector, says that the Brahmins are going through a decline that happens to many communities during historical periods. The subject of the ‘poor Brahmin’ is of great interest to the community. They have lost traditional occupations and skills, and have become auto drivers, shopkeepers and labourers. Mr K.N. Lakshminarayan tells me his father was a Sanskrit scholar, who could cross over and weave and plait scriptural texts. Jedda, they used to call him. Opposite his house, where now the owner has built a pretty cottage with a charming garden, which has a coniferous tree, there was once a printing press that published Sanskrit works. He says:

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Some people in the grammam may still have copies. In the 1920s, it shut down for lack of buyers and a new press opened. They print texts, but not necessarily Sanskrit. When people say ‘Heritage Village’ today it is limited to taking some foreigners for a walk around Kalpathy. Preservation of culture is not limited to buildings, it is not only about buildings, it is about Vedic culture, about music, mathematics and scriptural knowledge, that is, Sanskrit.

The Tamil Brahmins in Kalpathy remain migrants in Kerala though they have been here for centuries. Mayavaram or Mayiladathura remain extolled, though not many people may visit the ancestral oor, which is a well-known site for cultural and ritual activities existing in Tamil Nadu since the Chola period. The temple is 650 years old, and by the records in the memory of residents, it is the woman Ammal (or Lakshmi Ammal) who established the stone by decree of the king, so that Kalpathy and the river became embodiments of Shiva Shakti of the Benaras Vishwanath Swami temple and the Ganges. Achutanandan Prasad says a dip in Kalpathy is worth half of a dip in Benaras. No one is ready however to take any action over the increasingly polluted Kalpathy river. Prasad says, ‘It cannot be done by a single individual.’ The Kalpathy river is dependent on the Mallampuzha dam for its rapid flow. During the summer months, water is diverted from the dam to the town for drinking purposes, so the farmers and the pilgrims have to manage with the minimal silted flow, trees growing in the middle on garbage islands and stagnation. In a later part of this essay, I will discuss the significance of the Mallampuzha dam for Palakkad and its inhabitants. People still come from far to bathe in the Kalpathy river, and women can be seen carrying their buckets of washing in the early morning, and jumping into the bus with their children and women friends, their long hair washed in the river. Cows are washed in the afternoon. The men come after a day’s work as do boys in the evening. The transformation of a Brahmin agraharam by commerce is very visible in the recent past. Mala, a trained homoeopath, who has been living in the same house for 26 years, says that they have not renovated their home because one has to go to Thiruvanthapuram to get the

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papers to do this. She looks around, where by the day, houses are being demolished and rebuilt. Most of New Kalpathy has become vividly commercial—there is a herbal beauty shop and Ayurveda clinic, two telephone and internet shops, a private milk depot, a food shop (canteen and caterers), document writers, an old age home and its accompanying office. It then merges with the temple complex and the shopping arena which has a series of grocers’ shops very well stocked with provisions, a tailor shop, a ‘fancy’ store for women and children, a kitchenware store, a cycle-repair shop and a Milma or government milk depot, a bakery and three eateries for tourists and pilgrims. There are two pickle stores, one of them run by two ladies who are local residents and sell fried savouries in packets along with pickles and appalams or papads. There are coir and broom dealers, a carpenters’ shop, a publishing house and a clothes store, and of course, well-stocked medical stores. Fruit merchants and flower merchants have pushcarts stationed in front of the temple. There are also two shops selling betel leaf, fruits, lemon drinks and eggs. The last is a representation of changing times since eggs and non-vegetarian food were traditionally not to be found in Kalpathy. However, the former residents are selling their homes to others, and new mosaics of residence and food customs are now to be found. Ezhavas and Nairs, traditionally meat-eating, are found working for the Brahmins in their homes, and one of them laughed and said, ‘In the flats, if the tenant wants to eat and cook meat, the Board cannot say anything.’ However, while diaspora Tamils may indeed eat eggs, there is a circular taken out, if meat or fish are cooked, saying that this is strictly forbidden. Those who eat meat say that the rule is for Kalpathy, not for Vaidyanathpuram, which is outside Kalpathy. At the entrance of the heritage village, near the main road is an eatery, which serves the truck drivers and manual labourers and this sells curried fish on banana leaves to the Malayalis. The flats are taking over the heritage village rapidly, and the skyline is beginning to change, as people return to Kalpathy because it is a sacred site, but still remember neighbourhoods in Delhi or Bombay with affection. I have had interesting conversations with diaspora Tamil women (always perfectly dressed in fine silks or expensive handloom cotton in the calm of their homes), who accompanied their bureaucrat

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husbands to various parts of India, and who speak Hindi with felicity while being nostalgic about the shops in Sector 1, R.K. Puram, New Delhi, which I too know well. Many of them still have children in big cities in India, or more likely in America or Singapore, the citadels of the computer-employed men and women. It is not necessary to cook meals at home in the agraharam of the Brahmins of Kalpathy since there are excellent caterers who bring food to the doorstep on request. Even the cakes sold at the bakery were eggless ‘ghee cakes’. Outside the local eateries which are crammed with clientele, mainly the working-class and middleclass pilgrims from outside the village, the Brahmin men and women congregate outside the ‘mess’ where caterers sell appam, dosa, vada, coffee and all sorts of sweets and delicacies known to them such as shoondal (chickpeas sauted in coconut shreds and mustard seed), sewai (semolina string sweets) and parram vada (mashed ripe bananas in fried batter). As if this were not enough, there are pakoda (vegetable fritters) sellers doing brisk business too. On my first visit to Kalpathy, I made an awful hybrid type language mistake. While my daughters asked for dosas, I said very grandly, ‘Ennika thali vennam!’ I imagined that a plate with steaming curries and rice would appear. It was 5 p.m. The owner of the café looked aghast and then perplexed, ‘Tali vennam?’ I had asked for a plate of food using a Hindi word, but he converted it into a word that Brahmins and Nairs must have had in common for many centuries—a marriage locket. My secular Syrian Christian identity was immediately undercut. A kind woman eating with her husband said, ‘Shaddam vennam’ which means rice. Malayalis would have used the word ‘chor’ since that is what they use in everyday language for rice. Being Malayali, in the erstwhile Madras Presidency, I am often confounded since my earlier work was in Travancore. The questions of language, politics and identity are too large to present here but would include the questions of the historical location of Palakkad both in medievalism and after the merger, when it came to Kerala: agriculture, caste and language are the key motifs of that ensemble. Dikshitar, the most eminent of the men in the agraharam, asked his relative who I was, and the man answered

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angadikar which could mean a resident but was traditionally used for Syrian Christians, who lived in settlements known as Angadi, as opposed to agraharam. The Syrian Christians as pepper merchants were traditionally allowed into the agraharam. It may be noticed that caste as exclusionary is the subject of fiction-writers’ attention, and in modernism, the problem reappears in new ways which are yet to be analysed. Niels Brimnes (1990) speaks of the significance of the relationship between colonialists and the upper castes: In general, it seems most fruitful to look at the relations between colonial power and indigenous inhabitants as the result of a dialogue in which both sides participated. They did not, of course participate from the same motives, and rarely did they participate on equal terms. The specific relations of strength between the colonial power and various indigenous groups determined the extent to which each part could assert themselves, and it seems reasonable to assume that the Indian voices in the colonial dialogue weakened as colonialism consolidated. (ibid.: 9)

Brimnes writes: A prime example of the Indian component in the discourse is the role of the Brahmins as assistants to the great gatherers of knowledge.... It seems that the codification of Indian society was thanks to the continuous possibility of participation from privileged groups of Indians—at the same time, a process of Brahminisation took place. In this process, a particular indigenous interpretation of the nature of Indian society—or one of the Indian voices in the colonial dialogue—began to dominate over other interpretations. (ibid.: 75)

Similarly for the Dalits, Sambaiah Gundimeda writes: For the present purpose, it is sufficient to note here that the SC (scheduled caste) category is part of the colonial project of reconstructing Indian Society in the lines of the Brahminical world view, with the help of both British and Indian officials alike in the service of the colonial state, especially in the context of law and order, education and political representation. (2009: 108)

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Class and caste become read in Kerala through the motifs of dispossession of land and property for the agraharam Brahmins after 1956. Today, the agraharam resembles an emptied-out landscape as the old and infirm remain stationed in picture-book houses for relatives who have made new lives elsewhere but visit for festivals and ritual purposes. Tradition is crystallised in motifs of archival significance—texts, architecture, medicine and music being some of them. The street on New Kalpathy remains empty in the afternoon because of the heat, the bright white light, an unblemished azure sky. During the early morning, it is busy with school children waiting for the bus, parents waiting with them, old people reading newspapers, women drawing the ornamental and sacred kollam. Evenings are markedly different, everyone comes out to chat and talk. Families sit at their verandahs, the women wear jasmines in their hair, the children play and sing and chatter. The men are often comfortable in their white sarongs, bare-chested with only the sacred thread as an upper vestment. The street is a public thoroughfare with fruit vendors and vegetable-sellers, jasmine merchants carrying their fragrant ware on bicycles or on their heads in baskets. Kalpathy is rapidly becoming a flatted area. The residents in the flats which are now elbowed in with the agraharam homes are professionals who have retired from Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi or Chennai. Elderly couples with children abroad or in the metropolis (Bangalore is a hub for professionals’ children, many of whom are in the sciences, industry or electronics) spend their day as other retired professionals in India do, cooking, cleaning, reading newspapers and watching television, chatting to one another over balcony walls or in the corridors. They often visit their children in cities and towns in India and abroad. They hurry back because they are wealthy enough to be able to afford to live in Kalpathy or culturally inhabit one of the most valued places on the tourist map of Kerala. Valentine Daniels has an interesting concept called the ‘territorial-limit-indicator’. This helps us to understand how a map of memories is organised around space. It is similar to Evans Pritchard’s concept of structural time and space-event maps, where lineage and territory combine to coincide in concentric circles

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of expansion. Daniels uses this with regard to the diaspora world of Tamils, but it can be used significantly to understand occupational migrants as much as refugees of war.

October 2009 Kalpathy has the sense of a picture postcard. The colours are always placid and bright. The breeze blows cool as if there was a beach close by. The houses are set in such a way that the horizon extends and is fulfilled by the temples. (As an ethnographer, it seems coincidental to me that I studied Puthenangadi, a Christian hamlet with five churches in 1980 and here in Kalpathy, there are five temples in sequence with its local legends!) Suddenly the empty road ends and there is the warmth of people and activities and lights, colour, sound, fragrances. The solitude of the street and the appearance of the crowds come as a surprise. Somewhere, the mosaic of people, men and women, of different castes and communities appears as a map of Kerala as it is changing with urbanisation. The calm and peacefulness is marked by the appearance of the cows as they desultorily walk down the lanes, rummaging in the occasional garbage consisting of plantain leaves outside the cafeterias; for the rest, the streets are extremely clean, the frangipani and the parjyathi (coral jasmine) lie noticeably on the streets, uncrushed by the occasional passerby. In the evening, the families sit outside sharing gossip, front to front, as the houses are adjoining, the entire street now begins to resemble an open courtyard. Fried vadas and bhajjis or pakodas are most frequently bought, neighbours participating in the commerce of the everyday, together buying what is popularly called ‘tiffin’. Perhaps because they love to eat fried foods, a great deal of this is easily available. Dosas, vadas, bondas (these are seasoned potatoes dipped in a pulse batter and fried) and a delicious sweet called adai, which is rice flattened on a banana leaf, on which is placed cooked jackfruit with jaggery and coconut, then folded and steamed. A carnival sense fills the marketplace every evening. The temples at the end of every street are brightly lit, people thronging them and the children playing. As it happens, a lot of Kalpathy since British times

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has had people visiting from Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi or Chennai, so ‘gol guppa’ and ‘bhel puri’, typically northern delicacies or urban foods, can be bought at the street corner. The bakery has soft springy white bread, warm and delicious, tray loads of fresh bread and buns, appearing at noon, rapidly sold at 4 p.m. along with fruit cakes, treacly and sweet icing pastries in vibrant pinks and chocolates, and the traditional sponge cakes, for which Malayali bakeries are famous. The local eateries also provide rice and sambhar (lentils cooked with vegetables) and gourd vegetables cooked in coconut and served on banana leaves. The Milma supplies excellent hot idlis and vadais to the auto drivers and pilgrims who haunt the shop for good coffee and buttermilk. As they say about Paris, there is never a bad meal in Kalpathy. Eswarya Mess is the most popular of these eateries. Crowds gather in the early morning and late afternoon, happy to get large quantities of coconut chutney with their vadas and bondas. The family living adjacent to the Eswarya Mess has put up a trestle table. Eswarya continues to get its loyal Brahmin clientele, but the vendors next door seem to get enough customers. Especially during the ter or the annual temple chariot festival, profits are substantial, never mind the size or custom of the eateries, mobile (as on pushcarts or pedalled on bicycles) or stable as in cafes.

13–18 November 2010 Kalpathy is ready for the annual Ter or Rath (chariot) festival. The agraharam prepares slowly day by day. Bamboos line the street. On these advertisements come up banners fluttering in the wind. The houses receive the ramshackle additions on bamboo poles with aplomb. Everything looks makeshift. Diwali is over, the Ter festival is what Kalpathy looks forward to with excitement. I visit the Ayurveda doctor who practises in new Kalpathy and has a factory in Ambikapuram, and a hospital too. They have been practising since 1934 in Kalpathy. His father established a practice; now he, his son and daughter circulate between three clinics in Palakkad. The Arogyadayam Ayurveda Hospital is a modern double-storey house with two patients and a clientele of outpatients. The older Dr

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K.K. Kumaran Vaidyan studied with his father Vaidyan K.R. Krishnan Ezuthachatan, who was born in Kuthanoor village of Palakkad in 1903. In 1934, Krishnan Ezuthuchathan set up a clinic in Kalpathy. He also started the production process of the medicines used by the present doctors. Earlier they got the herbs from gatherers and foragers— ‘local people’ who went in for any kind of work, such as gardening, cleaning of courtyards, paddy agriculture and cement labourers. Now the government protects the right of the tribals, so the Arogyadayam pharmacy buys from shops in Palakkad, and there is the main outlet in Trichur, to whom they place orders either by post or by phone. I visit his factory. It is adjacent to his house. His wife Seethalakshmi comes out to greet me. His manager Shakkit takes me upstairs where there is a laboratory that checks each bottle for its purity and alcohol-based content. Downstairs are the vats for boiling, storing, distilling and bottling. The bottles are collected by two or three agents from New Bazaar and then washed with soap and water and dried in the sun. It is a small unit, occupying the floor space of one house of medium proportion (2,000 square feet). Production varies by the day. The output is dependent on all the factors being in place. The laboratory check for each batch is to provide for the standardisation certificate required from the government. Seethalakshmi Amma, who is the vaid’s wife, is rolling the small balls that go into the making of the cough medicine. The manager tells me that he cannot explain the application and use of the medicine since these are very complex and take years to learn. The medicines come from the town, from individual shops and are stored in big plastic buckets. Each herb is classified by its Sanskrit, Malayalam and Latin names. Some herbs look very similar, so they have to be identified by the specialist. The vaid tells me on a subsequent visit (interview of 17 April 2011) that he is one of nine brothers, all of whom are or were practitioners of Ayurveda. Seven brothers practice in Chennai, and he and his brother inherited the Kalpathy practice. The two brothers were very compatible, but the sibling died very recently. They would meet often, these nine brothers, discuss cases and these were very useful for them as individual practitioners.

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The temples are getting ready for the event, with lots of lights, people, shops, despite the drizzle. The sky is very dark blue. The river is flowing fast and sure. It is very different from the summer when the river was a mere polluted trickle, and sand miners abounded. The children cycle in the rain, the girls wearing beautiful long silk skirts. Their mothers are dressed in flamboyant silks too, with diamonds glittering in their ears. The men are no less demonstrative and also wearing new clothes. In every house, guests have arrived; the accumulated slippers show how many are gathered. These rituals serve to integrate the five wards of the village. Tomorrow at midnight, there will be a meeting of raths in the street. Some say tomorrow, 12 November, others say 13 November.

12 November 2010 The women at the river wash clothes late in the morning after the chores are over. The talk is about ration shops, electricity bills; one woman has forgotten to bring her husband’s clothes for a wash. The children have lost handkerchiefs, the mothers are laughing and complaining. One mother says that her son uses his handkerchief to clean the seats of the bus, another says her daughter always gives away everything she owns —handkerchiefs, bangles, even rubbers and pencils, oh, the expense of it all! The men chat desultorily at the back, robing and disrobing with ease. The bathing space is not divided; water weeds grow to divide the river, and while the women are to be found near the steps, the men venture deeper into the water. The women are detached and do not look at the men who are oiling themselves; they slip into their petticoats and stand in the water continuing their baths and clothes rinsing, and scrubbing the younger children who have accompanied them. The young girl, who is already dressed in bright blue silk after her bath, is waiting for her mother to finish and complaining that the ants are following her. The shopkeepers in the street are beginning to stock the ribbons, buttons, clips, bells, bangles and toys. One of them is called Saladri. Portly, dark and handsome, he has spent twenty years in the Gulf, in

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Saudi, as a courier agent, but the work was very hard. So, he shifted back to Wadakencheri and is an itinerant seller of toys at fairs. He says he was in Bombay as well for 12 years. Since he suffered from backache from carrying loads for the courier agency he worked for, he is now happy to earn a little every day, stay with his family and now keep in good health. The day is very hot. The only person venturing out in the verandah is the Dikshitar, the wisest and most learned man in the village. He has grown older year by year. His sole diamond in one ear gleams harshly against his ancient creased wise face. He is the most knowledgeable of the Sanskrit scholars. Other than him, the other person who is outside in the afternoon heat is a woman, making a pattern on the ground. She stops to gaze at the kollam she has made and wonders if she had made it perfectly. A man feeds a cow and chases the bull calf away. The street is completely silent. At the chemist’s, the shop girls are excited. It is the fifth day of the Ter festival. All the gods will gather at midnight at Kalpathy Vishwanath temple.

13 November 2010 The girl who cleans my flat for me gave a graphic account of the Rath festival. ‘There will be crowds. Pushing and pulling. Gold-chain snatchers and alcoholics will move about freely. For the prasadam, people come from miles around. The shops will be busy. Everything that you want!’ However, later she brings me a huge and delicious laddu along with pomegranate kernels, which are a novelty for her. She too has stood with the devout and is happy that it is festival time. People gathered yesterday, the fifth day of the Ter at D.K. Pattamal Street, known commonly as Chattanapuram. The music festival at Chattanapuram is supported by Kerala Tourism. The singers were well known and exceptionally talented. Each day is dedicated to the memory of a traditional musician. The simplicity and joy of the musicians are matched by the devotion of the listeners, mainly residents, the women dazzling in their diamonds and silks, the men urbane and detached. They sit on plastic chairs under shamiana roofing. The local television

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unblinkingly records every moment for the captive audiences at home, mainly old people and housewives. Each pandal is embossed and decorated with the name of a patron. Allukas, the Syrian Christian gold merchant who has earmarked Kerala’s urban landscape with his shops, has emblazoned the Kalpathy Viswanath temple. The industrialist Bajaj has his name up on the Lakshminarayan temple in old Kalpathy. The music pandal is sponsored by Mathrubhumi and the state government to promote tourism in Kerala. The sellers of toys, ceramics, cold drinks, picnic foods like popcorn have started to line the road. Each day brings new vendors, some from as far away as Kodaikanal and Ooty. At midnight, the mini raths with the gods arrive. There are two entries from the streets adjoining the Shiva-Shakti temple, known as Viswanathaswamy, and the other from the New Kalpathy Ganesha temple. The Shiva-Shakti Rath is drawn by white cows with perfect horns. All the white cows look mythic, perfect and identical. They are used to the crowds, though there is some essential pulling and straining. The people have been waiting for hours, sitting on ledges outside the houses or on any odd crook of the wall. There is a sense of excitement; the boys race past on cycles or in gangs, the girls are dazzling in their synthetic clothes with spangles and sequins. A new dress culture has evolved among the children—keds (canvas shoes in different colours), t-shirts with logos and shorts for the boys, ubiquitous churidar-kameez for the girls. Young women wear silk saris with jasmines in their hair; they are accompanied by siblings, parents, in-laws and husband. Families move together in large groups, and many have come from other places.

14 November 2010 Yesterday, the ‘chiefs’ appeared on the dais—the minister for tourism, MLAs, the cultural secretary and police officers. The minister for tourism has sanctioned 3,00,000 rupees for the festival. The propagation of cultural values, the importance of heritage, the celebration of religion, difference and diversity, the adaptation of tradition and culture to the

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internet and other technologies, and the significance of inter-religious and intercommunity dialogue, were the main themes of the talks. After the speeches, Sharrat, a famous film musician who has supported classical music in films, introduced a young musician who sang to a very musically enlightened audience for three hours. He passed the test, and people went home satisfied at 10 p.m. The ter (wooden chariot) is out again, travelling slowly from the Ganesh to the Swaminathan temple. People continue to flow into the streets, a steady river of human beings, all excited by the presence of the gods. The normally quiet street is packed with visitors. Rajshri, who is an associate professor at Anna University, Coimbatore, tells me that during Ter or Rath festival, people continuously visit them, all their relatives and friends gather together. They all eat together; everywhere else, people return home for Diwali and Christmas, but here they assemble for Ter. Her parents have gone to feed the visiting priests and teachers and gurus, vadayar at the temple. Rajshri takes me to her house and introduces me to her cousins and aunts. Everyone has collected here—cousins, aunts, in-laws. The house is large with glass fitted into the tiles. So a lovely dim light comes in. It is a hushed tinted light, keeping the house incredibly cool. There are no partitions, no separations, no alcoves or hidden spaces. In a joint household, everything is shared. Collective or joint living means that every room is accessible to everyone else. At the back, there is a large garden. It extends with adjoining gardens to a boundary wall. Each house stands close to the neighbours, such that the wall of each house shares bricks with the next. The government does not allow renovation of the front part of the house any longer, inside and beyond can be renovated. Rajshri explains the route of the ter: •

• • •

Shiv and Shakti have two ters, Ganapathy has one. They meet in the same street in New Kalpathy with Ganapathy setting out to meet his parents; Ambikapuram has its ter related to Guruvayur; Old Kalpathy has a ter for Lakshmi Narayan; and Chatapuram has a ter for Krishna.

Each ter with its god or gods will meet the people.

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The main function of the ter is to have the gods meet the people. There are people who cannot come to the temple, so once a year, the gods come to visit the people to see them in their homes. Rajshri says that when the Palakkad king invited them to live in the 18 villages, the migrant Brahmins had only one condition: The ter festivals which they celebrated in their village in Mayavaram, should be celebrated in the Palakkad villages in every detail. Rajshri sends me an email circular outlining the said events. It consists of seven pages and has a long list of recipients, all having a personal interest in the Kalpathy Rath festival and mentioning the cultural music festival events by date and event. The festival is described as starting with dwajarohanam (flag hoisting) and ends with rathasangamom according to the publicity circular sent by email to several residents and diaspora Tamilians (http:co114. coll14.mail.live.com/mail/PrintMessages.aspx?cpids+1820f0115bfa-1.4.2011). To quote: This year, the Kalpathy Car festival is scheduled to be held from 8 to 16 November 2010. The Dwajarohanam (Flag hoisting) will be held on November 8th. The Ratha Sangamom will be held before the Viswanatha Swamy temple on the evening of November 16. The main attraction of the car festival is on the last three days, i.e., from 14 to 16 November 2010. On these three days the chariots are ceremoniously drawn through the streets. On the first day (14 November) the three chariots carrying the deities of Sree Viswanatha Swamy temple is taken out in procession. The first chariot is of Lord Shiva and Parvathi. The second chariot is of Lord Vigneswara and the third is of Lord Subramanya. The chariots set out on Grama Pradikshanam, which is the village tour, around 10 in the morning for a small distance and continues its journey to all the 4 nearby agraharams and returns to its base on the 3rd day evening, where the Ratha Sangamom takes place. On the second day (15 November), Lord Maha Ganapathy which is the presiding deity of New Kalpathy temple is taken out on procession. On the final day (16 November), Lord Maha Ganapathy which is the presiding deity of New Kalpathy temple is taken out on procession.

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On the final day (16 November), the deities of Lakshmi Narayan Perumal of Old Kalpathy and Mahaganapthy of Chatapuram villages are taken around the villages on their chariots. In the evening on the final day (26 November) Deva Ratha Sangamom—the congregation of all the chariots—will take place in front of the Sree Viswanatha Swamy Temple.

The raths are covered with flowers and fruits, which are well known to South Indians, such as jasmines, kannakambaram (a small delicate orange-hued trumpet-shaped flower) and of course the maroon banana flowers. Fruits and vegetables adorning the rath are the many varieties of bananas and gourds, and the sense is certainly of a rich and bountiful harvest. They are heavy and need hundreds of people to pull them around, and sometimes an elephant appears for ceremonial purposes to the delight of the crowd. The people are impressed by the beauty of the rath, small boys sitting at the top, delighted to be in a place of power, with their families waving out to them. An occasional small girl who climbs up will hasten down because of the heat and the danger of the rocking rath, which sometimes teeters in the narrow lane. When it rains, the work does not stop, but the men and women continue the hard task of steering the rath with heavy ropes, with the understanding that what they do is for the gods. People and sellers of food and trinkets throng the usually silent streets. The noise level is very high, as those who enter the agraharam are revellers, who increase the decibel of noise with their slogans, both Shaivite, extolling the holy family of Shiva, Parvati and Ganesha as well as in favour of Lord Ayyapa the bachelor god who shuns women and rules Sabarimala. Is there an opposition between the familial traditions of the Tamil Brahmin agraharam dwellers and the large numbers of Malayali youth who enter the streets on festival days, yelling and dancing with great enthusiasm for Ayyapa Sharanam! Not necessarily. Michel Maffesoli writes, ‘Cultures exhaust themselves, civilisations die; everything becomes inscribed in the mechanization of saturation ably described by Sorokin’ (Maffesoli 1996: 114). But if an equilibrium is lost, then destruction only leads to construction.

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He demands that we acknowledge a natural plurality, a plurality of natures. ‘This is what I mean by conflictual harmony since an equilibrium is more difficult to attain when passion triumphs over reason; this is a phenomenon quite easy to observe in both everyday and civic life’ (Ibid.: 115). The vahanam rituals are perhaps the most interesting in appearance because they integrate totemically the animal world and that of the gods and humans.

Postbox Economy and the Survival of Farming Websites on the Kalpathy Shiva Shakti Temple are interesting to the extent that they communicate the significance of the rituals and the importance of tradition. In Rethinking Maps (2009), Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins write about community map formations, where the idea that tourism and ceremonies (political, secular or ritualistic) can inform those who are interested in events. The authors collectively usher in an analysis of why local knowledge and direct experience give us new democratic and local mapping practices, which are narratives towards sharing and emancipation of communities. Pierre Bourdieu in The Logic of Practice (1990) has an interesting discussion on how traditions in the habitus motivate people to action, where the grammar of the future is already in place. Bourdieu argues that ‘the homogeneity of habitus that is observed within the limits of a class of conditions of existence and social conditionings is what causes practices and works to be immediately intelligible and foreseeable, and hence taken for granted’ (1990: 58). When the Brahmins had their lands taken from them in the 1950s since they were not cultivators, they became impoverished. This resulted in the continued migration for work to the big cities in India for purposes of employment. The cultivating castes, including farmers with small holdings and agricultural labourers, are dependent on the nearby Mallampuzha dam, which is eight kilometres from Kalpathy. Appukutty Masha, a retired school teacher, whom I interviewed in 2006, near Kannadi village, explains the process of what cultivation means to him. Love for agriculture is his legacy. The Mallapuram dam,

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which came in 1956, to some extent made the farmers independent of the rain. But the dam lacks water because the monsoon was not sufficient, so the water is sent every 15 days, with regular breaks in between. For three days at a time, the canals have been dry and everything, consequently, shrivels up. Masha loves farming, and since he has a pension, he can manage even in the years when there is loss from drought or unseasonal rain. But what about the others? He says that by putting the fertilisers himself, without hiring farm labourers, he had saved 500 rupees a day. He is 65, but he said he enjoyed paddy cultivation. In 2006, the farmers in Kannadi village had told me that water for the fields comes from the Mallampuzha dam and that in the summer, the water is not released so paddy cultivation suffers. Bettina Weis has given a detailed analysis of how dams for local farmers become located in a complex frame of social relations around the aspect of the land, the sluice and the hierarchies of ownership of tools, motor and land and the biographical notations of actors in the context of redistribution of water (Weiz in Mines and Yazgi 2010: 130). Similarly, Jyothi Krishnan gives us an elaborate and detailed description of wells, ponds, tanks and fields in Palakkad, showing the importance of fields, location and type of harvesting. Padmaja Sasi Kumar who works in the Panchayat of Kannadi says virripu (kharif) from June to September and mandakkam (rabi) from November to December are the two main cropping seasons. Poonja is from February to May, and this is when the farmers are advised to go for short crop durations of 90 or 130 days, or mixed cropping seasons. Farmers are given a schedule of the water-release plan from Mallampuzha. Because of fragmentation of land, unlike the Tamil Nadu farmer, who works with hundreds of acres, the Kerala farmer works with 5–10 cents, sometimes 25 cents, where 100 cents make an acre. Labour charge is too high, so farming is dependent on other activities such as school teaching, employment in private firms or government services. It is supported not only by mixed cropping (coconuts, areca nuts, yams, banana) but also keeping of cattle and fish in ponds or rice fields. Earlier Bharatapuzha had water, now rivers are drying up because of plants and trees which are not cleared, sand mining which aggravates the condition, paddy lands converted into real estate, so

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no water drains into the soil but is cemented up. Fifteenth December onwards, water is released from the dam. Mallampuzha Dam is a recreational site where families gather for picnics. The water supplies Palakkad town with drinking water, so in the summer months, there is no diversion to agriculture, but only piped to the town. The water is locked in, it is a peaceful lake, fenced off from tourists. Against the backdrop of the sky and the Nilgiris, the water is a beautiful expanse of the clear blue. There is an electric-wire trolley car that gives an aerial view of the dam, a snake museum and an aquarium, and a garden that is closed for renovation. There is most significantly a temple to Hidimba, the rakshasa wife to Bhima. Colonel Venugopal, who accompanies me to the dam the first time, believes that the poor Brahmina has no opportunity to believe in secularism. His father was an entomologist in the employee of the king. Once, he asked his father for one anna to buy a pencil of German make, because the poor boys in the class got free books and new pens, but since he was a scientist’s son, he was excluded. He longed for a pen, and his father agreed to give him the money to buy one. When he went to school, his friends said, ‘Let’s buy peanuts instead.’ Before he knew what was happening, he was persuaded. A large number of peanuts were bought and distributed among the boys. Trailing home, he went to his father’s laboratory and asked his father’s assistant to loan him a pencil. When his father came home, he asked to see the new pencil, so Venu showed him the pencil. His father said, ‘This is a glass-marking pencil!’ (interview of 18 April 2011). Sanjay Subramanium, David Shulman and Narayana Rao, while discussing the emergence of folktales in Tamil Nadu, write that the poor Brahmin pits his wit, lies and survives. The folktale is a parody of, not a foil to, high-caste Sanskritic modes. Parody pivots on a hinge that swings in two directions, both towards and away from the subject. Satire works in a linear fashion. Parody mingles domains and superimposes or interweaves contrasting visions, including competing notions of the real. There is real kingship and there is illusory kingship. Both wield power. What are the contexts in which we can see parallel structures at work? (Rao et al. 2004: 21).

