Road to Kamanahalli

IT is harvest time in Kamanahalli and the surrounding villages. The stunted ragi crop is being harvested, stunted for lack of rains during crucial stages of its growth. Reduced grain yield means reduced fodder for the cattle and a desperate cattle-sale is only to be expected before the onset of summer. The beasts of burden of the work season become a burden to the farmers when fodder and water become scarce during summer. When I first came to live in the village, I had been surprised by the employment of milch cows to plough. The material circumstances of most villagers do not allow them the luxury of being sentimental about cattle. Reverence to cattle is shown by giving them a day off from work, usually Mondays, believed to be the day of basava or nandi.

I watched the cotton plants as they drooped in the heat of the noon sun and again standing erect in the evenings as it got cooler. They showed signs of recovery after a couple of rains but then the heavy rains that lashed just when the buds were about to bloom affected the quality and quantity of the yield. Most buds did not open, and from those that opened came out shrivelled cotton, not the normal fluffy white. Puttanna, my neighbour, harvested just one quintal of cotton this year as against the three and a half last year. With a sad face he loaded the cotton stalks on to his bullock cart saying "makes good firewood, burns well."

The coconut trees on my farm are looking healthier but the increase in nuts has not helped as the price of coconuts has fallen to an all time low. Workers ask me for a raise in the wages and I snap back at them "fetch me a better price for my produce." Basamma, a landless labourer, is not concerned about the plight of farmers but she has not been happy with the rains either, because of her leaking roof.

Yet, it is celebration time in Kamanahalli, never mind the bad harvest. Basamma had been talking about marlami festival for almost a month now. The beginning of navaratri festival season starting with mahalaya amavasya, referred to as marlami is an important festival for many agricultural communities living in and around Mysore. Most households of Kamanahalli have bought sheep and goats in preparation for the feast. Basamma's younger son, a school dropout has been taking special care of the goat, fattening it up for slaughter during the festival. The village traditions of agricultural communities, whether land owning or labouring, has little to do with the way navaratri is celebrated and reported. The emphasis here is on ritual offering of food to ancestors and the "meat accepting" deities. Relatives are invited for a meal of rice, ragi mudde and mutton curry. Men folk bring their own liquor in case the hosts do not provide it.

Raji's father has asked her to borrow money from me to buy new clothes for her and her two sisters and all my pleas with her not to borrow has failed. During those early years after Independence, a ministerial colleague of Nehru tried to convince him about the need to impose a ceiling on festival spending to save the poor rural folk from getting into debts. Nehru rejected the suggestion on the grounds that festivals were the only joyful occasions in the otherwise drab lives of the poor. It seemed cruel to Nehru, an aesthete and lover of beauty, to interfere in the cultural life of the people and be the cause of making their life dull and monotonous. Mao and his colleagues in new China thought differently and even the character of the festivals changed. This reminds me of my participation in the Ramadaan festivities in north-eastern Chinese city of Jilin in the 1980s. There was a military style parade, red flags, banners from different Muslim organisations such as from the Muslims belonging to Jilin city, tofu (bean curd) makers unit and many other organisations, speeches by officials, dragon dances, a kind of celebration no different from the celebrations of political holidays in China. I, an ordinary language student, was given a badge to wear that said "honoured guest" and made to sit with officials on the dais. I had then fervently hoped the photographs would not appear in the China Pictorial as testimony to the friendship between the "Indian Peoples" and the "great Chinese Peoples."

Basamma is shamefaced about her poverty and inability to invite me home. Last year she wanted to bring me food but I had refused, a hundred thoughts of all kinds of contamination suddenly came to my middle class mind. My rudeness did not deter her from making the offer again this year. I realised that on festival days even the poor villagers clean and scrub themselves, their utensils, houses, fetch clean water and buy fresh ingredients to cook food, especially if the festival has a religious significance. I decided to go to her house for the festival but she was not happy with the idea and offered to send me food. Mutton curry, ghee rice packed in hot cases and apples specially bought for us. Basamma's relatively well-off daughter had left her prized possessions of steel vessels, mixie and electric iron in the mother's house for safe keeping so that they were not carelessly used in the large joint family into which she had married. Basamma had dreams of her daughter setting up a house of her own some day.

