Forrest Fleischman's blog

Fleeing to the forest

2011-03-10T05:47:00.021-05:00

Refugees hiding deep in the forest near Andhra Pradesh's border with Chattisgarh.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." Many Americans have used this argument to justify the lax gun laws of the US - after all, how will the patriots bring down the tyrants if they have no guns. Edward Abbey, the great prophet of the desert southwest, argued that wilderness was just as essential. It was in the wilderness, in the places beyond the regular paths of ordinary humans, that the patriots could hide, bide their time, and build up their forces.

The history of attmpts to hide in the great American wildernesses, however, leaves something to be desired. The Apaches and the Lakota - and many others in the 19th century fled to the wildernesses, but they were hunted down and died out. Gangs of outlaws still roam about the desert in cowboy movies, but by the dawn of the 20th century, in North America at least, that the days in which wildernesses could provide shelter beyond the reach of formal governance were over.

In his recent book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Southeast Asia, political scientist James Scott expands on this idea. He argues that, while the conventional history of Southeast Asia is one of empires that dominated the fertile rice-growing valleys and fought amongst each other for wealth and for slaves, the history of many of its people consist of fleeing the slave-makers in the valleys, and adopting lifestyles in the steep and thickly forested mountains that would make them resistant to capture, enslavement, and political domination. Their agricultural practices, which favored shifting cultivation and hunting and gathering, insured that they could easily flee from invaders, and not fear starvation due to the loss of stored grain crops. Their religions and languages also adapted to a life of shifting resistance. Ultimately, Scott argues, the ethnic categories we have inherited, which distinguish between the civilized men of the agricultural plains, and the wild men of the hills, are based on political strategies. It is not that the hill-men are primitives who never adopted the ways of settled cultivation, but rather that the hill-men are refugees from the process of state-making and civilization-building, whose cultures developed in response to the oppressive nature of the early state.

While Scott's synthesis is original and based largely on his reading of Southeast Asian history, he freely acknowledges his debts to many other historians of both Southeast Asia and other regions, who have pointed out how ethnic categories grew out of political responses to empire. Sumit Guha, an Indian historian, for example, has made the case (in his book Environment and ethnicity in India, 1200-1991) that the people who we call "tribal" in Central India today are not fundamentally primitive peoples whose primitive ways of life reflect their longstanding, unchanging residence in the area, but are rather people whose ethnicity itself was shaped over the last several centuries by their continuing resistance to empires - Mughal, Maratha, and British, which forced them to adopt the "primitive" ways of the hill-man so that they could hide in remote forest tracts.

I had the good fortune to meet James Scott when he spoke at Indiana about a year ago. I asked him if the communes and radical collectives that I knew from the rural hills of New England, Northern California, Oregon, and southern Indiana were the modern analogue of these primitive hill-men. Scott told me that, as he had said in his book, his argument did not apply to the period after the end of World War II. He said that at this point, the power of the state had become so pervasive that there was no possibility of sustained flight. He gave examples from modern South Asia (the Vietcong spring to mind, but Scott, being a regional expert, had more complete examples to discuss) of groups that had fled to the hills, but were ultimately destroyed by the superior firepower of modern armies, coaxed into returning to the state by promises of participation in new urban wealth, or, in the case of the Vietcong, succeeded only to harness themselves to the state machinery.

Regardless of Scott's arguments about the overwhelming power of modern governance systems, there are still people hiding out in the forest. Their complicated stories can teach us alot about the possibilities for freedom and stability in modern societies.

A few mornings ago, I set off to meet a rural health worker named Haneef. My research assistant and I were staying in a small coal-mining city in Andhra Pradesh near the Chattisgarh border. We had meet Haneef a few days before at the offices of the Integrated Tribal Development Agency in a nearby city. The Tribals, or Adivasis (meaning original inhabitants), are a diverse group of peoples who together constitute a little less than 10% of India's population. As the name implies, they are said to have been the original inhabitants of India, although such theories about the origins and peopling of India are highly speculative and deeply controversial. They are distinguished today, however, by the poorest indicators of human development of any identifiable group in Indian society - poorer even than the former untouchables, now generally known as Dalits (oppressed) or scheduled castes.

