The Chronicles of 'Nanya

Welcome and Guide to this Blog

2008-09-30T09:44:00.000-07:00

Hi there,

Thank you for stopping by the Chronicles of Nanya!

I started this blog during my travels through India in 2007. Being of Indian descent but having grown up around the world, traversing the length and breadth of the land of my heritage has always been my dream.

My big chance came in April 2007, when as part of my Master's program in Geography and International Development, I had the option to research in rural India for a period of up to 7 months. I immediately jumped on the opportunity and ended up spending almost 9 months in India - 6 conducting my field research and 3 simply backpacking and seeing as much of the country as possible. While I certainly did not traverse as much of the length and breadth of the nation as I had hoped, I was able to spend some quality time in the East, North East and Southern parts of the country.

This blog is a log of some of my experiences in India during my stay there. Unfortunately, I abandoned blogging after a time (September 2007) due to inconsistent computer and internet access and more importantly because at a certain point, I stopped viewing my experiences as "travel" and more as just a part of (my) normal life. I would like to finish the blog though and one day when I have plenty of time and am feeling nostalgic...I might even do so :).

Until that day, however, I hope that you enjoy the Chronicles of Nanya in their incomplete form as much as I enjoyed writing the entries. If this is your first visit to the site, the posts are in reverse chronological order with the first post being "Out in the Middle of Nowhere" written in August 2007. I suggest that you begin with this post and scroll your way to the topmost entry written in September of the same year. A guide to the chronological order of posts is also included under the 'Blog Archive' on the right hand side of the blog.

Thank you once again for coming by and Happy Reading!

-Ananya

Darjeeling Times

2007-09-15T03:00:00.000-07:00

In hindsight, I think that probably the reason the little mountain town of Darjeeling had such a profound impact on me was because I was overstretched and craving for rest. Plus, N and I had chosen to take our trip during the off-peak season – the rainy season, when all good tourists stayed away from India and only a few risked the trip up to the mountains for fear of the ever-common landslides. As a result we enjoyed Darjeeling and the spectacular views of the Himalayas devoid of the hustle and bustle of crowds that apparently flocked to the town between October and November and then again between February and June. Being curiosities at an odd time of the year, we were able to participate in local life more intensely than would normally have been possible within a short seven-day period. We were able to learn that the gentleman whose mountainside café sported posters of Bob Marley alongside that of the Gurkha Insurgency Movement also played guitar and led expeditions into Sikkim and up Mt. Everest. We tasted bamboo beer for free, courtesy an elderly momo-shop owner who took a liking to us and invited us to a free open-air Nepali cultural program in the ‘Shrubbery Nightingale National Park.’ Being one of only three tourist duos staying at our hotel, we were also able to learn about and wonder at the pictures of our hotel-owner’s youth as a disciple of the Dalai Lama during the latter’s flight from Tibet into exile in India.

Overall, Darjeeling was a therapeutic experience that restored our waning strength and re-infused in us the enthusiasm and energy to continue our research in our respective village sites for another six weeks.

Idol Worship in ‘The Abode of the Gods[1]’

2007-09-15T02:27:00.000-07:00

“A new deity had gripped the hearts of all Darjeeling” – we quickly learnt, when our jeep from the NJP station was forced for a short stretch to crawl at a snail’s pace behind a convoy of jeeps filled with raucous singing youngsters. “Prashant Tamang for Indian Idol 3” they chanted. “Come on Darjeeling, take out your cell phones and vote for your own, Darjeeling’s very own local boy, Prashant Tamang!”

Sigh, globalisation at it’s best!

In India, competitions such as Indian Idol or II for short (started here by the makers of American Idol) are taken very seriously. Second only to cricket, which has the power to shut down the entire country during critical matches, song and dance are greatly revered in the nation. Whoever thought to start an audience-driven talent contest in India is a pure genius because Indian Idol and other similar programmes are watched religiously by young and old across the country. Even politics and vote-garnering, which permeates every aspect of Indian life from admissions in schools and colleges to employment to health care to the local and national sports teams, embroils itself in these televised talent contests converting them into matters of regional pride. This is reflected by local newspapers, which are filled with reports of how “such and such MLA has pledged for free X number of PCOs or Public Call Offices (phone booths) so that the people of such and such area can call in and vote for their local participant in the II contest” – and in the process remember to vote for their kindly MLA in the next political election.

