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.