In an attempt to address the "backwardness" of tribal people, the government of Andhra Pradesh many years ago set up a series of Integrated Tribal Development Agencies in the tribal areas of the state (similar exercises were conducted in many other states). The idea is that development assistance to the tribals will be facilitated by a coordinating agency that oversees all development programs in the tribal area. There is little evidence that the existence of the Agencies have done much to help the tribal people - by reputation the office is staffed by cast-offs from other administrative agencies, and headed by a junior official - just out of training in the elite Indian Administrative Service - who lacks the skills and experience to make things work - that is - if his urban background gives him any interest in the problems of rural development in the first place. I met the Project Officer. He lives in a large air-conditioned bungalow in the back of the office complex, and when I arrived, the sprinklers were watering the lawn, and a driver was washing one of his 3 brand new (government owned) SUVs. In the office, I met a man who looked like he might have just walked out of an IU fraternity. He wore a tight t-shirt with a complicated rock-band style decoration on it, blue jeans, and his thick, gym-toned muscles bulged out of it. His watch band was gold. He couldn't have been more than 25 years old, and he could have walked straight out of an IU fraternity. Among other things, I asked him if he could introduce me to any NGOs working with tribals. That was how I met Haneef.

After a short conversation, Haneef suggested that he could take us to the field to see his work. He said he was a RMP (I think this stands for Registered Medical Practitioner - it means some kind of low-level health worker), who had been working for many years in tribal areas. He and his colleagues doing similar work had formed an organization to support their charitable work, and they had cooperated with groups like Doctors Without Borders and Human Rights Watch. A government holiday was coming up - Shivratri - and since I study the government, I knew I would have little of my normal work to do. I asked Haneef if he could take us on that day. Speaking like a brave Gandhian, Haneef said that a service worker takes no holidays - presumably as a Muslim he was not planning on celebrating the Shaivite holiday.

The village where Haneef wanted us to meet him was about equidistant from his home and the city where we were staying. To get there, Haneef suggested that we could take a bus, but after inquiring at the bus stand, we found that bus service to that village had been stopped. Apparently there were many share autorickshaws heading in that direction, and the people at the bus stand helpfully told us which street corner these autorickshaws leave from. If you've ever travelled in india, then the autorickshaw will be familiar to you. In urban areas the autorickshaw is the standard private taxi-type vehicle - it is a 3 wheeled vehicle, usually run by a small (and very dirty) 2 stroke engine. The driver sits in front and uses controls that are similar to a motorcycle's controls, while the seat in the back accommodates 3 passengers, plus some room for luggage. Auto drivers (at least the honest ones) charge rs. 10 (25 cents) per km, most of which goes to gas and maintenance of their vehicles. In the rural areas, however, the auto is transformed into a bus with essentially unlimited seating. 4 people can squeeze into the back seat, while another four can squeeze onto the railing facing the backseat, and 3 can squeeze in next to the driver in front. Another can sit on the outside railing - and sometimes you'll see 3 men hanging off the running board in the rear. It isn't comfortable, but it does mean that people who live far from bus routes and are too poor to afford a motorcycle can get around. Our auto never got that crowded, peaking out at 9 passengers.
crowded autorickshaws, waiting for a train to pass.

After an hour's ride through countryside we could barely see between the stuffed in bodies in the auto, we arrived in the village. It was now midday, and while summer is just beginning here in India, the blazing midday sun was crippling. I sought the shade of a pipal tree. Almost immediately a number of boys from the village gathered around us. In these circumstances it is tempting to say that I attract attention because I am white - but my sense was that the villagers were as curious about my research assistant as they were about me. In a remote village, strangers attract attention, regardless of their alien characteristics.

We called Haneef (this may be remote rural India, but in a nation with 600 million mobile phone subscribers, it isn't easy to find places without a mobile network). He told us he was doing some work in a neighboring village, and we could wait for him to come, or we could see if we could catch an auto headed in that direction. We soon found an auto going in that direction. Apparently someone was planning a party, as the auto was loaded with boxes of liquor and beer bottles. We sat on top of the boxes, our heads bent down to avoid colliding with the roof on the bumpy road.

We found Haneef waiting for us on his motorcycle by the side of the road. My assistant and I squeezed onto the back of the motorcycle, and we drove down a narrow paved side road.
For a couple kilometers we passed through intermittent fields of cotton and scrubby forest. Cotton - the chief cash crop of this region - is an amazing plant. These dry upland fields have no irrigation, and the last rains ended 6 months ago. The cotton plants don't look as lush as they did in October, but they are still pumping out tufts of white threads. The fields were obviously cut out of the forest recently - if you look carefully at this picture you can see a teak tree sprouting up from its stump right in the middle of the cotton field. The people of this region traditionally practiced podu, or shifting cultivation in these uplands. This practice, although it sustained people for thousands of years, has always been deplored by foresters (who valued forests for the timber they produced, not for the fertile soil they created), who succeeded in having it outlawed more than a century ago. Before roads were built, however, the presence of law enforcement in these villages was weak. More recently, in the 1980s and 1990s, this area was controlled by Maoist insurgents known as the People's War Group. The Maoists actively kept the foresters from enforcing their laws in the remote areas, and supported encroachment of government lands by the poor.