With contests like II, everyone is happy; the contestants for the votes received, the TV viewers for the momentary peace and unity in their often conflict-ridden regions, the politicians for the free campaigning platforms, and the mobile-phone companies, oh the mobile-phone companies for the billions raked in in SMSing revenues. Here, I must point out that India is still a very young mobile-phone-using culture. Due to recent liberalisation, wireless networks and technology have only exploded on the national scene in the last five years, resulting in behaviour that is comparable to the beginnings of the Internet revolution in the West. People delight in passing on sappy SMS forwards and actually take great pleasure in reading (often aloud) and even acting upon every annoying forward and promo from friends and their wireless provider alike! They’re just not as impatient and jaded as we are (yet!), and the phone companies are milking this naive tolerance for all it is worth.

For Indian and foreign corporations, India’s billion strong consumer base is a marketer’s dream come true. The country’s population strength alone can keep a company afloat, a truth discovered by Google’s Orkut and Youtube, which have now caught on like wildfire in India. Furthermore, with its newly opened economy and exponentially enhanced purchasing capacity, India particularly the younger generation that was previously forced to curb demands and tastes, is drunk on the limitless choices that are suddenly available. The result is that the country’s urban middle-class is now optimism and consumerism personified. “India is changing” is the catchphrase on everyone’s lips and nowhere is this more apparent than in Darjeeling. N and I were astounded at how savvy the youngsters in this obscure little mountain town were. All of them were impossibly hip in the latest skater/punk/rock/metal trends from the West (more European than American). They sported the edgiest anime hairstyles, wore the most radical graffiti art, messages and icons on their tees and looked sharp in their (goth) jewellery and other carefully chosen accessories. The girls in comparison (at least the ones we saw on the streets) were less rebellious in their attire, although still impeccably dressed in the smartest and most elegant fashions. Perhaps this was the effect of globalisation running up against tradition, the pull of which has always been stronger on Indian women?

Nevertheless, N and I were truly amused and astonished. Where were these kids getting these messages? Or for that matter, where in the world were they shopping? How on earth were they so darn cool?! All we could see were the prehistoric little shops in and around the town square selling Pashmina shawls, pony rides, postcards of the Dalai Lama and authentic Darjeeling tea; where were the real goods? There definitely was a thriving underground culture that probably had the older generation lamenting about ‘the corrupting influence of outside elements;’ just we couldn’t see it.

The presence of this hidden world became glaringly obvious during our forays into the Darjeeling nightlife (which by the way shuts down at 10:00 pm). Initially, we visited a little British-style pub that was described in our guidebook (name withheld =)) as the place to go. This pub was very relaxed and fun and only mildly busy with tourists (who had undoubtedly read the same guidebook), a handful of locals and small groups of young executives who were likely in Darjeeling for business. Other pubs we visited over subsequent days also shared the first place’s ambient, relaxing and mature air. Although, we enjoyed the opportunity to have drinks and just catch-up, we were surprised that all these joints were youngster-free and very male dominated with not a single local girl in sight. We concluded that like the majority of India, possibly, the drinking/pub culture was only a recent and small phenomenon with only a handful of people indulging in the same for recreational purposes. We only discovered during our last two days in town after being befriended by a local college student musician/rock artist and two American tourists that the place to go was this hidden little pub slightly away from the others in the town centre. Darjeeling was apparently famous for its vibrant local music scene and this pub was where the music and the young townspeople were. All along we had been going to the wrong places, we were told.

Entering this epicentre of the Darjeeling youth music scene with our new friends, I remember feeling severely disoriented. Where was I? I could not believe this was India. I could have been entering any lively pub/diner in the United States (actually, it felt a little bit like TGIF with the wood panelling and the stained-glass light shades). The band was superb and the drinks were exquisite – that’s another thing they take seriously in India, as it is traditionally a ‘dry’ culture and alcohol is expensive. Every pub will mix drinks with the right measures, in the exact proportions as specified by the book (not with those spray heads they use in Canada), resulting in rums-and-cokes, gins-and-tonics and other common drinks tasting like delicate concoctions that I have never sampled before. Again, although this pub was brimming with life, aside from the girls in the odd tourist groups, there was not a single local girl in sight.

