The Heart of India

"Mahatma Gandhi had become the spokesman for the conscience of mankind, a man who made humility and simple truth more powerful than empires."

General George C Marshall

US Secretary of State

According to my Indian host mother, Saturdays in India are intended to be lazy. After sleeping for a virtually unprecedented 10 hours, I have no objection to that suggestion. Unfortunately, it appears as though my professors do. My current To Do list runs an inherent risk of remaining unfulfilled by the end of this weekend, a scenario that does not fill me with joy nor set a desirable tempo for next week. Deep down, though, I know that I would prefer this feeling one thousand times over having too much leisure. Being an American University student, it is practically a part of our DNA that we seek ways to ensure that life remains purposeful and productive. To be candidly honest, I wouldn't have it any other way. Speaking a few weeks ago with one of the three other colleagues on this program, I remarked that I was sleeping well and working out much more than usual, and noted that it seemed I had too much free time. My colleague, laughing, said that if I was sleeping well and staying healthy, she knew I wasn't doing something correctly. Sometimes there is more of AU in me than I will freely admit, but in this case there is no denying the truth in her statement. 

Now then, a recall of the past week. Seven days ago, on Sunday, our program made a few visits to three tribal villages in the state of Maharashtra. A few weeks ago I wrote a subsection of an entry entitled "The Real Village People," referring to a small tribal village located near Durshet, a rural area in the same state. This visit was similar to that experience, albeit much more in depth. We started off with a visit to an agrarian site, where a nationally based Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) has concentrated part of its loan portfolio. In this case, the NGO provided an initial loan to lease a small, one and a half acre tract of land which was not in use by its owner. The lease agreement was for one year, renewable for an unspecified number of times. The land was then used to cultivate a variety of different crops, and one village family was selected by the NGO as the laborers. After one year, that family was able to pay off the loan to the NGO, and had even made enough profit to lease the land for another year without capital from the NGO. The objective of the NGO was thusly completed; the landowner gained from the rent paid for the use of the land, the NGO gained back its initial loan, and one village family that before had had no income now generates enough to lease a one and a half acre plot with their own income. This illustration of how an NGO operates is not unique to India, but it is here that many such initiatives are reaching fruition. With just a small amount of capital and time, an NGO of any size can provide a family with a sustainable source of income, and along with it the opportunity to achieve a better quality of life. 

Our professor who directed the endeavor was himself an Adivasi, or Tribal. He indicated that environmental conservation, a concept that is relatively new in the Western mentality, is an intrinsic part of the village mentality. Additionally, due to the work of the NGO, the villagers have become increasingly aware of the importance of such practices as sanitation and health. The villagers have made substantial changes in their lifestyles that reflect the growing value on these ideas. Livestock that previously inhabited the same quarters as their owners are now sheltered in separate facilities, and levels of alcoholism, once an essential part of Tribal life, has been greatly reduced among the older generation. 

Our second site was a rural public health clinic, a part of the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM). The facility itself was small in comparison to the hospitals that we had seen in the city of Pune, but even with a limited number of staff the clinic still manages to have someone available 24/7. We were able to observe the means by which healthcare in rural India is administered. A registration fee of five rupees (approximately .12 USD) is required from the villagers for access to the clinic, unless the villager in question is below the poverty line set by the government, in which case access is provided free of charge. The clinic included health information featured on wall displays on a number of illnesses and procedures in the local language, Marathi, but our professor expressed his doubts that the displays were adequate in spreading health awareness. The wards for patients, just one room with several beds, were separated by gender, and while we were there our group witnessed a woman being escorted into the female ward by two members of the clinic staff. We later learned that she had ingested poison, but whether it was intentional or accidental was unclear. Of the total number of fatalities in the village, around 10% were due to suicides, a figure that is shockingly high. 

It was in this village that we were able to interact with a few of the villagers. This was a difficult task, as the language barrier was almost absolute. We had a few members of our program staff who spoke Marathi (the villagers did not even speak Hindi), and as such we required their presence at every opportunity. I observed a brief interview with a traditional Indian healer who was being questioned by one of the girls on our program, who herself was interested in studying alternative medicines. The traditional Indian practice is called Ayurvedic medicine, and it is not widely practiced outside of India, unlike other alternative medicines such as Chinese acupuncture. I remember having one brief conversation with this girl about the topic. She had made the point to a friend and me that all organisms have souls. This was a reasonable claim to both of us, and we agreed. She then pointed to a chair that we were sitting on, claiming that it, too, had a soul. My friend and I exchanged uneasy looks, and the conversation abruptly terminated. 