In the early part of the last decade, the Andhra Pradesh government adopted a more aggressive stance towards the Maoist rebels, and successfully drove most of them over the border into neighboring areas of Maharashtra, Chattisgarh, and Orissa states. The Maoists consolidated their hold over the dense remote forest areas across the border (to give you an idea of what this means, you might read this highly favorable article on the Maoists in Chattisgarh by Arundhati Roy). In 2005, the state of Chattisgarh began sponsoring a citizens militia to counter the Maoists, and the forests erupted into violence. The citizens militia, with support from the police, would occupy the villages in the daytime, persecuting and executing suspected Maoists and their cooperators, while at night the Maoists would occupy the same villages, doing the same to the suspected police collaborators. Haneef was taking us to a village of people who had fled the conflict, crossing the border into Andhra Pradesh. Indians love to use acronyms, so Haneef told us that they were IDPs (Internally Displaced People), but a simpler term might be refugees.
The village was strikingly different from the neighboring villages we had come through. I would never say that those villages were well-off - the people were obviously of limited means - but the electrical lines running from house to house, the stores selling biscuits and sodas and sim cards, and the government buildings - school, village hall, bus stop - all indicated some level of disposable income. Cows and buffalo roamed the streets. Even if many of the houses in the village were mud huts with thatched roofs, they were large and well built, and the village centers were invariably populated with a few substantial brick and mortar buildings - signs of the beginnings of some rural prosperity.

This village, however, had no sign of any services. The houses were tiny huts made of small trees stuck into the ground. There were no cattle, just a few chickens pecking in the cleanswept dirt surrounding the home. The surrounding forest loomed in close around the village.

It being the middle of the day, few people were home. Most of them spoke none of the 5 languages my research assistant knows - they were Koya speakers - but there was one man who spoke some Telugu, and Haneef knew a bit of Koya, so we sat down on a small woven cot under the shade of a small open hut, and started to converse.

Koya women and children - refugees from conflict in neighboring Chattisgarh - in front of their home. There isn't any scale in any of these pictures, but as you might expect, these people were all very short - indicating their poor nutritional status.

They told us that the residents of this village - about 20 households - had always moved back and forth across the border - coming to Andhra Pradesh seasonally to look for work picking chillies in the valley of the Godavari River, and returning to their farms in Chattisgarh during the rains to plant their own fields with rice. In 2006, concerned about the conflict, they decided to stay in Andhra Pradesh. At first they settled in an area inside the forest, but after a couple of years, Forest Department officials came and burned their homes. Haneef's organization, SITARA (Society for Integrated Tribal and Rural Action), had helped feed them after their homes were destroyed. In 2008, they established the current village, on land which they claimed belonged to the Revenue Department, and was thus fair game for establishing a village. They had no agricultural land here in Andhra, and had left their livestock behind in Chattisgarh. Here they made their living as casual agricultural laborers - picking cotton in the fields of the neighboring villages. It is a fragile existence. Up until recently, they had received no assistance from any sort of formal sources, but recently, with the help of volunteers from SITARA, they had obtained temporary ration cards, entitling them to purchase limited amounts of basic supplies (rice, dal, sugar, kerosene) at highly subsidized rates.
Typically when a few men show up in an Indian village, it is the local men who do all the talking. This young woman - who looked like she might be 15 or 16 - came out of one of the huts, and spoke confidently to us about the situation in the village. I was surprised. I later found out from Haneef that she was visiting her sister here, but lived in another refugee camp closer to town. Unlike most of the children in the camps, she had attended some school, where she had learned to speak Telugu. Now she was an active volunteer with Haneef's organization, helping the other refugees obtain government services, and encouraging the families to send their children to school.

Haneef suggested that we could return here later, but first we should visit some other villages. Again, my assistant and I climbed onto the back of the motorcycle, and we took off, driving back to the main road. I wrapped a light cotton cloth around my head to protect myself from the blazing sun and dust.
After several kilometers, we turned down a one-lane dirt road, which we must have followed for half an hour. The road wound through a fertile valley, bounded on both sides by low forested hills. Most of the fields, such as those in the picture above, were old paddy fields, the rice straw now stacked in great piles to provide feed for the cattle during the dry summer. In some places we found fields of cotton and toor dal - toor dal or pigeon pea is the most commonly consumed bean in this region, and the local varieties grow like small trees - I saw bushes that were 10-12 ft high. In a few places, we saw irrigated fields where the year's second crop of rice was growing, a vibrant electric green against the arid backdrop of greys and browns.