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While the legendary Palakkad raja and the Tamil Brahmin are the two possible subjects of analysis, on the other hand, we cannot understand agriculture without the serf, who wins in the end, as land redistribution, party politics and the displacement of Coco-Cola and the appearance of Pepsi have shown in Palakkad district.

23 May 2011 The Mallampuzha dam was established in 1956 as part of India’s development project. It provides drinking water to Palakkad town and water to the farmers from November to March. From April onwards, the dam water is released on specific days. There was a conference going on the day that I visited (19 April 2011). So while I was not permitted to attend the meeting (in fact, it was so confidential that the engineers were locked in), the discussion was around the question of increased surveillance, CCTV cameras, etc. There has been no trouble, the dam site is peaceful. It is a ‘large dam’ for Kerala, but in comparison to others in India, a small dam. People are in a state of agitation because the garden is closed for renovation. There are many people from Tamil Nadu who come to the dam after visiting Kanyakumari, Guruvayur and other temple sites. Busloads of gaily dressed peasants, including newly married couples arrive, and visit the pleasure booths (rides, food, lucky dip and toy stalls.) There is a fish aquarium and a snake zoo. Since it is ticketed, some of the poorer citizens sit despondently but even so, the dam conveys a sense of a leisure zone. On the way back, I caught a local bus to Kalpathy. The old woman sitting next to me was in traditional Syrian Christian dress: white mundu or sarong and white shirt or jacket, and a cotton drape over it, also white. I asked her, ‘Are you alone?’ She pointed to a boy at the back. He was about 14 years old. ‘Isn’t it too hot to come to a tourist site?’ I asked in a conversational tone. She looked blankly at me. ‘I live here,’ she said. ‘Where?’ I was puzzled.

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‘Behind the dam. In a village called Annakallu (Elephant Stone). Elephants still come down the hill. We have to fence it. The agriculture is good. We grow everything that we did in Naadu (that is Kerala before 1956). It’s not hot here, the cool breezes come down the hill. The rain falls, and we have planted many trees. We came from Moovatapuzha and bought the land cheaply 35 years ago from farmers who feared the Dam. I am going for an eye check-up. My son will meet me in Palakkad. The boy accompanying me is his son, my grandson, training to be a kappiar (a deacon). We belong to the Patriarch of Antioch’s party. No, he cannot visit us, since there is a war. (She is referring here to the Iraq war.) He will be killed if he comes by sea. (There could be a cultural signifier here since a Jacobite bishop was killed at sea in 1664.) He could come through the forest. People of all religions, Hindus, Muslims and Christians live peacefully in Annakalu.’ I had to leap off the bus, since the agraharam where I stay, had come. Kurt Iveson writes, ‘For Simmel, then, the stranger is the product of an arrival which has both spatial and temporal dimensions. The stranger has moved from one place to another, at some moment passing across the boundaries of a pre-existing group with the hope of staying. This arrival brings strangers into contact with other individuals to whom they are not connected through ties of kinship, locality and occupation (Simmel 1950 [1993]: 404, cited in Binnie et al. 2006: 72). The diaspora Brahmins have made their homes in every corner of the world, and today, they have had to open their doors to tourists, pilgrims, anthropologists and anyone who can afford to buy a flat or home in Kalpathy. This is not a matter of ‘cultural pessimism’ but the Brahmins’ innate ability to integrate into the new vocabularies of postmodernism without losing their sense of self-validation regardless of personal circumstances.

Bibliography Aloysius, G. 2005. Interpreting Kerala’s Social Development. Delhi: Critical Quest. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Wasted Lives, Modernity and its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bennet, Oliver. 2001. Cultural Pessimism, Narratives of Decline in the Postmodern World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Binnie, Jon, Julian Holloway, Steve Millington, and Craig Young, eds. 2006. Cosmopolitan Urbanism. Abingdon: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford Ashgate, Cornwall: Stanford University Press. Brimnes, Niels. 1999. Constructing the Colonial Encounter, Right and Left-Hand Castes in Early Colonial South India. Surrey: Curzon Press. Brodbeck, Simon Pearse. 2016. The Mahabharath Patriline, Gender Culture and the Royal Hereditary. Cornwall: Ashgate. Chekki, Dan A. 1997. Religion and Social System of the Virasaiva Community. Connecticut: Greenwood Press. Daniel, Valentine E. 2010. The Lost Ur edited by Diane P Mines and Nicolas Yazgi Village Matters. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Dirks, Nicholas B. 2008. Castes of Mind, Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Dodge, Martin, Rob Kitchin, and Chris Perkins, eds. 2009. Rethinking Maps, New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory. Abingdon: Routledge. Eldersveld, Samuel J., V. Jagannadham, and A.P. Barnabas. 1968. The Citizen and the Administrator in a Developing Democracy. Dallas: Scott Foresman and Company. Firth, Raymond. 1963. We, the Tikopia. Boston: Beacon Press. Gundimeda, Sambaiah. 2009. ‘Madiga Dandora: A Social Movement for Rationalisation of Dalit Reservations’. In Dividing Dalits, edited by Yagati Chinna Rao. Jaipur: Rawat. Ignatieff, Michael. 1984. The Needs of Strangers. London: Vintage. Irschick, Eugene F. 1994. Dialogue and History, Constructing South India, 1795–1895. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Iveson, Kurt. 2006. ‘Strangers in the Cosmopolis’. In Cosmopolitan Urbanism, edited by Jon Binnie, Julian Holloway, Steve Millington and Craig Young. Abingdon: Routledge. Krishnan, K.V. 2010. KVK’s Take, Honesty Is Still the Best Policy. New Delhi: Dayan Krishnan. Maffesoli, Michel. 1996. The Time of the Tribes, the Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. London: Sage. Mines, Diane P. and Nicolas Yazgi, eds. 2010. Village Matters: Relocating Villages in the Contemporary Anthropology of India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Morris, Lydia, ed. 2006. Rights, Sociological Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge. Muthaiah, S. 2009. ‘It’s Time to Put Down Memories’. In Biography as History, edited by Vijaya Ramaswamy and Yogesh Sharma. Delhi: Orient Blackswan.

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Oommen, T.K. 1972. ‘On the Distinction between Micro and Macro Studies’. In Beyond the Village, edited by Satish Saberwal. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Perkins, Chris. 2009. ‘Playing with Maps’. In Rethinking Maps, edited by Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins. London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis. Prasad, Leela. 2007. Ethics in Everyday Hindu Life, Narration and Tradition in a South Indian Town. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Ramaswamy, Vijaya and Yogesh Sharma. 2009. Biography as History, Indian Perspectives. Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Rao, Yagati Chinna. 2009. Dividing Dalits, Writing on Sub-categorization of Scheduled Castes. Jaipur: Rawat. Rao, Narayana, Sanjay Subramanyum, and David Shulman. 2004. Symbols of Substance. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rude, Georges. 1974. ‘Paris and London in the 18th Century’. In Studies of Popular Protest. London: Fontana. Saberwal, Satish, ed. 1972. Beyond the Village, Sociological Explorations. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Visvanathan, Susan. 1993. The Christians of Kerala, History, Belief and Ritual among the Yakoba. Chennai: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. The Children of Nature, the Life and Legacy of Ramana Maharshi. Delhi: Roli Books. Venkatachalapathy, A.R. 2009. ‘Making a Modern Self in Colonial Tamil Nadu’. In Biography as History, edited by Vijaya Ramaswamy and Yogesh Sharma. Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Weiz, Bettina. 2010. ‘The Man Makes the Village Makes the Man: The Story of Varadan, the Common Irrigator of a Village in Northern Tamil Nadu’. In Village Matters, edited by Diane Mines and Nicolas Yazgi. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Williamson, Dominica and Emmet Connolly. 2009. ‘Their Work: The Development of Sustainable Mapping’. In Rethinking Maps, edited by Martin Dodge et al. London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis. Youngsters’ Association, Newkalpathy, Palakkad: www.kalpathyfestival.blogspot.com. Zimmerman, Francis. 2009. ‘A Hindu to His Body: The Reinscription of Traditional Representations’. In The Body in India, Ritual, Transgression, Performativity, edited by Axel Michaels and Christoph Wulf. Berlin: Paragrana, Internationale Seitschrift fur Historische Anthropologie, Akademie Verlag, Freie University.

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Alternative School Education and the Standardisation of Right to Education Debate

Fig. 8a Children are integrated into organic farming practices in everyday classroom contexts in Marudam Farm School, Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu. 2011. Copyright: Author.

Fig. 8b Arun Venkatraman, the ecologist and currently President of the Arunachala Reforestation Society, takes a class with children of the Marudam Farm School, Tiruvannamalai. An engineer by training and a founder member, with his wife Poornima, of the alternative school, he is able to communicate ecological precepts to schoolchildren at an early age. Tiruvannamalai, 2009. Copyright: Author.

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Fig. 8c In the school van, with their teacher Poornima (and founder member of Marudam Farm School with a team of friends), the children set out for a new day at school. They learn to play together, garden, sing, practise yoga, learn crafts, along with reading and writing, maths and science and also go for horticultural expeditions to other areas nearby on school trips. Close supervision of children and sponsoring remain crucial to alternative schools trying to bridge the gaps between indoor and outdoor learning, and social categories of race, class, caste and gender. Tiruvannamalai 2011. Copyright: Author.

In this chapter, I am concerned with how school education in the 21st century raises important questions about the globalisation of village and forest communities. Spiritualism is one aspect of the platforms where the new questions of pedagogy and social service are poised. Ecology presents another facet. The paper presents data from two contexts which are being mapped by the author in terms of educational practice and innovation in a small town in Tamil Nadu, where local and foreign are placed on a common web of shared interests in education, supported by Tamil Nadu’s success story in ‘Education for all’ which was seen as the platform for social mobility and well-being. Paul Ricoeur in a dramatic essay titled ‘Work and the World’ defines the polysemy of the world in terms of multitasking and the significant role that dialogue plays in this. The mechanistic world is charged by the potential it has for speech and memory (Ricoeur 1965: 205). He draws strength from Socrates, who, he says:

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... fought the battle of language over the meaning of the word ‘virtue’, that is to say, the good in man. In opening the field of the possible, the world opens also that of the better. Henceforth the question is posed: what does my work mean, that is to say, what is its value? Work is human work beginning with this question concerning the personal and communal value of work; and this question is a matter for the word. (Ricoeur 1965: 208)

Ricoeur thus gives to both work and conversations a profound dignity. By prefacing this essay with the optimism of faith in the world, I wish to discuss the relationship between ecology, community and education. Since information technology points out to us that we are human, despite machines and their overlordship, when it comes to labourpower, the new sociological problems are about identity. Biology, health, resources—both human and monetary—are questions of survival. Soper asks us importantly, how do we look at progress? How do we analyse ecology and ecological politics? (Soper 1995: 5). What is nature? Unlike Levi Strauss, who raised the problem of nature and culture very poignantly for us, but then went on to describe women as ‘valuables’ in interactive systems of marital exchange and politics, Soper’s preoccupations pertain to the limits of nature and the necessity of valuing, conserving and recognising our dependence upon it. She emphasises the importance of recognising ethnocentrism in the debates. Thus ‘nature endorsing’ or ‘nature sceptical debates’ must be analysed (ibid.: 8). She believes that these varied interpretations of nature have political consequences. She argues that the convention has been to divide civilisations into those which are ‘developed’ and ‘the other aspect is defined as primitive, bestial, corporeal and feminine’ (ibid.: 10). This aspect of the debate has been well covered by Ivan Illich, Maria Mies and of course Hannah Arendt. All these thinkers have constantly communicated to us that it is important to be attentive to questions of human rights, citizenship and the moral questions that biology raises for us. Work and the right to a healthy life are of crucial significance, particularly when it comes to the issues relating to women and work. What about the rights of peasants and tribals in this regard?

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Kathleen Morrison in her essay ‘Pepper in the Hills’ considers the role of tribal communities in the Western Ghats in the production of pepper, so valuable for purposes of trade with the west right up to the early 20th century. She describes these uplands people as being hunters, farmers, pastoralists, even bandits as repudiating the idea of ‘simple aborigines’ (Morrison 2014). Tamarind for fish and pepper for everyday use is produced in the small kitchen gardens of the Malayalis. Logan’s Malabar has been a valuable text for those who wish to understand the attachment to the land that Malayalis have had traditionally. How then shall we think about foresters and their present location in globalised contexts? Tourism is one aspect, the other is survival in their habitat in the manner in which they are accustomed without being exposed to predators, who are culturally, politically or ideologically vested with powers to displace forest peoples. I wish to use the term forester since this takes into account all those who make biodiversity their concern. It might be relevant here to look at the website of the Australian aboriginals and Kerala aboriginals where the similarity between them as a racial type has been communicated and endorsed. Colonial, as well as tourist, photography has raised many issues regarding the presentation of the self vis-à-vis the photographer and his or her subjects. Ramachandra Guha refers to the contemporisation of tribal studies by writing about the painter J. Swaminathan, who was the curator of the Bhopal museum. He was a man who had admired Verrier Elwin; so, he sent out 30 students to recover and learn from the natural archives of the tribals, namely their homes. Guha writes: ‘The students fanned out into the forests and uplands while Swaminathan himself headed for Patangarh. Here he found one house decorated with the most vivid portraits of birds in flight and tribal deities in a zestful mood’ (1999: 323). Bharat Bhavan built its collection around this artist, Jangarh, who was a Pardhan from Elwin’s village and related to his wife Lila. In contrast, perhaps, is the story of the tribal artist trapped in a modern Japanese art gallery, far from home, commissioned to produce ‘tribal art’ but destined to die homesick, alone, desperate and by his own hand.

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Much of the questions of tribal culture in the 21st century swamped around the problems of nation-state politics, arguments for integration and assimilation, quests for nation and sovereignty, and the commercialisation of their territories and products through tourism, and the forces of globalisation, including accessibility to territories by police, administrators, hoteliers and political parties. When it comes to the question of the forests, tribe and caste communities may be severally divided or interlaced with shared interests. Many of the new problems regarding the reading of caste, in the case of village communities and peasantry, has to draw from political scientists and historians as much as sociologists. Sociologists have tended to stay with the categorisaton of caste within fieldwork studies. The enhancement of the varna model in terms of the continuous reading of jati as the established practice for the 1980s and 1990s has been valuable. Village studies have been substituted by a variety of area studies where caste and class have been analysed in terms of livelihood patterns. The best example of this kind of work is by M.S.S. Pandian, whose Brahmin and Non-Brahmin has given us new indexes for reading caste politics in terms of the grammar of mobility. Similarly, the corpus of work associated with Satish Saberwal has defined the varied locations of power in the last 100 years. How can we understand domination, particularly when it appears through bureaucracy and law? What happens to caste and class and religious identity when tradition is re-read through the map of colonial interventions? In this context, we may benefit from Ananthamurthy’s reading of the co-existence of time, where, in a public lecture given at NMML in the early 1990s, he spoke of each segmentalising his/her experience and identity. Orthodoxies and the right to free choice concerning marriage, food practices and choices, occupation or companionship alternatives intermesh in contradictory but not always problematic ways. Kumari Jayawardena in Erasure of the Euro-Asian (2007) refers to the poly-vocal voices, the blurring, highlighting, amnesias or stridency in the choices people make about recalling their past and their intentions, for the future, which is varied. Many sociologists now use narrative analyses to explain processes such as racial

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mixing or varieties of hybridities to understand globalisation. These methodologies steeped in self-proclaimed bias such as feminism or Marxism, Dalit or right-wing sociologies, all require some alertness to the matter of objectivity in the social sciences. Consider, for instance, Paul Gilroy’s classic reading of race relations in the modern world, where questions of being what he calls Between Camps (2004) is a routine aspect of existence. He returns to Fanon’s preoccupation with ‘epidermalised’ embodiment, going on to argue that it is the reciprocity between environment and the body that we must be concerned with. Internal cannot be identified with genetic but where reciprocity is the key ensemble of relations between nature and culture. These are very old debates, where the ‘curse of racial domination is the condition, of being black, but of being black in relation to the white’ (ibid.: 40). The ghettos of tribal peoples in reservations often resemble the concentration camps as a ‘novel form of political administration, population management, warfare, and coerced labour’ (ibid.: 61). If there is a mutuality between human beings and culture, how do we understand this relationship in modernism? We know that Max Weber’s methodological call to stating one’s bias before proceeding to explain a social phenomenon or the directive to keep politics outside the classroom has been of great significance. Similarly, Geertz’s call to believe in the task of objective social science is despite the calling to art, creativity, spontaneity and expressivity is well taken (Geertz 1973). Feminism has liberated many spaces of social documentation once rendered invisible or silent. Genealogical maps, questions of land ownership, ghettos having a majority of women as heads of households because of issues or work or displacement, all draw our attention to the problem of gender and identity. New questions regarding urban space are generated through media analyses, which includes film, photography, advertising the world wide web, and new forms of bureaucracy and domination. Analyses of citizenship rights and new forms of democratic judicial enquiry are pertinent to the questions of reading urban space. One of the most interesting debates is around the problem of the peasantry as it appears on the map of urban life and factory production. Sociologists

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and historians have proved over and over again how the factory worker is drawn from peasant or tribal background. Who is the immigrant to the industrial belt? Special economic zones and the issue of confrontation between displaced peasantry, political parties, mafia bosses, provides many issues that 21st-century Indian sociologists have to encounter. Exclusion refers to large masses of people being victims of the privileges of development, while their labour may be used to manufacture the means of production. Human Rights Watch groups have always been concerned with the problem of the servitude of the Indian masses to the state, and yet we know that the poverty of the large mass of the Indian people is matched by their resilience and their ability to shake up the government in power through the electoral process. Many of these questions are raised in Paul Graves-Brown’s collection of essays where the authors consider material culture as a problem not just of ideas and relationships, but with regard to objects and things, where the human body may also be seen as an artefact. Things according to him have life histories—technologies, phase of invention, commercialisation and adoption. Artefacts are manufactured, used, discarded, preserved or reused. Bruno Latour (2000) uses the function of the key to understand what it means to be locked in, locked out or to be in a state of being controlled or innovating ways to escape control. He writes that when it comes to material culture we must look at ‘circulations, sequences, transfers, translations, displacements, crystallization’ (Latour in Graves-Brown 2000: 18). He says, ‘Consider things and you will have humans consider humans, and you are by that very act interested in things. Bring your attention to humans, and see them become electronic circuits, automatic gears or software’ (ibid.: 20). This depersonalization of knowledge through the customs of war zones and postmodern worlds help us understand how individuals become mere atoms to be observed on television or computer surveillance screens, having little identity other than their visibility. Mediation for Latour is a process of how networks are created. In the following section, I will look at the role played by activists and writers in the problematics raised for subsistence farming in relation to the state.

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Activists and the Greens Movement In a seminar held at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi, in February 2009, the Kalpavriksha, a well-known Delhi-based organisation, interacted with government officials, journalists, activists and university scholars. It is this intermeshing between various bodies of society that promotes a healthy and optimistic view of the world. Checks and balances, support and questions of criticism and free speech which is disciplined in its motive while being completely judgmental are the signs of a free society. Kalpavriksh and Grain brought out a publication for public discussion ‘6 years of the Biological Diversity Act in India’ at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in February 2009. They write in this text, that: Human interactions with biological resources are determined by cultural contexts, religious beliefs and economic considerations. The diversities of local practices through which people spiritually revere, carefully select and collectively nurture diversity, comprise the means of managing these natural life forms. These practices aim at achieving a delicate balance between the need to use nature’s resources to meet absolute needs and allowing for the regeneration of natural systems. There are, however, different world views, which seek to harness natural systems often resulting in its over-exploitation. The term ‘diversity’ then becomes a ‘resource’ which can be accessed marketed and controlled. This is where conflicts develop, between users of natural resources, precipitating at both ideological realms and practical instances. (Koli et al. 2009: 1)

Implicit in this Act of 2002 and the Biological Diversity Rules, 2004, are certain key dimensions including the ban on transfer of genetic materials outside the country without permission, prohibition on claiming patents on Indian materials without permission, control of the collection and use of materials by Indians, but greater freedoms for those communities traditionally engaged with these tasks, measures for research use, joint research with consequences for monetary benefits (national vs local interests), provisions for conservation and protection, provision for local communities to be involved

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in the manner of disposal of resources, protection of indigenous traditional knowledge, regulation of the use of genetically modified organisms, setting up of national, state and local biodiversity funds to support conservation and benefit-sharing, setting up of biodiversity management committees (BMC) at local, village and urban levels, biodiversity boards at the state level and the national biodiversity board at the larger integrative level of the Indian state. Kanchi Koli, presenting the report, asked for the collaborative interaction of local peoples, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), government and the intelligentsia. I now come to regenerative forest policy and its success in the case of Tiruvannamalai, a temple town in Tamil Nadu where I had been actively engaged in urban studies for the decade 2000–2010 (Visvanathan 2010).

Annamalai Reforestation Society In Tiruvannamalai, the case of peasantry and afforestation has several dimensions, for, at one level, it is landless labour that is employed by the greenings association to plant saplings. Their wages are low and they are local grasscutters who are in the pay of the association. The Annamalai Reforestation Society has a board consisting of several members who appear annually for meetings. Yet the volume of work done in spite of this low-profile attitude is substantial. It is dependent on donations from visitors to Ramanasramam, and the guiding light of the association is an old couple, Mahalakshmi and Suryanandan, who concern themselves with the day-to-day arrangements of the nursery and the sapling transplantation. J. Jayaraman, the asramam librarian, has also been centrally involved since the gift of the land for the nursery was made by a friend of the Ramanasramam, who inherited some money from her father and told JJ that she had never owned land. Once the land was bought, she transferred it to society. In some senses, it is like a miracle. However, the real spirit behind the afforestation programme has been Abhitha Arunagiri, who has, according to V.S. Mani (one of the trustees of the Ramanasramam), been the single person for 30 years most

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involved with reforestation. It is her story, which is central to this tale, so I shall be using some of her letters and documentation on the web to communicate how efficacious her work has been. In 2010, she creatively worked with school children and housewives, mobilising support from visitors, cafe owners and caregivers of various kinds. It is important to note how variegated the term ‘peasant’ can mean in globalised contexts. Those who stand for commerce and overbuild in Tiruvannamalai have stakes in saleable land as farmers or merchants, those who plant trees for ecological sustenance also are tillers of the soil. Resulting from the problems of commercial overbuilding, there is tension in the town because the contestants will be set up against one another. The Ramanasramam withdrew from a court case over greening vs over-construction since it too had built an archive and a large library, which house, according to official accounts, 80,000 volumes. First, there was only the hut and after that, the thatched buildings of the 1940s and 1950s. The urban landscape is continually reconfiguring depending upon the needs of residents. Abhitha Arunagiri has contributed substantially to the greening of Arunachala. Her latest venture is to get the schools in Tiruvannamalai involved. I have since 2001, directly or indirectly, been interacting with Arunagiri’s methods of greening. She lives in the local neighbourhood of the holy mountain in a pretty house overlooking the mountain. Most of the time, she interacts with the residents of the town in their formal or informal contexts of work and home. Her most recent strategy (since 2010) has been the use of the parade and carnival, of gathering children together under the umbrella of their respective schools to circumambulate the holy mountain. I present my field notes for October 2010. In 2011 October, a bicycle rally was held by the integrated schools participating in Tiruvannamalai to highlight the ecological dangers of plastic and refuse around the mountain Arunachala. My fieldwork notes are given below. On 10 October 2010, the morning began early, with the children of several local schools, and some from Bangalore assembling in the Children’s Park very close to Ramansramam. Arun, one of the key figures in the greening movement in Tiruvannamalai today, was at

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the gate, giving caps with sun shields to the volunteers. The children first watched a play by the Tiruvannamalai Learning Centre children (the school is now known as the Marudam Farm School), each child concerned with making a statement about the danger to the woods. Ecological consciousness is raised through songs, plays and poems. The banners are few, but the number of children with their teachers is about 1,000. There are 200 volunteers. They are in a jubilant mood, with some of their faces painted in totem masks, full of eagerness for the walk to begin. They walk in orderly phalanx, the sky clear of clouds, it is going to be a hot day. The traffic stops for them to pass, the teachers make sure that they do not wander. Krishna Sampath, a research scholar at JNU, tells me that the link between forestry and farming is much closer in Karnataka than in Tamil Nadu. He says that in the Malnad region, which is a lot like Kerala, the residents do not use plastic, tend not to accumulate rubbish, and prefer local sweets and cool drinks rather than those produced by multinational companies. The children on this awareness parade in Tiruvannamalai, walk for 7 kilometres and then stop to eat lunch. The children were given samosas to eat, but there was a rush, and the boys crowded the girls out. Arun says, ‘Next time we will give each child a bottle of water, and a food packet separately, so that the children do not have to squabble for food.’ The children were seated a second time at 11 a.m. and given bananas and when they strewed the field with waste, volunteers cleared up after them. The children walked in orderly groups with the volunteers protecting them from the traffic. They were happy to be out and tended to stay in friendship groups, chattering and laughing. The five children who routinely disturbed the group were caught in time as they tried to take handfuls of drying peanuts or millets being sunned on the pavements. When they spliced off from the group to smoke cigarettes, the school teachers immediately caught them and sent them back into the group. Seven hundred children had come from one school, but they had only a few teachers guarding them, so there was some panic on that front. The policemen had not arrived either, though it had been promised that a contingent would be sent to protect the children from the traffic. Abhitha says the children broke ranks on reaching the point after 9 km, where the play with Arunachala village children was staged. The

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girls sat quietly, watching them play, while the boys got bored and ran hither and thither. Arun did not tell me about this, clearly because it was the same set of troublemakers who had been chastised earlier. The walk for awareness had been a success as far as the organisers were concerned, and they intend to repeat it every year.

