A Mouthful of Petals: The Story of an Indian Village

1

Sokhodeora

Shortly after the scattered township of Pukri Brawan a dirt track branches off the bitumen road and points towards a range of jungle-clad mountains. Deeply rutted by bullock carts and cut by creek beds, this track threads the villages together for the next fourteen miles. Occasionally a truck uses this route to collect bamboo from the mountain sides or a Government jeep comes from the capital, Patna, a hundred miles away.

For the fair-weather bus the terminus is Kawakol, the Police Station town for the 63,000 villagers of a sub-division in the Gaya District of Bihar. Kawakol straggles along the track for half a mile from a mosque framed in feathery bamboos past the market where the bus stops to the Government hospital outlined against black outcrops of granite.

The shopkeepers here squat on their front steps at five in the morning cleaning their teeth with frayed sticks from the neem tree and spitting into the gutter. Dairymen lead their cows and milk them in front of the householders to prove they have not watered the milk. Gardeners’ wives bring cucumbers in bamboo baskets on their heads and squat on the roadside selling.

Three miles farther on, under the cliffs of the Monghyr–Hazaribagh hills, clusters the compact jumble of low chocolate and bronze walls which house the 2,000 people of Sokhodeora – farmers, carpenters, potters, shopkeepers, Muslims, toddy tappers, washermen, barbers, bamboo workers, leaf-plate makers, shoemakers, woodcutters, and oil-pressers. The mud walls are only as smooth as hands can shape them, but coloured with earth ochres. The roofs are made of straw or red-earth tiles. These houses merge with the yellow-brown fields and the red sandiness of the road, looking more of the earth than of man, or as if, here, no separation exists between man and nature, no loss of identity with the universe.

Sokhodeora is a dot that is part of the plain; beautiful, serene, full of a sense of continuity with the very beginnings of human civilization.

But to enter the narrow, zigzag alleys between the congested houses is to lose much of the impression of beauty and to realize the antiquity of man’s anxiety, poverty and misery. Just wide enough to walk through, the alleys are strewn with animal dung and twist closely past accumulations of rubbish. Slimy gutters issue from home kitchens and form greenish puddles. Goats wander with protruding ribs and backbones; emaciated mangy dogs lie exhausted from hunger; pigs fossick for edibles, including human excreta.

The sun breaks the deep shadow of houses, throwing here and there brilliant gold patches on the rows of cow-dung fuel cakes. Slapped on the walls to dry, these still bear the imprint of the fingers of the woman who made them. Where the cakes have dried and fallen there are round stains on the walls.

Some children are naked, others wear only a shirt. The older ones are covered in tattered, discoloured rags of cotton. They peep through matted, dusty and lice-ridden hair or run to hide inside their dark, windowless homes.

To the north, in the foothills of the Himalayas, Pahari people keep flowerpots outside their houses; but here in Sokhodeora no flowers or fruit trees lighten the oppression. As the distant view suggests the beauty and potential of man’s life, so the inner reaches of the village contradict this with the closed-in ignorance, the empty-stomached apathy, the hopeless, disease-prone poverty which are Sokhodeora’s tragedy in a world that is rich.

There are about 600,000 such villages in India, in which live some 80 per cent of her people – about 350 million. Generally these villages are similarly congested and have neither formed streets, drainage, sanitation nor electricity. Water is drawn from wells and carried for cooking purposes to the houses. A daily bath, if taken, is taken at the well. The fuel is cow-dung. Two meals a day are eaten, the chief item being rice. The remnant of the night meal may be eaten at dawn, before work, and a coarse pancake is eaten in the field about midday. The poorest families use the cooking water of rice with spices to replace pulse soup or vegetables.

Members of the castes and sub-castes often live in separate sectors of the village and there is almost no regular association or friendship between castes or between men and women. Most villagers are illiterate. Farming is archaic and unproductive. A mirror, a bicycle, or furniture other than beds, are rare; a village clock or radio even rarer. There is a high incidence of disease and a tragic lack of medical, dental, hospital and educational facilities.

Sokhodeora represents another world, the world of two thirds of mankind, so different that it is almost beyond the imagination of Westerners. And yet someone from London or from Sydney could get there in three or four days.

*   *   *

Our first visit to Sokhodeora had been arranged by a friend in London. For about six months we did unpaid educational work for the Gandhian Movement for Village Development, at the invitation of one of India’s leading national figures, Shri Jayaprakash Narayan, who at that time was widely considered likely to succeed Mr Nehru. We developed an enduring affection for India before returning to Australia. Two years later Jayaprakash invited us to return and we agreed.

