We
head towards the Taj Mahal, built by Shah Jehan for the dearest
of his wives Arjumand Banu Begum whom he married in 1612 and who
died bearing their fourteenth child in 1631. Shah Jehan took it
hard, remaining in seclusion for two years and emerging with spectacles
and gray hair. He spent twenty years supervising the construction
of the Taj Mahal, joining her in the mausoleum 35 years later,
having been imprisoned for a number of years by his son, Aurangzeb.
There’s
a split rate for Indians and foreigners, which seems sensible:
15 rupees for the former and 110 (about $2.60) for the latter.
The crowds are large, but without the air of sullen resignation,
amplified by the gross corpulence conspicuous in American crowds
in Disney World and other attractions. The children are mostly
cheerful and the mothers animated. In all my journeys I neither
saw a really fat Indian nor a skeletal one, of the sort enshrined
in Oxfam posters, even though we later visited several homes with
families so poor that the man of the house had killed himself
from shame at the inability to pay off his debts to the banks
and to moneylenders. As Sainath stresses, though you can see emaciation
in the slums of Mumbai, most hunger is invisible and has been
swelling since liberalization began in the early 90s. Sixty-seven
per cent of Indian kids are malnourished.
I’ve
never cared for the Taj Mahal, depicted on the biscuit tins of
my childhood. And after seeing Akbar’s first palace compound
at Fatehpur Sikri, I feel this more strongly. Kitsch is emotional
blackmail and the Taj Mahal, blaring Shah Jehan’s bereavement,
seems to me the very essence of kitsch. Part of the problem is
Shah Jehan’s snobbery about red sandstone. Both here and
a mile up river at the Fort he ordered white marble and in the
case of the Taj Mahal the result is a sort of airless sterility.
The manic symmetry amplifies this. Also, the Taj Mahal is just
too big. Akbar’s tomb, a few leagues back down the road
towards Delhi, though large, seems proportionate. But the vast
Taj Mahal diminishes its skeletal contents, ensconced in two sarcophagi
at its core. Shah Jehan was locked up by Aurangzeb in the Fort,
a mile upstream, and spent many years looking down the river at
his wife’s mausoleum, apparently squinting in a little piece
of mirror at night to catch the reflection. When he died Aurangzeb
shipped him downstream to join Arjumand in the comity of the sepulcher,
though symmetry is for once controverted since his stone coffin
is slightly larger and higher than hers. These days the river
is shallow and dirty. In the mid seventeenth-century it was clear
and twenty feet deep.
On the way home Sainath starts reminiscing about Karanjia, the
famous owner of Blitz. Karanjia was an owner-editor who plied
his trade with élan. At the dawn of the Cuban revolution
he traveled to Havana where the new government took him to be
the new Indian ambassador and, gratified with such diplomatic
recognition, gave Karanjia the red carpet, including an interview
with Fidel. Finally, after three weeks, Karanjia disclosed that
he was not the ambassador but a journalist and there was a momentary
chill, soon dispelled.
For
Karanjia, said Sainath, impact was everything. Blitz’s stories
had sizzle and the phones burned with powerful people howling
libel threats down the lines. Death threats came too, in such
profusion that reporters would solemnly request the callers to
postpone their homicidal visits for a day or two owing to the
length of the line of people preparing to exact retribution. The
Hindu fundamentalists in Shiv Sena (Shiva’s Army) got mad
enough one time at a slur in the humor column that they sent a
mob from out of town to burn three of Blitz’s delivery vehicles
and break office windows. Karanjia was away at the time and Sainath,
who’d let the humor column through without reading it, quaked
at news of his return.
When
he saw his burned trucks Karanjia trumpeted his dismay and Sainath,
taking full responsibility, was under heavy fire until Karanjia
noticed Blitz’s business manager, an elderly Parsee, looking
undismayed. So, Karanjia asked him, were the trucks insured? No,
said the manager, still calm. Then the glorious truth came out.