Earlier in the year, I had spent some time with the children of Tiruvannamalai Learning Centre (now known as the Marudam Farm School), which epitomises the integration of children of different backgrounds in holistic learning. My fieldwork notes are given below. I catch the school bus at 8 a.m. from the Children’s Park on 5 July, Monday, 2010. The teachers are already there, at school, getting things ready for the children. We go on a walk with the nursery children, which takes us through the fields, and then near a mooing cow and a very raucous crow, we sit down on an outcrop of rock. The children are really small and both Poornima and the teacher’s aide are very careful with them. However, when they need to cut the mosambis (citrons) they have brought along, they find that the knife is missing. The children wait patiently while two of the children aged seven and five go to borrow a knife from a neighbouring farm house. They appear almost immediately, with one of them carrying a large wooden log with a curved knife attached to it and the other with a more modest kitchen knife. One of the interesting things about the children is that they are quite fearless. The teachers too do not excessively protect them in the way that urban mothers do. Arun, Poornima’s husband, tells me that they have found that the children in their school, however young, are able to cope with the terrain—they go out and do things, are comfortable with the rocks, and are ready to slither and jump, whereas the other children, where physical training is seen to be a chore, whom he takes out for treks in the hills are completely unfamiliar with the relation their bodies have with nature. ‘Teaching must be kinaesthetic,’ Arun says. He believes that the tactile quality of everyday tasks is important for the children to work with their environment. These are local children,

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and among the nine Tamil children, only one is a Christian. There is a tenth child, a little boy of four from Denmark. His brother is an older child and provides him with the sense of security that he needs when he comes into the school every morning. Within the hour, however, when he has started playing with the other children, he begins to adjust, usually by pushing the other kids around, till he is reprimanded. His parents are interesting people—his father is a Danish pastor, and his mother is a social worker; both are connected to a dialogue centre called Quo Vadis, which is very close to Ramanasramam. On Thursday, 8 July 2010, I accompany the children and the teacher’s assistant Pari Pooranam to a little pond in the Arunachala inner path route. The inner path is Ramana Maharshi’s quiet route, away from the crowds. It is referred to as ‘The Direct Path’ and is very different from the noisy bus and car and truck routes which always have a cacophony of horns blaring. On this direct path, the sounds of birds predominate. There is a Children’s Garden, where an artist works with enamel paint to recreate the specific birds and animals that may be found in the woods. He is a gifted signboard painter whose skill is in imitating the artwork found on the world wide web, with regard to the scientific attributes of the fauna that he captures on rocks with enamel paint; but when it comes to the natural background, he draws from direct observation. Arun joins the children taking them to the platform where the museum is being constructed. The workers come out to watch. The children sing two Tamil songs, two English songs, and then divide up into two groups. The older children go with Arun, and the nursery children with Pari Pooranam and me, and Anna who is the mother of SK and his brother (the Danish boys), accompanies us. She is standing in for a regular teacher who is absent that day. As soon as we reach the pond, the children take off their clothes and jump into the water. The shyest and quietest of the children are in the pond, shouting and screaming, and before long, they are completely engrossed in various games. There is something innocent and pleasurable and primaeval about the scene; it seems strange there is another world outside which worries about the future, about the killing fields of modernity, about the variety of ways in which

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children can be exploited. There is here a slow and tranquil sense of time. Pari Pooranam dries them when they come out of the water, first washing them in an upstream part of the water. Arun and the older children arrive, having walked over a longer more difficult path, and they are quite surprised to see the little ones in the pond enjoying themselves in the water. They continue their trek, with Arun explaining the lay of the land, the names of plants, and the character of animals and birds. In the evening, I go to see Anna at her home, where her husband tells me that they have 100 schools, that the state supports them, that their staff is paid by the state government. The Danish mission is very well thought of, and he says that they never have any trouble from the local people, all of who are very well disposed to the mission. There is no active missionising, in fact, their numbers have remained constant, and the only increase is by children born to Christian families. Nicolai is happy in Thiru, he joined the church as a pastor because he was close to some priests back home, and his wife shares his interests. Yet the work does mean that they are away from home for several years. Schooling in TLC (Tiruvannamalai Learning Centre, now Marudam Farm School) has been wonderful for the boys, and they seriously believe that what TLC achieves is quite unusual. He phoned the director of Quo Vadis who agrees to meet me in the evening at 5.30. The director is called Joshua Paul and is busy not just with Quo Vadis as a dialogue centre but also with the integration of the 100 schools under his care, which are known as the Arcot Danish Mission schools. Before heading to see him, I drop in at the Amman café, where the owner Kannan is a friend of the ecologist Abhitha Arunagiri. Ramesh, the hands-on man for the team, also arrives. Kannan says he no longer has time to do the active work he once did for the Kattu Siva Plantation (Abhitha Arunagiri’s Trust) because he needs to make a living. The trust took up too much of his time, he enjoyed it very much, but things being what they were, he needed to concentrate on the rooftop café. Its lean season is now over, and on Sunday, 11 July, he would be reopening because the foreigners would be returning to Thiru. He serves mainly fruits and salads and soups, and it’s advertised as an organic café, which sources most of its materials from Kodaikanal. He has two young women who cook and serve, and for five months while

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the café was closed, he was working as a gardener or any work at all that he could get. Abhitha says he is the most honourable person that she knows and has left him in charge of her Trust plantation. Kannan says he cannot read or write, so he summons Ramesh, who appears with some of the papers of the plantation, including the information that I already had that they have not been able to pay the workers for the last few months. There is no money, and the work is slow. I ask Ramesh about the method of biodynamics that they are using for enriching the land. He has a degree in Biochemistry and then went to Mysore to the ISCON camp to learn the method. It is a four-day course. The method is to access the horn of a dead lactating cow, fill it with cow dung and bury it in the earth for six months; after that, it will be exhumed, an ash grey powder, which then 500 grams added to 1 litre of water will produce both fertilisers as well as pesticides for one acre of land. When I ask whether he will be able to access many such horns, he says that he has left word with all the local farmers, that when a lactating cow has died, he will be informed and allowed to collect the horn. JJ the librarian, says that Abhitha is now in a state of disquiet because she lives in Australia and is not able to understand the Indian system. V.S. Mani says the same thing. He says that when she lived here, she was able to understand how slow things were and to be creative within the ambit of the given. Ramesh says that while she is in a great deal of distress about how slow the bank account for foreign funding is in terms of being opened, she has no idea how difficult it is to do things without paying a bribe. Since she refuses to pay a bribe, she will have to wait the three years it ‘normally’ takes. Kannan, too, says that where the Kattu Siva Plantation is poor, there is never any money which is wasted, thrown about or misused. On 5 July 2011, I meet another of Abhitha Arunagiri’s close associates. He runs the Arunachala Village School, which is seven kilometres from Ramanasramam in Vediyaptannur village. The trust was set up in 1996 by a Swiss lady, and then Madan took charge. The school charges no fees for the local children. Madan sees education and health as primary requisites in a democracy. The trust has a mobile clinic that treated 33,000 people last year. They serve 45 villages and have covered 47,000 people with health care. The school is with teachers and students very involved with the tree

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planting programme for the betterment of the local population and has contributed plays as well as songs which are integrated into their routine learning practice. The greatest problem that is felt by the Arunachala Village School is the preying nature of local bureaucracy, which does not clear papers without a bribe. Since they have refused to pay bribe, they have not got their registration for this block yet; it was due in April, but the concerned office requested a meeting on a Sunday with lunch provided and a bribe. The school faces continual harassment on this count. Kannan and Madan are Abhitha’s assistants and both ecology and community service are important for them as duties that they take to heart. Madan says his father, Abhitha and Maharshi Ramana are his gurus. Here too, the children are given a space of freedom and discipline. There is the rigour of timetable and collective learning, on the other hand, the respect for the teacher is accompanied by an instinctive love. They are unafraid of the Principal, as Madan is a friend to the tiniest child.

The eminent educationist Jane Sahi, who runs Sita’s School in Silvepure, Bengaluru, says that: The word we use to describe the place of education is ‘school’ which is derived from the Greek word ‘skole’, which means leisure. It has also been linked to the meaning ‘hold back’ or ‘rest’. Leisure for the Greeks has been explained as a ‘receptive attitude of mind … it is not only the occasion but the capacity of steeping oneself in the whole of creation’. Leisure is not spare time, nor idleness, but is connected with the celebration of meaningfulness. It is the play, the drama, the festival that serves as pointers to make the whole of life, including work and duty, worthwhile. Maybe, leisure carries with it the idea of meaningful space. Relatedness begins for the young child largely through the space of play. It is by seeing, grasping, moving, letting go, dropping, listening, undoing and constructing that the child discovers concepts of time and space and explores the laws of nature. (Sahi 2000: 55, 56)

Jane Sahi (interview of 10 June 2011) argues that the mother-tongue learning is most significant, that the children who come to Sita’s School are trained very early to write in their own words. In My

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Own Words is the title of her new book. She believes that the Right to Education debate must take into account the questions of parallel school education, particularly when it comes to village schools. The standardisation argument is problematic and for them lethal, because what they are doing in the alternative school movement is essentially taking schooling to each child each according to his/her/their need. The movement is inspired by many who are networked now as the Alternative School Network. The blurb of the published Marjorie Sykes lecture which she gave in 2000 says that: Sita’s School is outside the formal educational system following its own curriculum and methods of teaching. Artistic activity is one of the principal mediums through which children educate themselves with the help and guidance of the teachers. Most children attending Sita’s School are from the common poor folk who would otherwise have had to go without education. The children come from the five surrounding villages and are mostly first-generation schoolgoers. The children are at school from 8 a.m and the older children stay until 6 p.m. They are divided into five groups according to ability rather than age. A number of activities are shared and there is a stress on interaction and cooperation between the different groups. Work plays an important part and gardening and printing are an integral part of the school curriculum. Art and craft help the children to use their hands, heads and hearts to make learning something alive and dynamic. There is a framework of projects related to such themes as house-building, the food we eat, the history and geography of the village etc.; which are explored from one to three months. Books are used as a resource but rarely as conventional textbooks.

In terms of current standardisation debates, Jane Sahi argues that alternative school education has different goals, and among themselves, there is a great deal of debate about the methods to be used. For instance, Jyoti Sahi, India’s best-known Christian artist using Indic themes in his painting, and former President of the World Association of Christian Religious Artists and the founder of the Art Ashram in Silvepura where Sita’s School is located, says:

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What both Gandhiji and Tagore stressed was education through craft. Traditionally, there has been a distinction drawn between art and craft. Art is something inherent in each individual – a talent that each person has to discover. This art cannot be learnt, but it can be nurtured, and given the freedom to grow. Craft, on the other hand, has much more to do with cultural traditions, and the development of certain technologies. These can be imparted to the young through a direct process of learning through seeing, and participating in a working situation. That, as I understand it, is what the gurukul system was oriented towards. (Sahi 2000: 140)

The standardisation of textbooks and school curricula will affect the teachers and thinkers in the alternative school movement primarily because they have had the energy and ambition to set up a discourse different from the mainstream, whether it be public or private or state schooling. Influenced by Rudolf Steiner and Martin Buber rather than Maria Montessori, Jane Sahi talks about the necessity of engaging with the state on the right of the small schools like hers to survive. Only two children have registered in the local government school, all other children prefer to go to schools of their choice. When I walked for two kilometres on 4 and 5 May 2011 in Tiruvannamalai and spoke to the shopkeepers and their children on the giripradikshanam route (circumambulation route of the sacred mountain Arunachala), I was surprised at the number of schools that they said they went to, no two children went to the same school. A web search into the list of schools for Tiruvannamalai will show the vast number of schools available to the local populace, confirming the difference between the children in this respect. This free choice is interesting since much of it reflects religious or secular tastes, free or paid schooling and the questions raised about the variety of syllabus would also be significant. On 9 July 2010, I visited the Quo Vadis which is a quiet hamlet of trees and gardens. The chairs are comfortable, and the assistant helps me to access the journal they produce, a kind of newsletter, which describes their activities. Daphne meets me to talk about her reasons for joining Quo Vadis, as a consultant. She had been an advertising designer, employed by the Coca-Cola company. Disillusioned by just everything, she came to India

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and then to Ramanasramam, which she found immensely healing, but then, Quo Vadis was interesting, because they were doing such exciting work. It seemed to her that inter-religious dialogue was where all the excitement was. She found the momentum from listening to people who came to the talk. Quite often, some people found Christianity alienating and wished to discuss it. Other people found the visual experiences of a practised Hinduism startling, sometimes disturbing. As foreigners, they needed a safe house from where they could orient their own beliefs. Quo Vadis was a kind of rest house from which they could experience the volatility of life in Tiruvannamalai. The café serves as a discussion centre. People come in to talk about anything at all. Having a voice is the most significant aspect of this exercise. To be heard and to hear. Women, particularly, find Quo Vadis a sanctuary where their identities can be reforged in the circumstances of everyday life, where they encounter their silence at home or in the workplace not passively, but with the idea that others at the café will find it interesting to hear what they have to say. Joshua Paul, the director, who had come in, speaks to me about his schools where everyone who did not receive an education or who could not be admitted anywhere else comes to study: ‘Anyone at all, who could not get admission anywhere else!’ The Tamil Nadu State supports these schools, and the salaries of the teachers are paid by the state. V.S. Mani, the trustee of Ramanasramam, says that when they were children, the Lutheran Danish Mission School was seen elite, and the rest went to a government school. Now it seems that no one wants to go to Danmission. However, 4,000 children attend the school. Joshua says that the education of Dalit children was the primary motive, but when they were set up, the essential aim was to repudiate casteism. He himself has never felt his Dalitness; his father was a teacher, and since they were educated, they believed the world was equal. Only once was he made to feel that he was Dalit, and this was in the acquirement of property to set up Quo Vadis. The land on which they have the building now was once owned by Madam Taleyarkhan (a well-known Parsi socialite who was a fervent devotee of Bhagavan Ramana) but since the land had not been measured correctly, there was a court case which was resolved in Joshua’s favour. However, the experience of being shouted

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at by the other party was disquieting for him, and he felt that he had been humiliated because he was Dalit. For Joshua, education is the only way in which Dalits can prosper, it is the only way by which the right to citizenship can be won. Quo Vadis also works with interesting experiments with young people, nomadic groups and foreign students who are looking for the certainty of co-existence on a global level. While wholeheartedly supporting conventional schooling, Danmission attempts through Quo Vadis to integrate children into the larger cosmos. That they are given the freedom to express their creativity in functions that are organised conjointly for Quo Vadis is the consequence of 150 years of the Danish or Tranquebar mission’s presence in South India. One of the organisers said at one such function in 2007 (quoted by the Express News Service, 9 September 2007, in the website): Today’s education system treats first rank students as geniuses and low rankers as stupid. This creates a feeling of inferiority in many and superiority in a few. A good education should make the learners brave and liberal.... Our aim is to make up for the deficiency in the present system of education, by making children confident and liberal thinkers.

In the next part of my essay, I will look at the way children in an informal setting look at the question of everyday interactions in nonformal methods of teaching practice as a time of evading censure by being what they essentially are, friends in the classroom. On 14 October 2010, I went to the Children’s Park again. The elderly man sweeping and washing the gates and courtyard said that the bus for TLC, now known as Marudam Farm School, had not left yet. At 8.05, I said I would walk to the school (about 5 km) and he insisted, ‘Wait, wait, it will come.’ ‘I do not see any children waiting. It must have gone.’ ‘They will arrive. I heard that they are going to the Land.’ The bus arrives. Pari Pooranam, the teacher’s assistant, is happy to see me, we have now become old friends. The children are passive, but make a place for me to sit. We jolt our way to Arun and Poornima’s land where the new school is going to be built. Their thatched house with the solar water bathroom is in a field adjacent to sunflowers and tuberoses

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are grown commercially. They grow rice and are experimenting with four varieties of nitrogen-fixing plants, which are threshed into the barren field to create organic manure. Arun says they first grow nitrogen-fixing crops, cut, thresh, and beat into the ground. Then they leave the land fallow and allow it to soak in water, either by monsoon or by local irrigation methods. In Tiruvannamalai Learning Centre, the children are not very keen on the details of agriculture. They are very excited about the cement grinder since the concrete is being prepared for the third-standard classroom roof. Arun took them to see the bulls ploughing the field. The worker was knee-deep in slush and so were the bulls. The children had no idea what crop it was. ‘Rice?’ they asked puzzled. ‘The bulls are floating in the water,’ one child said in a lazy tone. ‘Ploughing,’ Arun said patiently. Then, he said, ‘The furrows are first created, before planting the rice. That they will do tomorrow.’ Seeing the children distracted, he said, ‘Rice. They are growing rice. What did you think? Chocolate? That they are growing chocolate?’ He was a little exasperated. ‘Don’t you like rice? Eating rice?’ The little Spanish girl nodded. She had spent most of the educational walk that morning constructing simple Spanish sentences for the benefit of her seven-year-old Tamil classmates. They were teaching her Tamil and she was teaching them Spanish with a great deal of laughter. ‘He hopes that his Mama will wash his bottom after he shits,’ was a sentence that flew this way and that in three languages, Spanish, English and Tamil for quite a while. Unsupervised, the children walked talking about many things without embarrassment. Sex and violence in films is something they are exposed to by way of a common culture of signboards, even in a temple town. Arun guards them carefully from wandering off and refuses to be a nanny to them. Poornima, his wife, is much clearer about discipline and distracting conversations on routine school days. The Montessori method clearly validates censoring the children and keeping them on track, but in gentle nurturing ways rather than brutish ones. Arun then took them for a long walk to the edge of the land verging on the bund, in the ancient riverbed. He said it was called samudra, and when

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it rained, this land became a huge lake. The walk was about one and a half kilometres, so the three- to six-year-olds had to remain behind. The walk was through sandy yellow land with scrub through many fields, which had become harvestable through time, all the time walking on narrow bunds. Far out, in the basin, we could see the holy mountain rising sharply in the distance. When most of the children got stung by nettles, Arun told them to notice the plant, learn to recognise it and not to be scratched again. It was a stinging itchy sensation, both painful and irritating, smarting the skin. He gave them the sense of being independent, small though they were and yet, adventurous. The nursery children had been left behind in the first instance with Pari Pooranam. The 7- and 12-year-olds were straggling each with their chosen friend, talking non-stop. Nature walks happen every Thursday, and the children enjoy them tremendously. At the end of the walk, they have peanuts and some refreshments, simple and nutritious. Learning is at a subconscious level, and they are expected to be tough at everything. On the way to the bund, they had looked into an ancient well, with Arun shouting, ‘Don’t go so close, move back’ at periodic intervals. When they looked in, they saw a fish, a turtle and a snake, all at the same time. The catfish was mythic huge, the snake slithered away into the rocks, and the turtle was tiny and independent, swimming adeptly in the cool obscure water. What is ecological consciousness? This is a question that Eveline is asking of school children in two schools in Tiruvannamalai for an MPhil dissertation. She has administered questions to children of one private school and one government school. The children enjoy their interaction with her, and she meets a pair of children for half an hour, five days a week. She asks questions about soap, hygiene, roads, safety. The details are important to her because what soap they use, and how often they wash their hands elicit many answers about traditional methods and ecology.

Saron Public School On 15 October 2010, I had visited the Saron Public School in Tiruvannamalai. The teacher Paul Visuvam had met me at a previous visit, in July 2010, and had encouraged me to look at the Danmission schools.

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Paul Visuvam loves the school he teaches in. Joshua Paul in my previous visit had told me that growing up on the campus, as now three generations of their family have been educated there, they do not feel oppressed, and they work very hard to communicate to the children in their charge, that education is a fundamental right. He says, ‘This ground is holy. Whoever touches this ground, does great things. My father taught here, and now I teach here.’ The interesting thing about the three generations of modern education is the sense of professional worth that is communicated by those who have had this opportunity to work with ideas. This is finally communicated as most valuable by the Tamil Nadu state since these are state-assisted schools, where the teachers are paid salaries by the state. The Saron Boarding School has a charming aspect, with large grounds, many trees, an old building which was established 150 years ago. While maintenance is typical of state institutions in India, the children look happy despite the clutter. It is the euphoria that is difficult to describe, and the loyalty of the teachers whom I met, to the cause of schooling. Visu, as he is called by his peer group, sends a seven-year-old deputy to the school manager (Principal) with me. Reverend Vijayan says there are 350 boys in the boarding house and 1,000 students in the school in total, including day scholars, from Classes 1 to 12. The larger organisation which funds them, the Lutheran Gospel Mission, which is a global mission would like them (school authorities) to charge 500 rupees as school fees, but this is impossible, as the children are from very poor families, and even 200 rupees a month per child is hard for them to pay. However, Danida, the mission from Denmark, does provide some aid to needy children, and the Lutheran Mission also provides a subsidy. The school is now run as a government-aided school, and the teachers, in 2011, were paid salaries of 20,000 rupees and more per month. They provide secular education with common syllabi with other schools, but morning and evening prayers are Christian. State-aided schools may be of any religion or persuasion, but the Tamil Nadu government sees education as the most important need of the moment. Principal Vijayan’s wife introduces herself and gives me hot coffee in her office which is set up with timetables, pictures of eminent leaders,

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and a sense of things happening continually. The children in their classrooms greet me with salaams and noisy English songs learnt by rote. They look happy and healthy. Outside, a simple mid-day meal of rice and sambhar is being cooked for them. They also get an egg every day. What one gets is a sense of ebullience and joy. Joshua Paul had attested to this, when he first met me in the summer of 2010, saying that because of his education, he had never felt that he was a Dalit. ‘Do children drop out?’ ‘Yes, they do.’ ‘Why?’ ‘They get admission in other schools.’ I leave to be in time for another appointment and Visu drops me on his motorcycle at an auto stand, a kilometre away. It is Ayudha, and Saraswati puja is being celebrated everywhere; in great jubilation, all the houses, craftspersons’ shops, motorcycles and bicycles, autos, the cattle and the business houses are decorated with banana trees and hibiscus. I will now turn to some of the aspects of school education in relation to higher education since these are integral to the dreams of the nation-state. The schools consist of either children of the same class or caste or religious background or heterogeneous groups located in a mosaic fashion. While Saron Public School begins with prayers, the Tiruvannamalai Learning Centre begins with yoga and meditation. The children are drawn together into a ritual sacred space that they value. The first of the clauses we need to concern ourselves in the mediations on right to education is with the freedom of opinion. I should put this as the freedom of personal opinion. This should be protected by judicial rights, which are as transparent as citizenship rights. The right to one’s personal opinion should certainly not be to negate the rights and freedoms of others. To move away from the politics of hate, to the social circumstances of coexistence, is the hardest task. Is it possible? Emile Durkheim (1973) once wrote of the significance of freedom and responsibility in the family, neighbourhood, school and university, culminating in the state. Science, liberalism, rationality, democracy and human rights are the watchwords of such a quest. It presumes that plurality and free and open debate are central to the quest for education and freedom which

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go together. To achieve the dream, which is a constitutional right, of education for all, scholars of all ages have to remember that waste of resources is the greatest threat to this dream. Every time we waste paper, electricity, money or food, we are depriving rural and urban children, who do not by the accident of birth, have access to these. Ramana Maharshi and Gandhiji were friends, both of whom though they had never met one another, knew well of each other, and in their everyday practice would never waste even a scrap of paper. To me, it seems the ecological dream of sustaining trees and rivers comes from such careful use of materials by these two great sages of India. We live in an agricultural society, and we are blessed with the finest fruits, vegetables and cereals, which our farmers provide for us. To invest more in education for them would be the sensible thing to do. The real question is whether the urban elite is ready to consume less and share more? The peasantry must be allowed to continue to do what it loves to do most, growing things, without being made to feel that they are bonded slaves to consumers, or that they are backward and out of place in an industrialising economy. Agriculture will always be the economic framework of our people by choice and we should not rid them of this right to work and prosper on the land by displacing them from their homes. Economists have proved that it is the savings of the peasantry that has kept the Indian economy stable. Year after year, they produce bumper harvests in the most adverse conditions of climate change and personal deprivation. Let us concentrate on improving the world of the displaced migrant, the labourer and the farmer. These people are the majority of our nation. They are not invisible, they grow our food, build our roads, railways, bridges, houses and public establishments. Gandhi called it the ability to remember the daridra narayana, and Ramana Maharshi lived it out simply as narayana seva. The blue chakra in the centre of our national flag is a mnemonic for freedom of opinion and progress, where the wheel of the state converges with the wheel of all the different ways of life in India. The bullock cart, the spinners’ wheel, the jet-age and the idioms of religious belief in their myriad ways, each allows us our differences, yet represents our identity as Indian, to be our first and primary space. Every other identity comes

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only after this primary identity. This is the right to be me, an Indian! If there is suffering, let it be the idiom of the birth of wisdom. Paul Ricoeur quotes from Agamemnon, the tragedy of Aeschylus: Zeus, whatever his true name be, If this be a name acceptable, By this name will I call him. When I have reckoned all, only Zeus I recognize as capable of Removing the burden which weighs Me down with Anguish… He has shown man the way of Wisdom in giving him this maxim; ‘That man must learn by suffering’ In the fullness of sleep, like dropping Rain, descend the many memories of pain Before the vision of the Spirit. Wisdom thus acquired against the will. And this, I believe, is the grace of the Gods forced upon us from above. (cited in Ricoeur 1965: 209)

Whether we believe in the gods or the past or present or future is immaterial when enquiring about the questions of work and the world, of which words are the most complex aspect, enveloping actions both as description and intention. The relation between word and world, in the case of farming communities, is problematised by the relation between globalism and interactive worlds, where hybrid existence is taken for granted. Paul Viswam, like the other teachers in Saron Public School, has a diploma in Elementary School Education, which includes the subjects of psychology and business (school administration). He has been teaching at Saron Public School for 32 years. He was an apprentice in the beginning to Joshua Peter’s father. He believes that the tasks of a good teacher are stewardship (in the sense of Christ) and spending time, money and talent in a proper way. He tells each child in the school that he/she has a talent, a unique talent and that this should be developed. As the special teacher (the new name for crafts teacher), he is equipped

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to teach weaving, sewing, carpentry, music, gardening, bookbinding, poultry keeping and sericulture. This provides an ‘orientation’ to them. He teaches classes 6 to 12 for two periods each, amounting to 36 hours per week. When teaching sericulture for 10 years, he would get the eggs from the government nursery, then see them through the caterpillar stage tending them and feeding them with leaves; when they reached the cocoon stage, he would take them to Bengaluru and sell them. He did this for a decade by taking the evening bus from Tiruvannamalai at 10 p.m. and reaching Bengaluru in the morning. This he did four or five times a year but says it is now impossible for him to do this without an assistant. The rice he sows with the help of the children, as part of classroom activity, takes 90 days. They grow the rice which is used for making idlis for the school children. Agriculture and gardening are both sustainable hobbies for children, which may develop into professional interests. One of his students wished to do a BSc in agriculture. He says that for him, teaching means ‘to learn from the children’. Every morning in Saron Public School, there is an assembly for 15 minutes. There is a prayer, a passage from the Bible, a reading from the Thirukkural and a reading of contemporary news. Thiruvalluvar’s Thirukkural is full of wise sayings, truly secular, its wisdom applicable to all across the centuries. This combination of the religious and the secular is something that school teachers in both Saron Public School and Tiruvannamalai Learning Centre see as an essential part of their philosophy. For the TLC, which is now called Marudam Farm School, the philosophy comes from an essential belief in Ramana Maharshi’s teaching that all participate in the self and so all are equal; therefore, believing in the grace of Maharshi, a transcending love informs the world, and this is indeed the merging of Shiva and Shakti in Arunachala, the primaeval myth of a grand and consummated love between the male and female principles. Marudam Farm School (earlier TLC) is still to be registered. The teachers are waiting for the safety certificate from the government. The school had its formal opening in March 2011. There was an invocation and two songs from Kabir, and the ashram trustee V.S. Mani, who has been a friend and philosopher to Poornima and Arun, was present. A Japanese child accompanying her mother insisted that she wanted to

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study in the school. Her mother agreed to migrate to Tiruvannamalai to facilitate the child’s education in Marudam Farm School which sees integrative school education as an option that foreigners and local community parents may exercise, culminating in the Open School Examination. It is a non-competitive system, where the Montessori method, which includes Olcott, the Krishnamurthy Foundation and the Theosophical Society, combines with Maharshi Ramana’s philosophy. This year, they extended the explorations of the local terrain by drawing maps, providing local histories (collected by the children by asking local farmers questions) and taking photographs. Poornima explains the water project to me in an interview on 25 April 2011: It was very exciting for all of us to go from one lake to the other, to work out the connections. The local farmers said one thing, other people said another, so we decided to do a water project with the children. So we walked for three hours along the canal, along with a vehicle. The canal is fed with channels. We walked for four or five hours. The children were so excited. The lakes were connected to each other. There were three lakes connected to the first lake. There were waterfalls, even in summer, there was water trickling. We explained how trees grow, how water is absorbed into the soil. We did experiments with the water: its content, and the nature of its absorption. This was like discovering, also meeting villagers on the route. From Ayyanpalam onwards we could discuss with farmers what crops they grew, what trees grow. The small children were as interested as the older children. Underground water, the water table, how the wells get water: they seemed to know all this intuitively. They knew about porous rock, how all the water tables are connected, how they are recharged. I did an experiment with them. I poured water over one brick, and then placed it over a dry brick. They saw how the second brick started to absorb the water as it seeped down. We were focusing on water as a lifesaver. I think because we are in a village, the children are concerned with recycling and conservation through observation and active participation. They actually see the wells getting recharged. We made them draw tables and charts on water usage in their own homes. They drew completely honest graphs of water usage. The local children had shorter indexes of use for water for baths, kitchen and washing clothes than the European children. One Tamil boy said he

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would need another chart paper to show the graph for water used for gardening, it went way beyond the domestic uses. We also did ‘Weather and Seasons’ with them. It’s much easier for the children to learn when they go out into the open. We went to the Javidi Hills, where Arun collects seeds for planting. It is about 40–50 km from here. It is a tropical evergreen forest with waterfalls over the rocks. We took them on a one-day trip. They had a marvellous time. When we came back, we told them to write about it. They wrote in detail about it and then started asking more questions about the woods. So they got lessons on water absorption and metamorphoses of rocks. They got lessons on the development cycle of dragonflies by observation. We have kept a file of their writing. I see these as our teaching aids and assets. It will be useful for the next batch as well. What makes an experimental school different from a general school is the quality of time. With larger groups, it is very difficult to use this kind of interactive method. There is no time to evolve new methods for instance. In Marudam Farm School, we are now using the idea of making each child write a book. They are all so excited. Each one wants to write a book! They keep shouting, ‘When can we write a book!’ We visit a similar school in Auroville and they sometimes visit us. It is a wonderful experience, taking 15 children to a camp experience, where the key teacher introduces them to the tents, the woods, the organic farm. They love the tents, all piling in haphazardly, and then there are the games, and of course the visit to the seaside. There was a windmill, which my son immediately climbed. He has no fear of heights, and the other children wished to climb too. I said, ‘NO, you cannot!’ The other children were very disappointed. But it seemed to me, that as I take care of other people’s children, I cannot take risks with them. I have no idea whether they have a history of illness, which I have not been told about. If they fall, if there is an accident, there is nothing that can be done. We always do our background work before taking the children swimming, we find out the depth of the water, if there are crocodiles and so on. One accident and years of careful nurturing of an institution can be lost. Arun and I have been very influenced by a German naturalist, Wolfgang and his wife Leela, who with their children and associates manage a sanctuary or park in Wayanadu, called by the locals ‘Saiyipu inde Thottam’ (White man’s garden).