Awkward discourse on spiritually-based non-empirical healing techniques aside, the rest of our visit was as interesting as the first two sites. In the third village we visited an artisanal area in which the NGO assisted local artists in marketing their handiwork at expositions in urban areas such as Delhi and Mumbai. Apart from realizing how worthless I am in terms of my extreme lack of any creative capacity whatsoever, I was amazed by the pride and dignity that each of the villagers took in their work. Whether it was cultivating crops under the midday sun, treating patients in a small clinic hours away from any urban center, or creating small figurines out of paper mache, each of the villagers that we encountered exuded a quiet contentedness in their successes. Though it is not my intention to patronize or to make charged comparisons, I could not help but think of the workforce in the United States, of the vast numbers of people who truly despise the jobs to which they commute everyday. Here, in three small villages of each some several hundred inhabitants, there was a self-assured dignity and pleasure in the quality of life. The people here were exuberant to own a small plot of land and a three room house. Two years ago, the roommate of Miss Chhatrapati Lukeji had a list of "Kimo's Hawaiian Rules" hanging on the wall. The only one that I still remember was Rule Number Two: "The best things in life aren't things." There are few places that I have been to in the world that more perfectly characterize this truth than these three villages. 

We returned to the City of Virtue on Tuesday evening, and the rest of the week was unremarkable. Yesterday, Friday, we watched Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi. It had been years since I had first seen it, and viewing it after having read Gandhi's autobiography helped me to better appreciate the supreme service that Gandhi performed for his country. I have spoken to a number of individuals, mostly Indian, who have been more critical of Gandhi, citing his methodology as being effective but slow moving. A common criticism is that his methods prolonged the British occupation of India, and that had he adopted a more hardline policy the independence of the subcontinent could have been more quickly achieved. 

With the above statements, I could not disagree more. Gandhi was an idealist after my own heart, and whether the term carries a positive or negative connotation reveals much about the beholder. Whether one looks at Gandhi as Bapu (Father) of the nation or as an over-credited, stubborn old man, the fact remains that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, one man with a bamboo stick, went head to head with the British Empire and triumphed. He fought injustice with respect, imperialism with tradition, and prejudice with love. His army was comprised not of soldiers but of his brothers and sisters, children of God. His tactics, which would have been laughable at the highest echelon battle schools of West Point, Sandhurst, or Saint Cyr, proved superior to those of the greatest empire in the world. Such was the morality of his methods that Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela both strove to emulate him in their own great struggles in the United States and South Africa, respectively. Gandhi achieved a victory that India never could have gained through rebellion, and he did it without firing a single bullet. Even after he had peacefully overcome the British, he managed to check violence between the Hindu and Muslim communities across India. Responding to repeated encouragement to lead violent uprisings against the British, Gandhi steadfastly refused, arguing that even if such movements were to triumph, he would remain resolutely opposed to founding the new nation of India on such a violent and destructive legacy.

It is difficult to determine precisely why many feel so strongly about Gandhi. Perhaps it is because he represents the triumph of virtue over injustice, or because of his paradoxically simply and profound wisdom. Perhaps it is because he is an icon who consistently exhibited the best characteristics of humanity at a time when the world order was being dominated by the worst. Perhaps it is because he is a martyr who described himself as a Muslim, a Hindu, a Christian, and a Jew all at once, and thusly appeals to all individuals regardless of their religious backgrounds (maybe not Scientology, if that can be considered a religion).

It is important too to remember that Gandhi considered the Indian village to be the fundamental unit of society. In contrast to the more worldly and liberal thinking Nehru, Gandhi advocated the simplicity of village life as a model for all of India. Though I am no expert, having now visited four tribal villages I now see his logic. I have heard that rural India is the true India, and while I do not necessarily accept that statement there is one significant implication behind it that rings true. Nowhere else is the sense of community as strong as in village India. While this could be argued for any part of the world, India itself is compelling because of its growing social divide. The idea of there being two Indias is the basis for this comparison. On one side, there is traditional and sacred India, with overwhelmingly Hindu values at the core of society. On the other, a modern, secular India is rising, following quickly in the fashion of the Western societies. The community is fracturing, and traditional values have given way to an individualism more characteristic of the West. India's own response to this divide will be a defining element of the 21st century, to say nothing of the lives of her emerging generations.