Thursday, December 30, 2010

Fieldwork

In the early morning, I am riding down a narrow dirt road running through farm fields in an old Forest Department jeep, without seatbelts, shocks, or a proper door. Because I am an honored guest, I am sitting in front, next to the driver, a backpack with a notebook, camera, and water bottle crushed between my legs and the front of the vehicle (so it doesn't bounce out). On the benches in the rear of the jeep sit two forest officers - first is an older man who has spent his entire career with the department, at the lowest rank of the administrative hierarchy. Although he might be in his mid-50s, he looks strong and lean, as if he had spent a career outdoors. He stays alone in a small town here, at the edge of the area of forest he is responsible for. In our brief discussion in the early morning, I did not find out if he, like many such officials, keeps his family in some larger town in the region, seeing them only on weekends and holidays. The younger officer is a recent college graduate. He has entered the ranks of the service a step higher than the older man, and for the last year, he has been the man's boss. He has a wife and 2 little girls, who live with his parents in a town about 160 km away - a four hour journey by bus or motorcycle. Because of his education, he speaks some English. The driver is 20 years old, and tells me that he recently completed his 10th grade exam. He is from a village not far from here, and has been working as a driver since he was 14. He complains to me in Hindi that he has been hired only as a private driver on a contract basis, and thus gets paid only a quarter of what a regularly employed government driver would receive.
Out of the mist appears a caravan of 12 bullock carts. Men drive, or sit huddled on the back on a pile of rice straw, wrapped in shawls to keep out the morning chill (to a New Englander, it does not seem cold, but still, the temperature is only about 60 degrees on this late December morning, and the rest of their clothing, lightweight cotton, is designed more for the blistering hot summer than for the chill of winter). The jeep halts, and the officers hop out to discuss with the drivers: Where are they going? To the forest... to collect firewood. The officers remind them that they should only collect dead wood, and not fell any living trees, and we drive on.
At the edge of the forest, we find the remains of an attempted encroachment. Farmers from the local villages are desperate for land. There is a strong correlation between the presence of forests and the existence of severe poverty in India. Is this a causal connection? It is hard to say, since local conditions are so variable. But the landless poor - and those who have a little, but not enough land, often look to the degraded forest at the edge of their village as a source of new farmland.

This is not a new phenomena: for centuries, Indian governments encouraged the clearing of forest land for agriculture. Agricultural land could be taxed, increasing the treasury. Forests were a source of wild beasts: tigers and leopards ate people, while elephants, boars, bears, and troops of monkeys destroyed crops. Forests also provide a refuge for bandits and rebels. From what we can make out about the shape of forests prior to the British empire (which brought much more systematic record-keeping), the forests contracted when peace and economic growth encouraged the growth of agriculture, and expanded again when war and economic collapse wreaked havoc on the agrarian economy. As recently as the 1960s, the Government of India was still eager to give away forest land to farmers as part of its efforts to free India from dependence on imported food grains. This has changed, and the new emphasis is on forest conservation.

These farmers have built a watchtower in their field of Jowar (sorghum - one of the grains traditionally cultivated and eaten in the semi-arid rainfed agriculture of central India). At night they will sleep their, keeping watch for boars and other wildlife who may come from the forest to forage on their crops.

Who cut the trees in the picture above? It is possible that they were cut by villagers eager for farmland, but it is equally possible that they were cut by organized groups of timber harvesters. This particular area was severely affected by India's Maoist rebellion for about 20 years - ending a few years ago when police pressure pushed the "Naxalites" across the border into a neighboring state. The Maoists, I am told, encouraged encroachments and logging, and beat and killed those forest officers who opposed them. Forest officers are also not always innocent in such works. These forests are in the central Indian teak belt, where a single good-sized teak tree can fetch upwards of $1000 in the markets. With this kind of money, smugglers can afford some bribes.

I haven't written much about my work in this blog. In fact, it is somewhat of a struggle to maintain the blog. Although I have a cellular modem, internet speeds in many of these places are too slow for uploading pictures, and the work schedule keeps me busy. Most days I'm out in the field, with the forest officers, observing their work, or interviewing NGOs, villagers, and other government officials who interact with the forests. I travel almost constantly. After a long day in the field, I come home and type up fieldnotes, recording my experiences of the day so that I can draw on them when I write up my research, and labelling my photos. I'm averaging over 5000 words/day. Sometimes, riding the bus, or meditating in the morning, my mind catches hold of an idea, and I start composing an essay on what I am learning. I try to put these in my fieldnotes, and imagine putting them out in the world. But in the constant dialogue between theories and evidence called fieldwork, I am constantly rebuilding my ideas, challenging them, or confronting new circumstances. My findings are preliminary. What kinds of preliminary thoughts and findings can I write about on a public blog? These thoughts and findings are meant to be the subject of research papers and books, eventually, and I'm erring for the moment on the side of saving them for more polished works. In the meantime, I'm trying to share with you - my friends who read my blog - some of what it looks and feels like here.