[1] The Himalayas are known as the Abode of the Gods

Darjeeling

2007-09-15T01:27:00.000-07:00

Darjeeling exceeded all my expectations – it really and truly was beautiful! Vividly painted houses with opulent hanging gardens greeted us from high up on the rock face while quaint cafes and British-era guesthouses found us at the most unexpected corners. These were interspersed with luxurious forests, which hid in their midsts, ancient Hindu & Buddhist temples, historic churches and buildings & homes dating back to Darjeeling’s pre-independence designation as the summer capital of the British Raj. Occasionally, we would also catch glimpses of the impressive structures of the elite boarding/prep schools that the majority of India’s hill-stations such as Darjeeling are renowned for. European missionaries generally started these schools for the children of the affluent and many are still run by the same convents even today.

The locals, mainly Nepali, Tibetan and Bengali, were strikingly featured with more Mongoloid/ Pahari (mountain) looks than Bengali, making it difficult to believe that we were still in West Bengal.

N and I were in heaven. We realised only now how much we needed this change of air and scenery. We took in Darjeeling hungrily, savouring every sight, smell and sound.

We watched the sun set over earth’s five highest peaks from ‘Observatory Hill,’

....sipped wine while marvelling at the splendour of the snow-capped Kanchenjunga[1] from our hotel’s open-air terrace,

.... enjoyed the game of hide-and-seek between the hill sides and the clouds from an old 1800s cemetery,

.....dashed madly down the hillside of a Tibetan Monastery for fear of a mother and baby monkey evilly eyeing our cameras,

.... ate ‘momos’[2] at a tiny local café perched on the edge of a mountain and in general explored and did as much as we could in our surreal short week in the clouds.

[1] Third highest mountain peak in the world
[2] Steamed vegetable dumplings, a popular fast food in the North Eastern Indian States – sparking a debate between N and I about the ubiquity of dumplings in all cultures

Finally Up in Those Clouds

2007-09-15T01:10:00.000-07:00

After an arduous ticket-buying experience and a 15-hour-long train ride on the Darjeeling Mail, N and I were suddenly in a place called New Jalpaiguri or NJP for short. From here we had read that you had to take a shared jeep or the Toy Train up to Darjeeling. By jeep the journey was 3.5 hours long while by Toy Train it would take about eight hours for the historic British-era locomotive and recently UNESCO designated ‘UN World Heritage Site’ to make its winding way, 7000 feet, up the mountain to Darjeeling. We decided on the shared jeep.

Not knowing what to expect at the end of our journey, we climbed in and watched out the windows as the jeep made its way through a Siliguri[1] just stirring in the early hours of the morning. School buses filled with sleepy-eyed children in neatly pressed uniforms, tea-sellers, motorbikes, cycles, young working women in sharees and shalwar kameezes[2], and roadside dhabas[3] firing up their hearths for the day’s business gave way slowly to highway, more highway, a dry glacial-river bed, tea estates, national forests with enormous trees that I wish I knew the names of, the bases of the Border Security Forces (BSF), young cadets out running and then finally in the distance, looming majestically – the foothills of the Himalayas – green and aristocratic, rising gradually to the skies.

Looking back on our drive, I remember that the first thing that struck us upon arrival in NJP was the tremendous difference in temperature. While Malda and Calcutta were sweltering in the heat of the oppressive Monsoons, the Himalayan foothills in Darjeeling were deliciously cool and welcoming. The air was crisp and fresh and N and I both felt like we had stumbled from a stifling hot swamp into the refreshing surprise of a brisk Canadian Fall. Taking pleasure in the most inane, we rejoiced to see people in sweaters (reminded us of Canada =)) and for the first time since coming to India in what is probably the most difficult season of the year, we felt rejuvenated and alive.

As we drove up the mountain, an odd feeling of Déjà vu overcame me. All the strain and worries of the previous two months melted away and I realised with a feeling of joyous melancholy that I had witnessed this very scene so many times before. I had seen it in the moment that I had first beheld mountains. I must have been 10. We had driven up to Fujairah, an emirate 400 kilometres from my home emirate of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates where I had grown up. Presently, driving up to Darjeeling, I was reminded of the winding roads cut painstakingly into the Fujairahn hills that made their way snakelike to the mountains of the Sultanate of Oman, the UAE’s neighbour to the North. I also recognised this moment in the heart-tugging beauty of the Andes Mountains seen by the young Che Guevara in the movie The Motorcycle Diaries. Certainly, I imagined, this was also how beholding Machu Pichu felt. I had seen it in the descriptions and images of this Peruvian wonder shared by traveller friends.

