Thursday 12th October: Maal

After nearly a week of no writing, it is finally time for me tackle Maal. Leaving the hospital in the morning (and taking care this time not to stray onto the path that leads to Kojawara) I hang around outside the little roadside hut that serves as a bus stop. This place seems so untarnished by the ravages of modernity that it is always a small miracle when, after twenty minutes of chai and gossip, a jeep pulls up. I travel by jeep as far as Suveri, a village some 10 km off. I invariably travel on the roof, always a thrill and usually crowded - men, gunny sacks, jerry cans and once even a goat - so that I am pushed right up to the edge, clinging on for what seems like dear life. Two days back, however, I had the roof to myself and, feeling like a Maharaja atop his elephant, made a point of doffing my cap to passers-by. From Suveri I walk along a tarred road as far as Wanibore, a hamlet lying in a fertile plain of paddies and mango trees. Another half hour on a dirt track takes me to my destination.

Wanibore

Maal

   Maal has no real centre, although the tiny primary school serves this purpose. Houses –  brown mud walls with red-tiled roofs supported by great wooden beams and smaller bamboo frames – are connected by paths wending between rice paddies, maize fields and clusters of trees. The 570-strong community belongs entirely to the Meena tribe, once branded by the British as criminals but now formally located within the fabric of Indian society under the heading of "Scheduled Tribe". They hardly fit my textbook image of a tribe - nobody wears a headdress or war-paints and as yet I have not heard a single distant drumbeat or eerie ululation.  Rather, they are a soberly dressed lot with tatty shirts and trousers customary for men and brightly-coloured saris for the women. They are mostly dark-skinned with soft, intense eyes and a strange but beguiling manner that to my city eyes looks like living in slow motion. Men greet each other with a gentle touch of the hands rather than a shake, and out in public they seem to ignore other women altogether.
   On the first day Tapan, a friendly but strangely hard-to-like engineer from Vikas Samiti’s office in nearby Kherwara came as my chaperone, and introduced me to Amratlal, the owner of one Maal's few shops that sells soap, biscuits and little cigarettes called beedis. Amratlal is probably in his late thirties as he has a 15-year old son, but, like Rupchand back in the hospital, is curiously ageless. It was arranged that he would act as my main point of contact in the village and would provide a bed if and when I needed to stay over. It was with some relief that on the second day, halfway up the mountain, I heard a call of "Jon ji" (Jon, sir) from further up and had the strange sensation that even here, in the tribal heartlands of south Rajasthan, there was someone to watch over me. He and his family have been very helpful, although I've been careful to spend as much time as possible alone, so that I am not simply seeing the village from his or anyone else's sole perspective. My Hindi is sufficient to hold a reasonable, if tortuous, conversation with him, and we both pull out all the stops as far as general cross-cultural bonhomie is concerned. That aside, I am constantly aware of the great gulf between us - while travel makes us aware of the fundamental similarities of all humans at core, it also reveals the extent to which "superficial" differences can act as a barrier between them. Conversely, however, it has always taught me that astonishingly little is required to strike up a friendship, and for the time being Amratlal and I are as close as brothers.

Amratlal and his daughter

   My work so far has mainly consisted of what I like to think of as informal research -  long chats over tiny cups of over-sweet, weak, unspiced tea - all with a view to building up a basic framework of knowledge prior to any attempt at formal research. I’ve learnt about all sorts of things in this way – about Maal's amenities, such as shops, wells, hand-pumps, and about agricultural practices, livestock, trees, forest uses and village priorities. I've often felt out of my depth and struggled with Hindi, which in any case is a lingua franca, as the language spoken in the village is called Vagadi and is closer to Gujarati. Very few people speak English, although they are sometimes able to dredge up an English word to save the day, while I dredge up my small but trusty dictionary. One scrawny little fellow, after an almost excruciating period of brain-racking, managed to serenade me with a “How are?”, each word a painfully earned triumph of rhetoric.
  Other than Amratlal, the closest I have come to anything resembling a friendship is with a pleasantly eccentric character called Suraj. I met him on one of the paths leading to the forest, where he greeted me with a lengthy, mumbling sentence that concluded with the words "History, Politics and Hindi Literature". I repeated this back to him questioningly, and he nodded solemnly before bursting out laughing, leaving me no option but to join in, baffled. I managed to persuade him to sit with me in the shade of a large rock and talk about trees and asked him a number of questions which he answered in a whimsical drawl that I found hard to follow. The raucous laughter that punctuated his conversation indicated that he found both my questions and my difficulty in interpreting his answers extremely entertaining. And yet somehow, across the barriers of continents, cultures, experiences and lifestyles, I recognised razor-sharp intelligence. It shocks and embarrasses me to admit that this came as a surprise, and yet I now realise I needed a Suraj to warn me not to underestimate the Meena.