As everywhere in the world, forests are protected primarily by their remoteness.
Sometimes I spend hours riding on incredibly overcrowded, rickety State Transport busses to reach my destination. The major roads are 1 lane wide, paved, with dirt shoulders, so on those occasions where we pass another large vehicle - a bullock cart making its way from the village to a farmers' field, a truck carrying cotton to market, or a car carrying a government official to inspect a new road - we swerve off onto the shoulder, and the bus seems to hang perilously over the roadside ditch. Then the great diesel engines fire, and we are up again, on the cracked and broken tarmac. We stop in a small town, and a crowd of 50 villagers push and shove to get on the bus to return from the market, while another crowd of 50, already on the bus, push and shove to get out.
Village squares are decorated with statues of heroes, and you learn something about the village from the statues. Ambedkar, the great leader of India's Dalits (or untouchables) and the author of India's constitution, is almost everywhere - a short fat man, one arm outstretched, the other holding the constitution. Ambedkar converted to Buddhism at the end of his life, and his statues are often adorned with Buddhist imagery. In the wealthier upper-class towns, you often see statues of more recent political leaders - such as Andhra Pradesh's YSR Reddy, the popular chief minister who died in a helicopter crash a year ago. In the forest areas, you sometimes run into more obscure heroes. This man is Kumram Bhim - a leader of the Gond tribe who organized his people against the Nizam of Hyderabad to demand rights to "Jell, Jungle, Jamin" (land, forest, water). He was killed in 1940, but his memory lives on. I'm told that in the more remote villages, you can also find statues of the Austrian anthropologist, Haimendorf, who was sent by the Nizam in the 1940s to study the conditions of life among the Gonds, and try to improve their situation.

A friend I have made through my research, an activist with a deep commitment to working for the poor and downtrodden, told me that every place in India has its own indigenous history of resistance, political protest, and the creation of alternatives. In some places, I see the footsteps of Gandhi and his followers, who taught non-violent civil disobedience and village development. Gandhi's organizing principle was "Swaraj" or self-rule. Modern nationalism interprets this to mean freedom from the British, but if you read Gandhi's work (Gandhi published a newspaper for much of his adult life - his collected works run to over 90 volumes), you find a more complicated view of swaraj, which emphasizes self-government, as well as personal growth and development. In other places I see the footsteps of violent suppression of the downtrodden, as well as violent revolts by peasants and forest dwellers demanding rights, land, and lower taxes.
In the era of forest conservation, how can the forest land near villages be "conserved," when the villagers depend on the forest for their firewood, the timbers to build their wall frames and roofs, the bamboo to build their walls, the poles to grow their beans on, the thorny bushes to fence the goats out of their fields, the wood to build their carts and tools, and perhaps most importantly, the fodder to feed their domestic animals (who in turn, provide them with manure to fertilize their fields?). This has been a major struggle of the last few decades of forestry in India, and it is by no means certain that adequate solutions have been found to address the problem. Perhaps, some think, if the villagers had more means of livelihood, and earned some money from the intact forest, they would more carefully regulate their own use, and also serve as a bulwark against the organized timber smugglers. In the picture above, the tribal department has provided the villagers with eggs of silkworms, and the forest department has made an arrangement to allow a group of villagers to grow silk worms on the Terminalia tomentosa trees in the forest surrounding the village. The silkworms are thick and fat, reminding me of the I used to pull off tomato plants in Maine.
By stereotype, the villagers living near forests are "tribals" or "adivasis" - people who claim to be indigenous to India, and to have long historical relations with the forest. The reality is often more complicated. This lovely village was settled by Hindu refugees from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in the 1960s.
Unlike the pattern typical of villages in the region, where houses are densely packed together in a small settlement, surrounded by large agricultural fields, the Bengalis plant trees and extensive vegetable gardens around their homes. Approaching this village, I thought I was driving into a forest, but instead found myself in a village shaded by tamarind, banana, neem, banana and drumstick trees. I suppose I could learn from these people that climate is not completely deterministic - I had imagined that the lack of trees was due to the arid climate, but the Bengalis showed me that the lack of trees was due to a cultural conception of what a village is.

Incidentally, one of the amazing things about India is its linguistic diversity. The Bengali refugees are poor and uneducated, but every one I met spoke at least 3 languages - their mother tongue, Bengali, the language of the state they now live in, Telugu, and Hindi, the national language.
I have already mentioned Jowar - one of the many varieties of millets grown in central India. In my experience, they are all rich, flavorful, and nutritious foods, but they are suffering a fate similar to the scorn that European derived cooks once felt for peasant foods like rutabagas, turnips, and parsnips. I am told that people would be ashamed to serve a guest - especially an honored guest like me, a foreigner, such lowly foods. I am stuck eating decent, but somewhat bland and boring white rice. Jowar is also grown - as in this picture from my research assistant's family's farm - as a fodder crop, mixed in with various legumes.
Ripe jowar stalks, ready for harvest.
Perhaps the most widely planted crop in the arid lands of central India is a remarkable legume called Toor or arhar dal in Hindi (English names include red gram and pigeon pea). A native plant to India, toor seems to have the ability to thrive in the driest and least nutritional soils, producing abundant protein rich seed, used to make dal - including the famous sambar of South India.
Toor in bloom. Toor is widely interplanted with cotton, the region's primary cash crop. Of course cotton is grown widely in the US, but not in places I had visited previously, so I find myself fascinated by the amazing tufts of fiber this plant produces.
Cotton being brought to market in a village's weekly market day:

Once the cotton is sold, the villagers have cash to buy clothes, spices, plastic sandals, and vegetables. Strangely, the vegetables come from traders who go to the city to buy them - farmers markets as we know them in the US are rarely found in India, and the ladies selling their vegetable wares in this market are traders, not farmers (this has always struck me as an opening for a different kind of business opportunity for the rural farmers).Eggplant is one of the few native vegetables of South Asia to spread widely outside. The eggplants are very diverse, and some are remarkably beautiful.
These are Jujubes, a fruit that grows wild on the margins of fields and villages, as well as in cultivated orchards. They taste somewhat like plums.
Crossing the Pranahita River on a ferry boat:
My essay so far might give off the misimpression that forests are used only by villagers. Forests are also used by industries. Teak is native to central India, and central Indian teak is still considered to be of the best quality (although I've learned that many Indian furniture makers have turned to teak grown on plantations in west Africa and Malaysia, due to domestic shortages and high prices). Bamboo is also used for paper making, as at this giant factory:
The man with the hard hat is my research assistant's brother, who works in a junior engineering position in the Sirpur Paper Mills in the town of Kaghaznagar (translation: paper town). Kaghaznagar is a stop on the main railway line, where you cover your nose to avoid breathing in the belching sulfurous plumes. The town itself is a mixture of orderly quarters occupied by the thousands of company employees, and rickety slums where the rest of the towns' residents live. You can walk from the mill to the bus stand at the far end of town in about 20 minutes.
My research assistant, shown here with one of his nephews, grew up in a small village about 5 km as the crow flies from Kaghaznagar. During the dry season, you can wade across the river, and reach the town relatively quickly, but during the rainy season, it is necessary to detour about 15 km around to reach the main road.

I have been reading Anirudh Krishna's fantastic new book, "One Illness Away: Why People Become Poor and How They Escape Poverty." Krishna did some of his field research in Andhra Pradesh, in a district near to where my assistant grew up, and found that few people in such rural villages aspire to, or attain, anything beyond the lowest levels of employment outside of their village. People may become village school teachers, or police constables, but few become high level professionals. Ramdas, my assistant, seems to be an exception to this pattern - he is currently studying for his MPhil in economics at a reputed institute in Hyderabad, and hopes to do a PhD studying sustainable agriculture.
Ramdas and 2 sisters-in-law shelling beans.
Although Ramdas' family belongs to one of the Scheduled Castes (the modern government term for the former "untouchables" or dalits), they are descended from the first settlers of this village, who arrived here 70 or 80 years ago. His grandfather owned over 40 acres of land, and was quite wealthy by local standards, but they sold alot of land to pay for medical care for his grandmother (Krishna finds that healthcare related expenses are one of the primary reasons that families fall into poverty - hence the title of his book - One Illness Away). They are fortunate, in that they still own 17 acres, making them still one of the wealthiest families in the village. Ramdas is the youngest of 5, and his eldest brother, the one who works in the paper mill, encouraged him to pursue higher study. Few other people from his village have achieved as high levels of education as he has.
Of course, this does not mean that they lack talent. More, it would seem that they lack opportunities and information about how to pursue them. Consider the young friend of Ramdas who painted these pictures of the Buddha and Ambedkar on the walls of his home. He has quite a talent for painting, and I've seen similar paintings for sale for 1000s of rupees outside of the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai. But how is a poor boy from Central India to reach those heights?
Ramdas' sister-in-law embroidering her sari.
The women of the family gathered in the courtyard in the evening.

One would like to think that in the future talented people from these villages would have the opportunity to make a better and more secure living, and to be free from the pressing wants of real material poverty. Not only their lives, but that of the rest of the world, will improve when their talents are able to reach full potential. On the other hand, it seems to me from my glimpses of life in these homes, that there are aspects of their lives that ought not to be lost. Children grow up surrounded by loving family. Neighbors respect each other, and people live lives that are orderly and predictable. They are embedded within a rich culture, one that is not merely "traditional" but also reinventing itself in response to a modern time with television sets, the spread of Buddhism among the scheduled castes of the region, etc. They eat healthy homegrown organic meals, and work hard with their hands. It is not that poverty is beautiful, but rather that in escaping poverty, I would hope that they will not lose sight of the things of value in the communities in which they came from. There is nothing perfect about the lives of the wealthy - be it in Hyderabad or in Bloomington, so perhaps our lives can also be enriched by what people who come from these villages have to teach us.
A couple of very hyperactive nephews.
A Bengali family returning from their fields by bullock-cart at dusk.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Giving Thanks

In the last few months I've celebrated many Indian holidays that I had never experienced before. Although I've enjoyed all of the celebrations, I find that I do not really understand their rhythm. As they are new to me, I have no experience of anticipation of what is to come, and holidays bring no nostalgia for times past. It is a very different way to experience a holiday.

Today the tables are turned - since it is one of my favorite holidays in the US, but I am alone in a new city (as has so frequently been the case in the course of this research) where I have few friends, and don't know a single other American. It is just another regular working day here. I feel a sense of nostalgia for Thanksgivings gone by - but don't really have anyone to share it with. I remember a couple of years ago I went for a long bicycle ride on Thanksgiving afternoon, before dinner. I was struck with the pattern - everyone was already at their Thanksgiving destination, and the roads were very quiet. Out in the country it was striking to see most houses empty - and every fifth or sixth house packed with people.

When I was a teenager, my Thanksgivings began with helping my mother cook on Wednesday afternoon, after we both came home from school. I did not cook much growing up, and it was helping mom cook these special holiday meals that taught me the rudiments of cookery. We would often listen to my parents' old record collection - Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Judy Collins, and of course, The Beatles. Then Thursday morning we would pack our bags and leave early for our little post and beam cabin in the glacially scoured schist hills of Southern Vermont, so that we could light a fire and warm the place before our guests arrived. Being from a small and scattered family, we rarely shared Thanksgiving with relatives, but with other friends whose families were equally small and scattered. They would join us in the afternoon, bringing plates of lasagna or vegetables to add to my mothers' pumpkin pie, corn pudding, tofu-spinach pie, and cranberry bread. For many years my guitar teacher and his family joined us, and after dinner we'd go for a walk up the hill to the old commune at Packers Corner (it was on such a Thanksgiving walk that I saw a goat, housed in a building that had once been the commune library in its more crowded days, chewing on a copy of the Odyssey). Then we would sing songs and play guitar around the woodstove, and eat our dessert.