As we drove Haneef told us that many of the refugees from Chattisgarh, like the people we had just met, had formerly been seasonal migrants to the area. The internal borders of India are porous, and both sides of the border are occupied by Koya speakers, although by some accounts, the Koyas of Chattisgarh are not recognized as tribals here in Andhra Pradesh (as the tribal identity is based on place, the government only recognizes people as tribal if they are living in their supposed ancestral territory). When the conflicts began, seasonal migration turned into settlement. Haneef also told us that many of the refugees people who had actively opposed the Maoists. Since the Maoists lived in the forest (where they can hide from the police), they are able to prevent their local opponents from accessing forest produce. Gathering forest products is one of the main livelihood strategies of the poor, and so, according to Haneef, it is the loss of access to forest products, as much as the violence, which has driven the people to move. Of course, here in Andhra Pradesh, the migrants are invariably suspected of being Maoists, fleeing the Chattisgarh police.
One village seemed to be celebrating the holiday with a big volleyball tournament.
The road was not in very good condition, and at times we had to get of the motorcycle to cross ditches or fallen trees. Past a final village, and the road narrowed to little more than a path, as it wound around a reservoir, where ghostly dead trees stood in the drying mud at the edge of the dwindling water. Now we entered the forest, and the path wound through the trees, and then widened out to another village.
The situation here was similar to what we had found before. Few people could speak to us in Telugu or Hindi, and we had to rely on Haneef's translations from Koya. The village, however, seemed slightly more stable - many of the homes were roofed with tiles and had proper mud walls. The villagers told us that some of the residents had come to the area in 2005, and had been able to obtain proper ration cards. They have moved to this site in the forest because it is remote enough that the Forest Department officials will not bother them here - as I myself have seen, forest officials are reluctant to venture beyond the main roads into the interior of the forest. They are free, it seems to cut the forest for their agricultural fields, and sell the resulting timber in neighboring villages. They are also engaged in gathering non-timber forest products - of the kind that were closed off to them by the Maoists back home.

A Koya family - the girl is grinding a chutney out of chilies and tomatoes.

The mother of the same family.
Tamarind drying in the sun. Their village site is surrounded by old tamarind trees, which implies that it may have been a village in the past, as Tamarind is native to East Africa and only partially naturalized in India.
Another family.
A man weaving bamboo to create the cover of a drum. The drum was to be made out of a 3 foot long log, which had been completely hollowed out.
Brooms made of wild grasses drying on the rooftop.

Haneef told us that there was another village over the other side of the mountain - he thought it was 10 km away. He had never been there himself, but then he suggested that we go there.

oon we were again driving down a narrow path through the forest.
We soon came to the Podu fields created by the village we had just visited - clearings of a few acres, where trees were being felled, logs cut and squared roughly by axe to be sold in the local (illegal) timber markets. Nothing was growing, but in the rainy season, the villagers will grow crops of local varieties of millets and dals, the core of their subsistence economy.
The going was rough - in fact, the path was barely passable by motorcycle, and repeatedly, My assistant and I got down to let Haneef steer the bike across treacherous rocks as we climbed the hillside.

By now the air was cooling - it was 3 pm, and the heat of the day was gone. We realized that we couldn't continue on the motorcycle , and so we stopped to rest in the shade, while we waited for some walkers we had passed to catch up with us. A cool breeze was flowing through the forest.
When they arrived, Haneef tried to talk to them. They spoke no Telugu or Hindi, and were drunk with the liquor they had purchased after selling their wares in the nearby market, so it was difficult to find out, but Haneef was able to learn from them that we were only about a 20 minute walk from the village. We followed the path slowly downhill, running parallel to a ravine. The ravine was full of mango trees, and we were level with their tops, so we could see the spikes of small white flowers rising out of their branches.
As we rounded a corner, we heard noise. I was a little nervous - we were deep inside of a forest known for tigers and Maoists. We then saw about a dozen men walking slowly towards us, pushing bicycles. Each bicycle had one or two large logs strapped to it crosswise. Many of the logs looked to be 12x12 or larger, and were roughly hand squared with an axe.
Here is a closer view of the bicycle transport of heavy logs. We later found out that each one of these logs might fetch rs. 400 or 500 (about $10) in the illegal timber markets in the nearby villages. This is a substantial sum - 4 or 5 days wages for a typical male agricultural laborer. But it will take these men most of the day simply to move the logs to the market - not to mention the work of felling the large trees and squaring the logs using small axes. The work is illegal. Of course, it seems that Forest Department officials are unaware of the remote villages popping up (I'm not certain exactly where I was, as I had no detailed map of the area with me, but I'm fairly certain this entire forest was inside of a wildlife sanctuary). As I side, forest officials don't like to venture of their motorcycles into these remote areas. On the other hand, they do monitor forest cover at the head office in Hyderabad by purchasing detailed annual satellite imagery. But regardless of the threat to the remote villages, bringing timber to markets has its own risk. If the forest officers are doing their job by the books, they will confiscate any timber that is not accompanied by a proper transit permit (timber felling in India is only permitted as per working plans sanctioned by the Government of India, and given the generally poor state of forests in this region, the local working plans do not include any felling). In reality, however, the forest guards are more likely to take a substantial bribe - perhaps half the cost of the material - than they are to confiscate.

