Kilokery and Kalekhan; a study of Indian village life

If you come by air from Calcutta to Delhi, you will see the villages of India stretched out below you like an endless threadbare patchwork quilt. To the right, at the rim of the plains, stand the gigantic ramparts of the Himalayas; but the plains themselves are entirely flat – fields of rice submerged by water (inpage 407 the Bengal Province), reservoir and village well, irrigation canals, occasional banyan trees, clusters of mud-walled houses – the same pattern repeats itself mile after mile, while the hawk-shadow of the aeroplane rushes onwards. It is plain to any observer that the first problem of the country is irrigation – how otherwise can the villages far from the great rivers maintain production in the dry season? Four-fifths of the population of India lives in her villages. I intend to describe in this article some aspects of the life of the people in Kilokery and Kalekhan, two villages which lie close together just outside the walls of Delhi. Their combined population numbers perhaps 250 people, while the population of Delhi itself is greater than that of New Zealand.

Delhi itself is two towns in one – the ancient and typically Indian town of Old Delhi, with the crowded, swarming life of bazaar and slum, open to the villagers who come to market there; and the tree-shaded administrative blocks of New Delhi, the seat of the Indian Government, with prosperous suburbs, modern hotels, and a high scale of living. New Delhi is built among the palace tombs of the Mogul emperors and their retinue. Taxi, tonga, motor- scooter, bus, and bullock-cart hoot and grind below the broken tomb walls, and many destitute people have made their homes in the burial chambers. Washing is hung out in the archways; fires are lit to blacken the flower-carved ceilings; and the sound of guitar music can be heard there in the long, hot evenings. The suffering of the poor is very great, yet they find means to keep life moving.

Quite different images rise in memory when one considers the life of the villagers. A drum hanging in the porch of the headman’s house at Kilokery, beaten for the daily meetings of the Punchayat, or village council; an old man seated cross-legged on a bed, smoking a hookah in the corner of a mud-walled yard; a group of women, very strong and graceful, filling their brass pots and gossiping at the village well in Kalekhan; a steel pylon striding above a field of maize. The village communities are each autonomous, each a small republic, as it were. Despite their evident poverty, the villages convey an impression of relaxation and well-being, which springs no doubt from a life lived in deep accordance with natural law.

One enters Kalekhan by crossing the railway line beside the suburban station of Nizamuddin. A local train goes by slowly, crowded to the doors with turbaned villagers, en route to the markets of Old Delhi, where they will sell their vegetables at a meagre profit. They sit in the doorways of carriages, their feet dangling, enjoying the winter sunlight. Mist rises from the morning fields. Hawks are circling above the blue weathered dome of the tomb of the tutor of a Mogul emperor. In the narrow streets of Kalekhan, where sewers once lay open, transforming each street to a bad-smelling marsh, the villages have laid down brick, working under the Community Development Scheme, and confined the sewage to a concrete gutter. A community centre has been built, its white walls decorated with geometrical design. But village life ispage 408 essentially unchanged. Wooden-wheeled bullock-carts sway past, loaded with the dry stalks of sugar cane, a hot-burning fuel. Buffalo cows sleep in the shade of the houses. A barefooted woman climbs the street, carrying on her head three large brass pots of water. As one passes, she draws the folds of her shawl across her face. A village woman will not readily unveil her face to a stranger: the practice of purdah is still firmly established. In the yard of every house stand square mounds of cowdung, shaped like small temples. Cowdung is the most valuable commodity of village life – a fuel, a manure, and a mortar. Stubble, cowdung, and mud are mixed to make fresh mortar for building and repairing the walls of houses.