For several years, we made it a tradition to climb Mount Greylock the day after Thanksgiving. Mount Greylock is the tallest mountain in Massachusetts, and while westerners may scoff at its height, it is still a massive chunk of rock, dominating over the valley of Williamstown and North Adams. The closest approach to our cabin was from the Appalachian Trail in N. Adams, and from there I recall the climb taking perhaps 3 or 4 hours. The Housatonic Valley, where the trail begins, is solidly in the temperate zone - dominated by maples and beeches, but as you climb, you enter a great boreal forest, dominated by spruce and fir. One year, as if to remind us of the difference between the warm valleys and the harsh summits of the Taconic Mountains, we arrived on the summit to find 3 feet of snow. Our trail was hard packed by previous visitors, and we were always prepared for the wind and cold, so we took it lightly, but it was impressive to see the difference with the valleys, where we had yet to see snow.

Like many well-known mountains, Mount Greylock has the misfortune of having a motorable road to the summit. I suppose if you climbed it in summer you might find it full of motorists, but we never saw any in late November. However, this particular year, we heard a car making its way up the snowbound road as we sat sipping our hot chocolate in a wind-free spot in the lee of a building. Although the road was not plowed, it had been packed tight by traffic from four-wheel drive vehicles, but still, we were surprised to see a station wagon appearing in the parking lot. Because the 4-wheel drive tracks spread out in the parking lot, the snow was less packed in the lot, and as the station wagon drove into the parking lot, it sank deep into the snow, and the wheels began to spin.

Out of the wagon poured a big extended family of Indians, taking advantage of their holiday to see some of the famous sights of the state. They were dressed as people in the city might dress for a cool day in the late fall - leather jackets, street shoes, cotton socks. The wind and snow howled around them, and they clung to each other for warmth. Being foreigners, they did not know that New England mountaintop in late November was a thing to be treated with respect, fear, and heavy down parkas. Things did not look good. Fortunately, there were a few other hikers on the mountaintop, and together we were able to push the car back to the safety of the beaten track.

Being here in India, I sometimes feel like that Indian family must have felt - dazzled by the beauty of the country I am visiting, but struggling to understand the customs, culture, ways of life, and dangers. So far, my car has not gotten stuck in any snow drifts. I have now been here for over six months, and every day I've relied on the kindness of strangers and friends to show me the way. I feel a deep sense of gratitude for all the help I've been given, as I've made my way through this challenging experience of living and conducting research in a foreign country. I also feel tremendous gratitude for all of those back home in the US whose support has helped make it possible for me to undertake this wonderful adventure. I hope you all have a warm Thanksgiving, and I look forward to sharing many more with you!

Last night, thinking of friends and family far away, I opened up my copy of "Selected Poems" of Rabindranath Tagore (Translated by William Radice) to a page with this poem:

Flute-Music

Kinu the milkman’s alley.
A ground-floor room in a two-storeyed house,
Slap on the road, windows barred.
Decaying walls, crumbling to dust in places
Or stained with damp.
Stuck on the door,
A picture of Ganesa, Bringer of Success,
From the end of a bale of cloth.
Another creature apart from me lives in my room
For the same rent:
A lizard.
There’s one difference between him and me:
He doesn’t go hungry.

I get twenty-five rupees a month
As junior clerk in a trading office.
I’m fed at the Dattas’ house
For coaching their boy.
At dusk I go to Sealdah station,
Spend the evening there
To save the cost of light.
Engines chuffing,
Whistles shrieking,
Passengers scurrying,
Coolies Shouting.
I stay till half past ten,
Then back to my dark, silent, lonely room.

A village on the Dhalesvari river, that’s where my aunt’s people live.
Her brother-in-law’s daughter –
She was due to marry my unfortunate self, everything was fixed.
The moment was indeed auspicious for her, no doubt of that –
For I ran away.
The girl was saved from me,
And I from her.
She did not come to this room, but she’s in and out of my mind all the time:

Daca sari, vermilion on her forehead.

Pouring rain.
My tram costs go up,
But often as not my pay gets cut for lateness.
Along the alley,
Mango skins and stones, jack-fruit pulp,
Fish-gills, dead kittens
And God knows what other rubbish
Pile up and rot.
My umbrella is like my depleted pay –
Full of holes.
My sopping office clothes ooze.
Like a pious Vaisnava.
Monsoon darkness
Sticks in my damp room
Like an animal caught in a trap,
Lifeless and numb.
Day and night I feel strapped bodily
On to a half-dead world.

At the corner of the alley lives Kantababu
Long hair carefully parted,
Large eyes,
Cultivated tastes.
He fancies himself on the cornet:
The sound of it comes in gusts
On the foul breeze of the alley –
Sometimes in the middle of the night,
Sometimes in the early morning twilight,
Sometimes in the afternoon
When sun and shadows glitter.
Suddenly this evening
He starts to play runs in Sindhu-Baroya Rag
And the whole sky rings
With eternal pangs of separation.
At one the alley is a lie,
False and vile as the ravings of a drunkard,
And I feel that nothing distinguishes Haripada the clerk
From the Emperor Akbar
Torn umbella and royal parasol merge,
Rise on the sad music of a flute
Towards one heaven.