When Basamma came back to work after two days of feasting, she had had enough of the mutton curry and rice. She was overjoyed to learn that we had actually eaten the food. The reason for not inviting me home, she said, was that she did not want me to walk on the Kamanahalli road which was used as an open air toilet especially in the evenings when the elderly and children did not want to go too far in the darkness to answer calls of nature. Little did she know of the many years I spent in Chennai, negotiating my way through all the faeces on either side of the road leading to the Kalakshetra main entrance. The Kalakshetra authorities had erected a "Great Wall" to keep themselves protected from the defecating barbarians. I had then wondered if it wasn't cheaper for them to have constructed a few public toilets. On that road, there was a temple, a mosque and as if that was not enough, a new church of the proselytising type was being built. We are perhaps the only country in the world to keep building places of worship and fighting over it when what people desperately need are toilets. I recently read in an article published in a major newspaper, that 600 million Indians defecate in the open and only 30 per cent of the urban and 3 per cent of the rural Indian population have access to toilets.

Talking to Basamma, I realised the difficulties women, especially pregnant women, menstruating women and young mothers face without access to toilets. Women in Kamanahalli indulged in extra food only during festivals because of the difficulties involved in waking up neighbours in the night to accompany them to answer calls of nature. No wonder thousands of women suffer from bladder related diseases in the country.

The Zilla Panchayats (ZP) of Karnataka launched Nirmala Karnataka scheme to help villagers to build toilets in the villages. Yelwal town has a shop run by the Mysore ZP, appropriately named Nirmala Bazaar, that caters to the sanitary needs of the several surrounding villages. It provides information on sanitation and displays an array of sanitary fittings meant for constructing the squatting-type toilets. The friendly shop assistant, an employee of the ZP tells me that most people are afraid of going to the shop, thinking it is a government office. To attract people to the shop, they stock articles of everyday use such as soaps, detergents, plastic goods of quality, PVC pipes, nuts and bolts. The shop is only two years old and is slowly making an impact in Yelwal and the nearby villages. The ZP provides the sanitary fittings and material worth Rs. 1200 for a single pit and Rs. 2000 for double pit toilets. The applicant is expected to contribute bricks, sand and labour to dig the pits and their contribution equals that of ZP in money terms. The single pit toilets are cheaper to build and most villagers opt for it. The procedure for applying is quite simple and the contribution of ZP varies depending on the economic status of the applicant. The only red tape involved in the process is that the application requires attestation by the Gram Panchayat secretary who can create unnecessary bureaucratic hassles. Some gram panchayats had initially posed problems to the ZP, denying them land to build shops. Panchayats sometimes resent schemes funded by the World Bank and UNICEF (involved in helping village schools to build toilets) because it deals directly with the applicants, leaving no scope for corruption.

A year ago, there was a rule that made it compulsory for those contesting gram panchayat elections to have toilets but now the rule has been done away with. It prevented, for example, those using community toilets from contesting. Community toilets were built in villages that had space constraints to build toilets. Toilets were built a little away from the houses with contribution from individuals eager to have toilet facilities. When ZP visited these villages later, they found that they were being used for storage purposes. It is obvious that success in such work is slow, a matter of convincing, and awareness-building measures. The single pit toilet, though cheaper to build, needed emptying when full. Without an alternate pit, many reverted to old habits of defecating in the open. Many villagers wait until the toilets overflow and houses being so close to one another, the stinking toilets were the cause of fights and disputes between neighbours.

China had community toilets when I travelled in that country. I don't know if they have been abandoned as reminders of a dreary past in this age of globalisation, gloss and aping of the west. The community toilets were actually two long rows of toilets, sometimes ten, fifteen on either side, with a long passage in the middle. They were separated by half-walls on one side and as such, open to view from the opposite side. This did not deter the people from using them. The toilets were long, open drains and now and then but not very often, flood of water was let into the drain that carried the refuse into huge pits from where they were transported to fertilise the fields. The people who carried them were not discriminated against or socially ostracised. Cleaners wore protective garments and were equipped with long brooms and shovels to remove the refuse. The system worked fine, except that they did not provide much privacy to the user. I used to go to the very last toilet, hoping to find no one there which was often the case but sometimes the toilets had two entrances!

I was told that in China, the government honoured those who carried night soil for the service they render to the community. Contrast this with India where we heap discrimination on the people who carry the night soil and thus help maintain a cleaner environment for everybody. Recently, the Standing Parliamentary Committee on Labour and Welfare severely indicted the Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment and expressed dissatisfaction over its efforts to eliminate the practice of carrying night soil. According to a report in this paper, "the Committee reiterated its earlier recommendations and asked Government to draw a definite scheme with proper targets of conversion of dry latrines into wet ones and imparting training so that people engaged in this obnoxious and inhuman work could find alternate occupations." The Ministry could perhaps find ways of assisting schemes such as being undertaken by the Zilla Panchayats to provide toilets in the villages. The Road to Kamanahlli will only keep reminding me, the long way we still have to go to call ourselves a civilised country.

PUSHPA SURENDRA

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