His letters are an interesting record of our arrangements: London, 27 November 1959. ‘I would strongly advise that you lose no time now and return to India as soon as you can. At Sokhodeora there will be a house ready for you and many warm hearts to welcome you.’

Patna, June 1960: ‘I want with all my heart that you both return to India: first of all for personal reasons – I want you to be with us. Secondly, and no less importantly, for the reason that it is in the heart of both of you to serve India, and thirdly, for the reason that your service – even though its shape and form may not be very clear yet – would be of great value to us and would add to that international good-will and understanding that are so badly needed.

‘I therefore suggest that you prepare to return to India at the beginning of winter this year, i.e. some time in November. You come prepared to stay for at least three years … we have a new house fitted up for you. We shall arrange for an allowance of Rs. 400* a month for you i.e. Rs. 200 a month for each of you.

‘I shall be anxiously waiting to hear from you. I’m going to Europe on 14 June, and will be back by 7 July …’

Patna, 11 July: ‘I returned to Patna from Europe (via Delhi and Bombay) yesterday. At Delhi I was told to expect a call from Australia at noon, but the telephone exchange informed us that the call did not materialize on account of the Calcutta line being out of order. I was disappointed …

‘I had gone so far as the above when the message came that the Australian call had come through. I left off and hurried to the telephone – it is in another house some distance away … I must express my sorrow that our talk was so unsatisfactory. For me the line was not clear and then I had difficulty in following your accent…

‘I feel equally excited now that you are coming. Nothing in our country runs or will run as smoothly as in Australia and you will face problems. But isn’t that life? And there will be others facing them with you …’

Sokhodeora, 14 October: ‘The question of pioneering arises because it is after all not common for Europeans or Australians or any other foreigners (I hate to use this term) to live in the interior villages of India and do educational work … In another sense too you will have to pioneer. This is the backward East; so please don’t expect all practical details to have been settled for you. You will have a lot of heartaches, but if you do not lose faith in us and in the simple people of this country, I am sure you will never have a heartbreak.’

Tilakpur, 20 October: ‘Now I am anxiously waiting to hear from you the exact date of your departure and the approximate time of your arrival at Bombay … so that I might make all necessary arrangements for your being received and your travel to Sokhodeora.’

New Delhi, 10 December 1960: ‘A most warm welcome. Kusum, who is like a daughter to me, will take you to her flat and you may stay in Bombay as long as you wish to recover from the sea journey and get acclimatized to India again …’Our kindergarten

*   *   *

From Bombay we took the train to Patna, a city accused by a Delhi politician of being the dirtiest in India, where we were met by old friends, including Jayaprakash’s wife, Shrimati Prabhavati Devi. There was a party to welcome us and the next morning, accompanied by Shri Brahmanand, Jayaprakash’s private secretary, we set out on the 100-mile trip to Sokhodeora in a station-wagon that the Gandhian Movement provided for us.

As we passed through Sokhodeora that evening people and children stared curiously at us, and then a quarter of a mile farther on we reached Jayaprakash’s ashram,* quite literally the end of the road.

Men and boys were bringing their cows home to the village from the jungle beyond the ashram and dust rose high from the hooves in the orange evening light. One lad sat cheerfully astride his black buffalo.

The ashram consisted of sixty acres of land, reclaimed from the jungle, and fenced with barbed wire. On the east side of the track were the dairy and maternity hospital separated by an orchard, but we turned through the ornamental wooden gateway into the western half of the institution.

‘Goodness, haven’t the gol-mohar trees grown since we were here before,’ Wendy exclaimed to me, as we drove slowly between the communal hall and agricultural students’ hostel which lay on one side of the track and two circular colonies of houses situated on the other.

Since we had left four houses had been built in a square at the village end of the ashram. We unloaded outside the farthest of these, the ‘Western Guest House’, distinguished from the ‘Indian Guest House’ because it had a Western-style lavatory.

Its brick walls had been lately coloured with orange earth ochre, the iron bars and wooden shutters of the windows freshly painted green, the roof of potter’s tiles renovated, the concrete floor in the three rooms newly swept. There was a verandah the full length of the house at the front and a shorter one at the back with a small kitchen at one end and a bathroom and the lavatory at the other.

We unpacked bedding, mosquito nets and our Primus camping stove and, after eating, talked and drank tea with Brahmanand by lantern light.