The music is true
Where in the everlasting twilight-hour of my wedding,
The Dhalesvari river flows,
Its banks deeply shaded by tamal-trees,
And she who waits in the courtyard
Is dressed in a Dacca sari, vermillion on her forehead.


Finally, here are some pictures of the beautiful gardens at the Centre for Economic and Social Studies in Hyderabad, where I am staying this week:

The building in the background here is some sort of old palace, now a school for mentally handicapped children.
The rocks of Hyderabad are 2.5 billion year old gneiss.
In front of the library.

The building in the background is the old observatory of the Nizam of Hyderabad - the telescope is long gone, but the preserved campus is now a lovely place for me to spend Thanksgiving.


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Sunday, November 21, 2010

Hyderabad!

Hyderabad is India's 6th largest city - with an official population estimate of about 6 million, and an unofficial estimate closer to 10 million. Like the other Metros (as India's 6-8 largest and most cosmopolitan cities are known), Hyderabad is a dizzying mixture of old and new, fantastic wealth and great poverty, and perhaps most of all these days, incredible aspirations. The wealthy are buying high rise apartments and BMWs, while the rural poor flock to these cities in search of a job carrying concrete in a bowl on their head up a rickety bamboo ladder to build those high rises, in the hopes that their savings might enable them to send their children to a proper school, or care for their aging parents. I've been in and out of Hyderabad for the last few weeks, and since I'm looking forward to welcoming many of my colleagues here next month for the IASC Conference, I thought I'd share some pictures and anecdotes about the city. I draw several of the anecdotes from Narendra Luther's charming Hyderabad: A Biography, published in 2006 by Oxford University Press, and highly recommended for visitors who want a flavor for the history of the place.
The pearl bazaar near the Charminar in the old city. Charminar literally means 4 spires. This beautiful building was built at the chief crossroads of the original city on the banks of the river Musi by Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, founder of the city of Hyderabad, in 1591. His Persian architect designed the city to be a model of heaven. The center of the old city remains a heavily Islamic district, and, strangely for a landlocked city, is one of the best places in the world to buy high quality pearls. The Qutb Shahi dynasty fell to Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mughals, in 1671. Aurangzeb greatly enlarged the Mughal empire, but his endless wars against the Maratha guerrillas and other South Indian chieftains exhausted his treasury, and his religious intolerance earned him the enmity of many local populations. After his death, his sons fought bitterly over the throne (this was the established means of succession - Aurangzeb himself became emperor only after imprisoning his father, Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal, and killing all of his brothers). The Mughal governor of Hyderabad gradually claimed greater and greater autonomy. His descendants, the Nizams, became vassals of the British - the largest of the hundreds of princely states - and ruled until 1949.

At one point in the mid 19th century, the Nizam was so in need of cash that the British forced him to surrender his control over the region of Berar (centered on the city of Amravati in what is now Maharashtra). This ended up playing an important role in the American civil war. The greatest fear of Lincoln and his cabinet was that the British might join the conflict on the side of the Confederacy. An effective naval blockade by the Union Navy had crippled the southern economy, cutting off the crucial export of raw cotton to the British cotton mills. If the British, had decided to protect this flow of essential industrial material with their superior naval power, there would have been little the Union could have done to stop them, and as a result, the Union would have had great difficulty defeating the Confederacy.

Instead, the British realized that they could grow cotton in Berar, which turned out to be uniquely well suited to the crop (cotton is still one of the major crops of this region). The British provided incentives to farmers to clear forests in Berar and plant cotton, and then forced the farmers to sell the cotton directly to the Manchester mills, who then had a monopoly on the sale of cloth to India. Gandhi would later target this monopoly in his campaign to revitalize khadi, or handspun cotton cloth, which he made a centerpiece of both his spiritual practice and the larger non-cooperation movement with British rule.

Although the 19th century Nizams struggled to balance their books, the replacement of feudal vassals with a bureaucratic modeled on the British revenue districts, and the birth of Nizams who were a little more thrifty, led to phenomenal wealth. The last Nizam, whose rule began in 1911, was widely believed to be the wealthiest man in the world for much of his life, and stories abound both about his wealth (last night at dinner I was told that once, in Britain, he couldn't decide which shoes to purchase in a store, so he just decided to buy the store's entire stock; I also heard that in 1949 his estate was valued at what would be, in today's dollars, 270 billion) and his miserliness (a British officer who had tea with the Nizam in Hyderabad described how the Nizam lived in a single, ill kept room in one of his giant palaces, and when he asked the officer if he would like biscuits with his tea, produced a single biscuit from a locked cupboard). The Nizam's associates also grew fabulously wealthy. When he fired his prime minister, Salar Jung, the man couldn't decide what to do with his life. A visitor suggested that he take up collecting art. He soon amassed the largest art collection in the world, a small part of which is now on display in the museum housed in his former palace. I went there expecting some nice Indian art, but was shocked by the vastness of the place - rooms full of Ming vases and 19th century European paintings compliment the sizable collections of Persian and Mughal miniatures and South Indian brass and woodwork.

This is my fourth visit to Hyderabad. The first time I came to Hyderabad was for the wedding of friends-of-friends (who quickly became upgraded to friends) in December 2006.
A Puja (religious ceremony) for the newlywed couple moving into their new home.
The newlyweds greeting guests at their wedding reception (the bride complained to me that with the throne-like chairs, the thick silk saree, and the heavy gold jewelry, she felt more like a temple than like a bride).
After the wedding, we spent a couple days wandering the city, and some of these pictures date back to that time. The groom was from Hyderabad, but the bride was from Assam, in the northeast of India. They met as junior lawyers working at a law firm in Hyderabad, and have settled here in the city, where the bride reviews contracts for a large American company's business process outsourcing company (she gets paid about 1/10 of what an American corporate lawyer would earn doing the same work, or about the same as her parents, both tenured professors, make combined).