The men told us that they had run out of rice at home, and so now they were taking logs to sell. Sure enough, when we were returning, we found the same men making their way back to the village, with sacks of rice on their bicycles.

As we descended the hill into the ravine, we started to see cattle and goats moving in the thick, streamside forest. Although many streams have dried up by this time of year, this was a good stream, and still had a small trickle of water in it. Across the stream, the land rose slightly, and then opened out into a large clearing. We could see a small village, up against the forest on the other side of the clearing, and beyond it rose another range of hills. In the immediate foreground, we saw a young woman and a couple children standing in a pool of mud.
We walked over to the mud puddle, and found that the woman was drawing water out of a hollow tree, which had been driven into the ground. I looked down, and saw that about 5 feet down, there was water that at least was not brown with mud. Haneef told me that when he does his medical work in these refugee villages, he primarily treats 3 diseases: Malaria, Typhoid, and Scabies. It did not look like he approved of the water in the tree well, and I noticed that neither he nor my assistant drank any water while we were in the village (and in an usual twist on Indian hospitality, we were not offered any water or tea. This in and of itself is highly unusual). Haneef asked, and we found out that these children were not in school - in fact, none of the village children had attended school for quite some time.
We followed the young woman through a grove of trees - the underbrush had been cleared and it looked like some crops had been grown there during the rainy season - we crossed some open land - where we saw stumps of large trees, and next to them, the boles of trees in various states of being cut into proper beams that would be sold to the market, and saw where the villagers had built a 5 foot high dam to impound the water of a seasonal stream - an impressive work of collective effort.
The water behind the dam was now no more than a puddle, where the buffalo and cattle gathred to drink. Then we came into the village.
One of the striking things about this village, and indeed all 3 of the refugee settlements we visited - was its cleanliness. Every inch of the courtyard was swept clean. Arundhati Roy, in the article I linked to above on the Maoists of Chattisgarh, made a similar comment about the cleanliness of the forest villages. She interpreted this as a sign of some kind of moral superiority amongst these remote revolutionaries. Being less prone to totalizing morality than Roy, I think the cleanliness of the village is not a result of some high moral virtue, but rather the result of poverty and remoteness: these people simply can't buy the kinds of plastic items that float along the roadside in the typical central Indian village. Still, there seemed to be something beautiful about life in this simple hand-made homes, surrounded by rolling hills and wild forests, in a place so remote that the Forest Department would never come and chase you out for encroaching the forest land.
We sat down in the front porch of one of the huts, where Haneef proceeded to open his medical equipment bag, and disabuse me of any feeling of romanticism I might have had about life among a community of subsistence agriculturalists deep inside of the forest. The first patient was a sturdy young boy who looked like he might be about 12 years old. He was leaning on a bamboo staff, and limping. Haneef couldn't give him a clear diagnosis using the tools he carried in his small handbag, but he reported that the boy's diastolic blood pressure was unusually low. He gave the boy some painkillers and, as with everyone he treated, some chloroquine (an anti-malarial drug which is no longer recommended for travelers to Asia, as resistant strains are apparently widespread - if anyone has further information on this, I would be interested). The boy understood only a small amount of Telugu, and Haneef tried to communicate to him that he should go to the Integrated Tribal Development Agency hospital in Haneef's hometown - a 3 hour journey if you own a motorcycle - it will probably take the boy a whole day - to get examined by a specialist. Haneef asked whether the boy - or his peers were in school. Apparently some of them had gone to school a while back, but had returned to the village after a month or so.
Another man - the small man who'd drunkenly failed to give us directions earlier - complained, using signs, of aches and pains all over his body. I wondered if this was due to a health problem, or due to a combination of heavy labor and alcohol, which he may have taken simply to ease the pain. 2 women's upper bodies were covered with sores - scabies, said Haneef. It could be treated with some antibiotics, but he emphasized that regular washing was the best treatment. The villagers do have a year-round water source in the tree-trunk well we'd seen earlier - but it is a long way to carry all of your drinking, cooking, and washing water.
A younger boy came over now, also limping and leaning on a bamboo staff. A small cut on his toe was deeply infected - the kind of sickness that simple washing could prevent. Haneef gave him some antibiotics, and told him to wash the wound regularly.
Villagers gather round to watch Haneef give medical care.