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Arun tells me the story of Wolfgang and his family in an interview on 28 April 2011: Wolfgang lived the life of a recluse, following a spiritualist quest, supported by the Bangalore branch of the Narayanaguru ashram. One day, an orchid fell at his feet from a tree. He had never seen a flower like that before. He was enchanted by it, and from there began his life’s work of recovering the original flora of the Wayanadu hills. He practises his botanical knowledge from experience, from learning from each event. He had planted trees for decades and varieties of flowers, which are of the Wayanadu region. Botanists, ecologists and green movements activists travel from everywhere to meet Wolfgang and his family and the two people who assist him in their work. It is possible to meet them from December to March, for the rest of the year, they are somewhat inaccessible.

Another informant told me that the dogs in the Saipe’s Garden are brutal guard dogs, so if school trips were to be made, the teachers should be warned of the Doberman Pinschers. A lot of the problems sociologists face is the criss-crossing of narratives so that inaccessibility of the sites of alternative schooling is taken as much into account as the subtexts of philanthropy and alternative livelihood styles. Poornima says it is the land, working with the land, that teaches the children many things. She says that she could not have had the same experiences working in a city school. Maria Montessori, she says, has patented a teaching kit, which is invaluable. It would cost Marudam Farm School a sum of 50,000 to 1,00,000 rupees to purchase this tool. She would need a sponsor to buy this teaching aid. Poornima says in an interview on 28 April 2011: However the pedagogic link is between the kit itself and the materials used by the craftspersons, which reproduce nature. By itself it cannot reproduce the effect of nature. It stimulates interaction with nature. When children draw I encourage them to go out to look at leaves. The texture of the bark, flowers—to draw these. They notice things very intricately, and when I say to them, ‘Go out and draw more.’ They draw the traceries of leaves, the patterns on barks.

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Maps are very invigorating and catalytic drawing exercises for the children too. The school is now focusing on maps as a learning device, supplemented by photographs. The children became motivated oral and local historians, interviewing people, using the camera and drawing maps. A great deal of the information then becomes an archive for the school to be used as teaching materials for future batches. The charts, maps, stories, poems, plays and photographs kept carefully give the children who produce them a sense of self-worth, as well as defining for the teachers the progress they make from year to year in the dissemination of valuable information, about terrain ecology conservation along with the skills of reading, writing, art, science and mathematis. In Marudam School (formerly Tiruvannamalai Learning Centre), the infant children who have recently joined are being taken on their exploratory walk by their regular teacher Leela and the teacher’s assistant Pari Pooranam. Mapping terrain by frequent walks is part of the training given to children. Teaching the three- to five-year-olds to cross the road, for instance, takes a good 15 minutes. First, the children sit down and drink water from their water bottles. There is a great deal of play and joking and also antagonism since new friendships forged sometimes undercut into old ones. A thorn or two has to be pulled out from a child’s foot. Hyperactive children have to be controlled by orders, conversations, hugs, attention. The children walk to the circular road outside the farm after Leela has repeated ‘Look to the right, look to the left, look right’ to see if a vehicle is approaching. ‘What do we do when we come to the road?’ she says, and till all the children chant, ‘We stop?’ she keeps repeating the question. Several repetitions later, the children do cross the road. The 15 minutes of the drill has been frequently interrupted with the boys who are now aged five, running hither and thither, and the teachers are almost raucous with shouting. The children are generally happy and overexcited after having crossed the road carefully, for there are occasional vans and trucks carrying water, milk, construction materials. Farmers pass by on motorcycles, occasionally with women and children precariously perched; there are autorickshaws too. Marudam Farm School is three kilometres from Tenmalai village, adjacent to the farm of the Annamalai Reforestation

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Society. When I had visited in April 2011, tuberoses surrounded the school, but now in October 2011, those fields are fallow and other fields have sugarcane, jasmine flowers and new shoots of paddy and millet. When they settle down to eat their bananas and biscuits, one of the boys runs off to climb a spiky palm tree, another runs very fast to the farthest end and two children start quarrelling over who will sit on a cement ledge. There is a great deal of disciplining by the two teachers, not by shouting or even the mildest form of abrasiveness, but with statements like ‘I did not expect this of you’ and ‘All of you are behaving very badly’. The three-year olds look like they are about to cry. After the food is eaten, the banana peels are all collected and then the children cross the road carefully to feed the cows. One of them is chosen, she rolls her eyes and runs away. Leela is from Israel and her son is in the class she is escorting. He keeps his banana peels for his cow who is at the shed behind the school. On reaching the school, the children run into class to continue a fresh round of activities indoors. The older children are already studying their Tamil alphabet. Poornima has made consonants and vowels with black paint on yellow backgrounds on small pieces of cardboard. They recite the letters, learning five new letters every day. They learn to combine consonants and vowels to form small words which they recognise and point out. There is a large cut-out of the human body with Tamil and English words. Bilingualism is a continuous presence in the school. After half an hour, they shift subjects. The arithmetic notebooks are taken out and the seven children, all seven or eight years old are at different stages. Poornima is quick to notice each child’s aptitude and the deficits in their work. She notices the logical reason for their mistakes. She explains it to each child. Why are they disconnected? They themselves may not know. The teacher, however, controls the situation by taking continuous stock. The children have the freedom to express their feelings, which may be negative—‘I don’t feel like doing this’ or ‘My mind is elsewhere’ but the teacher controls the situation by returning the child to the problem which has to be solved. Poornima says, Ten and units are difficult for them, because they are not thinking of the ten as a block. For them, the ten still consists of a conglomeration

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of units. To shift them to the idea of ‘borrowing’ and ‘carrying away’ takes time. The plastic log of ten units coalesced is a useful tool, which then allows the child to dismantle according to need. To shift from counting fingers, or tamarind seeds to the dismantle-able plastic tool is a jump that they have to make.

The class is over and the children run out to play. The little Japanese girl (the same who persuaded her mother to shift to Tiruvannamalai from Japan), who interacts with her teacher on an eye-to-eye basis and calls her respectfully by her first name, has just finished working on her sums. She got the answer wrong three times, and the fourth time she upturned the 9 (correct answer) to 6 but was finally released to play with other children. Why alternative schools are important is that they have an idea that the child is an individual, and each child is different. These schools have small numbers of students but they can be duplicated as neighbourhood or ward schools, and the urban park could be the space where the relation with nature is developed at an early age. The Japanese child does not run out to play like the others but takes out the Lego set. ‘Go out and play!’ ‘No, I want to build.’ ‘No, you cannot! Go out and play! Pack the pieces in. You can play with the Lego after you finish your lunch. Go out, you have fifteen minutes now!’ The little girl slowly put the pieces in the box. It took her a good ten minutes to assemble all the pieces from the floor and pile them back into the box. In a way, without anyone noticing, except the trained observer, she had obeyed the teacher, as well as followed her impulse to work on something creative and meaningful for herself. However, when she placed the box carefully back, the top tray she had put together so carefully fell with a large crash. The male teacher who was working with two ten- and eleven-year-old Tamil girls on remedial English (for they were newly admitted from a local government school, ostensibly in Class 6 but unable to read and write) smiled at her understandingly while the young Japanese girl came out from the storeroom for toys and books, looking embarrassed and repentant that her subterfuge had been

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undone. She had created a Lego base in a short time, which she would have developed at lunchtime, of a fort, a fence and a female warrior. When the children returned from their play, they set to using paints. They were divided into two groups. The teachers had taken out the paints, buttons, glue, sparkling tinsel. Each child chooses what she or he wants to do from a book. Shobha, the teacher handling the group is a microbiologist, who taught for three years in Olcott school in Chennai and will now be at Marudam Farm School for a year before going back to the US. She is alert, attentive, seeking to include me in the circle of children. Before the session started, there had been a minor fracas. One of the children, a teacher’s son, ran in saying, ‘The injection men are here, the vaccination men with injections.’ Everyone stared anxiously. ‘They have come to the house. They want me and Appa (father) to hold the dogs down. There is no one at home.’ His mother said, ‘But I am in school with the children. How can I do anything?’ The boy who was 10, put his curly head down and started to weep. It was too much for him—no one at home, when he had run home in the interval and the sudden call to authority. The dogs came running into the classroom, looking for cover. The children were delighted since the school dogs accompany them everywhere. The teacher held the dogs as the man with the injection came running in too. However he had only one injection with him, so the other dog had to be kept in place with biscuits before the vet returned. In the interim, politics between the dogs broke out with snarling, growling and fleeing, and while all this was happening, one of the children ran in and pulled down the bamboo curtain, followed by another, who pulled down the adjacent one. Poornima set up a careful questioning till the two children admitted that they had rolled down the chiks. The chiks or bamboo curtains are expensive and had come all the way from Chennai last April. Arun had told the merchant to load it on to the bus, and let him know the time the bus left, and accordingly, he would collect them from Tiruvannamalai bus station. However, the merchant had been proud of his perfect work and brought the merchandise to the farm school himself by bus and then auto from the town. The two children carefully rolled the chiks up and then rolled the string around the two supporting pillars. After the art class began, there was a great deal of laughter and sharing. Each child wishes to be different, some are marginally more

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creative than others, extravagantly using sequins and buttons to communicate their skill and delight. The little girl, Sambhavana, used her forefinger and index finger with her fist clenched to place upon the paper an image of a rabbit which she then outlined with a pencil held in the other hand. When her teacher gave her a crayon to colour the picture, Sambhavana refused politely and walked up to the shelf to take out Faber Castell colour pencils. The children have an innate sense of confidence; they are emotionally secure (except when bickering among themselves) and make very distinctive choices about what it is they want to do. Each child has a different personality, and the success of the teachers is in allowing them to articulate this. Here is a conversation with one of the seven-year-old boys in Marudam Farm School. Teacher: I heard you went with your parents to Madras for three days. Student: Yes, I had broken my slippers, so I went to Chennai. Teacher: Why did you go to Chennai? Student: I needed new slippers. (He shows them off, blue striped slippers with an enamel buckle.) Teachers and students, all together: All the way to Chennai to buy slippers! Student: Yes. Teacher: But why three days? Student: My father thought school was closed. (repeats) My father thought school was closed. Children do not talk about very private things to each other when there is an audience while they may gossip when thought unobserved. They communicate that the work at hand is significant and has to be finished. At lunch, they form small circles of intimate friendship groups. The food is cooked in the school kitchen and served on stainless steel plates. There is rice, sambhar, rasam, kootu for this is conventional fare in South India. At lunch, they form small intimate circles of friendship groups, but there is interestingly no segregation by the children in terms of gender, since the girls are able to climb trees and run as actively as the boys. Shikha, one of the teachers who has taught in Krishnamoorthy Foundation Varanasi, says that the interesting thing about alternative school is that though the children may not follow traditional ways of

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craft and artisanship later in life, to which they may have been exposed, they are sensitive to things that conventionally schooled children may not be. I mention that I can understand what she is saying for when we had taken the nursery children for a walk, Jacob, whose parents are Tiruvannamalai-born, immediately started picking up plastic from the field. Soon enough, the other children began to do so too. The unintended consequence was rivalry over bottle tops which they called ‘tops’. Shikha tells me about a school in Auroville, Puducherry, called ‘School in a Bullock Cart’. The cart with its students visits various sites which are associated with crafts or agriculture. If, for instance, they visit a farm, the students live and work on that farm for three months. However, at the end of the discussion, the director of the school had said what they finally wanted was a stable location. For that registration and a piece of land and acknowledgement by the Indian state of the value of alternative education has to be had. The debate is now central to the players. The relationship of the federal state to its citizens is of significance, and the role of the sociologist is to underline as Emile Durkheim (1973) emphasised soon after the First World War, the relation between family, neighbourhood, school along with higher education, and the principles of rationality, humaneness, science and human rights.

Bibliography Durkheim, Emile. 1973. Moral Education. New York: The Free Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. Interpretations of Culture. New York: Basic Books. Gilroy, Paul. 2004. Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and Allure of Race. London and New York: Routledge. Graves-Brown, Paul M., ed. 2000. Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Guha, Ramachandra. 1999. Savaging the Civilised: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals and India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Jayawardena, Kumari. 2007. The Erasure of the Euro-Asian: Recovering Early Radicalism and Feminism in South Asia. Colombo: Social Sciences Association. Ilich, Ivan. 1982. Gender. New York: Pantheon Books.

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Koli, Kanchi and Kalpavriksh. 2009. ‘Report of the National Dialogue on Six Years of the Implementation of the Biological Diversity Act’, presented at the Conference organised by Kalpavriksha, Grain, and the National Forum for Policy Dialogue, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, 3 February. Latour, Bruno. 2000. ‘The Berlin Key or How to Do Things’. In Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, edited by P.M. Graves-Brown. New York and London; Routledge and Kegan Paul. Levi Strauss, Claude. 1977. Structural Anthropology. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Logan, William. 2009. Malabar Manual, Vols. 1 and 2. New Delhi: Low Price Publications. Morrison, Kathleen. 2014. ‘Environmental Histories, the Spice Trade and the State in South India’. In Ecological Nationalisms, edited by Gunnel Cederlof and K. Sivaramakrishnan, 43–64. Ranikhet and New Delhi: Permanent Black. Pandian, M.S.S. 2007. Brahmin and Non-Brahmin. New Delhi and Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Quo Vadis. www.Quovadis interfaith.com (accessed on 10 April 2011). Ricoeur, Paul. 1965. History and Truth. Evanston: North Western University Press. Sahi, Jane. 1986. Stepping Stones. Reflections on the Theology of Indian Christian Culture. Bangalore: Asian Trading Culture. Soper, Kate. 1995. What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human. Oxford: Blackwell. Visvanathan, Susan. 2009. ‘Foresters and New Orientations to Survival’. Indian Journal of Development, 3 (1). ———. 2010. The Children of Nature: The Life and Legacy of Ramana Maharshi. Delhi: Roli Books. Weber, Max. 1978. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. New York: Free Press.

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The Abyss: Covid-19 and Its Implications In this chapter, I will attempt to look at the moral dilemmas of Covid-19 in terms of two themes. Can we understand the relationship between disease and fate? Is it possible that the second problem, that of social hierarchy, is closely related to the idea of social distance, magnified by physical distance and occupational prescriptions? I aim to delineate in the second section the question of caste-based occupation in relation to class. The working class is defined not by its access to consumption but its distance from it. It is alienated from its work during Covid-19 in 2020 and exposed to tremendous risk as migrant workers in between the safe spaces of territorial jurisdiction marked as point of origin and point of arrival for work. Whereas, earlier, these were sharply circumscribed by normative traditions and social expectations specific to the radius of work, migrant labour because of Covid-19 was exposed to tremendous risks. Paul Gilroy calls this the time between camps. He writes: At its worst, citizenship degenerates into soldiery and the political imagination is entirely militarized. The exaltation of war and spontaneity, the cults of fraternity, youth, and violence, the explicitly antimodern sacralization of the political sphere, and its colonization by civil religion involving uniforms, mass spectacles, all underline that these camps are fundamentally martial phenomena. They are armed and protected spaces that offer, at best, only a temporary break in an unforgiving motion toward the next demanding phase of active conflict. (Gilroy 2000: 82)

In the third section of the first part of the chapter, I shall show that Covid-19 becomes the route to greater surveillance and the camps shift to the questions of agrarian conflict where the Farmers’ Protest is not about federal politics but engages us with larger questions about financial resolutions not embodied in democratic politics. Different and opposing nationalisms, historically defined, become interlaced in 244

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mutual enmity. Here, then, lies the possibility of accusations amounting to ‘traitoring’ rather than distinctive solidarities collaging or emerging into a pattern. The resolution of the conflict resulted in the proposed repealing of the Farm Laws (India Today 2021). Covid-19 with its social-distance rules and the concerned farmers’ agitation coincided for one year, continuously exposing the farmers to death. Seven hundred people died during this period from various causes, and the costs of supporting the movement fell to the farmers through collective feeding and taking over the chores of those who were at protest sites, by kin and friends. The citizen is negated by undemocratic manoeuvres of the state and its machinery and becomes imbued with a vociferous nationalism that is overpowering in its collaborative grammar of capitalism and religious homogeneity. Paul Gilroy writes that race and nation, the higher and the lower, become integrated into this vocabulary in the life of the camps. He says: The dominant varieties were bound to the subordinate by their shared notions of what nationality entailed. The forms of nationalism that invoke that mode of belonging exemplify camp-thinking. They have distinctive rules and codes, and however bitterly their various practitioners may conflict with each other, a common approach to the problem of collective solidarity is betrayed by shared patterns of thought about self and other, friend and stranger; about culture and nature as binding agents and about the technological institution of political collectivities to which one can be compelled to belong. (2000: 82)

As it happens, the turn to religiosity is often represented through the appearance of new goddesses/demons all in furious battle, along with the continued acceptance of scientific demands to comply with the state’s vaccination drives.

The Persistence of God in the Times of Covid-19 Sociologists are famously trained to understand that god/gods/ goddesses are representations of the societies which acknowledge them. Marcel Mauss believed that when humans forget their gods, the

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gods die. So why is there such intensity of belief? The existence of god for those who believe is fraught with necessity. The power of god is internalised in the human psyche, as the ideas which embody divinity appear to humans through dreams and revelations. The infant is exposed to them from the moment of birth, and even when born in an atheist family, the relation between the microcosm and the macrocosm is understood through the goals which are placed before him/her. Ideologies can provide the sense of the sacred, human rights can be a charter, moral duties can be presented as transcending good and evil, the right to life, or, as we perceive it, the right to kill are presented as acts arising from consent to a common code. The very nature of the difference is thus presented as oppositional spaces within which the individual has to carve his/her own path. Whether it is food or marriage, choices of residence, work or friendship, the very nature of agency is presented as the vocabulary of choice. This subjectivity is then mapped into the overt or the covert, depending upon the ability to reveal the groups of which one is a part. Surveillance society does not preclude the right to choose as people know that they are watched, but they still believe they have the freedom of the right to expression and communication. Compulsory military service may be presented as a religious goal or secular orientation to citizenship identity. The world has changed so dramatically since Covid-19 made an appearance that people were able to go into seclusion because it was presented as fait accompli. If they did not adhere to the commands of the regulating authority, they could be put to severe punishment, of which ostracism by their local community was only a minor aspect. It was the cohesiveness brought about by this consent that allowed people to believe that they could edge past the dramatic days of March and April 2020, when the lockdown was first instituted globally. Curfew was too strong a word and people withdrew voluntarily into the inner precincts of their homes or found that they were interned in spaces that brought them into ultimate danger, as there were no borders of boundaries to keep them in. These then became the internment camps of the migrant workers, who found that they were dependent on state handouts of food and water, which involved standing in long queues.

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Religious organisations and voluntary organisations began to follow suit. By the beginning of June 2020, the lockdown began to show its fearsome qualities, as people realised that the cycles of infection and reinfection were continuing. The pandemic was not going to go away, and like a medieval ogre, it began to stalk populations worldwide, keeping them at home, a Beowulf who would appear only in the signalling systems of defunct healthcare institutions. God provides people with a sense of order, of a beginning and an end. When we die, god dies. When we die, the world ends. That was the experience of the world, of the holy, which sociology was so keen to dismember in the 19th century. The very nature of god’s existence depends on a language consistent with known imagery. The idea of the unknown god is a riddle that is answered through the presence or the manifestation of god. To be present is in some ways a mutual condition, the bestowing of grace. Joan of Arc is famously known to have said in her testimony that ‘even if he forgets me, I shall not forget him’. This is the ultimate trope of the believer that the seeker presents the existence of god as searching for the truth. Poetry, theatre, the novel, art forms, sculpture, architecture, photography and cinematic documentation have all pursued the abstract presence of god. Can we possibly deny the seeker the ultimate form of the mystery realised in words or images? Why should we? This has surely nothing to do with our own experiential space as seekers of information regarding the religious life of peoples whom we study. It is immaterial whether we believe in god or not. We have to believe that they believe. This putting oneself in the place of the other requires catapulting out of our limited imagination and learning the skills with which, those who are of professional interest to us as respondents, communicate their ideas about the divine. We learn with them how the cosmos is figured, how the balance of nature matches with the balance of good and evil. The terms themselves dance before us in a choreography of ambiguities. We cannot stop asking questions, and the answers we receive combine dexterity with certainties of which we are not part. They are compelling in their persuasion, they wish us to share their truth in a way that convinces them that we too are believers.

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We agree to do so, we persuade them that we have learned the metalanguage of their creeds and philosophies, we no longer argue with them (if we ever dared to as doors slammed shut) and we present their world to the readers who seek knowledge of specific religious practices with the assurance that what we interpret is in consonance with the practitioners. So where is god? Looking for tranquillity in a world beset with danger and death, we are blessed with the consensual power of our persuasion. When we have a new problem set to solve, we move on. So the Corona goddess, like the small pox goddess has arrived in India, and we need to look at how the assimilation of her virtues and malevolences are combined. In the Book of Life will our names be written or must we give in to extinction?

The Trouble with Being Poor One of the problems with being poor is being treated by people (not by just the politicians) as if they, as a class, do not have the right to exist, often being referred to as the ‘cattle class’. This can be heartbreaking for humans, who arrive in the cosmos in terms of what is called the ‘accident’ of birth. Poverty, that is the lot of 80 per cent of Indians, is something they don’t argue with. They are from rural areas and may be marginalised farmers, landless labour and craftspeople. This is what is called the aana jaana philosophy of the Indians, where early on, they are socialised into a particular ideology which communicates that they are paying for their past errors, and this has nothing to do essentially with lack of education or corrupt politicians insistent on spending crores of rupees on building idolatry statues rather than feeding the declassed and the poor. As poverty is widespread in India, and people don’t crumble in the face of disaster, a certain philosophy that some people are replaceable begins to develop. This ideology often applies to all those ‘others’ who are seen to be ‘weaker sections’ of society, so it’s not just the poor but also the lower-caste communities, tribal peoples, minorities, thirdgender individuals and women. The attitude of dominant groups is to treat them as ‘rubbish’ or ‘refuse’.

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Zygmunt Bauman in his very valuable book Wasted Lives (2003) argues that along with the idea that there is a class of people which is treated as if they are the ‘underbelly’ of society because they are unwanted, unreliable, unemployable, ‘un’ everything, there is the idea that consumption is the only thing that makes any sense. Along with over-consumption (or what has been called conspicuous consumption), comes the idea of obsoleteness or waste. It is extremely tragic that the mountains of waste created by an obsessiveness to own ever-new things, which are never fully owned or utilised, begins to overrun the landscape. Nothing can now be seen except, in every city, or by every railway track, masses of waste, which the unfortunate who do not have access to anything at all, must now begin to excavate and sort. The resistance to curtailing desires which is necessary for humans to survive has now been forced on us by Covid-19. The enormity of the deaths and the vulnerability of the populations to this disease have led to the change in the worldview of many who had earlier not been converted to the Greens debates. There are however two ways of looking at Covid-19. One is that it is curable if only we can find the vaccine, which we have, but for which variant? This leads to a lot of hope, as people believe that one day, we will survive the chances of catching what is a fatal mutation of the common cold. The other is herd immunity. The cold virus and cancer have always been resistant to cure, whatever pharmacological companies and large industrial houses may say, and have usually been understood in terms of the metaphor of time. The common cold takes a week to burn out; with cancers, however, the questions are always about buying more time for the patient to say goodbye to family and friends. ‘Recession’ is the phrase clinically used in care facilities, not ‘cure from cancer’. Susan Sontag who wrote her very brilliant essay on Tuberculosis and Cancer before she died of cancer herself said that the first was a 19th-century illness, which was an index of closetedness, while cancer was a metaphor for industrial encroachment, for it got into everything. Aids, we well know, was the disease associated with the overcommunication that was globally prevalent in the late 20th and early 21st century. It was associated with concentric circles of separation and distancing, and like Covid-19, brought in its wake a

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huge quantum of fear. People believed that safe sex and safe needleuse could protect them, but the relationship between the virus and human carriers became domesticated only after several decades. The Coronavirus is popularly thought to be a laboratory experiment with pathogens that leaked out after foreign collaborators were involved in war experiments involving Chinese agents, or if not that, the environmentally hazardous, wild-animal slaughterhouse markets in China. The Wuhan laboratory is thought to be the origin of the disease. The rumour-mongering and gossip about origins have made the Chinese least anxious as they proceeded to engage in cross-border attacks on the Indian side of what was once Tibet. The active engagement between India and Pakistan on the Pangong Lake resolved itself in mutual peace only by 10 February 2021. Migrant workers have been the ones who have been the most affected by this pandemic. According to a survey conducted by Noman Majid on behalf of Azim Premji University (www.APU Survey), 5 million workers would have moved from urban locations in the first phase of Covid-19 because of adverse urban housing, hoping to return to their villages and safe ground. The media has actively reported the difficulties of their condition and has brought to us the most puzzling and tragic difficulties relating to food, water, survival of labourers and workers trying to catch buses and trains to go home. The death toll has been frightening, as workers were often put on buses or trains in very terrible summer conditions without adequate food or water, in trains which were quite haphazard and complex in their routes and destinations, if at all they arrived. These images are so heartbreaking that India will never forget the year that disease overtook our land. Those who walked hundreds of kilometres in the hot sun were equally at risk, if not more so than travellers on public transport, and pictures of hungry people with calloused feet, dying men, women and children became our daily media feed. When we look at landless wage labour, which is the major subject of our enquiry, regarding the push-pull theory, we have to ask the question: How many of them are artisans? The so-called civilisational history of our country, which goes back to 5,000 years in the popular imagination, is, according to Jyotindra Jain (the former curator of

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the popular Arts and Craft Museum in the Purana Kila Complex and former Dean of the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU), the work of the Dalits and other backward castes. We are here talking about their contribution as lalitkars, murtikars and the contribution of women, too, as housewives, in terms of production of design, and innovators of symmetrical forms in handwork. Migrant labour often consists of skilled weavers, goldsmiths, sculptors and workers in wool, metal, ivory and vegetable dyes. Can we even begin to evaluate the loss in terms of abilities, when they arrive in the city, to carry out work which is remunerative as brick layers and sewer cleaners? This huge loss in terms of ability and technique is yet to be studied. To conduct a census to ask, ‘What is your talent’, is the first part of the necessary project. The second is to ask, ‘What else can you do?’ Culture Studies is essentially interested in the myriad ways in which human life is represented, and art forms become of great significance in terms of the meaning systems which are represented. Stories are told time and again through the craft traditions of events and calamities, of disease and war. Dances and songs, paintings, tapestries and now photography invent and innovate time and again, telling us of how people understand the changes in their lives and the nature of the heroic.