In the picture above, we are eating at a Macdonalds in a giant shopping mall. The groom and bride are seated next to each other, while the woman in the foreground is the bride's parents' servant, a woman from an impoverished village in rural Assam. For those of us who grew up in a world without servants, the servant-employer relationship is rather hard to understand. At home, this woman cooked meals, cleaned the house, and ate her meals after everyone else, seated on the floor of the kitchen. The mother of the family told us that in India, women of her class (she is a nursing professor, her husband teaches at the Agricultural University) are more free than in the West because they have servants to take care of household chores. They offered to help their servant get married, but she told them that she did not want to marry. A man from her tribe would probably beat her, and she would be less free than she is, living in the home of these educated liberals. In Hyderabad, where she had no household tasks to perform, she simply was another member of the family. In this mall, she rode on an escalator for the first time, which she thought was pretty neat. Too bad we didn't make it to Snow World, another mall, where you can experience the "magic of snow" for a hefty fee.

Incidentally, I don't generally choose to eat in International fast food chains, whether at home or abroad, but I have to say that my one taste of McDonalds in India left me impressed. It was pretty good! Of course, they serve no beef, and their vegetarian food is largely modeled after mainstream Indian snacks - the veggie burger was suspiciously similar to an aloo tikki. McDonalds has been successful in India largely because it has remade itself here. While in the US we think of MacDonalds as being cheap and poor quality - a place where you wouldn't want to hang out - MacDonalds in India has pursued a higher end clientele of people who are wealthy and westernized. MacDonalds food costs about the same in India and the US, which makes it an expensive restaurant in India. It is not uncommon to walk by a western fast food outlet in a big city and see well dressed professionals working on their laptops there.

Perhaps because in my subsequent 3 visits I've always stayed in Begumpet, a fancy neighborhood about halfway between the old city and the modern corporate campuses at HiTech City (they call it Cyberabad for a reason), I think of Hyderabad as a city of flyovers, traffic jams, and shopping malls.
Hyderabad Central shopping mall is about a 10 minute walk from where I'm staying, at the Hostel of the Centre for Economic and Social Studies, in Panjagutta. At this crossing, there is actually a traffic light, and so you can wait for it to change, and get across the road without risking life and limb. By contrast, if I want to go to the German-owned Spar supermarket, I have to find a way across 8 lanes of traffic which seems to come in about 8 different directions, without the benefit of a stoplight. I like the place - not only does it stock imported bread and cheese and American snacks (Pepperidge Farm anyone? Nature Valley Granola Bars?), which I generally avoid because I like Indian food and don't like the prices (they cost about the same as they would in the US, which makes them very expensive by Indian standards), but I also found baked namkeens there. Namkeens are salty and spicy Indian snacks, which are generally made by deep frying various things. I love them but I'm not such a fan of deep frying.
Golconda Fort, about 8 km from the Charminar, and now swallowed by the great expansive city, sits on one of the many massive outcrops of 2.5 billion year old gneiss that dominate the city. Every once in a while you'll be driving through some concrete jungle, and you'll find one of these ancient, rounded obtrusions sticking out from the middle of the earth. Unlike Nagpur, which is covered with the basalt of the Deccan trap formation - a huge series of lava flows that cover much of central India, and whose volcanic origin about 60 million years ago is considered an important alternative hypothesis for the extinction of the dinosaurs - here in Hyderabad the ancient core of the Indian continent is exposed, some of the oldest exposed rocks in the world.

Golconda predates Hyderabad by at least 500 years. When Aurangzeb, the last and most powerful of the great Mughal rulers decided to eliminate the Qutb Shahi dyntasty in 1671 (technically they were his vassals, but they were too independent, and also to Shia, for his tastes), the sultan abandoned Hyderabad and retreated to his fort, where Aurangzeb sat for months and months, in and endless and unproductive siege. He finally captured the fort by bribing away all the generals except one, who stood in the final passageway, fighting the invaders, until he was completely incapacitated. He survived, and recovered, but refused to abandon his principles and serve under Aurangzeb.

Now the fort is a popular picnic destination.

I love multilingual signs!
The day that I visited Golconda there was some kind of festival. The whole place was full of Hindu pilgrims, and devotional music to the mother goddess filled the walls of the ancient Islamic citadel. Near the top of the fort, the pilgrims gathered to make their way through a tiny cleft in the ancient gneiss, which apparently held some sacred significance.

The Charminar up close.

Unique among the major cities of modern India, Hyderabad was never ruled by the British, and this has shaped its skyline. Of the 5 larger cities, 3 (Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai) gained prominence as cities entirely because their position as British trading posts. Hyderabad's great buildings are all Islamic architecture, and the language of the city is still largely Urdu - a language that is essentially the same as Hindi, at least as it is spoken on the street, but is written in a beautiful flowing script derived from Persian. The language of the rest of the state is Telugu, which has about the same number of speakers worldwide as German. One of my favorite buildings in the city is the legislative assembly - unfortunately a difficult building to photograph because it is surrounded by big roads and security fences - a giant old palace built by the last Nizam, full of towering minarets, with a huge statue of Gandhi meditating in front of it.