As we climbed higher and higher up the narrow and rather precarious mountain road, the earth below, the rock face rising to the heavens beside us and the distant hillsides with their terraced farms and tea-estates, the waterfalls and the towering conifers, the ancient shrines to mountain deities carved into the rock and just the open sky at the edges of the road began to take on a storybook-like quality. As the clouds began to envelop us and usher us deeper and deeper into their domain I began to remember many of the stories I had read as a child. I remembered the Enchanted Forest and the Faraway Tree written by Enid Blyton[4] and for the first time saw how a little child standing at the base of a giant evergreen whose top was cloaked in cloud, and whose trunk was the size of a house, could weave an entire magical world around that one tree. I recalled Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie and could think of no better description for where I was. I was in a sea of stories and the clouds all around me were the stuff that tales were made off.

[1] Town just below Darjeeling, adjacent to part of New Jalpaiguri
[2] Names of two different Indian outfits – saree and salwar kameez – only pronounced with a Bengali accent, hence the extra h’s.
[3] Food stands

[4] (British author whose works all English-knowing children in the Middle East and particularly the subcontinent grow up on)

The Hogwarts Express erm excuse me The Darjeeling Mail

2007-09-15T01:04:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has personally bought an Indian Railways train ticket in Kolkata may be familiar with the chaos that is the Railways Ticket Reservation Office in the city. The waiting areas are packed to capacity and the queues do not move for what seem like hours on end. The ticketing agents work from behind, what at one time, must have been clear plexiglass but is now more along the lines of opaque. Everything including the train schedules and the no-smoking notices are handwritten either on giant pieces of paper or dry-erase boards. Here, time enjoys supreme importance – with the ticket officials paying strict attention to the times for their tea/coffee and lunch breaks and the customers glancing helplessly but nevertheless unfailingly at the time ticking by on their watches.

The computers used by the agents are also worthy of comment. These shrunken and yellowing machines still run DOS (!!) and look exactly like computers did back in the late 1980s when I was in elementary school. Probably the funniest thing is when and if you ever make it to the ticketing agent, everyone behind you automatically takes their places – no, not at a respectful distance behind you/the yellow line as we are accustomed to in North America, but right beside you on all sides. They watch your every move as you hand in your requisition form, rummage for your money and slide it in through the little hole in the glass, count your change and collect your ticket. If you glare at them they just stare blankly right back!

I guess the rules must just be different here =)!

Up in the Clouds

2007-09-15T00:52:00.000-07:00

With week 10 in the research field upon us, my colleague, N, who is working in a different district of West Bengal, and I decided that we were long overdue for a break that was not Calcutta city. We wanted or rather n-e-e-d-e-d a holiday that would allow us to explore a different part of India and for once allow us to let our guard down and rest after constantly being in a state of high alert in the research situation. We debated for a while between the beaches of Southern India and the Himalayan Mountains in the Northern and North Eastern parts of the country and finally pure logistics won out, and we decided in favour of the mountains.

It had taken us many weeks of sporadic phone conversations over a spotty wireless phone network to even warm up to the idea of a holiday. We were worried that somehow we would be compromising our work even though both of us had confided to the other about symptoms that spelt: ‘severe research fatigue.’ We were both overstretched and tired, eating poorly, sleeping badly and just generally irritable and low on motivation and energy. Work was becoming a chore and the physical and social demands of rural living were bordering on tiresome. Yes, we definitely needed a break, but neither of us was willing to leave. Like typical North American workaholics we felt that if we left our sites even for a day, our work would suffer. Breaks were for the birds; we would somehow just plough through and stick it out till the end!

But then one day, during what may have been probably the hottest week of the summer so far, the power in Ek Lakhi, my base village, went out – and did not return for four days. On the second day, the water, which is pumped by electricity from a depth of 300 metres under the surface, followed suit. I think for me that was the final straw. I needed out and FAST! The general tiredness and strain of being in a completely new environment had taken its toll and my capacity for endurance was momentarily exhausted. That evening I caught the overnight train to Calcutta and phoned N upon arrival in the city the following morning. “You know that break we were talking about? I think I’m going to take it – two tickets?”