We found that a man from a nearby village was visiting today, and as an Andhra Pradesh resident, he could translate between Telugu and Koya. He was carrying a large axe, and was interested in the prepared beams that were sitting on the edge of the village, so we surmised that he may have been a professional timber smuggler, visiting his sources. My assistant noticed that there were no old people in the village, and so asked the man what he knew about the old people. We learned that the people who had settled here were actually from central Chattisgarh. They had been landless there, and so had moved south into the forests of southern Chattisgarh to make a living collecting forest produce. The Maoists had then driven them out, and so they had come to settle here. The elders who were not strong enough for such arduous journeys had stayed behind in their native villages.
There were many small children running around the village. Most were naked, and appeared to be poorly nourished.

It was getting late, and Haneef suggested that it was time to leave. We walked back through the forest to his bike, and then drove back. As we went, we overtook some of the men who were still transporting their timber to the markets. They were resting by the reservoir, and one was fixing a flat tire. Looking at the landscape of dead trees in the reservoir, and the small hungry men bringing their dead trees to market by the most laborious contraptions, I realized that I was viewing a great metaphor for what has happened to India's forests.
When I got home my mind was still abuzz with the images I had seen. I have been to alot of very remote parts of the world - most notably the southern part of the Peruvian Amazon and Northern Ontario - but I had never met people before whose lives were so divorced from modern industrial civilization. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I'd ever been to a place before with so little electricity. Even in the Amazon, I remember people watching soccer matches on battery operated televisions. When I arrived in a remote Cree village on the edge of James Bay, after paddling down a river in a canoe for 14 days without seeing a soul, I found that nearly every resident of Fort Albany owned an F-150 pickup truck (although there were only 5 km of road to drive them on). But it would be a mistake to think of these people as primitive. They were living this primitive and extraordinarily difficult life precisely because they were refugees from another society. And it wasn't merely Maoist violence that had driven them here - in fact, their native villages were largely unaffected by the Maoist violence - it was in the places that they'd migrated to in search of economic opportunity that they'd run into trouble with the Maoists. They also said that they might go back if things got better there.

Haneef's organization is working to help the internally displaced people, but as he readily admitted to me, they mostly work with the people who live near roads. There isn't a whole lot they can do to help the people who choose to live way out in the jungle. These are the people who, to return to James Scott, have sought out being ungoverned. I would distinguish them sharply from the violent Maoists, who are using the forests to hide out as they prepare a campaign to replace the negative aspects of the Indian state with their own version of power and authority - one that, to judge from the history of successful Maoist revolutions elsewhere, would be far more violent and oppressive, at least in its initial stages, than any of the very real failings of democratic India.

Narratives about economic and political oppression in rural central India to portray the villagers as the helpless victims of a massive violent and oppressive political system. This is the narrative you will find in Arundhati Roy's recent writing, linked above, in which she portrays the Maoist revolutionaries as valiant fighters against a massive oppressive system called the Indian State (and in Arundhati's case, globalization and America too). It is also the narrative of writers such as P. Sainath, who look not to the Maoists, but to the Indian state, as the potential source for alleviation of these problems. This is also he narrative you hear from the officials of the developmental state, who propose "development" as the way to defeat Maoism, and propose massive schemes for the building of roads and industrial facilities in the rural areas. A forest official I spoke to recently was accused of being a Maoist by one of these developmental officials because he had spoken out against the illegal diversion of forest lands to industrial use in a remote area.

Sadly, all of these perspectives miss a few important things about life in rural India.

The first is that the character of people's lives is rarely shaped by grand narratives, but by everyday circumstances. As Anirudh Krishna's work on pathways into and out of poverty has shown, it is often the little things that count. Krishna's surveys in Andhra Pradesh located few people who had directly benefited from the massive scale government spending on "development," which, as is well documented, largely benefits existing elites. People escape poverty not when there is a fundamental change in the relations of society, but when improved access to irrigation and credit, or an opportunity for a low-paying job in the informal sector in a city, give them a little bit more income. They more often fall into poverty because of minor illnesses that keep them from working than from massive scale war and violence. The violence in Chattisgarh is terrible, but it is worth putting it into perspective. In the worst years, independent estimates have placed the death rate due to the Maoist conflict in Chattisgarh at around 350 people in a population of 20 million. By comparison New York City, the safest large American city today, has a murder rate of around 500 people among only 8 million residents. In 1990, at the peak of the crack cocaine epidemic, there were 2250 murders in New York. And in fact, among all of the refugees I met along the border, none had personally experienced violence as a result of the Maoist conflict. The Maoist conflict, however, combined with persistent poverty and lack of opportunity, had pushed them to seek out greener pastures in a nearby area.