I have already mentioned the last Nizam's great wealth. He built many of the most beautiful buildings in the city. Unfortunately the post-independence Hyderabadis have not kept up the tradition. There is only one post-independence building worth visiting - the Birla temple, built by a charitable arm of one of India's several giant family-run industrial conglomerates. Perched on a hilltop overlooking the Hussain Sagar lake (which is decorated with a giant statue of the Buddha), the temple is all white marble, and contains beautiful statues of several Hindu dieties, and provides 360 degree views of the city. Photography is not allowed - so no pictures I'm afraid.

While the Birla's made their fortune selling everything from textiles to cars (they make the distinctive Hindustan Ambassador, commonly used as a taxi or a limousine for high level government officials) to cement to metals to cell phone services, the Nizams made their (larger) fortune by taxing a kingdom that must be one of the poorest and least promising places on the planet. Most of the Nizam's domain is the arid interior of the Deccan plateau - cursed with uneven soil quality and sporadic and sparse monsoons, the region remains one of the poorest in India in spite of its location in the midst of 3 of India's most rapidly developing states (the Nizam's domain was carved up between the modern linguistically based states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Maharashtra). While the Nizam and most of his functionaries were Muslim, 87% of the population of the principality were Hindu. The great poverty of the region, as well as the deep gap between rulers and ruled, was not a recipe for stability. In the 1940s, as the non-cooperation movement with the British in the rest of India came to a head, a large scale communist revolution rose up in large areas of the Telugu speaking parts of the state. The revolutionaries murdered or drove out the landlords and bureaucrats, and began redistributing land and setting up a new and independent administrative system.

Meanwhile, as British India gained Independence in 1947, the Nizam struggled diplomatically to maintain his political independence, lobbying Mountbatten and the British to support him, and being pushed by the radicals in Hyderabad to merge with Pakistan. In September 1948, Indian troops marched into Hyderabad state. The Nizam expected assistance from Pakistan, but as the Indian troops marched in, Pakistan's founder, Jinnah, lay dying, and whatever his plans might have been for allying with Hyderabad, they were not realized. The Indian army, which included many soldiers who had seen action in World War II, and possessed modern weaponry, quickly overwhelmed the Nizam's antiquated army. The Nizam discovered that his army didn't even have up to date maps of the roads that his other departments had been building. An Indian general described entering a town at the head of a column of tanks, which were attacked by teenage boys carrying sticks and clubs. Thinking of his own son, then a student in University, he stood up on his tank, and ordered the boys to go home. Hyderabad became part of India.

The communist movement quickly faded away with the enthusiasm for joining newly independent India, but the region of the modern state of Andhra Pradesh that used to be part of the Nizam's domain (generally called Telangana) remains politically volatile. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the forest belt in northern Telangana was one of the headquarters of India's Maoist rebel movement, and only a concerted, and possibly largely illegal, effort by the state police has led to a decline in the violence over the last 5 to 10 years. Residents of Telangana have felt discrimanted against by the wealthier and more developed coastal region of the state, and there have been consistent calls to form a separate state. A major national commission on the question of separate statehood for Telangana is due to give its final report on December 30th. Finally, although the city seems to be a marvelous mixture of Urdu, Telugu, Hindi, and English - Islam, Hinduism, Christanity, and even some Buddhist iconography, the social situation remains volatile. Communal riots break out on occasion in the old city, and a friend of mine who is a long-time observer tells me that it is not a question of whether, but a question of when, another riot will take place. In May 2007, a bomb exploded in the largest mosque in the city, next to the Charminar, during Friday prayers, killing 9 people. 6 were reported to have been killed by police firing in subsequent riots. The bombings have purportedly been traced to a group of Hindu right wing extremists, associated with the RSS, but other sources claim the bombings were carried out by Islamic radicals. Which version you believe seems to depend on your pre-existing political leanings.

In any case, when I visited the Charminar a couple of years later, all was peaceful.
A man was selling mangoes in the plaza (it was June - Mango season)
And the only violence to speak of ws the great mob of people getting into and out of autorickshaws on the crowded shopping district - as seen from this picture taken from the Charminar itself. Still, when I hear people setting off firecrackers - which seems a popular thing to do on Sunday nights here, I always feel slightly nervous.

India is a strange place. I took this picture standing in a park overlooking hi-tec city, where the offices of every major IT corporation have been set up to take advantage of India's tremendous supply of inexpensive, educated, English speaking manpower, and where young people like me are earning salaries double or triple what their parents made, and are soaking up Western brands and cars like there was no tomorrow. In the foreground, a woman is carrying firewood to cook her dinner, harvested illegally from the city park. Here in India the contrasts between wealth and poverty are stark and glaring. But Actual levels of income inequality are dramatically lower in India than they are in the USA. Perhaps the glaring contrasts reminds the well off that some income redistribution is a good thing for maintenance of a stable and prosperous society - an idea that seems to have been forgotten in the US.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Pictures from central India

As I anticipated, once my research really got going, I have had little time to keep a blog. I am in the field most days, conducting interviews and observing the practices of the Indian Forest Department. I come home and take notes on what I've seen and heard, and by the time I get to bed I've typically already written 5000 words or more. So I haven't had time to blog about all that I've been seeing. In addition, I am very hesitant to blog about my work for two reasons. First, I am still in the early stages of my observations, and all of my conclusions seem very tentative. Second, I am aware that a blog is a public forum, and thus my research subjects may potentially see my preliminary thoughts - which could cause them to change their responses to me in ways that might upset my research agenda. So for all of these reasons, I haven't been blogging much lately. However, my friends Collin & Kara, who convinced me to keep a blog, convinced me because they said - at least you can post us some pictures even if you are too busy to write! So here are some pictures of what I've been seeing, along with brief explanations.
Eastern Vidarbha, the region of central India where I've been for the last 3 months, is a rice growing region. Vidarbha is more famous as a cotton-growing region, but the eastern edge of the region - basically east of Nagpur - is wetter, and so more suitable for rice. Early varieties have already been harvested, and the entire harvest will come in soon. Here are 2 varieties of rice - the one in the foreground is a late variety, the one in the background is a middle variety almost ready for harvest.
The grain is filling out.