Consider the daily life of the woman who climbs the street. She was probably betrothed at five or six years old and married before she was sixteen. It is unlikely that she has borne less than four children; she may be a mother of twelve. Her expectation of life is perhaps fifty years. To any normal New Zealand woman her situation would seem an intolerable one. Yet the vigour and cheerful bearing of the women of Kilokery and Kalekhan is most remarkable. They know exactly what is expected of them and it is within their powers to perform it. This woman rises at three or four o’clock in the morning to plaster her kitchen and chula, or smokeless stove, with clean mud and cowdung. She then milks the cow, gives fodder to the cattle, and prepares a breakfast of chapatis and seasoned vegetables for her husband and family. Chapatis are wheaten pancakes roasted on an iron griddle: these pancakes are commonly kept fresh during the day in grass baskets beside the fire. After getting her children ready for school, she takes his breakfast to her husband in the fields. Then for the rest of the morning she collects cowdung, pats it with her hands into small cakes, and lays these cakes in rows in the sun to dry, or collects wood, or draws water from the well, carrying it in summer in earthenware pots and in winter in brass ones. She prepares the lunch and takes it to her husband. In the afternoon she may work with her husband in the field, cutting the crop or weeding it. I recall seeing a husband and wife working together on a small plot of land outside Kilokery, crouched on their haunches, cutting bunches of meti (a green vegetable resembling watercress) with sickles, and holding in their mouth the strips of dry grass for binding – they impressed me by the courteous, gentle manner of their speech to one another. Husband and wife will return home at six or seven p.m. The wife will then light the kerosene lamps and prepare the third meal of the day – curded milk, chapatis, potatoes, tomatoes, lady-fingers, carrot, and cabbage. Threequarters of the villagers are entirely vegetarian in their diet, since a majority of them belong to the Brahmin caste. The term ‘Brahmin’ seemed to be used more loosely among them than it is by students of the caste system. A man whose forefathers had belonged to the Khatri, or warrior group, or to the Waish, or merchant group, was entitled to call himself a Brahmin. The menial caste are called Shudra, or Conquered Ones, a relic of ancient enslavement;page 409 though today a man of the menial caste may sit on the Punchayat and offer his opinion among his neighbours.

Bargaining over dowries is a common feature of village politics. The relatives of the prospective bride are heavily mulcted by the bridegroom’s family. Though dowries may include buffaloes, clothes, and cooking utensils, gifts of gold and silver are invariably paid to the father, mother, and sisters of the bridegroom. Nor does the debt cease when the marriage ceremony is over. At festival time the bridegroom’s family receive further gifts of sweets, clothes, and sometimes a little money. A mother-in-law may in some circumstances transfer a portion of her daughter-in-law’s dowry to her own marriageable daughter. Jewellery is the villager’s equivalent of money in the bank. A married woman wears her fortune around her waist, and on her face and arms and legs, in the form of anklets, bangles, a gold or silver belt, nose- rings, earrings, and elaborate jewellery worn on the forehead. One Indian friend assured me that in ancient times there was a deep respect for women, and no bandit, however rough, would rob a woman of her jewellery. The newspapers of modern India, however, have a different tale to tell.

The village headman of Kalekhan was glad to welcome strangers to his house, for good luck would certainly come from such a visit. It was the largest in the village, its doorposts carved with patterns of elephants and leaves. From the basement, storehouses with wooden doors opened on the village street; the house itself was built round a courtyard where heaps of cut hay were piled in corners, and a cow and her calf lay under a large tree. He was the local zemindar, or landowner: a thin, old, moustached man in turban and shawl, wearing a thick, heavy cotton robe and leather slippers. His type exists in a thousand Indian villages. He sat on a bed of plaited cloth (the narrow strips woven on a village loom) and offered me and my Indian companion salted buttermilk to drink. He owned a large share of the mile and a half of open fields between Kalekhan and Kilokery, skirted by the highroad to Delhi and bisected by the sewage-laden waters of one of the town canals. Some of the land also rested in the hands of a Nizamuddin business man, a Hindu from Sind who had lost his property at the time of Partition, and had received temporary possession of this village land as compensation from the Government of India.

The paths through the fields were trodden hard as iron by the bare feet of villagers. A fodder crop of yellow-flowered javi and lucerne stood shoulder high. It is a peaceful place. Bullocks turned a Persian wheel beside the canal: the buckets flashed in the sun, and water poured into the irrigation ditch, flowing out over crops of carrot and turnip. An old peasant prayed and cursed by turns as he prodded the bullocks. The Persian wheel is a modern innovation; until recently all water for irrigation had to be hauled up by rope and bucket. Women crossed the canals on precarious stepping-stones, lifting their saris above the filthy water. When the canal floods, during the monsoonpage 410 season, with the flooding of the nearby Jumna River, it leaves layers of mud in depressions in the fields, and these layers are cut and lifted carefully for use in making pottery and toys, the commonest of village industries. Nothing is ever wasted at Kilokery and Kalekhan. Even the nightsoil is used constantly as manure.

I have seen the village potter at work in Kilokery. The pot is begun on the wheel, a high stone spinning-top which he sets whirling with a pointed stick. Then it is lifted off and moulded by hand, much as a coppersmith would beat out the dents in metal, for the potter pats the clay continually with a wooden spoon-shaped hammer, or thape, while his left hand inside the pot holds a wooden knob, or paindai. Slap! Slap! Slap! The pot grows under his hands while the village children stare. Then the pot is plumped down in a basket mould, with a plug in its mouth, so that the air inside the pot balloons it into shape. The plug is removed and the pot is left ready for firing. All the village water pots in the area are made by this potter, and he also supplies a market in Old Delhi. The simple geometrical decorations have remained unchanged since prehistoric times.