My Study Site

2007-08-18T05:45:00.000-07:00

Dewani, my study site, is truly a beautiful village.

Situated high up on the banks of the Mahananda River, the village is green with paddy fields and mango orchards. Tall eucalyptus and bamboo groves create a cool canopy over the winding village roads, shading the village and the weary traveller from the wrath of the Indian summer sun. The tall trees also craft a low-hanging curtain of leaves on the banks of the river through which one may catch a glimpse of the waters below. Wheeling my bicycle along these interior roads, it is almost hard for me to imagine that these picturesque areas are annually submerged by the Mahananda that swells with the rains of the Monsoon to swallow, whole, Dewani, its fields, its homes and its adjacent villages.

The flood-prone nature of Dewani has led me to expand my research from an investigation into the impacts of Microinsurance in rural Bengal, to include the role of the development sector in disaster preparedness and management, changes in traditional coping mechanisms of villagers regularly afflicted by natural calamities as a result of these programs, and the role of Microinsurance if any in dealing with situations of stress and shock and other related questions.

On most days, the ride to Dewani is largely uneventful except for the numerous times we are stopped by curious villagers enquiring about our destination or my origins and then marvelling at the fact that I know Bengali. On some days, when I have miscalculated the weather and am caught in torrential showers, the kuccha (unpaved mud) roads in the village interiors take on a quicksand-like consistency and become impossible to trudge through let alone bike on. At times like this, I marvel at the resilience of villagers particularly the women who are often forced by lack of transportation or finances to walk for more than 10 to 20 kilometres for errands, business, healthcare or other basic services. Though most families in the village own a bicycle or two, these are customarily the domain of men, leaving women with no option but to walk long-distance in all conditions, often with heavy loads or small children in tow.

My Typical Day

2007-08-18T05:31:00.000-07:00

My day begins at 6:00 am with the arrival of the NGO caretaker and cook. Promptly the building is filled with the sound of offices being unlocked and readied for the workday, making it impossible to be any late of a riser amidst the hubbub of activity outside my door. Sometimes, as my room is on the ground floor, I am awakened at the crack of dawn by the strangest sounds. One day, I woke to the sound of a rhythmic and periodic “gyyaah/heemph/arrr.” I lay for a few minutes under my mosquito net puzzling about these sounds and finally got up to investigate – it was a farmer tilling his land with the traditional and commonly-used buffalo-drawn plough and loudly goading his two animals to keep moving! It was at this moment that I truly realised that the village was devoid of any sounds except for those of nature. There was no honking of traffic or humming of machinery in the entire area, so much so that the sound of a human voice at an ordinary volume could carry from a significant distance and sound like it was coming from just next-door. I laughed then to think of the sights and sounds that had now become a regular part of my day.

Regardless of how strange an alarm clock I am awakened by, I normally work for about an hour or more on my computer, before bathing and making my way upstairs to the kitchen on the third floor open rooftop/terrace for breakfast. Breakfast is usually roti and some sort of sabzi (flatbread and veggies) along with a delicious red tea that’s made with fresh ginger or cinnamon. By the time I’m done eating at around 9:45 am, my research assistant has arrived, and we head downstairs for a short debriefing session before setting out into the field for the day.

The field or my research site is a village named Dewani, a predominantly Muslim village on the banks of the Mahananda River, which runs from the Himalayan mountains of Nepal through Bihar, Jharkand and Maldah in West Bengal State before joining the mighty Ganges or Ganga River on its journey to the Bay of Bengal. Dewani is approximately six kilometres from my base and it takes my research assistant, Sheila Biswas and I almost 50 to 60 minutes to cycle to the village interiors. We bike along a barely two-lane, potholed pucca (paved) road that runs a distance of 30 kilometres from one national highway to another and in the process links Ek Lakhi with Dewani.

On our ride, we pass several villages and intersections, under railway bridges, over water-reservoirs and through never-ending stretches of paddy fields, ponds and bamboo groves. We ride over sticks of bamboo, straw, and jute drying in the middle of the road; and like all other vehicle drivers, simply manoeuvre around cows, goats and other domestic animals that park themselves rather indifferently in the path of oncoming traffic. Often, we even ride through entire chicken families, which in spite of my best efforts at advance warning (furiously ringing my cycle bell) peck around unconcernedly until my bike is almost upon them, and only then decide to scatter off and zip across the road in a mad panic, almost throwing me off my bike in my bid to avoid a feathery collision.