The issue of everyday circumstances also has a bearing on the kinds of solutions that help people. The Maoists argue that Indian society is fundamentally corrupt and needs to be overthrown. Their chosen solution, the launching of an armed rebellion based in the poorest regions of the country, appears not only to have little chance of success, but also to have substantially worsened life for many of the most vulnerable. The Indian Government, by contrast, is preparing to throw an increasingly large pot of money at the poor districts in the name of development. As I have mentioned, much of this money goes to benefit a relatively small elite, and little of it has the intended effects on the rural poor. Both of these are totalizing narratives. In order to achieve revolution (in the Maoist worldview) or development (in the developmentalist worldview) it is necessary to sacrifice everything. Thus, in the name of development, the Indian government is promoting streamlined environmental reviews for industrial projects in Maoist-affected districts - ignoring the fact that it is the rural poor who are most dependent on natural resources, and least likely to benefit from industrial development.

As I hope to write more about, there is, however, an alternative worldview that, if not so coherently expressed, is still actively shaping local life in India. This is the worldview of ordinary people like Haneef, who are devoting their lives to bringing improved health services to the disempowered, and serving as brokers in bringing existing state services to the rural areas (Krishna's work shows that the single most powerful anti-poverty intervention in most parts of the world is likely to be the provision of reliable, affordable health care). It is also the worldview of the confident girl we met in the first village who is going to school, and volunteering her time to help her fellow tribal refugees negotiate through a complex government system. In this worldview, there is no single Solution, but many small solutions. While Government can play a role in facilitating these solutions, they, by necessity must be co-produced by the people themselves.

It would be easy to portray the refugees - particularly the very impoverished people I met in the remote 3rd village - as helpless victims of a failed state and a violent revolution. They are certainly victims, but their lives show an incredible amount of resistance and positive force. Escaping the poverty and violence of their homes, they are attempting to start anew in a new place. The Forest Department will surely see them as encroachers in a valuable wildlife sanctuary. The new place is not particularly promising. But if we insist on seeing them only as victims and encroachers, we will miss a fundamental aspect of the human condition - the ability for reinvention. My great grandparents came to America as economic and religious refugees, and my own parents fled the violent collapse of New York City (which as I've mentioned, was far more violent than contemporary Chattisgarh) to make a new life in rural Western Massachusetts. I don't sit around proclaiming my victimhood - instead I celebrate the fact that these flights led ultimately to a better life for our family than we could have ever achieved as Jews in Poland. Seen in this light, the question ceases to be - how can we succor these poor victims - and becomes - how can we aid these victims in taking advantage of their new situation in order to create better lives?

I will now return to the puzzle I began with. As you may remember if you've made it this far through my writing, I asked James Scott if the radical communities I knew from the rural US were analogous to the ungoverned hill people of southeast Asia. I already said that Scott said that his arguments were probably not applicable to the late 20th century. But I left out one important piece of his answer. The histories of the communities I know well in the rural US are definitely the histories of people escaping oppressive political and social situations. For example, many of the communes I know from southeastern Vermont were formed in the late 1960s from a mixture of anti-war and civil rights activists and gay people, all of whom were facing significant police repression in Boston and New York. When they moved to a run-down old farm on rocky land in rural Vermont, no one bothered them anymore. In fact, they emerged to become leaders of a revitalization of the poor rural communities they had moved to. Scott told me that governance in the US (and probably in Europe and some other fairly developed countries) differed fundamentally from governance in many developing countries because while governance - even pro-developmental, democratic governance - in developing countries sought to remake citizens in a new mold, governance in the US facilitated the ability of people to express and create a world that they wanted.

Scott's comment was an offhand response to a poorly formed question, so I would not take it as a literal truth, but I think it raises some interesting questions: How can we create a governance system that facilitates people's best impulses, without forcing them into predetermined social roles? And in light of numerous recent corruption scandals in India, we might also ask, how can we create a social system that funnels people's energy in socially constructive directions?