In the morning our servant arrived and asked what work he should do. He was a skinny, nervous lad of sixteen, Mahadev Mochi, with a long thin face, broad flat nose, square jaw and protruding ears. For the occasion he had dressed in his best shirt and dhoti.

‘I don’t want a servant,’ Wendy insisted vehemently to Brahmanand.

Mahadev timidly balanced on one bare foot and then on the other.

1. Wealthier section of Sokhodeora looking south towards the ashram and the Mongyr-Hazaribagh hill track (view from the top of the abandoned landlord’s mansion).

2. Sokhodeora Village. One of the widest streets and the better constructed homes.

3. The authors with Vidya.

4. Our kindergarten teacher, Shrimati Kesurwa.

5. Our helper, Mahadev.

‘But Jayaprakashji has told me you are to have a servant,’ Brahmanand said.

‘I’ll tell Jayaprakashji that I don’t want a servant,’ she replied.

Mahadev simply stood, his hands clenched together, frowning miserably, in considerable fear of us. Since we were speaking English he did not understand what was taking place. But our failure to relieve his obvious anxiety was unintentionally cruel of us. We were simply tired and overwhelmed with the many other adjustments we had to make in our new life.

He accompanied me to the office of the Secretary of the Village Construction Board, the non-profitmaking body which ran the ashram with money from private donations and Government subsidies. The Secretary sat cross-legged on the blue cloth which covered the earth floor of the small mud-walled room. He looked up from the papers on a low desk and exchanged greetings.

‘Could you find some other job for him instead?’ I asked,

He explained gently that it was Jayaprakashji’s wish that we have a servant because life here was difficult for foreigners; that the two Japanese agricultural experts had a servant, Mahadev’s elder brother; and that the ashram would pay Mahadev’s wages. However, he would not insist on our having Mahadev.

I returned to our house alone to find Brahmanand using all his persuasive talents to win Wendy’s consent before he had to return to Patna. In the end she agreed reluctantly and presently Mahadev reappeared.

But he passed a miserable and lonely day, for apart from pumping up the water and buying kerosene we did not know what to give him to do.

A stone’s throw from our back steps was a well with a pump and hydraulic ram for filling the square tank on a high brick stand from which the water ran into the house. The two guest-houses were the only houses with taps in them. The other ashramites had to carry their water from their well. Pumping was a task Mahadev came to hate, his evasions of which caused the only angry moments between us, while mending the pump became my chief irritation.

We set up house with a pressure cooker, handle-less steel saucepans, a dinner-set, cutlery and curtains for the windows and doors, all of which Prabhavati had bought for us. Early on Christmas morning our kerosene-powered refrigerator arrived by bullock cart and unpacking and starting it, arranging books and belongings and washing clothes in buckets of cold water fortunately left us little time to feel how lonely we were or how much we missed our families.

Shortly after our arrival we received a letter from Jayaprakash in Calcutta saying: ‘I feel very ashamed that I could neither welcome you at Bombay nor at Patna or the ashram … I expect to return to the ashram on 2 January Lots of love till then …’

* Whenever specific sums of money are mentioned in the text we shall refer to these in rupees. The equivalent in Australian, English and American currency is as follows at the time of going to press:

* Resting Place.

2

The Start of the Pioneering

The news that Jayaprakash was coming with guests jogged the ashram family from the serenity of its daily routine into hurried, nervous activity. Everyone hustled himself and was quick to prod everybody else to look sharp. Each day’s arrangements were made at the end of morning or evening prayers.

For two hours before breakfast the men bustled to chip grass from the paths and hurriedly weeded borders, calling fussily to each other, searching for enough mattocks and trying to be first to finish their section. Communal breakfast in the hall was taken in a commotion of chatter instead of in the usual sober silence. Files, papers, accounts flew about the office rooms; hired labourers from the village hustled about the plots and trees in the nursery. Jayaprakash’s house was swept, painted, and decorated with pot-plants. The blacksmithy, the soap and carpentry departments were tidied and swept; stray village cows or goats were hurried out the gate. In the Indian Guest House we could see a fluster of bringing of lanterns, bedding and cooking braziers while hired village women mixed cow-dung with water in buckets and swept the mixture across the earthen floors to make a fresh, carpeted surface.

When the station-wagon arrived, the ashram workers and their families, in their best clothes with hair newly oiled and combed or oiled and plaited, met it at the front gate and were warmly greeted by Jayaprakash and Prabhavati. Then the driver brought it down the track to the Indian Guest House next to our house.