The work in the village usually takes us the entire day up until 6:00 pm when we begin the six-kilometre cycle-ride back to Ek Lakhi. So far (all of July) we have been carrying out mapping exercises, some key-informant interviews and a door-to-door household survey/census that is aimed at acquainting the researcher and the locals with one another, and understanding the demographic make-up of the village in terms of age, education, occupation, asset and wealth distribution, vulnerabilities and access to social safety, banking and other services. At the present time out of the 300 plus households in my village area, I have reached my target of 150 households surveyed. This process took my research assistant and I much longer than expected, teaching me a valuable lesson about the nature and hardships of daily life in the Indian village, the constraints placed upon mobility and work by disagreeable weather conditions and the absence of transportation and all-weather roads. I have also been forced to learn the value of patience and of being able to adapt preconceived plans to the realities and demands of the field situation.

After the day in the field, the return to Ek Lakhi is usually conducted in silence, as both Sheila di[1] and I are generally too tired to carry out a meaningful conversation. Sometimes, if the day in the village has been particularly productive and our spirits are high, we chat about a host of different topics barely noticing when the turning into Ek Lakhi is upon us.

My first activity upon returning to Ek Lakhi is to bathe and fix myself a snack of tea and biscuits. Thereafter, I usually climb up to the third-floor open-air terrace and watch the sun set over the entire village. On most days, the son of the NGO director, who is only 19 and has become my closest friend here, joins me, and we chat, exchange stories, read, listen to music, sketch or play a board games until it is time for dinner at 9:00 pm. Sometimes, I solicit his help on different work projects or coerce him into helping me prepare for the subsequent day in the field. On his days off from university, he can sometimes even be persuaded to accompany me on field visits or random errands.

Occasionally, RCHSS has staff, students from all over India, or guests visiting from other organisations such as CARE, UNICEF, WHO or their own branch offices. Presently, there are two staff members visiting from the RCHSS Darjeeling branch’s anti-trafficking wing visiting the Ek Lakhi office. These two girls, S & S are from Nepal and Darjeeling respectively and have been a wealth of information for me on a host of topics related to their work, geography, respective cultures, languages, music, dances and so on. The outstanding invitations to visit Darjeeling and Nepal are also an exciting bonus.

[1] Suffix added at the end of a woman’s name (usually older than addresser) to indicate respect. Translates as ‘elder sister.’

Internet?

2007-08-18T05:25:00.001-07:00

Like a cold drink, the Internet is unheard of in Ek Lakhi, where basic utilities like electricity; phone connectivity and running water are unpredictable and sometimes non-existent for days. This is particularly irksome for the RCHSS office, which is forced to stop all computer-related activity during the all-too-frequent power-cuts. There is talk of a Government-pledged electric generator but till date there has been no sign of this magic machine. Like most of the staff at RCHSS, whenever in the office, I have taken to glancing periodically at the red light on the electricity indicators around the building and mentally assessing if my mobile and laptop are charged enough to last me till the next power cut. If not, I have to make haste and plug both in before the red light disappears indefinitely.

Sometimes, people in the village ask me if we have power cuts in North America? The only response I can give them then is: “Umm very very very rarely, if there is a particularly bad rain or snow storm.” If in the mood to amuse my listeners (and myself), I recount the incident of the winter storm a few years ago when the entire North-Eastern US and Canada found itself in a blackout. I tell them how several people thought that terrorists had struck and that the world had ended. “People were stuck in skyscraper elevators, businesses and the stock exchange went haywire, while shops and private homes had to discard of massive quantities of food and medication hoarded carefully in their cold storages,” I tell them. To myself, I think I am now living in a world that has none of the amenities that are an essential part of my life at home. The most amusing part is that I have somehow adjusted, grudgingly at first, but surely – as if I’ve been here forever.

My New Home - Ek Lakhi

2007-08-18T05:12:00.000-07:00

Ek Lakhi’s railway station and numerous roadside shops make it an important stop for people from surrounding villages. The shops, which are usually little thatched huts or wooden shacks with the odd cement structure thrown in, sell anything from garden-grown fruits and vegetables, live chickens, eggs, tea, sweets, snacks, biscuits and other food supplies, to soap, shampoo and stationary. There are also one or two long-distance call booths, called STD booths (No, not that sort of STD, but Standard Trunk Dialling!), one bicycle repair shop, one or two tailoring shops and a few other tiny businesses scattered all around the main village intersection.