This temporary check dam is meant to try to store water for the long, harsh summer (in April and May average daytime highs are over 45 C - around 115 Fahrenheit). I arrived here just as the villagers completed building it, and someone promptly set a fishing net in the resulting pond. I found out later that this village is occupied by a traditional fishing community, although now they are mostly farmers.
Meeting with a village forest protection committee in the village schoolhouse. The young man to my right is my translator Siddhesh - a recent graduate of an engineering college who is joining a software company in a few months, but was temporarily unemployed. Although he grew up in the city, he always spent holidays in his grandmother's village, so he is able to speak and understand the local dialect of Marathi. The young women to my right is a representative of an NGO which has been helping this committee cultivate lac - (the antecedent of lacquer) which is excreted by an insect which eats palash trees (Butea monosperma).
A traditional house in the village - mud walls, wood frame, tile roofs. These houses are very good at staying cool in the summer - much better than the modern concrete and brick constructions - but people who have money always build the modern concrete houses. This typical house is actually a series of buildings surrounding a courtyard - I am looking through the entryway on the street.
One of my favorite fruits is the sitafal - or custard apple (related to Indiana's pawpaw), which grows wild, and is also cultivated, as this specimen that I found in a dooryard.

Most rural households have extensive homegardens surrounding their compounds. One of the most common sights this time of year is trellises - built above head height - covered with sprawling squash and bean vines, and providing shade to the house. Her is a bottle gourd hanging from one such trellis.
Members of a village protection committee showing off the forest that has regenerated naturally as a result of their efforts to protect the area from grazing cattle and firewood collectors from neighboring villages. Note the villager taking a picture of me with his cell phone.
Village boys wrestling to get in front of the picture I offered to take of them. Actually, first I wanted to take a picture of the cute baby goat resting in the shade, but the boys quickly took over.
A forest official showing confiscated material - illegally harvested wood, bicycles which were taken from people illegally using forests - that are stored in front of his office. A major activity of the forest department here is policing illegal activities.

Timber harvest - this was a windfallen teak tree. While the daily wage laborers cut up the tree, the government officials stand aside, making sure the cuts are mad properly. The trunk will be used for timber, the branches cut up for firewood.
I might be giving off the impression that I spend all my time in villages and forests, but since I study government, I probably spend more time in medium-sized cities, talking to officials who sit behind desks. This city, Chandrapur, is in the middle of a resource rich region of forests and coal mines. The smokestacks in the distance are supposedly from Asia's largest coal-fired thermal power plant. Combine that with several paper plants (processing bamboo into paper pulp) and steel smelters, and you have a recipe for really horrible air pollution. The village square has a monitor which shows local air pollution data (although I don't think anyone understands what the numbers mean - I've studied air pollution, but I don't know what the numbers mean), but the last time I went by, the power was out and there was no display.
On the holiday of Dusshera, hundreds of thousands of people converge on a modern stupa - a buddhist religious building - in Nagpur city. These people are the Ambedkar Buddhists. Ambedkar was one of the founders of modern India - he wrote the constitution. He was also the political leader of the people formerly called untouchables (though they would prefer to be known as dalit - or oppressed). He struggled all of his life to gain political rights for his people - a struggle which often brought him into direct political conflict with the other independence leaders and founders of modern India, including Gandhi, who once fasted to death in opposition to Ambedkar's political demands. Ambedkar came to believe that the Hindu religion was fundamentally flawed, a source of oppression for the dalits. On the spot where the stupa now stands, on Dusshera in 1956, Ambedkar formally converted to Buddhism, in the company of hundreds of thousands of his followers. Now you find that many of the poorer villages and urban colonies in the region have Buddhist statues, and Ambedkar's followers continue to gather in huge numbers each year in Nagpur to celebrate their conversion. Here, monks are delivering a lecture, with pictures of Ambedkar and Buddha in the background.
Diwali, which just passed, is a holiday analogous to Christmas, in that families exchange gifts and sweets. Here, crowds fill Bardi, Nagpur's main shopping district, a few days before Diwali.
A few weeks ago, I went for a walk in a rural area with a friend. We found this bullock cart carrying fodder out of the forest along a narrow cart track.
A beautiful lake at sunset, with forested hills in the background.
A local villager happened by, and told us about the temple on top of the hill, so the next morning, which happened to be my 30th birthday, we climbed the hill.


A little shrine with this horse-god stood on the summit. The shrine is sacred to the Gond people - one of the largest of the Adivasi or tribal groups of central India. I have heard that they worship horses because they were once wandering horsemen. Cities such as Nagpur and Chandrapur were founded by Gond kingdoms during the middle ages, but they were driven out of power gradually by the succession of rulers - Mughal, Maratha, British. Now most Gonds are farmers, and many of them live on the edge of the forests.
A flag waves in the hilltop breezes above the shrine.
In one direction we can see the outskirts of the small city of Gondia, but in the other direction, hills and forest stretch as far as we can see.