Jayaprakash had recently inaugurated in South India the Tenth Triennial Conference of the War Resisters International and had brought with him two of the delegates, a Frenchman and an African. Looking about the rooms they were to occupy he issued instructions on the making of beds and the provision of towels, mosquito nets and soap, all of which were promptly fulfilled. He shook our hands affectionately.

‘You look very nice,’ he said, meaning that he was pleased to see us there. Then promising to visit us for tea he turned his attention back to lanterns and cooking arrangements, before he went to take his bath and lunch. He was wearing traditional kurta (shirt), dhoti and sandals and somehow managed, as he invariably did, to look fresh and clean in spite of more than a day’s travelling in heat and dust.

He was a tall, slender man of somewhat above six feet, erect despite shoulders which were slightly stooped with his fifty-eight years. The fine hair had receded a little from his high forehead. He had a long upper lip and delicately chiselled bow of mouth over a square chin. His eyes, full of movement behind fine-rimmed spectacles, had worry, gentleness and impatience written in them. In repose his face bore a sad, frowning expression which possibly had been what had given rise to a Time characterization of him as being ‘nearly as prominent, and as much of a brooding Hamlet, as Nehru himself’.

His flesh was drawing in slowly on the high cheek-bones and wide jaw-structure which newspaper cartoonists enjoyed exaggerating, but he remained extremely handsome and youthful-seeming, vital, sensitive, idealistic, compassionate, a leader of men.

When our nervous Mahadev saw him coming to our house that afternoon he made himself invisible. Jayaprakash rested his carved, rosewood walking-stick against our doorway and was about to slip out of his sandals when Wendy assured him: ‘We don’t bother to remove our shoes J.P.* because the floors are concrete.’

‘You are both looking very well,’ he remarked with solicitude. His first query whenever he met us was for our health.

To begin with we were all awkward. Although affection had passed between us in letters there was still shyness and reserve between us on meeting again. He inquired about Kusum and our journey, which was natural enough. But it was also characteristic of him, whenever there was an embarrassing pause in conversation or a discussion he did not want to begin abruptly, to talk about travelling arrangements; probably because he spent so much of his own time travelling.

‘Is the house comfortable enough for you to manage?’ he asked. ‘You must let me see how you have been able to arrange everything. I am only sorry that we are not able to accommodate you as comfortably as you would be in your own country.’

‘We are quite comfortable,’ Wendy assured him, showing him through the house. It was the most modern house in the ashram and for at least thirty miles around.

‘You have mosquito nets and bamboos for them,’ he murmured approvingly in our bedroom.

Our twin beds were pulled together in the middle of the room. Each of the nets hung on four pieces of bamboo caught behind the bed legs.

‘You must also have a dressing-table with a mirror. You will be used to that and you will need it. I will have one made for you.’

‘No, please don’t,’ Wendy protested.

‘Most Western women have them, don’t they? Are the beds comfortable? They were made here in the ashram.’

‘Yes, quite comfortable, thank you. We are spoiled having mattresses.’

The base of the beds was strung with a criss-cross of webbing which was springy and the mattresses were about an inch thick, stuffed with cotton. Ashram beds were normally string-strung or made of planks, like low tables, and the sleepers used only a cotton sheet underneath themselves.

We had also been given a teak wardrobe and beside it was our refrigerator, the only other piece of furniture in the room.

‘It’s a funny place to have it,’ Wendy laughed, ‘but just there seems to be the least draughty spot in the house.’

‘It is the same model as we have in the ashram maternity hospital. I brought that one from England,’ he remarked.

‘I hope you didn’t have all the trouble we had getting it through the Customs in Bombay,’ Wendy said.

‘Someone else handled all the baggage for me,’ he replied vaguely. ‘What was your difficulty?’

We told him the story as we went through into what we called our workroom which we had furnished with a table and chair and a glass-fronted cupboard in which we kept our crockery, cutlery and food free from flies. He looked with interest at the two trunks of children’s projects, display charts and pictures, reference books and kindergarten equipment we had been given.

‘How are you managing about your food and cooking?’ he then asked.

‘Very well,’ Wendy replied. ‘Come and see our stove.’

The kitchen was a tiny room with two small glass windows. Glass windows were most unusual, the nearest being thirty miles away in the shops of Nawada. There was a tap in one corner over a concrete sink set at floor level. Concrete shelves ran along two walls. As we had installed a small table, a wire cupboard and the Primus on the box it had travelled in, arrangements which allowed Wendy to stand instead of squatting like Indian women, there was only space for her and Jayaprakash to go in.