The trucks had been rented from the local Shiv Sena outfit, whose
capo soon appeared at Blitz’s office distraught at his dilemma.
He could not, he told Karanjia, get compensation from the arsonists
since they had been sent from out of town by Shiv Sena’s
supreme commander. Karanjia told him he could offer no satisfaction.
Somewhere
in the late 60s a guru made the rounds of India, saying that his
spiritual powers enabled him to walk on water. And so he could,
with the assistance of a German engineer who had designed a tank
with a span of fiberglass rope just under the surface, along which
the guru would pace, to the amazement of the rubes.
Karanjia
announced that Blitz would sponsor a demonstration by the water-walking
guru in a local auditorium. He ordered an extra big tank to be
fabricated. Seeing trouble ahead, the German engineer made a prudent
exit. In front of an excited crowd the guru faltered to Karanjia
that the commotion was impinging on his powers and diluting the
cosmic forces. “You’ll walk on water or I’ll
break your legs”, Karanjia shouted. The trembling guru stepped
off the edge of the tank and sank like a stone. When he’d
dried off, Karanjia told him to try again. Once again the guru
stepped and sank and fled into the night. Karanjia’s staff
worried that the crowd would want its money back but Karanjia
wouldn’t hear of it. “They have had their money’s
worth”, he crowed. “They’re happy”.
We
bowled along, hooting at the antics and impostures of gurus and
fakirs, from the Maharaji on. Only months ago, JP and Sainath
told me, an up-and-coming swami, Sri-Sri Ravisander, had headed
into southern Tamil Nadu, vowing to project his spiritual powers
to those afflicted by the tsunami of December 26, 2004, and soothe
the cosmic forces. The bigwigs of the local town assembled to
greet the great mystic.
But
as his cavalcade of 70 cars rolled south along the highway down
the coast of Coromandel, some subversive wag raised the cry that
a second tsunami, even more immense in destructive potential than
the first, was just over the horizon. The swami made a quick estimate
of his powers versus those of the cosmic forces and ordered his
car to turn round. The road was narrow, and the ensuing jam very
terrible to behold as Sri-Sri Ravisanker tried to beat a retreat.
March
28
At
9.30 pm JP, Sainath and I head for Jwaharlal Nehru U for my big
talk. They drive round the campus reminiscing about the good old
days when they hosted Iranian students protesting the Shah’s
visit and JP managed to get onto the roof of the car behind the
Shah’s. The next day JP brings a black and white photo and
there he is, a blurry, bearded protester. I ask why the police
didn’t beat him to death with their lathis – bamboo
staves – and he said that they circled him and began to
whack away, but the staves clashed above his body, as in a cartoon,
and he was able to roll away and flee.
The
venue is the mess hall of one of the hostels. At ten Sainath gives
me a generous intro and I’m off on my scheduled talk, “War
on Iraq, War in America”. I go at it for about an hour,
throwing everything into the pot, from Judith Miller to Abu Ghraib,
to the failures of the American left. It goes down well, and questions
are vigorous including a fellow who asks about the neocons and
their origins in a Trotskyite groupuscule headed by Schachtman.
I confirm the story and questioner, obviously a Maoist, grins
with knowing approval. The Trotskyites furrow their brows.
April
2
After
a few more days in Delhi and Mumbai we fly to the southwest, land
in Tamil Nadu and drive over the state line into Kerala and visit
a Coca Cola plant blockaded by peasants since it has destroyed
their water supplies. Then we head on down into Kerala, ending
up in Khozikode, aka Calicut (a few miles from where Vasco da
Gama made landfall in 1498), where I give a press conference under
the aegis of Mathrubhumi, the million-plus circulation newspaper
daily, published in Kerala’s language, Malayalam (spoken
by70 million).