Suraj

   He told me about mango trees; trees called sagwan with plate-like leaves, the wood of which is used in house-building [6]; mahua trees, from whose flowers a “country liquor” called deshi is made; a tree with finger-like leaves called neem, with twigs that are ideal for brushing teeth; and the tendu, whose leaves are used to roll the little cigarettes that everybody seems to smoke called beedis. In a tortuous pantomime I managed to work out that these tendu leaves are sold to government contractors who then sell them on to companies that manufacture the beedis and sell them to retail outlets such as Amratlal's shop. This discovery of elaborate order in apparent chaos somewhat shook the lazy, judgmental paradigms of the life indigenous that I had brought with me. But Suraj had still more unintentional tricks up his sleeve to shake at the foundations of my naivety, for the full meaning of "History, Politics and Hindi Literature" became apparent towards the end of our conversation - it was his BA degree! Admittedly, it was from a college in the local town of Kherwara, rather than St Xavier's, Bombay or Trinity College, Cambridge, but nonetheless it came as a strange and almost unwelcome surprise. Why unwelcome? Why would I possibly wish these people to remain uneducated? Simply that I had built up an indulgent private fantasy of a truly remote village, disconnected from the mainstay of my reality, and the presence of Bachelors of Arts lolling on the grassy hillsides rather jarred on this. Likewise Suraj's trump card, the information that four of Maal's sons are working out in Kuwait! Kojawara had prepared me for this, but somehow the whole thing seemed ten times more ridiculous in Maal than in Kojawara. I sometimes wonder whether we Western Europeans think that we have a monopoly over immigration - it is certainly always a refreshing surprise to discover immigration patterns that defy this - Rajasthani villagers in the Gulf, Lebanese in Brazil, Chinese in Madagascar.
   I spent one night in Maal at Amratlal’s house, which enabled me to work into the early evening and start earlier the following morning. I had a good chance to explore and drew up an initial map of the village. Amratlal’s wife cooked a tasty but extremely spicy meal of chapatti and dal, which I ate outside by candlelight, sitting on a string bed and using an empty oil can as a table.  Later on, various friends and relations came and hung about in the area outside the house. We had a fun evening of cultural exchange, which featured my performing Once in Royal David’s City and Flanders and Swann’s Oh It’s Hard To Say ‘Hoolima Kittiluca Cheecheechee’. I tried to explain their meanings in Hindi, but they didn’t translate very well, as nobody had heard of Jesus Christ, and in my attempt to convey the meaning of the amusing innuendo at the end of the Flanders and Swann I used the word sambhog (sexual intercourse) at which Amratlal was visibly a little shocked. Still, on balance, it was a moderately successful set, and far outshone the 15-second Hindi song that I finally managed to persuade one of the boys present to sing in return.
   So far I cannot make any pronouncement on how the project is going. It has been a fascinating first week, and I think I have used my time relatively wisely. I certainly feel better placed to enter the next stage of the microplanning which will involve a village meeting and a formal household survey. For now I am glad of the prospect of a weekend in Udaipur.

Footnotes:

[6] It was a long time before I learnt, to my great surprise, that the Sagwan was none other than the teak tree (Tectona grandis)