Famine in the Time of Covid-19 When we look at a disease, it is the symptomology of something else that calls attention. The survival of the fittest has a corollary, and that is access to food, water, shelter, medical help, education, money and power. Eighty per cent of our people are vulnerable and can never build up the required immunity to disease because they are left to their own devices. Even activists become vulnerable, as those who have been educated in cities return to their people to organise workshops, camps and cultural festivals; but when they fall ill, they share the same life chances as the people whom they work with. Access to medical care is made difficult by bad roads and the ineptness of the bureaucracy. We can see in the case of food distribution that the centre fell short of facilitating the states, which in a federal system of government is fatal to

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the people, and the granaries filled with cereals rotted (bought cheaply from poverty-stricken farmers after harvest, at minimum price) as the grains were not moved and redistributed in time. The people were hungry and dying; there was food, but the politicians who intervened, not as catalysts, but as obstacles, is known to all. There is a solution to this problem, and that is to learn from one’s mistakes. Covid-19 is going to be with us till the cycles of its infections and reinfections naturally culminate in what is called herd immunity. This means 70 per cent of the population will have been exposed and will have produced plasma which can be used to cure others who can afford to access hospital care, though there are varied interpretations on its efficacy. The formula is of slowly but surely going back to work, meaning agricultural and industrial production, so that a lease of life is given to other institutions, namely knowledge-producing and other cerebral resources, including art and artisanal work. Artisans and artists are to be found in every corner of India. We see small children at the street corners of Delhi doing skilled somersaults, a task their parents have given them so that they can pay for some food, while the elders are out on contract wage labour. The neighbourhood auto driver is perhaps a skilled musician. The istri wali or dhobi wali (the woman who irons clothes in the street) probably draws expertly or sings excellently. The list is endless, but we do not know what their talents are unless we ask the right kinds of questions. For artistic work to be evident, the belly must be full. The artisan, who is meticulous in every respect, must have the right to feed his family. The industrial war machine sees them only as wage labour, which can be dispensed at will. With hours of work and concomitant wages always somewhat askew, and the immoral imperative of capitalism to draw more and more out of the worker till he/ she drops dead without telling a story, art itself is extinguished. It is crucial that the government dispenses money and food during the years when the pandemic of Covid-19 is expected to rage, as loans to the poor will only create more hardship. People notice how the industrialists, politicians, petty bourgeoisie including intelligentsia live, what they buy, what they eat, how they spend their time. People know that the falseness of their hopes lies in the building blocks of a capitalist global economy where they are constantly told that there is no food, but

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meanwhile, the crops standing in the fields cannot be harvested, and in the granaries there is rot. Politicians can skim off the fruits of the land, and the labour of the people for one or two terms, spinning new utopias to seduce the masses, but as it is popularly known, these totalitarian democracies do not last forever. The consent to totalitarianism is false. The consent is manufactured out of fear of the venom of the politician, the local goons, or the ability to buy voters with small tokens of vested interest, such as money and alcohol. In the seasons to come, we will see that the local communities, which make up our villages and small towns, will fall back into a space we have only imagined, where fear and hatred compound and everyone becomes afraid of the other. It could be the hacker on the computer, the football or kabaddi (local wrestlers) ideologue who commands his troupe of friends and admirers to abuse the women who never emerge from their homes or are incapable of going back to their workplace because of the climate of fear, the children who point fingers at others who do not resemble themselves … the list is endless. In contrast to that is the faith humans have always had in one another, which transcends the line of difference, rivalry, bigotry, hatred. It is that world that we must seek to build to assure workers that their lives are precious and that every attempt must be made by the state to classify them as human beings. The recognition of humans is the first endeavour, and survival of our world depends on this simple task, rather than comparing ourselves with tyrannical and authoritarian world leaders.

The New World and Its Constituencies A few years from now, after the cycle of deaths by Covid-19 are complete, we will be faced with how to deal with the immense sense of loss and despair that will engulf those who have lost members of their family or dear friends or respected colleagues. Death is the annihilation of memory, and very often, we may visually remember, as in a dream, of all that we held most dear about loved ones. However, we have no recall of their voices. Artists and artisans have given us a huge volume of materials through digital means of the work that they and their predecessors have produced. What is interesting is that we

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are dependent on electricity for this recall. However, the tenuousness of this access is not just a matter of class locations such as funding, air conditioning, lighting, preservation tools, imported technologies; it is also about climate change and its impact. Climate change has made us understand melting ice caps and raised temperatures, which in turn increase the volume of sea levels. Unseasonal rains and coastal flooding have become as endemic as a disease. Farming populations, with their allied crafts, have to be protected by policies, not just by assuring them seasonal remuneration or cash handouts, though these are essential for their immediate survival. They have to be trained to return to their lands or to adapt to new lands, after the season of flood, and to rehabilitate themselves on land with new soil compositions, which may have turned saline in seacoast villages. Covid-19 along with flood rehabilitation is one of the most exacting circumstances in which coastal and riverine people would find themselves. Sundarbans in 2009 was affected by the cyclone, and the people returned to their homes, starting their fishing and horticultural practices, market gardening and tourist-promoting activities as soon as they could. The fear that they felt is palpable. The cyclone Amphan has wiped out their struggles and hopes, but the versatility of the Indians has depended on their determination to remain in familiar spaces. The bureaucracy has never quite been able to communicate with people who have been relocated in flood plains that life here is dangerous. It is like alcohol and tobacco advertisements, no amount of proclaiming its terrible dangers is helpful when the state actively promotes it as an anodyne to hungry workers for their troubles and receives revenue from it. Similarly, in relation to land utilisation, petitioners are created to fill the fields, occupy and harvest them; then, the area is threatened with policies that ensure that the same lands are emptied for the ‘good of the environment’ or industrial progress. Paolo Freire coined the term ‘the intelligentsia of the people’ to describe first-generation learners who would be able to mediate between local communities and scientists, so that through mutual dialogue, they would come to an understanding of the necessity of the survival of people who live off the land, such as fishers, farmers and artisans. It is time now for the state to enter into dialogue with

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migrant workers before we all go into entropy. Their poverty could be borne only because they had access to wages and seasonal harvests. Once manpower or human resources has been crushed, and women excluded, the politics of far-right fundamentalism will express itself through a huge cultural extravaganza, where the craft communities will be sacrificed in the name of industrial progress. One of the problems that citizens face with the promise of a cure is the intractable sense of hierarchy that pervades the right to have access. These are monitored in terms of how the state defines the rights of individuals; whereas in the last century, liberty, equality and community were the axioms of hard-earned democracies, the right to be free is now contested. Consensus is manufactured out of fear, and people believe that the right to life is defined by the state. Intellectual production and reproduction of ideas are seen to be the most dangerous, and the watchdogs of the state are mobilised in terms of the ideological legitimations that they carry forward. Efficiency is thought to be the codeword for this fast propelling machinery that carries the concept of progress forward. As John Berger and Jean Mohr wrote in the mid-1970s of the last century in A Seventh Man (2010), the migrant worker is particularly estranged since he/she occupies several places simultaneously: To try to understand the place of another it is necessary to dismantle the world as seen from one’s place within it, and to reassemble it as seen from his. For example, to understand a given choice another makes, one must face in imagination the lack of choices which confront and deny him. The well-fed are incapable of understanding the choices of the under-fed. The world has to be dismantled and re-assembled in order to be able to grasp, however clumsily, the experience of another. To talk of entering the other’s subjectivity is misleading. The subjectivity of another does not simply constitute a different interior attitude to the same exterior facts. The constellation of facts, of which he is the centre is different. (Berger and Mohr 2010: 96–98)

From this, we can infer that the move to smart cities provides the fulcrum of how we may define the acceptance of oligarchies without question. The sudden rush to salaried employment, never mind the

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discrepancies of wages or the disorder brought from emptying the villages, is typified as the increased opportunities made available to the working class. This is ‘development’. Accompanying it is the roar of the unfortunate who are being divested without notice. It does not go unheard, for, with every cordon and every bullet, there rise masses of people who see the old world disappear before their very eyes. George Rudes showed us that it was possible to ask sociologically or historically speaking, ‘who makes up or composes the crowd?’ At this very moment, the appearance of farmers who had been the backbone of the agrarian revolution represents the antidote to privatisation and the megalomania of individual industrialists who seek to capitalise gains on the backs of the farmers with small landholdings. The term ‘small landholdings’ is in essence a relative term since they are shared among clan groups who, once divested of property or its beneficence, will begin to set rolling the ball of discontentment. Covid-19 and farmers’ protests go hand in hand, as in this dangerous moment, they take over the imagination of the people. We can only presume that if democracy and the Greens movement is to prevail, the rejection of Monsanto and the adaptation to Covid precautions are the moral dilemmas of the politicians and the people. Covid-19 bears no hierarchical apparatus, everyone is equally vulnerable. Food production as industrial production is by its nature selectively distributed. The annual greetings to the farmers on Independence Day from the ramparts of the Red Fort include congratulations for them, but bonanza crops will become a thing of the past. Social change through legal and constitutional means takes longer than the imposition by a political party’s intention to wrest power from the people. It is for this reason that the courts have had to intervene. Already, the courts represent the transition moment ideologically as judges too may be open about their loyalties to specific political parties. The Punjab farmers sowed their crops and came to the city. They stayed in protest sites leaving harvesting to kin and friends who looked after family farms in their stead. Can we imagine then that political movements will be defined by the seasonal time of agriculture? Finally, Felix Padel (2011) writes in his Sacrificing People that,

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… engineers, businessmen and politicians possess great knowledge about mines, dams and factories, but when they act on this without an adequate awareness of their effects on the natural environment, the results can be disastrous. When we write about tribal people divorced from an awareness of our own relationship with them and the effects of what we write, the result is dehumanizing. (Padel 2011: 33)

In trying to understand the circumstances in which farmers with large landholdings are beggared by being divested of their options, by the three Farm Laws in times of Covid-19, one must look at the fleeting nature of speech itself, as the television garners for us advertisements, Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha TV clips and the Prime Minister’s comment ‘Those who don’t want the new can stay with the old, says Modi in LS, underlines the power of private sector’ (Mathew 2021). Amita Baviskar has proved in Uncivil City that the face of the urban conclave of ghettos, shanty towns and highrises is indeed the migrant worker. The worker who sets out every morning thinks of home and those he/she has left behind and the chances of their survival in the days of Covid-19, climate change and the possibility that wages will not be paid, since caste and class hierarchies place them lowest in the grid. Who will plant and who will harvest, when will the rains come, and having come, will they leave? These are existential questions that migrant workers face in the time of dissolving ice caps and rising seas (Visvanathan 2009, 2020).

Facing Our Fate as Humans The abyss faced us in 2020, bringing all the ambitions of the previous year to a close. We sat at home, wondering if we would live to see the next day. This was not unknown. Zygmunt Bauman called it the state of the precariat. It was profoundly the dilemma that faced humans as they faced the possibility of extinction. But the virus has existed or at least has been recognised since the middle of the last century. Its claims were toward formlessness, and unlike the bacteria, it could not be caught, it mutated ceaselessly. It was this aspect of its constant elusiveness that made it so appalling. How to catch the thief that you cannot recognise, who changes form with every single body that it appropriates, clinging

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to cells and changing their structure, implacably settling on the lungs and killing off the human right to breathe? The moment came when the Malthusian principle was recognised as the most efficacious one. So in India, migrant labour became the victims of neglect, in the USA, it was the colonies and ghettos of the Afro-American and migrant Latin-American populations. However, when the world leaders suffered Covid-19 themselves, the search for the vaccine became more significant. Like the arms race, improvised in laboratories, the fuelling of the dramatic impulse to cure became the symbol of resistance. The Space Age was here. The call to occupy Space was not just about climbing Jacob’s ladder and fighting with the Angel of Death and wrestling with it, but it was about the infrastructure of knowledge and the paraphernalia with it. We began to accept the relentless struggle and familiarised ourselves with the unexpected. The symbol of the Corona became decorative and commonplace, hanging like celebratory wreaths in dramatic colours of blue and red behind the newscasters as they read the statistics of death as implacably as they read cricket scores of the winning and losing parties or the cost of new guns produced for defence purposes. Every day brought new monsters, not just of the cadences of human behaviour, but the plea for the right to be human. This is possibly the most difficult negotiation of all. Oligarchies of merchants, in league with politicians, army and police began to define the extent and degree of the barricade dividing the class of ‘them’ and ‘us’. The moment that Covid-19 was seen to be the axes where surveillance technologies could be used legitimately to inscribe citizenship or its lack, the battle towards the selection of the superior was already defined. It was the categorisation of humans into the natural species and the culturally superior. The classification of this simple dyad was left to those who had the means to imagine the future. For the rest, it was a game of Russian roulette, the mask of death was already present in their lives, like hunger or disease, and the disease was quick to choose the most vulnerable. The vaccines which proliferated in the New Year were equally devious, being marked like flags on a yet unknown map. The vaccines were defined by country, source of production and international alliances, and other host countries purchased according to their friendship or

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loyalty ties. Rumour-mongering was looked at with disfavour, and the test of democracy was the right to dissent should one not want to take the anti-Covid vaccine. The deaths that followed vaccination were of the sick and the infirm, the old and the already vulnerable. If a receiver of the vaccine died, it was because of a pre-existing illness or some concurrent medication not known to the vaccinator. In India, when people die of malnutrition, the state says they died of organ failure, not hunger. Similarly, when people died suddenly, the cause of death was anything other than vaccine response. Statements about untested vaccines being promoted were sidelined simply by saying that the recipients would be counted among trial candidates. Obituaries became the lifeline of the secure populace sitting at home, not wishing to travel, endowed with concentric circles of support who could then imagine that if frontline workers and the poor could be on the list, then the results of the fallout from vaccination, would be available to the others. Obituaries during Covid-19 gave them a strong sense of self-worth, that they were chosen not to die. This created a tremendous sense of a surreal time, which coexisted, as people did not any longer know experientially who would be the next to go. Solitude produced a sense of abstractness, where life and death were coterminous, each one believing that this day could be his/her last. Both intense enjoyment and fear became the pinnacle of the day’s sensorial experience. Time could only be counted by the day or even by the hour. Like the alleged last minutes of one’s life, all of one’s memories coalesced, so that they could be enjoyed fragment by fragment. Everything appeared at a distance. As Christoph Wulf writes: In close reference to the viewed object, mimetic visions lead to many heterogeneous means of perception, and enables plurality in the processing of aesthetic experiences. With the aid of mimesis, the assimilation of foreign objects, image, and circumstances can occur. This makes it necessary for the beholder to step away from the context that is familiar to him and to experience the Other. Along with this comes a sensitization for similarities and differences, and for the irreducibility and incommensurability of life forms. (Wulf in Michaels and Wulf 2014: 106)

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What stuns the observer, of course, is that Covid-19 has an unrecognisable grammar because of mutations, and only when it appears in the statistics of death can it be distinguished from routine colds and coughs. Wulf states: Medical experience is constituted through the fact that the medical view is infused with knowledge, and every symptom has its own meaning—or is given meaning—in conjunction with other symptoms. The more precise the observation, the greater the chance of gaining an adequate knowledge of the disease. What is of interest is the totality of the visible, that is what constitutes the overall structure of the statements. (Wulf in Michaels and Wulf 2014: 101)

It is this vicarious pursuing of the demon by digitisation that allows each one of us to follow the scientific conceptualisation of the disease on a day-to-day basis. Since the legend of runaway genes and war memorials had already appeared through media reporting, the worst fears of humans had been realised. It is the nature of an ever-present war machinery that is activated. Borders are closed, people are commanded to stay home, arrests are made (or threatened) if people break curfew, jobs are lost, safeguards are implemented so that human lives can be saved. There is a memorialisation of these war zones by images of the dead, and the statistics numb the viewer. Like any other war, the petitioners of the right to live are commercially invested with unique gear and defined as the warrior class. Their vulnerability confounds us, as they are like other humans, equally susceptible to death. This war economy appears in the form of commerce which brings the product home. Such people, who are frontline workers, like doctors and nurses, also die. Representations of these myriad deaths (or survivors) like in the landscapes of war become palimpsests, as new mourners replace older ones. The continual biographical notes and pictorial images that appear become representative of continuous thematic construction. Jerome de Groot writes that a new form of history writing, separated from the text, appears through digitisation as the form of mediation requires the integration of many other senses, which are interpreted by the message providers (De Groot in Watterton and Watson 2010: 92). The

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hyperreality of continuously appearing images, substituted by newer ones, sometimes conflicting with earlier representations of reality, separates us from reality as individual viewers. Personal memories and photographs become culled from media sites to infuse intimacy into alien motifs or distant ones, and we reread the public and the private in ever new ways, as we seek to remain in communities or be forever isolated and distraught. Ross Wilson argues that ‘the image, in this respect, does not have to be of an event experienced in person, or of an individual personally known to the observer, but one to which importance is attached to the observer’ (Wilson in Watterton and Watson 2010: 78). Of course, the neighbourhood during this time of Covid-19 internment was the internet chatroom, made friendly and habitable by Facebook. It was further profitably entrenched as people used it as a public room to hang out their memories like snapshots from home movies. This created an entourage of supporters of a life well-lived, selectively presented. Here was the public moment where rhapsodies were shared, capitalism and the ghetto rubbed shoulders and the market profited. People genuinely felt that if they had internet connectivity, money in the bank and plastic cards, life could go on ceaselessly. The market had entered the home, the cosiness of the interior became the window to the world sealed to outsiders physically, but letting everyone in, ostensibly without danger. This mutual trust in common humanity was the fulcrum of the globalised world. It was a web of relations activated according to need. Most substantially, the principle of exclusivism dominated this expert negotiation of reality. We felt we were still human, we cared because we could respond, although from a digital distance, to the catastrophes that went on accumulating independently on the world map. Revolutions, carnage, destitution, floods, famines, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions all went on around us, while newscasters described these in lesser significant headlines to the real news: the dip and rise, the return of Covid-19 to areas which had breathed easy for a few weeks. When will we humans be Covid-free? As a mutation of the cold and cough virus, it has no end, and that is its very nature. Christine Bucci Glucksman calls the creation of continual terror the work of the bisexual angel (divine androgyny) who brings torment

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and death. It never ceases, it came with the world and everything in it (Buci-Glucksman 1994: 95). She describes transgressive Utopia as that state where opposites collide: … the appearance in writing and historical praxis of a purely imaginal space (hundertprozentigen Bildraums) which convulses established frontiers and forces people to think together a number of apparent opposites—catastrophe and progress, messianism and marxism, feminine and masculine, novelty and repetition of the same. (ibid.: 94)

Out of this irreconcilability, which arises from juxtaposition that is not synthesised, she follows Walter Benjamin in constructing the concept of an alienated time, where everyone is a participant, a witness, but cannot be involved. This is the abyss as I see it, the storm from paradise which blows us hither and thither, without our moving. It is both incarceration as well as intellectual intervention. We attempt to make familiar that which is focused on our ready destruction. Already, industrialised farming in its 21st-century phase had made the world recognizable in terms of consumers and producers. Farming represented the old world and the benefits of agrarian economies came from particular kinds of traditions. These were specifically of kinshipbased economic occupations. Such people were seen as hindrances to the new world order, where regardless of national borders, the purveyors of new ideas and economic power would see catastrophe as their chance to profiteering, supported by the state. Inbuilt in this was the idea of the superior peoples and the degraded ones, the active and the redundant. There was no chance for mobility, as educational opportunities were taken away from the poor. Capitalist economies, hand in glove, saw that the defence, medical and food economies would be tailor-made to protect each other. Selection would be seen to be the most important way by which people would be classified as having the chance to life. Triage economies became the rationale for the ever-present lucidity of the scientist and the politician, who interlinked to prove rationality, and industrial modes of production were the only factors of significance. The very confines of superimposed captivity meant that protest was impossible except digitally, and this too could lead to sudden arrests. The truth was harboured in political terms, and

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cleavages were electorally fashioned. The rule of trading families who intercrossed their profits with leisure and defence equally now moved into the harvest of ready food production. The farmer was the target, for the peasant was also, traditionally in India, the soldier. The very nature of a continuous war economy where food and medicine became symbols of proliferation and excess would take on the traditional fragmented farming household who provided manual labour as well as soldiering and clerical functions. The promise of the raised GDP was based on the ominous profits of the industrial capitalist, the average of which would be provided as cover for the impoverishment of the peasantry. The responsibility of the state would be to feed the people, and the anchor of this promise lay in the solution: the demise of the working class. Slavery would have other names, as the migrant population would be ushered into the city, as the means of livelihood were taken away from them. Contracted wage labour would build smart cities, the need for cement would dry up the rivers as sand mining proliferated, food would be grown in laboratories or another continent. As Brian Massumi puts it, there is both singularisation (the propelling of the individual) and fabulisation (production of a copy without a model) happening simultaneously. There is dividing and separating, there is a coming together, and simultaneously, there is a departure (Massumi 1993: 34). As he puts it, the tension between the singular (simulation) and the individual is abjection or the free fall, to which is added the ingredient of yearning. Free–fall and staying afloat aggravate rather than encourage one another. They define a contradiction resolvable only through a selfexpiring act of purchase. The ‘individual’ or actualized capitalist subject is the spark ignited, at the buying site/being site, by the friction between the generic and specific conditions of consuming existence. (ibid.: 35)

As George Simmel (1978) interprets it, it is the relation between desire and value that we must use to understand commodity and exchange. Now, the ultimate postbox economy is energised not only by how we feel we can own the things we see but the waste that is packaging, the surplus that confounds us, the statistics of vulnerability for the messenger. The

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antidote to this accumulation should ideally be redistribution, but like the smallpox blankets famously distributed by the colonising British to tribal communities in America, the function of reused objects is to carry with it the pox of memory. The poor are confronted with the possibility that not only will they no longer have access to food, education, medication, but in the age of Covid-19, they are further threatened with the recycled materials that reach them. This excess of the worthy middle class, this abundance of materials reaches the waste sites, as Zygmunt Bauman describes it, and can include everything from radioactive computer parts to clothes and defunct household goods. The poor were the last to be paid, but now in Covid-19 times, they are not paid at all. To avoid thinking about the effulgence of procurement and allied waste, the solution for the consumer is film portals. Here, the world appears to them to confirm what they already know through newspaper and television headlines. Security in the abyss is always personal, it is the creation of optimal comfort for those who are bounded in, but view the drug addict, the murderer, the Mafia organisation, the kidney trade (extended to heart, liver and limbs), the corrupt politician and cop, with the intense gaze of the one at the peak of the panopticon. This seeming make-believe world is analysed as distant, but the knock of the Gestapo is always close, the fear that sets in by viewing the psychotic or psychopath is in effect to remove us from the tranquillity of a known or imagined future. We become participants in collective violence, continual viewers of the interlocking of the innocent and the malefic. Out of this emerges known practices of transcendence, of putting ourselves beyond the pale of the ordinary. Here begin the techniques of meditation and theologically astute objectification of the extraordinary, which are also placed in the known market economy. It must be purchasable. Yet, the landscapes of memory always return us to the past, to the people we have known and the spaces we have inhabited. During internment in war or pestilence, the informed heart engages with the past in myriad ways. As Simone Weil pointed out to us during the Second World War, only thought is free (Visvanathan 2007). We are continually living in shadow worlds, where fear reigns supreme, and

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yet we know that the future is incandescent, and we must reach there. It is our goal. Robert Harbison (1977) defines the garden as narrativised through paintings, architectural ensembles and the literary work of those who believed that through our thoughts, we could imagine a world. While painters don’t make pigments or writers’ language, those materials do not go on living and dying visibly, those works are not green one day and brown the next, tamed for a time but never permanently subdued. Although the grandest conceptions have been achieved by the gardeners who resisted least the natural tendencies of plants, their gardens are finally as thoroughly human as the most strict. (ibid.: 4)

It is this optimism that gets people through from one day to the next. The poles, the axis of the earth, the Gods, the changelings, they all exist. How then may we come to terms that life must go on, that whether we exist or not, the very nature of our imagination propels us into known worlds or the unknown? It is this very ability to transcend time and space that makes us conscious of time as a principle not just of the seasons, but also of thought itself. Whether we are trained or not, have gurus who may tell us of the journeys of the soul, we become alert to the probability of our own existence as dust motes in an ever-spiralling cosmic zone. ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was God’, John’s aphorism is sufficient unto his readers. It is this intellectualism that allows us to access the experience of others as intelligibly as we may. Covid-19 showed us the presence of essential humanity, making no distinctions of caste, class, gender, age and race. Everyone became susceptible to the possibility of bronchial infection and a slow death preceded by the flooding of the lungs. Between life and death, there was only breath, ruah or spirit. The social consequence of this simple fact was substantially varied. Across continents, people found themselves vulnerable not only to the pandemic but to the whole machinery of fear and preparation that accompanied it. Scientifically speaking, the governments had to allay fear by the production of the vaccine. How it worked had to be

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symptomatically described. It is this which brings us to the problem of the normal and the pathological. There had to be an understanding of the arc which transcribed it onto the human body in terms of its variations. Not surprisingly, after many trials and episodes, the healthy body was circumscribed, and the period of effectiveness of the vaccine described. This needed to be an adult (above 18) as consent to being vaccinated was an essential aspect. This ideal body should not be on medication, should not be diseased, should not have allergies, should not be producing antibodies (i.e., should not be a Covid patient present or past) should not have diabetes or heart troubles, and no autoimmune suppressing ailments, thereby exposing the nerves to the pseudo-Covid. These parameters were then bypassed routinely, and those above 45 years were selected for trial in the first instance before vaccines were made freely available by the state. Age is the greatest handicap, and the illnesses described then would limit a substantial proportion of the population. The numbers would be sufficient to keep the entire medical industry busy for the next couple of years the world over, seven years as the estimate as billions are involved. It would become the new identity kit required for travel, with one prototype vaccine available for probably 3,700 mutating viruses and booster shots available in rich countries for those who could afford them. Yet people hope to live and enjoy their living moments while coexisting in times of dread. There is a routine pleasure in waking up every morning, in knowing that, for the moment, life is pleasurable in recollection of joys known previously. The survivor hangs onto that, in the way the victim hangs onto the spider web, before being consumed. The artistry of laboratory science has developed from the homologies represented between the fruit fly and us. We know that the microcosm and macrocosm of their existence and ours are based not only on chance but the delectable nature of selection. Who will select us to live or in grander terms, live on, through our children? This makeshift trend of our biological ambitions is restructured with every catastrophe, as we watch others die in the most inhumane conditions, where the known web of affectualities (kinship and friendship) are rendered insignificant.

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The very nature of life as we knew it was the presence of the loved one at the time of death. Ever present was the loving relative, the kinsman or kinswoman who kept vigil, whose patience and foreknowledge allowed this intimate contact between the dying and the closest mourner. How now may we make up for this absence, where masked and cloaked anonymous caregivers now provide attentive care to the dying. The logistics of respect for the deceased through mortuary rituals in mass crematoriums and gravesites are presented in terms of the number of dead on a daily basis. Do we have a language of remembrance or mourning where we ignite the fire or drop earth on the corpse when we may no longer be present? The commodification of mass death is present in the language of negation, ‘this is not that’. The industrial production of coffins, plastic shields, cellulose or cloth masks or hand sanitisers is where the scientific notion of modes of prevention brings us back to the human body being relegated to landfills with its paraphernalia. How much of it is combustible through organic decay? The lessons for global warming are present for us in terms of statistics of incinerator use. We are present during the extinction of the earth, and we see it as another morphological moment like the birth of the seas and the exaltation of land through volcanic eruptions. As Loren Eisely (1960) so dramatically showed us, the age of catastrophes placed Homo sapiens in a gradually evolving space where time was not epochal as we thought, but a mere parenthesis in a larger plan. All 19th-century geological assumptions were based on these escalating disasters, where the magma swelled and Pompei was remembered. Today, it is the melting of ice at the poles, the shifting of the earth’s axis and the rising of the seas by global warming. We are told that new microbes will emerge, new parasites, new viruses will manifest in this ecological evolution towards entropy. Yet, we hope that we will survive these catastrophes, we hope that our children will survive. Our words signify paradise to mean simply, everyday needs fulfilled. Our tenacity depends on this imagination, our sense of ardour and order are both confined by our access to that which we hold most dear, the recognition of ourselves and others as being human. Paul Gilroy describes this state as ‘Between Camps’, where the threats of dissonance are so continuous that humans feel their deprivation even when it is yet to materialise in their personal

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circumstances. Totalitarian governmentality is seen as necessary for security during the pandemic, and then, we must understand the ‘importance of terror in the everyday functioning of these forms of political authority that extend the domain of political processes and concerns in every direction and thus merit the name totalitarian’. He describes these as ‘the use of prisons, the spectacularization of death, the debasement of courts’ (Gilroy 2000: 153). Zygmunt Bauman described the problem for us two decades ago in his assertion that humans could be labelled as waste, where they were not recognised as consumers. In this particular context, it is interesting that the return to the Garden is recognised as a form of autonomy and self-sustenance (Visvanathan 2020). We are seeing new forms of facing the abyss, which withdraws individuals into the radius of their immediate habitat. The consequences of these are a Gandhian selfsustainable agriculture, a reluctance to be drawn into the time machine of entropy. The West has demarcated this as the Greens movements, where all over the world people return to Nature. This recognition of their own versatility has been the signature note of the people’s movements archived in countless stories of success, miniaturised in media as the stories of individual heroes. Now the war machines become ever active seeking to represent industrial agriculture as the only solution to feeding the people. The people respond to this in two ways. In the first instance, they grow their food, supporting themselves and local communities. When this is banned, as governments become proactive in supporting capitalist genetically modified agriculture, declassed individuals join the workforce as manual labourers in collective industrial projects. Can anyone evade this? It is the interesting dilemma of postmodern civilisations as they enter the transition stage of moving towards a landscape of fear and collectivisation (Kelly 1984). To accept the image of the world as self-destructive is probably a given because scientists like a god, say that it’s all ending anyway, seas are rising, epidemics are increasing, we are all going to die or ‘in the long run, we are dead’. Simply put, it is a case of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Some of the most interesting findings of E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1977) in his study of the Azande in Sudan was that because they believed they

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had been bewitched, individuals would fade away and die from fear. We are in much the same situation. Whether we live or die, we share the same fate, as our individual extinction is already premised at our birth. Because we believe in an ever-extending lifespan, we feel we have the right to that socially relevant length of time. However, nature has its own propulsion mechanism to assure us of our mortality. We are but extensions of our genetic correspondence with apes or fruit flies. With our digital expertise now ensuring that knowledge is at the tip of our fingers, and artificial intelligence can do the rest for us, we move forward to an implacable destiny already described as ‘6 Habitable Planets’ known by their numbers as naming labels. Since we are moving towards a timescale we do not understand, we hierarchise communities in terms of their information control systems. This could be in terms of detonating bombs from a distance or growing food in laboratories. Whatever be the nature of our ambition as humans, it can only extend consciousness by the will of its prime movers. If then the democratic impulse is pruned for the ‘greater good’, it is with nonchalance that the elites will shrug off their responsibility to the people or to the great populations that cannot compete with them. Once we accept this nonchalance as a given, our detachment places us back in the garden of infinite beauty, as we stroll about from the safety of our secure homesteads under increased surveillance. There will be nothing to fear except the breakdown of electricity, for then our interactions with each other and outer space will come to a close. Each one of us will have knowledge only of the day’s events from other survivors in hearing of us, and the effects of the sun’s shadow on our lives, no longer rising and setting, but edging to its own darkness. We would have found other suns by then, planning our futures in terms of the matrix of received light. In the following section, I will provide an autoethnographic account to show how surviving Covid in a public hospital ward, at the height of the pandemic, and the resilience provided by family support is crucial in the 21st century. Yet, though we may live or die, we leave behind a trail of evidence, of which digitalised hospital and phone records are our best evidence of survival strategies.