After
a while a fellow stands up and asks me if the CIA is active on
American campuses. I allude in my response to recent pieces in
CounterPunch about the new Roberts program, covertly funding graduates
for intelligence work. He persists. Is it not a fact, he asks,
that Professor Franke, at the state university at Montclair in
New Jersey, is working with the CIA?
Scenting
trouble, I immediately respond to the effect that I have absolutely
zero knowledge of Franke or of what goes on at Montclair, including
any possible CIA activity. The chap nods happily and sits down.
A few days later I get an urgent email from Richard Franke in
Montclair. Sainath and I and the fellows from Mathrubumi, traveling
in Wyanad, have missed a story in the ultra Hindu nationalist
paper run by the RSS, stating that “Cockburn confirms CIA
presence at Montclair”. Franke, apparently an excellent
anthropologist, is frantic to know exactly what I said. It turns
out this is all part of a long rumor-mongering campaign of sabotage
by left sectarians against Franke, who has played a creditable
role in Kerala politics, and a local left leader, T.M. Thomas
Isaac, State Secretariat member of the Communist Party of India
(Marxist), which as likely as not will be leading the government
of Kerala after next year’s elections
April 3
To
meet India’s rural crisis face to face we drive along the
lovely wooded roads of Wyanad, a district in north eastern Kerala.
To our east rise the Western Ghat mountains. Last night we stayed
in Sultan’s Battery, so called because it had been the last
stand of the local sultan, when the British came three centuries
ago.
Along
this road the ancient forests have long since logged off and the
state-planted young teak trees are usually cut, to judge by the
piles at the side of the road, with the trunk at about 12”
in diameter. Familiar follies of state-sponsored forestry have
occurred. Some years ago the clumps of bamboo, often forty feet
across and fifty feet high, were taken off the ridges and slopes
of the western Ghats and Eucalyptus globulus put in, the same
way it was in California in the 1870s. Elephants don’t like
it because it replaces their natural habitat and drives them out
in search of forage. As the old forest was cut, locals claim the
weather cycles in Wyanad changed for the worse, putting paid to
the orange groves.
We
turn off the road through the woods and onto a smaller lane, guides
by the area rep of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), whose
red flags and local offices are conspicuous throughout the district.
Then we walk up a path past pepper vines, bananas, cashew trees,
jackfruit and some coffee bushes to a single-story concrete-block
house. Here are Dinesan, two of his sisters and two little children.
The mother and another sister are away. Dinesan has a job as a
projectionist, though Wyanad’s farm crisis means few can
afford to go to the movies any more and so the local cinema is
failing. The proprietor refuses to screen the skin movies now
churning out of Indian studios.
The property is a house on three acres. Livestock: one cow, one
goat. Nearly a year ago Dinesan’s father, B.M. Kamelasan,
took note of the collapsing price of pepper, vanilla and coffee,
set the sums he’d borrowed from the banks and the money
lenders against the expected yields, and decided to end it all
with the one agent he could get for free, a pesticide called monocrotophos
made by Ciba-Geigy. It’s a horrible way to die.
This
is no tableau of beleaguered sharecroppers in a tar-paper shanty
in West Virginia fifty years ago. The family is trim, the two
kids clean and nicely dressed. A farmer’s desperation and
suicide do not require the backdrop of a rural slum, even though,
after the collapse in agricultural prices, Dinesan and his family
have their backs against the wall, with a mudslide of debt (tiny
by western standards) engulfing them. Amid the terrible crisis
of the small family farmers in the American Midwest in the past
thirty years there have been plenty of suicides or, to put it
more tactfully, higher than expected deaths, in trim ranch houses,
where the suicide might be reported as accidental death so the
survivors get the insurance money.
Kerala
has near-100 per cent literacy and a tradition of voracious newspaper
reading. The libraries are stuffed with poor people catching up
on local and world events. Young Dinesan talks about the reasons
for the crisis, the collapse of subsidies, the role of middlemen,
the World Bank’s subsidy to Vietnam whose cheap and inferior
pepper comes to Sri Lanka, a free port, and then into Kerala whose
Malabar pepper is the finest in the world. As with most peasants
and farmers across the world, he understands the world picture.