The village potter also makes the small clay lamps which are set outside every house at the time of the Diwali festival. This is the Festival of Lights, held in October or November, in honour of Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of good fortune. The other important festival of the Hindu year is Holi, held in March or April, at the time when winter changes to spring. The origin of the festival is a celebration of the mythical loves of Krishna and the milkmaids. It is difficult to ascertain how seriously the townsmen of Delhi or the villagers of the surrounding country retain and observe the Hindu traditions. One gains the impression that Diwali and Holi mean little more to them than Christmas and Easter mean to a New Zealander who is only nominally Christian: a holiday, a time to lay down tools, a family jollification, of which the religious significance has long been overlaid. The Festival of the Lamps is a time for the giving and receiving of gifts. A few annas and cakes are placed on a saucer with a burning candle as an offering to the goddess in each home. At Holi the children run wild in the streets smearing passers-by with red and blue paint, frequently of an indelible variety. The festivals provide an occasion for an outburst of energy which is habitually crushed by a hard and rigid working routine.

On the other hand there is a certain residuum of religious thought among the common people. The phrase, ‘It is the will of God’, is often on the lips of villagers. In the markets of Old Delhi, coloured prints of Lakshmi, Shivam Kali, and Ganesh rub shoulders with crude still lifes and pictures of Scotch terriers drinking from bowls. The idea of good fortune, success in business or marriage, seems dominant in Hindu popular thought. For this reason astrologers and fortune tellers are consulted regularly at times of crisis and decision. No village marriage can be contemplated if the horoscopes of thepage 411 boy or girl are inauspicious.

At Kilokery a new tube well has been sunk in the yard of the village temple. It had to go down a considerable depth to avoid seepage from the lagoon of water and sewage which lies below the village. The steps of the new well have been decorated with designs and religious inscriptions. The well is more prominent than the temple itself – a small room containing images of Shiva and Kali and Ganesh, where each worshipper comes alone to make his devotions. The custodian of the temple is an ambiguous figure who occupies a position midway between that of priest and that of caretaker. Since any Brahmin can perform the marriage rites or conduct communal prayers, the temple custodian has no privileged status. In ancient days the Brahmins were the sole teachers. Today a schoolhouse stands on a knoll above the path that leads to the village.

On our second visit to Kilokery, my Indian friend and I walked along this path, below a clay bank riddled with holes. Rabbits and snakes lurked there, unlikely companions. The boys of the village were accustomed to chase the rabbits and kill them with sticks. We climbed a well-worn track to the school, accompanied by many of the smallest children, dressed in shirts only and chewing sticks of sugar cane. It was February and a few French marigolds, planted by the children, were growing in a corner of the iron-hard clay yard. There also stood a water pump. In the school itself fifty children sat in rows on mats on the concrete floor, cross-legged, holding wooden slates. They smeared these slates with tailor’s chalk, then wrote upon them with a sharpened wooden pen, dipped in black ink. After each lesson the slates were washed again and rechalked.

With an almost absolute shortage of equipment, the teacher and his young assistant taught mainly from the blackboard, speaking to the class as an entire group. Some simple textbooks were available (pamphlets of a composite nature dealing with social studies and nature study) and these contained lists of questions after each chapter. All teaching was done in Hindi, the regional language of the Delhi State, and the universal official language of India. There were also pamphlets, supplied by the Government, which presented Indian legends and folk tales in dramatic form. These had been produced at Jama Milia, a Moslem College near Ohkla, and distributed to schools through the embryonic school library service. They were most attractively illustrated, and were of quite exceptional standard. Most textbooks in the Indian Schools are poor in quality.

We conversed with the teacher. He was most affable and enthusiastic. His salary would be, at the very highest, £6 a month. It is men like him who form the spearhead of work for literacy in the Indian villages. Later the children demonstrated their dances and plays in the schoolhouse yard. They were fortunate in their teacher. In most Indian primary-schools the three R’s comprise the entire educational schedule. But the little girls of Kilokerypage 412 danced a butterfly dance, waving orange and blue scarves; and their brothers acted a play, which they themselves had constructed, in which an old villager was unwillingly shaved by the village barber. Beyond them one could see the high concrete bridge built to contain the flood waters of the canal in the rainy season, the green irrigated flats between Kilokery and Kalekhan, buffaloes dragging the simple iron-pointed plough, and a grandfather carrying a child on his shoulders up the newly cobbled village street. From this environment the school children had sprung. It was sufficient to sustain them.

1960 (213)