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Personal History as Data for the Sociologist We are often afraid to tell our life histories though Cultural Studies commit us to collect the biographies of others in order to tell a story, glean sociological facts and produce narratives to generalise data. How may we presume that other people’s lives are less sacred than our own? Feminism made it increasingly apparent that the personal was political, and those who tried to camouflage it by speaking of value neutrality had already climbed the precarious ladder to salaried jobs and professional mobility in the profession. The bare-faced act of feminism to expose oneself to the general public was methodologically presented as the reason why genealogies could have women’s names in it, instead of presenting only the names of men. Patrilineality was by itself a cultural trope, where women were ordinarily subsumed, socialised, made to matter if they conformed, and excluded if they did not. In a way, the narratives of women when documented produced realities that were substantially different from the bureaucratic record. The strangeness of the contemporary, the scope of survival strategies, the honour of everyday work responsibilities, and the tenderness and care that strangers provide are immensely potent. In the following account, I provide a glimpse into the Covid ward which I inhabited with nine other women patients. When I was discharged on 8 May 2021, I had spent 12 days in the women’s ward for Covid patients. It all began with a low fever and a headache, and a terror that after one and a half years of social distancing and attempts to keep the house clean, and using a lot of soap to wash one’s hands every few hours, gargling with hot water, the virus had caught my youngest daughter and me. Afraid to inform anyone, we lay in bed, hoping it would go away. After ten days, a friend phoned asking us where we were as she had not met us for a while. As soon as she heard that we were ill, she got an oximeter and left it with us. On the third day of measuring my pulse and O2 levels, my daughter found the level of blood oxygen had dropped to 75. So, she phoned her two older sisters, who then attempted to find me a hospital bed, as the doctor friend we had called the previous day had said I would not survive if I wasn’t hospitalised. His remonstration that we had not informed anyone or got a Covid test fell on deaf ears. The

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newspapers had been full of weeping relatives who could not find their kin in the mortuary or had left them at the hospital for treatment, and then lost them forever, during the second phase of Covid-19 at its peak in Delhi in April 2021. Covid tests were also about queues and being told to return home even if they had been previously booked to be administered. By great fortune, a private company agent came with the kit, and both my daughter and I were definitively Covid positive. I was too ill to notice what was happening, as suddenly there was coming and going in the house, young people, friends of my daughter were there, friends of friends, all doubly masked, making phone calls. An oxygen cylinder appeared, but it seemed to be empty, so it was returned, and small aerosol-like containers were purchased. ‘Please don’t send me to hospital, I will never see you again, I won’t know how to contact you,’ I pleaded. The young people in the house, some of whom had contracted Covid previously and were banking on the immunity that follows for a few months, were urgently making phone calls all the while, maybe trying to purchase more oxygen aerosols! My eldest daughter, who was living in another city with her family, lockdown having enforced them into a relatively pleasant stay for a year and a half, managed to find a hospital bed for me. It was a window to survival that few people had in those days. She used Twitter and Facebook, and innumerable phone calls and someone sent an SMS saying, ‘There is a bed in Jamia Hamdard’. So at 7 p.m., my youngest daughter called the university ambulance from the JNU Health Centre, which appeared at the door. We reached the hospital very soon, given that there was little traffic. At the gate, we were told where to go and the doctor we should meet. We walked to the entrance, where a young doctor was waiting for us, who said, with some alarm, ‘You should not have walked, you should have taken a wheelchair.’ My daughter, who was also Covid positive, quickly relinquished me to his care and called a taxi to return home, where she self-isolated for the 12 days I was away. Friends sent her food, but while she did not have severe Covid, the fatigue was immense. The doctor who had greeted me had a ward boy bring a wheelchair and the bag with fresh clothes, which my daughter had packed for me. I went into the ward, which was packed, all the beds taken. I didn’t have

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any feelings of any kind, I merely thought that ‘Here is a bed, now I can sleep.’ I did have my cell phone and called after an hour to see if my daughter had reached home safely. Thankfully, she had. We were woken up every hour to have some test taken, and all of us submitted to this because we realised that when one is at death’s door, one has no will. We were in a collective state of lassitude, none of us made eye contact, we lay there in some physical pain, the magnitude of which depended on the severity of it. There were two 70-year-old women, who wept with the agony they were feeling, which caused the rest of us some inconvenience, for as soon as we dropped off to sleep, there was a heart-rending cry from one lady or another. Dying in the loo was the greatest fear most of us had. Some attendants would accompany us if we were willing to use the wheelchair, but most of us preferred to walk down to the toilets alone, though the nurses regularly shouted at us for doing so, saying we could have an accident if we were not accompanied. The first few days I got lost returning, there were only four rooms to pass, but I would keep walking, then have to ask my way. I had no sense of recognition spatially, but as I said, it was a short walk, and there were medical staff visible everywhere. What was interesting was that over those 8 days, several patients did recover; their oxygen levels in the blood reached 98 and they were sent home. We had not made eye contact, exchanged a word or tried to introduce ourselves. The ward boys were at attention, sympathetic to our terrible condition, we lay as if dead for a week, but it was their courtesy which was enormous. At night, it was a different story, as we would be woken up at all hours to have our temperature taken, a needle inserted into the vein or a lung scan. Anyone could die at any time, so the medical machinery just went on functioning as if there was no tomorrow. Neither did we bother with courtesies, nor did the technical staff who had to drag huge X-ray machines to each bed or take blood samples. There was no morning and no night, time was an abstraction, the bright lights of the Covid ward were on day and night. At the end of eight days, the world looked a little approachable, as the fever had abated and so had the headaches. I noticed for instance that we were on the ground floor and that when the green shade over the window was lifted, one could actually see cars and people. I started

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to listen to the phone calls that patients received and learnt about their lives and their difficulties. They, like people at railways stations and long-distance buses, had no problem discussing the most complex domestic issues. I made no phone calls, except a few to say I was alive and getting better. I also started reacting very abusively if people put on their mobile phone loudspeakers after 7 p.m. Till 7 p.m., I had no problem listening to the litany of messages about what was cooked for lunch, whose property was at risk, and what expat children said to old parents, who had been suddenly marooned. These overheard narratives were immensely interesting, and as they did not mind being overheard, from day eight, I started interacting with fellow patients and got to know them a little better. Post 7 p.m., I would get abrasive if they played religious music or talked to relatives. No one seemed to have brought their earphones with them, so this explosive enquiry, ‘Who has their loudspeaker on?’ would be met by complete silence. Then I would get up from my bed and accost the person, and say menacingly, ‘It’s not your home, it’s a hospital ward, a public place.’ Sometimes, having got to know their names, I would start shouting, saying, ‘It’s night, and you have your phone loudspeaker on’ and the accused person would say, ‘It’s not me’ in a weak voice. It was as if my hearing was sharper during the night, and any noise could make my head spin. By day 10, only three of us were left. The new entrant talked a lot and ordered a lot of tea with sugar from the canteen, but then she got sent off to ICU and the ventilator. The doctors and nurses were marvellously kind and stopped to speak to each of us. It was the everydayness of their concern that showed me what warriors they were. The whole nation was in their debt. They came regularly and tried to communicate to us how important it was to lie on one’s belly, as that was as good as being on the ventilator. I tried to do it as often as I could, the belly had to be empty, so it was possible between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. and between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m., as the rest of the time, one would have eaten a meal or had water or tea or soup. The kitchen was excellent; they fed us well as nutrition was a central part of the rehabilitation process. Two cats dropped by every day at lunchtime and would examine me

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from a distance as if they were reincarnated hospital consultants. No one chased them away, they seemed to belong, without infringing on us. The sheets were changed every morning at five, and for the first week, we stood precariously hoping not to fall and die. The cleaning staff came through the day mopping the floors and keeping the toilets clean. Their work is so difficult and yet they managed to communicate a certain valour. Sometimes one wondered why the men’s toilet was next to the women’s ward, and the women’s loo was next to the men’s ward. Just a change of the name plate would have made life so much easier. As most patients were in the state where reading boards given the fever was difficult for them, they would take the lassitude of their condition to use the loo nearest to them. As near death, all is obtuse (all are brothers and sisters), no one complained as long as propriety was maintained. The long sojourn in the Covid ward was like being in the Jammu Tawi slow coach train to Kerala, which takes five days with unisex loos. We had no idea when we could go home, and my anxiety about my oxygen level not going up was finally solved when it reached 93 for three days running. The nurses said, ‘You will do better at home, ma’am, with the food that you are used to eating at home. And of course, you will have to stay in bed for another two weeks, even if you think you have been discharged.’ My middle daughter had come to Delhi, the day after I had been admitted to the hospital. Friends loaned her an empty flat and she commuted to the hospital to liaison with the doctors regarding my treatment, and to ferry messages to the anxious family who had no news of me. She could not go home to JNU as my third daughter had Covid, and had arrived basically to make sure that I got clean clothes and fruits. She lived in the flat near the hospital, and the kindness of friends helped her get through two weeks of solitude as she could not meet anyone. Covid rules of social distance made it very necessary that since she visited the hospital once a week, she did not come in contact with the family who had kindly offered her the use of a safe house. When she came to collect me from the hospital on day 13 of my stay, she seemed a little like a Martian, double-masked with a glass visor. I was afraid to make eye contact, as I knew my days of isolation had somehow robbed me of speech, but she was completely at ease, saying, ‘Hi Mama!’ and escorted me with elan to the taxi downstairs. The ward

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boy, who had pushed my wheelchair to the ground floor said, ‘Yes, it’s our job, but we find it interesting, I cannot tell you how much we learn about others, and the knowledge they have. We don’t look at the risks, it’s about learning about humans.’ Since my eldest daughter has two little girls of her own, she was not able to come to Delhi, and my youngest was in home isolation with Covid, the trio would have long conversations from their different residences, and take all decisions together. This close interaction, though digital, was crucial for the mutual survival of the members of the family, who from one day to the next did not know the survival chances of their mother, for the first eight days. I remember the kindness of the medicos and the nurses, all of whom were about 25 years old. The senior doctors appeared only once a day at 11 a.m. to look at the charts and advise patients. For the rest of the time, we were completely under the care of the interns, each one so kind and alert. I felt as if the country was being run by young people, and that their love and patriotism was a talisman for the years to come. I was one of the lucky ones who survived. There was an old woman of 84, who had Covid and wept a lot. Of her, they would say, right through the day and night, ‘Keep calm, mother. The less you speak, the less you exert, the easier it will be for your lungs.’ To one another, they would say, ‘She has very little life in her’ (bahut thodi jaan bachi hai) and there would be patent anxiety about her chances of survival. They wanted to heal her and send her back to her family. As patients, we felt traumatised by her suffering and fear of death. We felt that her panic and her screams and cries mitigated our own chance of survival as we would be woken up from our endless slumber, day and night, by her constant speech. When she was sent up to ICU after five days, we felt relief and thought that the silence that was given back to us was a huge gift for our recovery. When I was allowed to return home, I knew that being in a public ward was as comfortable as travelling Sleeper Class or travelling in local buses. I am just grateful that I had the opportunity to be with women who understood our common human drive to stay alive, and the gratitude I felt towards my daughters who had made such an effort to get me on the side of the living.

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Bibliography Baviskar, Amita. 2020. Uncivil City. New Delhi: Sage/Yoda Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2003. Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press. Berger, John and Jean Mohr. 2010. A Seventh Man. London: Verso. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. 1994. Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity. New Delhi: Sage. Cangulheim, Georges. 1991. The Normal and the Pathological. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. De Groot, Jerome. 2010. ‘Historiography and Virtuality’. In Culture, Heritage and Representation, Perspectives on Visuality and the Past, edited by Emma Watterton and Steve Watson. Surrey: Ashgate. Eisely, Loren. 1960. The Firmament of Time. New York: Athaenum. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1977. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gilroy, Paul. 2000. Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race. London: Routledge. Harbison, Robert. 1977. Eccentric Spaces. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Kelly, Petra. 1984. Fighting for Hope. Boston: South End Press. Massumi, Brian, ed. 1993. The Politics of Everyday Fear. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Padel, Felix. 2011. Sacrificing People: Invasions of a Tribal Landscape. Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Simmel, George. 1978. The Philosophy of Money. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Visvanathan, Susan. 2007. ‘Simone Weil and the Quality of Friendship’. In Friendship, Interiority and Mysticism: Essays in Dialogue. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. ———. 2009. ‘Foresters and New Orientations to Survival’, in Indian Journal of Human Development 3 (1), January–June. ———. 2020. ‘Thinking about Agriculture in an Industrialising Economy’. In Science and Scientification in Asia and Europe, edited by Axel Michaels and Christoph Wulf. New Delhi: Routledge Wilson, Ross. 2010. ‘The Popular Memory of the Western Front’. In Culture, Heritage and Representation, Perspectives on Visuality and the Past, edited by Emma Watterton and Steve Watson. Surrey: Ashgate.

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Wulf, Christoph. 2014. ‘The Vision: Control, Desire, Perception’. In Exploring the Senses, edited by Axel Michaels and Christoph Wulf. New Delhi: Routledge. Websites ‘Who Can Take the Vaccine?’ Available at: www. who.int (accessed on 15 February 2021). Mathew, Liz. 2021. ‘Govt Respects Farmers Voice, Their Protests Pure, Bid to Pollute: PM’. The Indian Express, 11 February 2021. ‘Supreme Court Stays Order Granting Stay on Implementation’. Available at: www. livelaw, 1 January 2021 (accessed on 12 February 2021). ‘Government Will Abide by Supreme Court Order on Farm Laws: President Kovind’. Available at: www.thehindu.com, 29 January 2021 (accessed on 12 February 2021). ‘The Lockdown Revealed the Extent of Poverty and Misery Faced by Migrant Workers’. Available at: wire.in, 16 July 2020 (accessed on 12 February 2021).

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10

Diaspora and Memory Adaptation, Assimilation and Retention of Core Identities in a Globalised World

Fig. 10a The descendants of those lying in the cemetery do enquire about the conditions of the graveyard in the local parish in the villages they once came from, but have lived away for reasons of work. Now, vaults which are common platforms for the dead, in Kerala villages, have arisen because of the lack of space for conventionally named and cemented graveyards and gravestones. Niranam, Kerala, 2018. Copyright: Author.

Indians tend to conflate their personal experience and relocate these in terms of the larger issues they are interested in, in the worlds they simultaneously cohabit. This issue of the coexistence of differences and their ability to relocate the problem of identity in an adaptative way has been of interest to sociologists for many decades. Living in the world has meant a certain pragmatism, a certain joie de vivre, a love for the present and equally an ardour for the past. So, we need to understand why in postmodern India the long memory captured by 278

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smriti (that which is remembered) and shruti (that which is heard and is often canonical) are still so evident, not only in literate descriptive ways but also in photographs, forms of orality and landscapes of reterritorialisation and the theatre of ritual, which includes the arts and dance forms. Indians domiciled in India in 2015 composed 17 per cent of the world population and the figure for NRIs is 1,37,99,746. The count of people of Indian origin is 1,70,75,280 and overseas Indians is 28,45,55,026. We know that this demographic visibility is indeed the space of cultural reorientation. All over the world, people know that the transmigration of ritual and ceremony is the visible way that Indians have communicated love for the ‘natal country’, from which they may be removed in reality by three generations or more. Religious symbols incorporated in dance, drama, craft, food and clothes become the concrete symbols by which they show how resplendent this love for country is. These symbols, while expressive of the dominant culture of Hinduism, are not specific to Hindus alone as craft and art traditions have always been syncretistic. In America, students who enter the universities are immediately drawn into the carnivalesque space of ‘India week’. Hot samosas welcome them (a celebratory break from the cafeteria hamburgers and fries, so ubiquitous in American student culture). They perform dances from their specific regional states, and the dance hall or auditorium resound with the yells and cries of jubilation and recognition, and everyone, including the audience, loves dressing up in national costumes. Musicians and dance troops having professional status are also welcomed, and the quality of the amateur and professional are sometimes equivalent. Senior citizens welcome the young, who have newly entered into the portals of academia, and these become the spaces where the love for country are then reworked into promises to serve the homeland. Money is collected, votes are garnered and the vicarious Hinduism felt in exile is made more public by the customary membership into the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP). For diaspora Indians, this membership makes them feel they belong as this is the only form of Hinduism they can participate in, and their donations go a long way in the establishment of right-wing Hinduism as a prototype of

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all that is Indian. As a result, the questions of justice, of reconciliation, with the real text of moral disruption through riots and hate speeches, find no mention in this discourse. Love for homeland obliterates the terror zones of riots, internecine war or pogroms, where the search for justice and equality continues in daily practice. Diaspora Hindus recreate their homeland through the symbols of food, dance, drama and temple ritual. In a way, this is the hyper-reality of their alienated existence far away from home. At work, they wear suits and eat pizzas, drive fast cars, enter into liaisons, both professional and personal, assert their identity against subtle or violent forms of racism. They often meet at each other’s homes for meals and literary readings, endorse Indian customs including ‘arranged marriages’ and the use of regional dialects of speech as well as being enthusiastic hosts to visitors from their home country. They have easier access to Bollywood films than Indians at home do, as the circulation of videos is one way they keep in touch with the visuals of the homeland. Banal as this may seem, we have to understand that investment in the home country is not just through emotional chords based on nostalgia but on the very real questions of how tradition holds them tightly in its clutch. The real problems for the ‘Desi Born Confused’ in the next generation are how to segmentalise or keep apart from their feeling for their parents and grandparents, and maintain their friendship circles in a foreign country. This has been the stuff of many popular films, and Indians at home love to watch these films. The return home is premised on the understanding that the village to which people return for their scheduled holiday is the village of their dreams; it is a metaphorical space, not just a geographical one, because it shifts to wherever the clan or lineage congregates to welcome them.

Examples from Kerala of Christians, Hindus and Muslims Returning from Their Workplace Temporarily or as Retirees Among the St Thomas Christians of Kerala, too, their ‘memory as genealogy’ is crafted in such a way that it sometimes extends in printed

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pamphlets and handbooks up to 2,000 years. They have used this as a way to keep clan privileges intact and though they may live abroad in the United States of America, Europe, Australia or in the Gulf, kudumbayogam or clan union is a very important part of their annual ceremonies. These meetings are held in homes, parish halls or hotels, and clan members assemble and introduce one another to their progeny. Good food is eaten, hymns are sung, news of marriage, birth or death is announced. Facebook and Skype are very important institutions in the dissemination of information, and individuals and families return to their workplaces, replete with the memory of having met with their own blood. Every morning, before going to work, families living in Canada, Australia, Europe or America converse with their parents and relatives on the computer. The time difference is adjusted so that the family dinner or the early morning, when waking up or gathering the children for school or tennis practice, is a Skype or Zoom moment. Certainly, new marriages are arranged through gossip as well as pointed or focused information, culled from meeting clansmen and women, whether digitally or through intermittent visits to the home country. Matrimonial websites draw on the beneficence of holy monks, celibate themselves, to bless marriages. Many of these institutions of family, kinship, marriage, neighbourhood and professions are stabilised by the presence of the church since people look to integrate their children in the same religious affiliation. The numbers of overseas Indians are huge, running into millions as we saw, and so the church provides through its ‘ecclesiastical bureaucracy’, as Max Weber called it, the means of formally inducting new members through lessons and homilies available on the net. Shalom TV is a very important ritual medium, and though it is Syrian Catholic, the diaspora, whether in Bengaluru or Boston, watches it irrespective of its organisational affiliation. Tithe paying is a very significant part of timehonoured conventions since, without it, the burial ground at the time of death cannot be accessible. Those who are concerned with finding brides or grooms for their young use church-validated e-portals and with the blessings of the parishes, which are often far-flung across many continents, they find a suitable partner for their children. This involves travelling abroad to

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finalise the match, but as with arranged marriages, the young too are complicit, believing that their parents will make the ‘best choice’ for them. ‘You find me a bride, ma, I am too busy,’ is an often-announced request by young men employed in the fast-moving laboratories of the technological and digital industry. The contract of marriage is based on the traditional notions of maintenance of the house, respect and protection of the elders, and birth and nurturing of children on the part of the wife. These are unspoken obligations, which are based on social patterns of acceptable and honourable behaviour. In reality, the story may swing differently, when careers are prioritised over nurturing of the young or protection of the old. The fertility rate goes down with industrialisation, and in Kerala, the average birth rate is 1.68 or less progeny, as the diaspora has experienced industrial lifestyles at their workplaces without necessarily permanently migrating there. Dowry and gifts of gold remain stable, and the young couple enters into marriage with parental support. Forty years ago, in a study conducted by me, on behalf of the World Council of Churches (Visvanathan and Tharakan 1982), we found that all the women, without exception, believed that dowry was their right or avakasham. The Mary Roy Case which won equal rights of inheritance for children regardless of gender was turned into a travesty with the church coming out strongly against it since the tithes that came into parishes would be affected if stridhan became an anomaly, as they received lucre from both parties, as the record of the transaction of marriage (Visvanathan 1989, 1993). Property is one of the key issues that is stabilised through discussion and gossip when diaspora members return to their village. Daughters are still not expected to inherit property, and if they do, the men work very hard to wrest it back into the male line (Thulaseedharan 2019). Daughters are expected to build their homes, away from the village or land, where their brothers have their homes. This distance, however, is mediated with close family ties of bilateral filiation, so that all festivals, anniversaries and lifecycle events corroborate with the intensity of filial devotion to the parents and the equalising of emotions. Daughters are expected to be present at all these events with their family, and no contestation by them is expected, as their presence only communicates that love transcends rights to private property. Mannam or honour is

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the most privileged of sentiments. Filial obligations are now genderneutral, and both men and women are expected to contribute to the well-being of their parents as the parents often contribute with money to their education, and the offspring’s subsequent financial success is seen to be a reference point for monetary returns, helping to pay medical bills, the marriage of unmarried daughters, house repair and loans and old-age maintenance. The daughter’s absence during death or funeral is thought to be tragic, and the video industry now plays a large part in memorialisation, so that mortuary rituals are transmitted digitally as recordings. Who came for the funeral, the roll call of relatives, the lament of the artisans and servants associated with the family, the presence of the church and who officiated, the number of priests and bishops present, tell us a great deal about the status of the family. Mapping social relations through the statistics of visits, phone calls and Skype conversations is an interesting way to think of the mind– body relationship. Ghasan Hage presented at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Firth Lecture, hosted by the UK Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA on 3 April 2012), with the analyses of family gatherings across continents and reference to the Lebanese living in Venezuela, Australia, USA and Lebanon (www.theasa 2012). Territory transcends location and digital technology brings about emotional closeness though people may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. The idea of the ‘relative’ as someone who is no longer primary kin is mediated by marriage relations so that the family of orientation is secondary to the family of procreation and is juxtaposed with the real solidarity of kinship networks. The new mapping practices according to Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins are as follows: Mind Body Absolute Relative Nomothetic Ideographic Ideological Material Subjective Objective Essence Immanence

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Static Becoming Structure Agency Process Form Production Consumption Representation Practice Functional Symbolic Immutable Fluid Text Context Map Territory

In a sense, what they point to is how ideas hold within them a certain reified grammar, but the actor is placed in the historical context in which he or she has to make decisions. So, relationships would be represented through the imaginative abilities of actors, where emotions and desires are played out appropriately through their abilities, financial or cathartic. Dodge et al. suggest that we read the map subjectively, and as narrative, through insights drawn from cultural practice, psychoanalysis and linguistics. The map thus becomes known through the ability to be mobile. The idea of the extended family remains the desired ideal, but given stringent work obligations, men and women may be separated from each other for long periods, sometimes years; but they will remain in consonance with each other through the medium of the aerogramme in the 80s of the last century, daily phone calls in the 90s, and as the financial remunerations or salaries increased, mobile phone and Skype in the 21st century. Since sharing becomes visual and auditory rather than tactile, the interfamilial intimacy contributes to the immediacy of reception, and the emotions associated with them run in the same groove as if the family were indeed together. Faith and family prayer mediate the systematic conditioning to occupational hazards, war zones, aeroplane landings and departures, and the general conviviality of meetings in limited time frames. Jeremy W. Crompton in an essay in Dodge et al. (2009) titled ‘Rethinking Maps and Identity’ suggests that we return to the Platonic version of being, becoming and the place of becoming the chora or ‘ontogenesis’. It is like fire, ever-changing and without fixed properties, yet seems to have a ‘fiery character’. In this very place, truth is made; it is not static, but constantly evolving.

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When we think of the Malayalis who fled Kuwait during the Gulf war in 1991, they represented the waiting, the suspense, the camps, the getaway as a narrative of survival. This is echoed in the conflicts in Libya and in Iraq, where Malayalis were trapped in ongoing wars in the second decade of the 21st century and duly reported in the press. They returned to the homeland (Naad), bereft of income, and then started new ventures, such as pineapple cultivation on hitherto fallow land and lived off their inherited or earned resources. When the war was over, they returned as migrants to the Gulf, because their life there had become a known entity, their children returned to school and life was normal again. However, they were always anxious, knowing that as temporary workers, they could never settle or make it their home. In Saudi Arabia, they lived and worked under close surveillance, made fish curry with koddam pulli (indigenous tamarind, also called kokum, dried and valued as a cultural legacy) with bulbous organic red rice which they were traditionally accustomed to. They met in closed groups to pray in secret, formed close friendship groups, and at the end of 20 years, returned to Kerala, with happy or unhappy memories of their working life, where often the women were present too, as spouses or otherwise, and kept hearth and home intact in Kerala. The stability of the family depended on these contracted arrangements, where women often agreed to live apart for most of the year from their spouses. If asked how they managed, they would depreciatingly reply, ‘Veedu ondullu’, meaning ‘There is a house’, but meaning the complex relationships encompassing the family, which included care of family members, sometimes across three or four generations. Faith then becomes the cement, the intensity of which is compounded in formulaic prayer, expressed through the litanies of creed and Bible readings. Men, who went without their families and had to stay eight tenants in a room, would take turns cooking the food that they were used to in the village. The money they made was not spent except for annual gifts that were taken back to the village. They paid mortgages, dowries and education cost so that from the average ownership of two and a half acres of land, which was the coinage of traditional belonging that they would not wish to sell, a new economy of servitude/service to the family would emerge. The needs of the family, in an ever-spiralling cycle of costs, had to be met.

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Mortuary rituals for relatives who died while the members of the clan were elsewhere or who had died decades ago became extremely important. Services and meals held in their memory assert the coming together of the clan. Kudumbayogam on these occasions, with the traditional foods associated with the clan members, such as cooked meats, tapioca, fish, payasam (rice cooked in milk and sugar and cloves) and unni appam (batter of rice powder, jaggery and bananas, deep-fried) end with the singing of hymns, which had been sung during the person’s lifetime. This essentially brings together a collage of memories, of youth and the effervescence of believing, the aura of a return to the past, when the ancestors were alive. Richard Fenn writes: The sacred (the institutionalised Sacred) consists of a fragile set of symbolic defences that mimics the entire range of possibility with a substitute and counterfeit pantheon of possibilities. It offers a form of service that claims to be perfect freedom, and a form of renunciation that promises to give to the faithful the consummation of every desire. Thus, the sacred is a way of finding a safe place and time for the special graces, the charisma, of intimate, intense and enduring but evanescent and distant relationships. (Fenn 2001: 6)

Gathering together with prayers and food brings the dead close, but in a harmonious way, not a malefic one. Where tombstones are no longer possible because of population increase, the kin gathers outside the vault with the knowledge that the cement structures have been collectivised, and the dead anonymously, in aggregates, are entropied by time and biological process. Churches now refuse to give burial space unless there is a family grave that can accommodate the remains; so, like tenants, the diaspora must know where their ancestors lie and can only claim the grave if they have been regular contributors in tithes to the church and their clan members churchgoers in that parish. Richard Fenn suggests that the spiritual process of touring the past and assimilating it is essentially to accept that memories create a place inhabited by the living. This is as significant as the qualities imbued in the dead by the survivors. Remembering becomes not the harrowed space of violent or antagonistic relations but is characterised in terms of the strengths, including the motifs of allegiance and affection, not to speak of authority (ibid.: 19).