He talks about the weakness of the dollar against the Euro.
An
hour later it’s time to go. The little boy climbs a cashew
tree and brings me down a fruit with the large cashew shell growing
out of its top. The fruit tastes a little like mango. Cashews
came from the New World via the Portuguese, along with chili,
tapioca, tomatoes, pineapples, cocoa, potatoes and groundnuts.
That was early globalization. It was quicker in those days. The
first housewives on the Indian subcontinent got chilies. a basic
for what we regard as the eternal Indian diet in about 1550, and
not too long thereafter it was on every household menu in the
whole of India.
In
1957, in free elections, the Communists swept to power in Kerala
and delivered on their promise of land reform in a decade where
U.S. dollars and the CIA leagued with the local land barons and
international firms like United Fruit to crush it in Guatemala
and Iran. The Communists delivered on land, on education and on
health. By 1959, under U.S. pressure, the central government in
New Delhi struck, dismissing Kerala’s government. The long
counterattack followed, with brief interruptions by left coalitions.
Kerala’s still the most literate state in India. Its infant
mortality rates are the lowest. Its schools are still good.
Last
year Sainath wrote about a little girl whose father, working across
the state line as a day laborer in Karnataka, scrapes the money
together to send her back on the bus each day to get taught by
the nuns in Wyanad, a devotion to his daughter’s future
all the more remarkable because it’s a daughter, not a son
he’s sending back. Millions of Indian parents crave sons,
not daughters. When the ultrasound picks up the evidence of a
female embryo in utero, the parents all too often avail themselves
of choice and abort that embryo.
Wyanad
is a district caught in the backwash of “market freedoms”.
The Christian churches, who brought in thousands of immigrants
into Wyanad after World War 2 are in trouble, with their Sunday
collections down to 10 per cent of normal. Priests aren’t
being paid, though bishops surely must be. Movie houses have closed
down. There are less Tamil migrant laborers around and those that
are can’t afford the 10-rupee ticket.
At
least the Kerala State Road Transport Corp’s busses are
doing a booming business, ferrying people looking for work in
Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Thousands cross every day. Back in 95
there were six busses a day to Kutta, in Karnataka; now there
are 24 daily. On them are skilled men, masons, carpenters, electricians.
These are the people who worked on the half-built houses, many
of them substantial villas, one sees mile after mile each side
of Wyanad’s rural roads, abandoned after farm income slid
into the pit.
The
state-licensed toddy shops are in trouble too. Toddy is a fermented
brew from the sap of the palmyra palm. We visit Uttaman, the toddy
man. He’s a genial fellow, with the slightly knowing grin,
redolent of tolerance for human folly, one often finds in barkeeps
and kindred providers. Uttaman pays 48,000 rupees a year for his
license, 100,000 rupees for the welfare fund for his six employees.
These days they’re tapping 120 liters of toddy a day. Five
years ago he brewed and sold 250 bottles a day, today only 10
or 15. He’s being ruined by arrack, a spirit distilled from
fermented toddy that’s illegal in Kerala but for sale just
across the Kabini river in Karnataka. It’s stronger, and
because it’s illegal and the distillers don’t pay
taxes, cheaper.
Uttaman
offers me a glass of toddy. It’s pleasant. He lets the toddy
ferment for 12 hours, to get an alcohol content of 12 per cent.
If he leaves it ferment for 24 hours, it will go to 24 per cent.
It’s got a shelf life of 48 hours. As I sip, Uttaman describes
to us the visit from the cops after Sainath’s piece on him
was published in The Hindu in January. Why was he talking to Sainath,
they asked him. Sainath was the man who’d personally overthrown
Naidu, the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh. Sainath gives a gratified
smirk.