During my first few weeks in Ek Lakhi, I was driven by the maddening heat and lack of refrigerated water at the RCHSS to embark on a desperate quest for any cold drink or juice box that I could find. All I wanted was the taste of a chilled drink, and was even willing to pay premium price. I was not too worried about where I would find said drink as I had seen all the TV ads of moustachioed farmers drinking Pepsi atop their bullock carts and was certain that Coke/Pepsi or at the very least their local counterparts had made their way into the remotest corners of India. I was astounded to discover “NOT!” Not a single shop sold a drop of soda, not even in those glass bottles, which you had to drink from at the store and return promptly. To get a hold of a drink, I was informed, I would have to find my way almost 18 kilometres at the very least to a slightly larger village intersection that was nearby the national highway linking the ruralities with Malda Town. Here, I was told, maybe one or two shops would have a refrigerator! – Remind me to sue those drink corporations for false advertisement when I get back.

Reflecting back on this incident, I am struck by how different Indian cities are from the rural areas. For as long as I can remember (visits to India as a child with family), all sorts of drinks (yes, even the foreign brands) had been available on every street corner in Calcutta city. But the rural areas, I have concluded, are truly another world. Here, little influence of any city exists, and demand and supply are limited to purely functional materials that are within the purchasing capacities of village folk. The fascinating part for me has been discovering the commodities that lie outside this demand-supply bracket and realising that these same items (such as refrigerators, bug spray, powder bleach) are often taken-for-granted necessities even in modest-income households in the Indian city.

Out in the Middle of Nowhere!

2007-08-18T04:53:00.000-07:00

It’s been almost a month and a half now since I have been in India and almost a month since I have been out in the field for my M.A. research. My new home base is Ek Lakhi, a tiny rural outpost almost 30 kilometres from Maldah Town in the Maldah District of West Bengal State, and my research site is a village named Dewani about six kilometres from my base.

Maldah is an overnight train journey from Calcutta city and like many places in India that are eclipsed by the better-known metropolises and historical sites, is a hidden treasure trove of history, culture and commerce. Several impressive monuments and ruins dating back to the successive reigns of the Buddhist Pals, the Hindu Senas and the Muslim Nawabs can be found scattered throughout the district, particularly in the cities of Gaur and Pandua, which were the administrative capitals of Bengal during the 13th and 14th centuries. Dutch, French and British influences can also be felt in Maldah as the district was an important trading post and passageway into bordering Bihar, Bangladesh and the Himalayas of Darjeeling, Nepal and Sikkim. Today, Maldah is renowned for its unique mangoes, silk farms and marshes that attract and house a tremendous diversity of birds and other fauna.

Ek Lakhi, where I am based at the headquarters of the Rajadighi Community Health Service Society (RCHSS)[1], is a peaceful little village region lush with paddy fields, mango orchards and innumerable streams and waterways making their way across the landscape. Out of the 30 or more express trains that whiz past the Ek Lakhi rail station every day, only two halt at the little platform, the others considering it too inconsequential to interrupt their express services to larger destinations like Calcutta, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and other areas within and outside India.

Since my stay in Ek Lakhi, the meaning of “middle of nowhere” has begun to acquire new significance. I have realised that the Indian middle-of-nowhere is really and truly the middle-of-nowhere. There is minimal outside influence and the majority of villagers in Ek Lakhi and its many surrounding villages earn their living by farming less than an acre of land. Most of these folk, particularly the women, have never left the lands that their families have tilled for generations and cannot visualise any other life for their kids or themselves than the one their parents, grandparents and forefathers have lived before them. In fact to many, Maldah town only 30 kilometres is a faraway mystical place never mind Calcutta city or the rest of India.

[1]RCHSS is an NGO committed to the empowerment and sustainable development of vulnerable and marginalised communities in the fields of decision making, democratic and human rights, income generation, environmental and regular education and health care. RCHSS has been working since the 1980s and partners with a number of international bodies such as UNICEF, WHO, UK’s DFID, CARE, Save the Children UK, CGEP USA and others.