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The naming of children by recollecting traditional and ancestral names, the exultation of recognition of genetic traits that have travelled over generations is one way the diaspora remember their family of orientation. The eyes are not merely the child’s eyes, it equally belongs to a dead grandmother or grandfather, as do the nose, the walk, the facial expressions and so on. A new generation of Malayalis has taken to renouncing names of ancestors by inventing new names that are composed of syllables of both parents. Thus, these names are like sounds without meaning and cause some amusement to those who do not share the same cultural familiarity. Icy, Ivey, Rocky, Jeeju, Fibby, Joji, Biju, Biji are some cases in point. What is relevant is that these arbitrary sound juxtapositions are a kind of cultural reaction to the austere, sacred and biblical names which were constantly repeated across families, such as Thoma, Yohan, Geeverghese (or Thomas, John and George,) for men, and Mariam, Susa, Elsa (for Mary, Susan and Elisabeth) for women. Diaspora Malayalis found it inconvenient to add on the house names, which were related to the immediate topography—so these too were deleted summarily. Vazhapallil meant house with bananas, mavelil meant in the environs of mangoes, tamaravelil meant in the shadow of the lotus. It is possible that the retention of the house name earlier provided topographical clues to the placement of the house, and while living in metropolitan locales, Malayalis just could not keep them on. Thundathileyath (rice fields), a well-known house name in Travancore, when attached as a prefix, had the curious postman saying in Hindi, ‘Yeh “Thunder Thunder” aap ke naam ke pehle kya hai?’ (‘What is this “Thunder” in the prefix to your name?’)

Remembering the Dead through Photography and Video for Those Who Live Far Away The videography of the corpse in Kerala is one of the most macabre aspects of visual mummification as the dead then enter into a space of continuous presence. The funeral becomes a transglobal phenomenon, as the living, wherever they are, may now participate in the prayers for the soul. The presence of the dead is given corporeal and ever-present immanence, and the bright lights of the video camera then record

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the emotions of the mourners in the indefinable space of an eternity, which immortalises the deceased and mourners. As memory codes, the peacefulness of the visage or the utter and total disfigurement is a testimony to the struggle against death. When Ramana Maharishi died, his corpse was photographed by the eminent French photographer Cartier Bresson. This collection is with the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi. People came from all over the world and India to have darshan of the sage, and the return to Tiruvannamalai to view Maharishi during his last days was in a way the recreation of his life through tribute and memory. Those who were present saw him pass away like a meteor that crossed the sky at 8.47 p.m. on 14 April 1950, the time of death. People saw this meteor in other parts of India, too, and the next day, the news of his death was confirmed. Fenn writes: ‘Religious language possesses the capacity to embody possibilities excluded from social discourse and the conventional imagination. Not merely to point to that possibility, but to embody it, that is the core of religious speech’ (Fenn 2001: 27).

Days of Waiting: The Old People Who Remain behind when Children Leave for Work outside the State Let us now look at the visits to the home country of the children of the old, who visit them in old age homes. There is a great deal of mutual embarrassment, as love predominates over negligence, and yet, conterminously, there is a utilitarian sense of time and obligation to the work world, which both generations recognise. Old age homes are Kerala’s gift to the rational soul, who knows that his or her obligations are to the next generation, who have to be educated and fed and propelled into economic and financial independence. The loneliness of the old is circumvented in collective activities, where prayer, music, sociability, autonomy are all seen to be valued in themselves. Often crèches are run in the premises of the old age home, as this provides for the mutual pleasure of interaction, which Radcliffe Browne, as every undergraduate Sociology student knows, called

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‘the merging of alternate generations’. Phone calls from children and grandchildren become the high point of interaction because there is information that is exchanged on both sides. When senility falls like a shadow, the institution knows how to handle it with the help of specialised staff, and the offspring are protected from the humiliation of being absent and seemingly non-caring. Employees in the Gulf often return home for a month to see an ageing parent through the last days of his or her life. Life is impossibly hard, as they have to return to their workplace and see their children through school activities. For many such employees in England, the States (as America is called by them) or the Gulf, the husband may not be an earning member, because he has been retrenched or retired or is merely accompanying the wife, who is the primary salary earner. This dependent relationship has created emotional tensions in a society, which is marked by patriarchy as St Thomas Christians essentially foreground men as the dominant partner. In the end, it is often recognised that the discomforts of living and working abroad are to earn money for dowries for daughters or paying for children’s education. Building large houses, buying fast cars, holidaying in Europe are only attendant privileges to hoarding gold and paying huge sums to achieve life conditions for daughters who must be married hypergamously. The men are continuously caught in a socially established conundrum, where their sons will inherit the ancestral property but the daughters must make suitable marriages that buttress family ambitions for higher status. The perceived agony of separation from loved ones is understood as a logical consequence of providing for them. Honour and conspicuous consumption are thus interwoven inseparably. The pilgrim, the tourist, the countryman, who is privileged to return home are coincident. They bring with them the exhaustion and joys of their working lives. They communicate on their return that this is a holiday which is hard won. They work very hard to please the family, to make long journeys to spend an hour or two with distant kin, to attend betrothals, marriages, baptisms and death rituals. Their success, financially and experientially, is a sign of their honour. They left the homeland because there was no avenue of employment, but having made good, the trip home annually or less frequently, to visit ageing parents and extended clan members, is an embellishment of love of

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family and country. Martin Buber suggests that beyond the cult of the individual, the monolith of the state or collectivities is ‘relationship’ as the total social good. How is this made possible, how is dialogue the virtue of those who wish to remain connected? He describes it as anguish and expectation, as the context in which all religions maintain not uniformity, but specificity. As he suggests, dialogue is not traffic, it is a relationship (Buber 1992: 47). Further, he adds: Accordingly, even if speech and communication may be dispensed with, the life of dialogue seems, from what we may perceive, to have inextricably joined to it, as its minimum constitution, one thing, the mutuality of inner action. Two humans bond together in dialogue must obviously be tuned to one another, they must, therefore—no matter with what measure of activity or indeed of consciousness of activity—have turned to one another. (ibid.)

It is this tuning into one another that allows for the intimacy of the return, the ability to forgive and forget, the realisation that the homecoming is always painful and yet liberating. Love transcends class differences, and the return to poverty, or, at least, frugality is made evanescent in the exchange of confidences, the sharing of mutual sorrows and joys. The visitor and the host exchange gifts between themselves, with signs of mutual pleasure, consumer items such as foreign soap and shampoos, perfumes and colognes, chocolates, synthetic garments, electrical gadgets and in return receive spontaneous gifts of jasmine flowers, yams and home-reared goat meat, chicken or duck eggs, freshwater fish from the nearest river, jackfruit chips, mangoes and bananas from the yard, all of which are seen to be novelties that the home country still provides, including eating meals on banana leaves. It is the meal as a cultural signature of community life that has its greatest significance. The diaspora is used to eating hamburgers and steaks unselfconsciously, in cafes or at home when living abroad, and the political connotations of this with regard to specialised forms of bovine totemism in several parts of the home country quite escapes them. Where there are bans, the diaspora eats from cold storage what is available and permitted. Certainly, that export of beef occurs is a well-known fact, and sometimes the beef exporters live in a village

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where people remember them for their initial poverty, and then, for the palatial house they were able to build with their new wealth. A ban on beef in India means increased export to the West. There is no social taboo to eating beef since in Kerala, it is not the cow belt politics that pervade North India, and for Malayalis, there is no taboo, unless selfimposed, through systematic Sanskritisation by the RSS or because of traditional Hindu upper-caste affiliation. In North Malabar, Christians eat pork to differentiate themselves from Muslims. The idea that what one eats is one’s own business is a very dominant position taken in Kerala vis-à-vis ritual taboos, probably because of a century of the antiBrahmin self-respect movements and Marxism. Diaspora, when abroad, eat the best produce, exported from India, from the fisheries or mango orchards. When they return, they find that with their remuneration, they can afford expensive sea fish or fruits but their neighbours cannot. Often religion becomes a divisive force, when lower-income groups, on their return from the Gulf, can afford expensive food, and upper castes who have remained in salaried jobs in the home state cannot afford the same. Alcohol consumption rose so substantially that in 2015, the Kerala government banned liquor in the toddy shops and the government retail stores, but permitted hoteliers and tourists to stock alcohol. This led to a public outcry, and those Malayalis who had become addicted to liquor found vendors setting up stalls at the Coimbatore border. Fried beef and arrack were the common man’s staple, and the shutting down of the indigenous pubs created a hue and cry. Dilip Menon had argued that the Tiyyas were politically powerful in the 19th century because of their ability to provide alcohol to the Nairs for their temple rituals, where libations of toddy was an oblation. However, the use of toddy was a time-honoured beverage, included in cooking even in Syrian Christian domestic use for pancakes, and could still be procured from the Ezhava community on request since every family had a toddy tapper bring down their coconuts according to domestic need or for sale. The real abuse came from the sale of hard liquor, and since the Kerala government was receiving crores in excise duty, the ban did not come into place till the rates of suicide, rape and murder were too high to ignore. However, in 2017, the ban had been removed as Malayalis protested that luxury hotels and foreigners were

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being exempted and that as inhabitants, they too, had the right to access home-brew or local liquor at least. Diaspora members who have family members, primary kin with them, insist that everything is paradisical since the luxury tours and the fast cars allow them a view of the homeland which ordinary people do not have. There are, therefore, two Keralas. One is cut off spatially from the routine everyday disturbances and excesses, though the traffic jams in tourist towns are an indication that members of both worlds must meet. The homestays and tourist hotels are in narrow corridors amidst secluded beaches, where the inhabitants provide every comfort to the visitor, including a sanitised rural environment; however, the rest of Kerala continues to live in hyacinth-choked water, undisposed garbage and burning refuse piles.

‘Difference’ as Unmediated Separation, Pushing towards Homogenisation of Separate Communities The cleavage between Hindus, Christians and Muslims became increasingly evident in the 21st century. Religious sensibilities were further aroused by the ideological provocations of political parties, and with exaggerated religious communalism, the loudspeaker became a site of continuous contestation. Small towns were riddled with noise pollution from the churches, temples and mosques, all expressing their right to profess their religious beliefs equally at the same time. Muslims, too, had benefitted hugely from work in the Gulf as engineers and masons, petty shopkeepers and labourers. Prema Kurien (2004) has outlined clearly that upward mobility for petty bourgeoisie communities, such as Syrian Christians and Muslims in Kerala, was marked by excessive consumer aggrandisement. Abid Saittu in his valuable thesis, ‘Contextualising the Veil’ submitted to JNU in 2015, shows how Gulf money affected the Muslims in North Kerala, primarily through the adoption of fundamentalist tenets, and the acceptance of the veil for women as an everyday form of attire, not common in previous decades. Diaspora Muslims brought in a Saudi nuance to everyday life by supporting the designer veil industry, so, there was a

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competition about wearing boutique and custom-made veils among the local women in the villages and small towns of Kannur. Female literacy increased how women appropriated for themselves the right to think theologically, creating new kinds of literature. Further, Abid argues that the Hajj becomes a status symbol for women who, accompanied by male members of the family, insist on making this sacred journey. These women became reverentially known as Hajjis and were able to propel the family status forward by their religiosity and experiences of having travelled abroad and owning a passport (Kurien 2004; Saittu 2016). Fundamentalist interpretations of theology in all religions close the community into itself, presenting its face as inviolable and superior. Maurice Blanchot tells us: The Book always indicates an order that submits to unity, a system of notions in which are affirmed the primacy of speech over writing, of thought over language, and the promise of communication that would one day be immediate and transparent. Now it may be that writing requires the abandonment of all those principles, that is to say, the end and also the coming to completion of everything that guarantees one culture—not so that we might in idyllic fashion turn back, but rather so we might go beyond, that is, to the limit, in order to break the circle, the circle of circles; the totality of the concepts that found history, that develops in history, and whose development history is. (1993: xii)

Included in all this are events, lapses and interruptions: death itself.

Homogeneity as a Desired Principle of Cultural Identity, Socialisation and Self-Awareness Once the book closes on itself, each religious community then defines its boundaries, excluding those who will not accept its totalising dictates. The Syrian Catholics in Kerala began to have prayer camps, which were magnetic in their power to ‘charismatically’ draw in large numbers. The Mar Thoma Church had its Maramon Convention, which innovated with music and drew in international gospel evangelists. The Pentecostal Church drew in larger and larger numbers from all affiliations, since it offered miraculous cures and catharsis as the total experience uniting all

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members. The Muslims began to go on Hajj, thus creating a hierarchy, or at least a distinction among themselves of those who could attain this life-changing ascent to Mount Arafat and the attendant piety in circumambulation of the tomb of Mohammad the Prophet, and those who could not afford to pay the travel agent for such a trip. The Hindus, namely the Nairs, returned to their traditional martial rituals and arts, representing the cult of self-defence not just as aesthetics but also as warfare. The Ezhavas dominated Marxist politics and the Dalits began to organise themselves to counter Brahmin hegemony. The Brahmins felt increasingly marginalised, and either departed to foreign lands, including metropolitan cities in India, or became professionally displaced. The pilgrim to Sabarimala, where Murugan, son of Shiva, appears as a bachelor god, created new osmotic boundaries between caste, class, gender, region and physical ability to enter a sacralised space, crowded beyond measure. The new dispensation was to the forming of new rules of conduct which became binding on those who belonged to any specific association. People just became used to the atrophy of dialogue in neighbourhood and family practice. These became codes of conduct, which were articulated publicly. Any move towards flexibility and syncretism was frowned upon. For the diaspora, work was a panacea, but the high turnover at the workplace because of recession meant that families quite often lived in different continents and women were often overqualified at the workplace as cashiers and schoolteachers when they had been educated as engineers or doctors or academics in the home country. Siblings too settled in other countries, and so people travelled in various directions because they could afford to meet their kin.

Global Resplendence in Domestic and Religious Architecture, and Imitation at the Native Place One of the interesting aspects of globalisation has been the need that the diaspora has for magnificence and a place of worship at the home site. When they returned to the village of their forefathers, they immediately constructed huge houses, larger than the neighbour’s.

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Inside, they maintain much the same level of comfort or discomfort, as they knew previously. The electricity routinely goes off in the monsoon, which because of climate change extends much beyond the harvest festival of Onam. This occurs when Mahabali, the rakshasa king loved by Malayalis and displaced by Vishnu (by the riddle of the three steps, when the dwarf becomes a giant, and the three steps of hegemonic control become the usurpation of the entire land), returns mythically for a brief visit in September, every year, after the rains, leading to much feasting and cultural activities. Hens and chicks, dogs, cats routinely run into the house from the yards, not to forget bees, butterflies, moths, tarantulas, varieties of ants, termites, fireflies, squirrels and ordinary everyday farmyard pests, such as civet cats and rodents. Kerala houses are essentially part of the natural environment since wood, clay tiles and granite are its essential components. Diaspora finds this closeness to nature not only enchanting but also frightening. In the monsoon, the house becomes vulnerable to leaks in the roof, electricity going off and rooms flooding, which native Malayalis are essentially familiar with and routinely deal with, unless it is a year of the flood. These mammoth houses are constructed ostentatiously as the nouveau riche see the need to exhibit carpets and chandeliers brought back from the Emirates, Dubai, Saudi Arabia or Oman. They like to communicate that they are different from the Malayali, who has not had the Gulf experience, and so vivid colours are used in painting the exteriors. However, when it comes to agricultural work, the NRI or overseas Indian is perfectly capable of setting up a haystack with childhood friends or sharing in ritual offices in the local parish, temple or mosque. Since many return when they retired from gainful occupation and are in their early fifties, they take up honorary occupations as principals of trust colleges and schools or work in any capacity available to them. They enjoy meeting their former colleagues in get-togethers called the Gulf Employees Reunion or they write their memoirs and read newspapers. Attending life crises rituals relating to marriage, birth, initiation or baptism and death are an occupation in itself. In places like Kuruvillangad or Ranni, the elite has transformed their hitherto obscure villages by duplicating the South of France villas.

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The demand for a privately constructed airport had been vociferous in the Chenganoor area, as the numbers of Gulf returnees are huge and has been now realized. In one village 10 kilometres from the town of Chenganoor, all 350 families had members who worked in a Gulf country. In Cochin, the large number of flats which have surfaced are establishments, mostly unoccupied, as the rentier class of Syrian Christians living in the Gulf or Australia or Europe or America, built them, but they neither live in them nor are ready to rent them out. Absentee landlordism takes on a new avatar.

Magnification of the Relic Church as an Archaeological Disaster Near Chenganoor, the Gulf-returned are so many, that they have demolished an ancient church and produced a huge and stunning edifice in its place. Parumalla Tirumeni was the humblest and purest of souls, a saint recognised by all and his living quarters are still preserved for pilgrims to see, his actual room being the size of a large conference table! Yet, the ‘miracle church’ associated with him has been turned into a massive cathedral, such as the medieval churches of Europe, which had been built from the loot of war. This contemporary Kerala church, however, built with Gulf remittances, has modern abstract art glass windows and three eucharist celebrations occurring on simultaneous altars, at which three different priests preside. The influx of the faithful is so large, that the size of the church is a matter of pride for the residents of the hamlet. However, archaeologists and sensitive laity are aghast. As one of them, Fr Ignatius Payappilly, a well-known archivist at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, said to me in October 2013, ‘I wrote to the Parish priests of several places, saying that Tipu Sultan did less damage than people like you. He only took off the thatched roofs of ancient churches but you have totally demolished them.’ In an email to me, dated 22 June 2015, Shri M.P. Joseph (IAS) responded to my concern over the confabulation of images and expansion of churches:

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The Cardinal Alencherry, Head of the Syro Malabar Church has now advised all parishes that they must avoid ostentation in the building of churches. He has also made it mandatory for the Cardinal’s Office to approve designs of new churches to be built. And more pertinently, there is a growing appreciation among the laity for the need to preserve these old churches and their beautiful architecture, however innocently they may have put motifs of the Swastika or the Eye or whatever.

It may be remembered that the concern about new art is often open to diverse interpretations. A Times of India journalist, Annu Thomas, wrote to me on 11 June 2015, to ask if the eye depicted in the wall art in the church or the swastika was a sign of the devil, to which query Fr Ignatius Payappilly and Hormis Tharakan (IPS) replied to me that it would be creating misunderstanding between religious communities if such a view was taken. The idea that shared symbolism might lead to communalism and misinterpretation was a very real fear. The contemporary data on the exaggerated renovation as representing the vested interest of the diaspora in affirming its piety in the home country is interesting primarily because of the traditional syncretistic motifs of Hindu Christian art, ancient crosses, temple walls, peacock motifs. In The Christians of Kerala (1993), I had argued that it was that aspect, where in the contexts of architecture and symbols, the osmosis between religions is notable. Its legitimacy was authorised through assimilation into dominant Hindu motifs when Christianity in Kerala had royal patronage.

Similar Reconstruction and Renovation in a Hindu Temple: Is Modernism without Costs? In Palakkad, the temple dedicated to Shiva is called Kalpathy Viswanathaswamy and has a long history of renovations, since this takes place routinely according to the prescribed temple calendar. However, when Indira Nooyi became president of the Pepsico, her mother, who was originally from the Kalpathy village, dedicated a meditation chamber in thanksgiving, as her father Justice Narayanswamy

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(Nooyi’s maternal grandfather) was from Kalpathy. As renovation had proceeded on a grand scale according to the desires of the local community, based on their donations, the wooden pillars in the temple were substituted by stainless-steel pillars and the archaeologically significant pillar thought to be an emblem of the 14th-century king, Raja Ittycheryan, was polished and the inscription removed. The Tamil Brahmins of Kalpathy are an upwardly mobile community and for them, the modern is the epitome of the present. The past is a legend; it is necessary as a bulwark to their present circumstance, but the present is sacred. People return from all parts of India to initiate their newborns, conduct mortuary rituals, be present at the annual Ter/Rath (chariot) festival, and of course to hear the musicians from all over South India, who perform on the invitation of the trustees of the Kalpathy Viswanathaswamy temple. There is nothing old according to this view, in that sense, because the new must present itself in keeping with the needs of the believers. Archaeologists, of course, feel differently. Heritage thus becomes a loaded term, with people contesting the state and the requirements of the tourist industry, which was clamouring for the old and the traditional.

Techno Parks and People’s Consumer Interests However, there are critics of globalisation’s extravagant by-products, and these voices are often influential. St Thomas Christians often feel their voice has been taken away from them, arbitrarily, in the marketplace of the church. The call to frugality comes at a time when Kerala is rapidly changing its traditional rural–urban continuum, and tourism and diaspora are looking for highways to turn the state into a site of continuous hedonistic visuality, be it IPL games or monstrous shopping arcades and magnificent sites of worship. Places, where the techno parks have come up, have promoted the laboratory as being less polluting than the factory, but, in truth, the needs of the cerebral workers are such that owning several cars and shopping compulsively in malls and arcades, brings with it a huge cost on the delicate ecology of the state.

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Similarly, building large churches on paddy fields has brought about the distinctly dangerous phenomenon of sinking floors, and parishioners have to carefully skirt the ragged construction and repair works as they come to pray and sing. The response has been to ban construction on paddy fields and to call on parishioners to be more circumspect in their architectural renovations. A very significant letter was written by Ezhupunna P.H. Hormis Tharakan to the Cardinal of the Syro-Malabar church, castigating the avaricious aspect of the St Thomas Christians’ ecclesiastical aggrandisement. P.H. Tharakan wrote in his letter of 6 May 2015 to Cardinal Mar George Alencherry, partly reproduced here with permission: On your seventieth birthday, newspapers reported, you consecrated the biggest and most expensive church of the Syro-Malabar church…. True, the ostentatious misadventure didn’t start on your clock, you only became its part. Maybe you could have spared yourself the odium of it all, asking your minions to do it rather differently, less flamboyantly. It is obvious that the Syro Malabar church is trying to impress to everyone, Rome not excluded, that it is the most powerful, wealthy and influential church in Kerala.... The Edapally church is in the news for the wrong reasons. My interaction with the faithful across Kerala revealed many things, which I feel free to share with you. A huge majority believes that this church is nothing but a vulgar display of wealth and power. Almost everyone echoed the sentiments that this certainly cannot be looked upon as an architectural marvel. So, why, pray, this huge expenditure in God’s name?

In an email, P.H. Hormis Tharakan wrote to me, he said, ‘It all started trying to save a heritage church from demolition. That struggle has exposed me to various allied causes. Each step forward is more like a mirage. But since I am wholly concerned that the church needs urgent reforms, I am doing my best to achieve that objective with like-minded people.’ The protest against the vulgarisation of ancient churches comes from a powerful member of the laity, whose family has a strong history of honours and obligations to the church, whose very past is retold

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through print, general opinion and rumour to record its special place. The Tharakan family history has been recently published as Profiles of the Parayil Tharakans: Glimpses of the History of a Family, a Region, and a Church (2014) written and collated by P.K.M. Tharakan, who lives in Belgium, and the work is replete with genealogies and photographs of family mansions, which house, not just eminent kinsmen, church honours, brave actions but also the material culture that accompanied them. As medieval pepper merchants, they became immensely famous for their cosmopolitan ability to deal with the Portuguese and British colonists during the period of the commercial revolution. They were the keepers of the Varthamanapustukam, the first travelogue, which communicated that the Malayalis, even when Christians, referred to themselves as Intugal or Indians and wanted more than anything ecclesiastical jurisdiction to be placed with Indian priests and prelates (Sen and Visvanathan 1995; interview with Ambassador A.K. Damodaran, IFS; Malekandathil 2013). Interestingly, with tourism, family mansions such as the Tharakan homes become the site of bed-and-breakfast arrangements, as the beauty of these aristocratic 18th-century houses is duly memorable and equally, well maintained. The diaspora returns to boat rides on backwaters in Kuttanad, eating the traditional fare of the Malayalis, and at the same time, savouring the sense of being an elite that has the best of both worlds. By bypassing industrialisation, and depending on Gulf remittances, the Malayalis have attempted to keep their backwaters pure. However, the backwash of tourism without regulation is of course pollution and the allied trades of prostitution and other forms of servitude, as those clerics working with artisanal fisherpeople have communicated to me. The lives of artisans and the working class, such as shop employees or professionals such as nurses, working in the Gulf, as has been pointed out by Prema Kurien in Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity is marked by a certain conspicuous consumption. This has much to do with how we think of subsistence economies, where the remuneration is such that it cannot always be defined as stable or permanent. Here and now is sufficient because of tomorrow nothing is known.

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Comparative Data from Brahmin Agraharams in Kerala and Tamil Nadu In the case of Kalpathy, Palakkad, we have a genealogical tradition that goes back to the 14th century, where a king patronised a widow, Lakshmi Ammal, and built a temple for her. According to legend, she had been to Benaras with her husband’s ashes to be interred in the Ganga, and she returned from there with a lingam. This was installed on the banks of the Kalpathy river, a tributary of the Nila. Steps were built in emulation of the ghats of Benaras, and this temple, the Viswanathswamy temple, became the site of mortuary rituals for those who could not afford to go to Benaras. The Smartha Brahmins (Iyers) had been invited by the Palakkad king, migrants from drought-prone areas around Tanjore and Chidambaram, and settled in 18 villages in Palakkad. The local historians, such as the eminent lawyer late K.V. Krishnan and Col. Venugopal, say that the raja was wrathful to the Namboodris who refused to serve him since he had a liaison with a tribal woman whom he wished to marry, and so he invited the drought-affected Tamil Brahmins who took their place on invitation. The Kalpathy Iyers, descendants of the migrants from Mayiladathurai (Mayavaram), became very well known in the early 20th century for the remittances they made to their families from the Presidency towns of colonial India, as service-providers, clerks and administrators, to the British government. The rich traditions of the Brahmins had been preserved through their culture of food, architecture, temple rituals, mathematics and music. Milton Singer has very well described the segmentalisation of home and workplace in his classic work When a Great Tradition Modernizes (1972) and so have C.J. Fuller and Harpriya Narasimha in their study Tamil Brahmins (2015). The latter authors assiduously describe how third- and fourth-generation mobile Brahmins from Tamil Nadu were able to assimilate into the West as software engineers, and in the cosmopolitan cultures of the big cities of modern India, such as Chennai. However, as a community, they always communicated total loyalty to their traditions and were able to express solidarity through their loyalty to their village, small town or city, through participation

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in temples and domestic rituals, including their renovation and management. A new and non-Brahmin resident of Kalpathy, a collector of antiques, reported to me that downward mobility is frequent and that the Brahmins are going through a decline, which happens to many communities during historical periods. They have lost traditional occupations and skills, and have become auto drivers, shopkeepers and labourers (interview of 28 June 2009). Preservation of culture is not limited to buildings, it is about Vedic culture, music, mathematics and knowledge, specifically Sanskrit, according to another informant. The Tamil Brahmins in Kalpathy remain ‘migrants’ in Kerala, though they have been here for centuries. In September 2013, in Palakkad, they have asked for minority status and privileges, including reservation. Joanne Punzo Waghorne in the ‘Diaspora of the Gods’ (2004) defined the specific ways in which the mapping of the temple, mosque and church in the Mylapore Luz area was a representation of the syncretic nature of religious persuasion in a historical framework. The Tamil Brahmins came in to do their shopping alongside ritual duties, visiting the gods, including the purchase of necessary silk sarees for festivals and rites of passage and so the juxtaposition of the marketplace and religious sites were indeed very visible. The diaspora is conversant with the best places to shop for the traditional items needed for pujas, and they take back to America the appalams (dry lentil savouries), the sambar powders, etc., which they may equally find in the Indian stores in their workplaces. Diaspora of the Gods describes the duplication of ritual sites in cities abroad so that people will feel comfortable far away from home. Equally, in temple, maths and pathshalas (schools imparting Vedic knowledge), young Brahmin boys are trained to carry out their responsibilities as temple priests in far-off countries. The ability to represent the cults of Hinduism as sites of ritual transfer is well known. Americans have invested in the Hare Krishna movement for decades, and the skill of the orators of other cult representatives of Hinduism is the new machinery of conversion. At street corners in Boston, one meets white devotees of some Hindu cult or another selling copies of the Ramayana or Mahabharata. In Santa Cruz, California, a quiet sanctuary exists for those who are drawn into

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the meditational practices of Sri Ramanasramam, but the temple aspect, the iconography and the representation of the gods in a traditional place of worship are well accentuated. The integration across race, caste and religious lines is established. Whereas previously, Hinduism represented itself as an exclusive religion of ascription, one had to be born a Hindu, the globalised world has communicated its need to be absorbed in Indic practice, whether Hindu or Buddhist. In Santa Fe, the Sikhs have established a cultic rendezvous, well entrenched in the postmodern practices of finding a comfort zone, wherever one may be. It is no longer necessary to be Indian, to fit into the kaleidoscopic religious ferment. This is in stark contrast to the idea of endogamy and religious community discussed previously. It may be noted that before the cultic supremacy of right-wing Hinduism became a social fact in the urban metropolis, the move to homogenisation was strongly resisted by the youth, who saw the senseless killings in the name of religion as abuse of faith. Right through the 1990s, the middle-class urban youth expressed great interest in religion, communicating that all the gods were interesting to them, visiting pilgrimage sites as devotees. The Sacred Heart Cathedral in Delhi, juxtaposed with the neighbouring Bangla Sahib Gurudwara and the Hanuman temple on Baba Khadak Singh Marg, and Nizamuddin Chisti’s dargah just eight kilometres away from the city centre, all had the sense of thronging crowds and the vibrancy of accompanying markets, where amulets, sacred pictures, holy water and food were available, in pre-Covid times, along with prayers for blessing, cures and favours. In contrast, the lumpenproletariat and the avaricious socalled ‘faceless mob’ is always marshalled by politicians to murder and desecrate across religious lines. Is there a justification for mass murder? Those who engage with it ascribe to themselves martial status and deny citizenship rights to others. The choice of faith and acceptance with respect for all religions is the most interesting aspect of Indian secularism. These young people were very different from the fanatics of each religion who had closed the gates of their faiths to the other. Terrorism, which Indians had been familiar with for decades and which had struck fear in every heart, was the ugly face of fanaticism, and communalism was equally rampant.

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Festivals, fairs, carnivals and trade that integrates communities, went against riots and pogroms and the easy dealing of death by those who carried the cards of violence (Visvanathan 2011). The diaspora often returned even during days of riots and violence, because of their commitment to families and neighbourhoods. What we need to understand is that while war, espionage and terrorism are everyday events, the normal world revolves around the ability to carry out mundane tasks.

Bibliography Blanchot, Maurice. 1993. The Infinite Conversation. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, (1963 Fr) English translation. Buber, Martin. 1992. On Intersubjectivity and Cultural Creativity. Edited by S.N. Eisenstadt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crompton, Jeremy W. 2009. ‘Rethinking Maps and Identity: Choropleths, Clines and Biopolitics’. In Rethinking Maps, edited by Martin Dodge, Rob Kitcin and Chris Perkins. Oxford: Routledge. Dirks, Nicholas. 2002. Castes of Mind, Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Delhi: Permanent Black. Dodge, Martin, Rob Kitchin, and Chris Perkins. 2009. Rethinking Maps. Oxford: Routledge. Fenn, Richard. 2001. The Return of the Primitive: A New Sociological Theory of Religion. Aldershot: Ashgate. Fuller, C.J. and Haripriya Narasimhan. 2015. Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-Class Caste. New Delhi: Social Science Press. Hage, Ghassan. 2012. ‘The Transnational Family as an Aesthetic Field’. In the Conference on Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalising World at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, and Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA 12) Firth Lecture on 3 April 2012, conference organisers Susan Visvanathan and Parul Dave Mukherjea, available at www.theasa. Irschick Eugene F. 1994. Dialogue and History: Constructing South India 1795– 1895. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kurien, Prema A. 2004. Kaleidoscopic Identities. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Lechner, Frank J. and John Boli. 2005. World Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Malekandathil, Pius. 2013. ‘Voices of Dissent, Early Nationalism and Indian Alternatives to European perceptions of Church: A Study on the Travel Narratives of Varthamanapustukam’. In Mughals, Portuguese and Maritime India. Delhi: Primus Books.

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Menon, Dilip. 1994. Caste, Nationalism, and Communism in South India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Oommen, T.K. 1985. From Mobilisation to Institutionalization. Bombay: Popular Prakashan. Philip, Shaju. 2010. ‘The Dalit Evangelists’. Indian Express on Sunday, 20 June. Saberwal, Satish. 1995. Wages of Segmentation. Delhi: Orient Longman. Sanil, M.N. 2005. ‘Dalits in Kerala’. Available at: www.groups.Google.co/d/ topic/greenyouth, 9 July 2005 (accessed 9 October 2015). Saittu, Abid. 2015. ‘Contextualising the Veil’. Unpublished PhD thesis submitted to JNU. ———. 2016. ‘Identity, Ethics and Fashion: An Ethnography of Women’s Dress Culture in North Malabar’. International Journal of Research in Sociology 6 (3). Sen, Geeti and Susan Visvanathan, eds. 1995. Kerala. IIC Quarterly, Delhi. Sharma, Anil. 2013. The Last Days of Sri Ramana Maharshi. The New Indian Express, 30 October (accessed on 6 October 2015). Tarabout, Gilles. 2003. ‘Magical Violence and Non-Violence: Witchcraft in Kerala’. In Violence Non-Violence, edited by Denis Vidal, Gilles Tarabout and Eric Mayer. New Delhi: Manohar and Centre De Sciences Humaines. Tharakan, P.K.M. 2014. Profiles of the Parayil Tharakans: Glimpses of the History of a Family, a Region and a Church. Delhi: Bloomsbury India. Thulaseedharan, Sindhu. 2019. ‘Inheritance Practices of Syrian Christians of Kerala’. In Chronology and Events, edited by Susan Visvanathan and Vineetha Menon. Delhi: Windshield Press. Visvanathan, Susan. 1989. Marriage, Birth and Death: Property Rights and Domestic Relations among the Orthodox/Jacobite Syrian Christians of Kerala 24 (24), 17 June: 1341–1346 (accessed on 6 October 2015, jstor). ———. 1993. The Christians of Kerala. Madras, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 8th edition 2008. ———. 2010. The Children of Nature: The Life and Legacy of Ramana Maharshi. Delhi: Lotus imprint, Roli Books. ———. 2011. Reading Marx, Weber and Durkheim Today. Delhi: Palm Leaf Publication. ———. 2013. ‘Kalpathy Heritage Village: Sacred and Modern’. In Education, Religion and Creativity, edited by Ishwar Modi. Jaipur: Rawat Publications. Visvanathan, Susan and K.M. Tharakan. 1982. Struggle against Death. Kottayam: CMS Press. Waghorne, Joanne Punzo. 2004. ‘Diaspora of the Gods, Modern Hindu Temples’. In An Urban Middle-Class World. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Zukin, Sharon. 1995. The Cultures of Cities. Oxford: Blackwell; Oxford Population Overseas Indians pdf, available at: moia.gov.in (accessed on 4 October 2015). Websites ‘Tamil Brahmins Seek Minority Status’. Available at: www.hindu.com, 23 September 2015 (accessed on 6 October 2015). ‘India on Top Regarding Beef Exports’. Available at: www.hindu.com, 10 August 2015 (accessed on 9 October 2015). ‘Muslim Groups Protest against Textbook in Kerala, IANS’. Available at: www. twocircles.net, 2 July 2008 (accessed on 9 October 2015). ‘Marthoma Communication and Development Centre to Equip the FirstGeneration Diaspora Christians to Document and Transmit Their Faith and Tradition’. Available at: www.marthomadc.org (accessed on 5 October 2015). ‘Gurudwara in Santa Fe, Sikh Places of Worship’ (accessed on 6 October 2015). ‘Moral Policing in Kerala’. Available at: www.FeministsIndia, 5 November 2014 (accessed on 9 October 2015).

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Index A Adivasis, marginalisation of, 97 Advaita, 156, 163, 164 Afforestation, 215 Africa, 123, 133 Aggarwal, Ravina, 44 AIDS, 249–250 Alternative education, 42, 51, 242. See also Marudam Farm School (Tiruvannamalai Learning Centre); SECMOL (The Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh) Alternative school movement, 223–224 Alternative School Network, 223 Ancient Futures (Helena NorbergHodges), 44 Andrews, C.F., 68 Animal migrations for sustenance, 79, 80 Annamalai Reforestation Society, 215 Arcot Danish Mission schools, 220 Arendt, Hannah, 209 Army in Ladakh, 40, 44, 47–48 Artefacts, 213 Artificial environments, 41 The Art of the Commonplace (Wendell Berry), 40, 67 Arunachala, 33, 216, 224, 233 Arunachala Reforestation (AR), 89 Arunachala Village School, 221–222 Arunagiri, Abhitha, 215, 216, 220

B Baba Ramdev industries, 40, 48 Badagas in Coonoor, land rights of, 92–96 Bakker, Karen, 82, 86–88

Bangladesh and India, borderline between, 74 Barthes, Roland, 164–165 Bateson, Gregory, 163 Bateson, Mary Catherine, 163 Baudrillard, Jean, 144 Bauman, Zygmunt, 179, 249, 257, 264, 268 Bayly, Christopher, 30 Beckett, Jane, 35 Benaras, 16, 183, 301 Benaras of the South, 183 Berry, Wendell, 2 Between Camps (Paul Gilroy), 212 Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary, 81 Biological Diversity Act of 2002, 214 Blanchot, Maurice, 293 Borges, Renee, 79 Brahmin and Non-Brahmin (M.S.S. Pandian), 211 Brimnes, Niels, 189 Britain, 121, 128 Buber, Martin, 224, 290 Buch, M.N., 16 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, 261–262 Buddhism, 143

C Capeolea, Isabel Gil, 145 Capitalism, trickle-down effect of, 71 Caste and class, 211 Cattle class, 248 Cayleff, Susan E., 66–67 Chandrika, S.S., 101 Cheruthoni dam, 108 The Children of Nature (Susan Visvanathan), 8, 33 The Christians of Kerala (Susan Visvanathan), 297 The Citizen and the Administrator in a Developing Democracy (Samuel

307

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Index

J. Eldersveld, V. Jagannadham and A.P. Barnabas), 173 Class-based violence, 70 Clean Coonoor project, 78 Clifford, James, 85–86 Climate change, 5, 41, 47, 79, 147, 149, 254 Coastal floods, 254 Coexistence, 138 Coliphage, 22–24 Collective paranoia, 105 Colonialism, 30, 64, 66, 73, 84, 91 Compost heaps, 99 Congress Socialist Party (CSP), 30 Conquest, 156–158, 161 Consciousness, 140–141 Conspicuous consumption, 249 Conversions, 143 Coonoor, 66 animals wandering into town, 79, 81 human–animal interface in, 81–83 land rights of Badagas, 92–96 as tourist place, 82 waste disposal in, 78 water scarcity in, 77–81 Coronavirus, 250. See also Covid-19 Covid-19, 9, 244–245, 260–261, 265–269 and existence of god, 245–248 farmers’ agitation and, 245, 256 food to wage labour, 252 lockdown during, 246–247 medical care and food distribution, 251–252 migrant workers and, 244, 246, 250, 251, 255, 257 obituaries during, 259 personal experience as patient in Covid ward, 270–275 poor and weaker section of society, 248–251, 264 sense of loss and despair, 253 vaccines for, 258–259 war machinery activation, 260 Creative spaces, 17 Crompton, Jeremy W., 284

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Cypriot poets. See Sitas, Ari; Stephanides, Stephanos Cyprus, 5, 120, 123, 125, 128, 133

D Damodar project, 91 Dams, 13–15, 27, 31, 201. See also Large dams; Small dams colonial, 84, 91, 96 Daniels, Valentine, 190, 191 The Death of Nature (Carolyn Merchant), 103 Debral, J.P., 32–33 De Groot, Jerome, 260 Detachment, 142 Dev, Acharya Narendra, 30 Dhyana, concept of, 150 Dialogue and History (Eugene Irschick), 15, 75 Diaspora Indians, 9–10, 279–280 church magnification, 296–297, 299 domestic and religious architecture, 294–296 Hindus, 279, 280 love for homeland, 279–280 Muslims, 292–293 naming of children, 287 return to homeland in Kerala, 280–287 St Thomas Christians of Kerala, 280–281 temple renovations, 297–298 traditions and emotional hold with home country, 280 visits to homecountry, 288–292 Diaspora of the Gods (Joanne Punzo Waghorne), 302 Digital texts, 153 Dirks, Nicholas B., 184 Displacement, 15, 27, 85 Disputes over Krishna Waters: Law, Science and Imperialism (Radha D’Souza), 75 Distrust, 105 Dodge, Martin, 283 Dolkar, Rinchen, 53

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Index Dowry (stridhan), 282 Drought, 66, 71 Dualism, 154, 156, 164 Dubos, Rene, 41 Durkheim, Emile, 142, 230, 242

E Eck, Diana, 15, 18 Ecological consciousness, 217, 228 Ecological development through education, 45–46 The Ecology of Commerce (Paul Hawken), 40 Eisely, Loren, 267 Electricity production, 85, 90–91 Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Emile Durkheim), 70 Emerging Contaminants in Ganga River Basin with Special Emphasis on Pesticides (report), 18 Environmental transformations, 41 Erasure of the Euro-Asian (Kumari Jayawardena), 211 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 268–269 Exclusion, 213

F Famine, 71, 72 Farmers’ protests, 244–245, 256 Feminism, 212, 270 Fenn, Richard, 286, 288 Feudalism, 146 Findhorn Garden, Scotland, 104 Floods, 66, 67, 72 in Kerala, 104–107 Food security, 40 Forester, 210 Forest land, encroachment of, 91–92, 99–100 Freedom of personal opinion, 230 From Mobilisation to Institutionalisation (T.K. Oommen), 27 Fukuoka method of night soil utilisation, 50

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309

G Gadgil, A.R., 30 Gadgil, Siddharth, 67 Gadgil, Sulocahana, 67 Galwan crises, 42 Ganga, 1, 18, 30–31. See also Neeri Report cleaning of, 18, 26–27 phage in, 22, 25–26 Ganga Action Plan, 26 Ganga Mukti Andolan, 19 Geertz, Clifford, 212 Ghatwai, Milind, 16, 17 Ghosh, Amitav, 68 Gilroy, Paul, 111, 244, 245, 267–268 Global cultural surrealism analysis, 85–86 Good and evil, origin of, 162 Graves-Brown, Paul, 213 Greening movement in Tiruvannamalai, schools involvement in, 216–218 Green movements, 1, 13, 15, 42–43 Green Revolution, 75 Groundwater, replenishing, 101 Guha, Ramachandra, 210 Gundimeda, Sambaiah, 189 Guyana, 124, 125, 127, 130

H Hage, Ghasan, 283 Hankins, Katharine, 110 Harbison, Robert, 265 Hardin, Russel, 105 Harvey, David, 86 Haryana, 87 Herd immunity, 249, 252 History in the Vernacular (Raziuddin Aquil and Partha Chatterjee), 153 History of the Periyar Project (A.T. Mackenzie), 14 Human rights, 142, 145 Human Rights Watch groups, 213 Hydropower projects, 25, 31

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310

Index

I Ice stupa, 47–49, 52, 149 Idukki dam, 76, 84 Illich, Ivan, 209 India, 120, 132, 146 Indus river, 46, 49 Industrial agriculture, 67 Industrial farming, 48 Industrialisation, 16, 35, 36, 90 impact of, 67–71 In My Own Words (Jane Sahi), 222–223 Integrative school education, 234 In the Belly of the River (Amita Baviskar), 16 Islands in Flux (Pankaj Sekhsaria), 42 Iveson, Kurt, 204

J James, Swapna, 97–99, 150 Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 2, 5, 8, 30, 132 Jayaraman, J., 90 Jhunjhunwala, Bharat, 19, 20, 22, 31, 32, 34

K Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity (Prema Kurien), 300 Kalpathy, 7–8, 20, 171, 301 agraharam of Brahmins, 175, 186–190 as heritage site, 171–173, 176 holy Kalpathy river, 175, 184–186 modernisation and transformation, 175–182, 185–191 music festival, 174, 177, 180, 181, 195 rituals for the dead, 183, 184 Tamil Brahmins in, 171, 173, 175–176, 186, 298, 302 temples of, 171, 172, 183–184 Ter festival (Rath or Car), 180–181, 192–199

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tourism and modernisation process, 173 Viswanatha temple, 181, 183, 297 water for farmers from Mallampuzha dam, 200–201 Kalpathy river, 19, 175, 184–186 Kalpathy Sangeetha Ullsavam, 174 Karnataka, 84, 217 Kar, Samit, 6 Kasturi Rangan Report, 80 Kattu Siva Plantation, 220, 221 Kelly, Joan, 163 Kerala, 4, 13, 19–20, 29, 35–36, 47, 66, 84, 182 floods in, 104–106 growing vegetables and fruits in, 148, 149 impact of floods in, 107–108, 110–111 small dams in, 66, 83, 84 and Tamil Nadu border, 108 Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP), 103 Keystone Foundation, 68–69, 79–80 Khandwa farmers, 29 Khap panchayats, 145–146 Kisan sabhas, 30 Kitchin, Rob, 283 Krishi Bhavan, 148, 149 Krishnan, Jyothi, 201 Kudumbayogam (clan union), 281, 286 Kurien, Prema, 292

L Ladags Melong (Mirror of Ladakh), 43 Ladakh, 2, 40–60, 87, 149 Ladakh Autonomous Hill Council, 45 Ladakh Students’ Movement, 47 Lakshminarayan, K.N., 175, 177, 180, 181, 183–185 Landless labour, 9, 73, 215, 248, 250–251 Landscape transformations, 41 Large dams, 76, 83–85 Larnaca Oranges, 127

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Index Latour, Bruno, 213 Legends of Khasak (O.V. Vijayan), 69 Lewis, Michael, 80–81 Life’s Weight (poem), 122 The Literary Guide to the Bible (Robert Alter and Frank Kermode), 153 Local communities forests and, 79–80 Ladakh, 47 tourism and, 42 Logan, William, 66 The Logic of Practice (Pierre Bourdieu), 200 Love for homeland, 279–280 Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (Roland Barthes), 164 Lutheran Danish Mission School, 225

M Madras Presidency, 74, 108 Maffesoli, Michel, 44, 199–200 Mahalanobis, P.C., 30 Mahapatra, Prabhu, 68 Maharishi, Ramana, 288 Malampuzha dam, 76, 186, 200–203 Mapmaking, 161 Maps, 35 as learning device, 237 Market gardening, 40, 41, 47–48, 67, 93 Martin, Deborah, 110 Marudam Farm School (Tiruvannamalai Learning Centre), 218–222, 226–228, 230, 233–242 Marx, 143, 150 Mary Roy Case, 282 Massumi, Brian, 263 Material culture, 213 Mauss, Marcel, 150, 245 Maya, nature and role of, 139, 141 McNeill, Donald, 110 Mediation for Latour, 213 Mehta, Lyla, 67 Memorialisation, role of video industry in, 283, 287–288

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311

‘The merging of alternate generations’, 289 Metanoia, concept of, 143 Mies, Maria, 209 Migrant workers, 244, 246, 250, 251, 255, 257 Migration histories, 72–74, 147 Migration of people, 72–73 The Mirror of Production (Jean Baudrillard), 139 Moench, Marcus, 66, 73 Montefiore, 160–161 Moral Education (Durkheim, Emile), 143 Morrison, Kathleen, 210 Mother country, love for, 155, 157 Mother-tongue learning, 222 Mountainous communities, 92 M.S. Swaminathan Research station, Wayanad, 100 Mullaperiyar, 13 Mullaperiyar dam, 76, 84, 108–110 Muslims diaspora, 292–293

N Narmada, 16, 17 Natural world, mutual synergy in, 104 Naz, Farhat, 75 Neeri Report, 20–24 Nilgiris rivers, 96 Nomadic groups, 74 Non-labour, 143–144 Nooyi, Indra, 180, 297 Norman, Becky, 2, 41–43, 59–60, 149. See also SECMOL (The Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh) ‘Nostalgia’ (poem), 122 Nostos, 121–122

O Old age homes, 288 One Valley and a Thousand: Dams, Nationalism and Development (Daniel Klingensmith), 90, 91 Oommen, T.K., 28, 132

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312

Index

‘Order of capitalism’, 83 Organic farming, 36, 42, 43, 46, 47, 48, 51, 55, 66, 98, 104 Organising for Science (Shiv Visvanathan), 90–91 Original inhabitants, 72–73

P Palakkad, 20, 66, 74, 97, 150, 171, 297 case of Swapna James, 97–99 Kalpathy heritage village (See Kalpathy) water for local inhabitants, 76, 83 Pandian, Anand, 13–15, 109–110 Panikker, Raimundo, 146–147 Pant, G.B., 30 Parmeswara, 157, 163, 165 Patkar, Medha, 28 Pearson, Willie, 68 Peasantry, 215, 231 Pennycuick, John, 14 People’s movements, 28 Perkins, Chris, 283 Phagi, 22–24 Philip, Shaju, 36 Phytoplankton, 24–25 Pilgrimage, 144 Pipe Politics, Contested Waters (Lisa Bjorkman), 83 Pit latrines, 46 Playing with Maps (Chris Perkins), 161 Poverty, 16, 48, 71, 133, 179, 213, 248 Prakriti, 163 The Predicament of Culture (James Clifford), 85 Pritchard, Evans, 190 Privatisation of water, 75, 86–87 Profiles of the Parayil Tharakans: Glimpses of the History of a Family, a Region, and a Church (P.K.M. Tharakan), 300 Protest movements, 16, 17 Punjab farmers, 29

Q

R Radhakrishnan, S., 30 Raju, Suvrat, 17 Rallia dam, 77, 78 Ramakrishna Mission, 6 Ramana, M.V., 17 Ramanasramam, 215, 225 Ramon Magsaysay Award, 2018, 46 Rao, Narayana, 153, 165, 202 Rashid, C.A., 27–28 Redfield, Robert, 138 Relief camps, 111 Religion, 142 faith and, 143 respect for, 143 and secularism, 145 traditional customs and, 146 Remembering Sir J.C Bose (D.P. Sen Gupta, M.H. Engineer and V.A. Shepherd), 149 Representation of Death in Benaras (doctoral thesis), 26 Rethinking Maps (Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins), 35, 200 The Revenge of Gaia (James Lovelock), 41 Ricoeur, Paul, 6, 208–209, 232 Ritual, 152 Riverbeds, exploitation of, 84 Riverine civilisations, 13 Riverine rehabilitation, 27 Rivers, 1, 13, 19, 24–25, 29. See also Ganga cleaning of, 18–19 extinction of, 76, 84 pollution, 16, 18–19, 76–77, 84 protection of, 34 sacred, 18, 19 sand mining, 19, 20, 84, 184, 201 Rodin, Auguste, 144 Rolex Award, 2016, 46 Rosset, Clement, 141–142 Rough Music: Selected Poems 1989– 2013 (Ari Sitas), 120, 123 Rudes, George, 256

Quo Vadis, 220, 224–226

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Index

S Saberwal, Satish, 211 Sacrificing People (Felix Padel), 256 Sadhaka, 157, 162, 163 Saha, Meghnad, 90–91 Sahi, Jane, 222–224 Sahi, Jyoti, 224–225 Sahlins, Peter, 91, 92, 99 Saittu, Abid, 292 Salter Dam, 89 Sand mining, 19, 20, 84, 184, 201 Saron Public School, Tiruvannamalai, 228–230, 232–233 Satish, A., 182 Schooling, 43, 230 alternative, 49–50 (See also Marudam Farm School [Tiruvannamalai Learning Centre]) Schools in Tiruvannamalai, 216–224 Scott, James, 86 Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo (Marcel Mauss), 42 SECMOL (The Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh), 3, 39, 43, 45–47, 49–50, 149 children and teachers relationship, 56 daily routines at, 50–59 skills taught to students, 56, 60 Segmentalisation, 146 Self and the Other, 142 Self-worth, sense of, 144 Settler communities, 73 A Seventh Man (John Berger and Jean Mohr), 255 Shah, Mihir, 66 Shakti, 155, 157, 165 Sharma, R.V.S.N., 154 Shepherd, V.A., 149 Shulman, David, 202 Simmel, George, 263 Sim’s Park, 82 Singer, Milton, 138 Singh, Ravi Nandan, 25–27

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313

Sitas, Ari, 5, 120, 122–124, 132–136 Sita’s School, 222–223 Slave Trades and an Artist’s Notebook (Ari Sitas), 120, 123, 133 Small dams, 76 in Kerala, 66, 83, 85 and large dams debate, 76, 83–84 priority to town dwellers, 76, 83 water for irrigation and electricity generation, 76 Solar energy, 46, 47, 50 The Song of the Dodo (David Quammen), 84 Songs of Solomon (King Solomon), 152–167 Sontag, Susan, 249 Soper, Kate, 209 Soundarya Lahiri (Adi Shankara), 152–167 Spaces of Capital (David Harvey), 28 Spiritual love, 163 Srinivas, M.N., 138 Sri Ramanasramam, Tiruvannamalai, 88–89 Steiner, George, 166 Steiner, Rudolf, 224 Stephanides, Stephanos, 5, 120–132 Subramanium, M. Bala, 92, 95 Subramanium, Sanjay, 153, 202 Subsistence farming, 48 Sundarbans in West Bengal, 73–74

T Talibanisation of religions, 146 Tamil Brahmins, 171, 173, 175–176, 186, 298, 301–302 Tamil Brahmins (C.J. Fuller and Harpriya Narasimha), 301 Tamil Nadu, 69, 74, 84, 217. See also Coonoor sedenterisation of agriculture in, 75 Tarpaulin greenhouses, 149 Tata Trusts, 40, 48 Tehri Dam, 20–25 ‘Territorial-limit-indicator’, 190

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314

Index

‘The intelligentsia of the people’, 254 The Wind Under My Lips (Stephanos Stephanides), 120, 126 Thirukkural (Thiruvalluvar), 142 Thomas, Renny, 138 Time of dream, 141 Tithe paying, 281 Topography and people, connection between, 74 Tourism, 40, 42, 46, 52, 71, 144–145 and local communities, 42 Transculturation, 120 Translation, 147, 153 Tribal communities, 210 Attappadi case, 69, 70 identity of, 68 Keystone Foundation and, 79–80 malnutrition and lack of proximity to water, 69, 70 non-assimilated tribal youth, 69 support to, 69 Wayanad, 100, 101

U Uncivil City (Amita Baviskar), 257 The Urban Question (Manuel Castells), 83

V Vashista Yoga (Swami Venkatesananda), 139, 140, 166 Vedas, 147 Venkatachalapathy, A.R., 173 Verses, 7, 153. See also Songs of Solomon (King Solomon); Soundarya Lahiri (Adi Shankara) Videography of corpse in Kerala, 283, 287–288 Vijayshankar, P.S., 66 Village Matters (Diane P. Mines and Nicolas Yazgi), 17 Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), 279 Viswam, Paul, 228–229, 232–233 Vocabulary of the Commons, 83

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W Wangchuk, Sonam, 2, 41–49, 52–53, 60, 149. See also SECMOL (The Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh) Wasted Lives (Zygmunt Bauman), 249 Water agriculture, water and land use, relationship between, 72–74 as commodity, 88–89 conservation practices, 101 from dams, 90–91 demand of, 67 famines and scarcity of, 88–89 harvesting, 49, 85, 101 Haryana vs. New Delhi, 87–88 for irrigation purposes, 76 personal hygiene routines and, 82 privatisation of, 75, 86–87 shortage, 71, 77, 87 as symbol of political action and governmentality, 75–77 urban consumer, 71 use by military stations, 95–96 Water management, 47. See also Ice stupa Wayanad, 97 dry zone, 100 floods in, 106 land use in, 100–103 organic farming in, 105–106 plantation culture, 101–102 tourism in, 106–107 Weber, Max, 212, 281 Weber’s theory of charisma, 33 Weil, Simone, 150, 264 Weiz, Bettina, 83, 201 Western Ghats, 4, 67, 77, 84–85, 100. See also Coonoor When a Great Tradition Modernizes (Milton Singer), 301 Wilkes, Carsten, 165 Wilson, Ross, 261

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Index The Wooing of the Earth (Rene Dubos), 67 Words and action, 139 Words, power of, 152–153. See also Songs of Solomon (King Solomon); Soundarya Lahiri (Adi Shankara) Work and non-work, 144, 150 Work as vocation, 150

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315

Working class, political conditions of, 68 World Bank, 17, 106 World Council of Churches, 282 Wulf, Christoph, 145, 259–260

Z Zemon Davis, Natalie, 156

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About the Author Susan Visvanathan is the author of Christians of Kerala (1993), Friendship, Interiority and Mysticism (2007) and The Children of Nature (2010). She has published essays in various journals, the earliest ofwhich was ‘Reconstructions of the Past among the Syrian Christians of Kerala’ in Contributions to Indian Sociology (1986). Prof. Visvanathan was Chairperson of Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University (2009–2011) and Teacher-in-Charge of Department of Sociology, Hindu College (1992–1997). She has taught Sociology 38 years, of which 25 years were spent at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where she had the privilege of working with doctoral students. She retired from Jawaharlal Nehru University, on 9 March 2022. Susan Visvanathan was Fellow, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi (1989–1992) and Honorary Fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla (1990–1995). Susan Visvanathan has edited Structure and Transformation (2001), Chronology and Event (edited with Vineeta Menon) (2019), Art, Politics, Symbols and Religion (2019), Structure, Innovation and Adaptation (2019). She collaborated with the art historian, Geeti Sen, and edited two volumes of the India International Quarterly titled Kerala (1995) and Women and the Family (1997). Susan Visvanathan is a well-known writer of literary fiction who has been included in Bruce King’s Rewriting India: Eight Writers (2014). Her first novella, a collection of integrated short stories, titled Something Barely Remembered (2000), was published by Flamingo and India Ink, and was one of the six nominees for the Commonwealth Award, UK. It is now a textbook for English literature students in the 200 colleges of the Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, Kerala. Prof. Visvanathan was Visiting Professor to the Maison des Sciences de l’homme, Paris (2004) and to Universite Paris 13 (2011). She was Charles Wallace Fellow at Ethnomusicology and Anthropology Department in Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1997. Prof. Visvanathan was Professional Excellence Award Fellow at Budapest, Central European University in 2018. 317

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Work, Word and the World.indd 318

27-06-2022 17:55:02