The Forrestcast: Intercontinental Locational Instability

2011-02-12T22:43:00.004-05:00

I've been putting together some plans, and people have started asking about them, so I thought it was time to publish them. As the title implies, I'm going to be moving around alot over the next 6-8 months. This is not really a change: I've already been moving around alot. What is a change is that it seems I will be less in rural India and more in the US.

Brief Summary: in India until 23rd March, in Bloomington from 24th-29th March, in Boston 29-30th, meditation retreat from 30th March-10th April, at parents' house in Amherst from 10th April-23rd April, in NYC on 23-24th, back to Bloomington on 24th night. In Bloomington for May and June (probably going to a conference in Madison in early June), back in India in July/August, back in Bloomington for 2011-12 academic year. Probable trip to California to attend a wedding at some point.

See below for the details:

Right now: I'm in Nagpur, at the office of Shodh, one of the main organizations that has been helping me with my research. One of the reasons I am here is I had stored a large number of books and files here, which had to be shipped back to the US. This was a rather entertaining experience, which you can read about here (this is a link to a website for Indian travellers and expats living in India - I thought my information would be useful to them).

On Monday night, the 14th of February, my research assistant and I are taking an overnight train to Khammam - a city in Andhra Pradesh. I will be studying a forest division in Khammam District as the 8th and final division in my dissertation. I expect to be in Khammam approximately 3 weeks, after which I will return to Hyderabad - on approximately March 7th. There is a chance of a short diversion to re-visit some friends I made while doing fieldwork in Adilabad, but no promises at this point.

In Hyderabad, I have a bunch of follow-up interviews to do with some senior policy-makers, and a few NGO type people I still need to meet. I also have more books that need to be shipped from there.

I leave Hyderabad on the night of the 17th of March - on an overnight train to Nagpur, where I will spend the Holi holiday with the friends I've made in my stay here.

On the night of March 20th, I take yet another overnight train to Delhi. I will be in Delhi for just 2 nights and 3 days. I have some final wrap-up kinds of work to do before I return to the US, and some friends to visit.

I'm flying out of Delhi on the night of the 23rd - my plane leaves after midnight so technically speaking, it is the 24th. I'm flying non-stop to Chicago, and then connecting to Indianapolis, where I arrive at 10 AM on the morning of Thursday the 24th of March. If anyone is interested, I would be really excited about getting a ride back from the airport, and will most likely need some help doing things like reconnecting the phone and internet in my house, getting some food (I no longer own a car), and readjusting to life in America.

Some people have been asking me if my return at the end of March means I've finished my fieldwork sooner than expected. I think when I left the US in May, I was telling people that I would be coming back between March and August, but I was never very sure how long fieldwork would take. Fieldwork has gone well, and I was able to meet with members of my research committee in January when they came to Hyderabad for a conference. At that time I explained to them what work I had accomplished, and what remains. There is always more work that *could* be done, but they advised me that the work I was planning to complete by the end of March would be sufficient.

There is more follow-up work I will have to do, but there are a few reasons why I think this work would be better accomplished on a follow up visit during July/August than by staying on in April and May. The primary reason is that April and May is summer in my study region, and summer in central India is notoriously hot - temperatures regularly top 120 F, and rarely drop below 90 F, even at night. My Indian friends tell me that it is impossible to work effectively in this heat. I'm from New England, and I think it is hot here in winter when everyone else is shivering and complaining of the cold. I'm not confident I'd make it when it is 120 degrees every day. I find the rainy season in central India - July and August - to be really quite pleasant - warm and wet, but not too hot, nor too wet. So I'll be much more capable of completing the necessary work in the rains than during the heat. A second reason is that I want to take the time to organize my notes, review what I've learned, and start some writing, and then come back and have an opportunity to present some preliminary results and ask questions about the missing pieces. A third reason is that my research visa expires on the 25th of March. While it appears that it isn't impossible to renew, it does sound like a big hassle, and thus, it seems to make more sense to go back to the US before the expiration, and get a new visa for my next trip.

I think that readjusting to life in the US will be difficult, but there are actually 2 adjustments. One, which I've done a couple times now, is the adjustment from India to the US - which are obviously extremely different cultures and societies. The second adjustment is from the life of a wandering field research to the life of a stationary writer. To be honest, I think I need to get away from the subject for a little while before I can sit down and start writing and organizing. For this reason, I've decided to take a break from research and go on a 10-day Vipassana Retreat, at the Vipassana Meditation Center in Shelburne Falls, MA. (For those who want to know more about why I do this, perhaps this excerpt of an essay by my father will help clarify). On the way there, I will be stopping in Boston to visit my college housemate David & his family on the 29th of March. David is a PhD student in Anthropology at Harvard, and lives somewhere in the Cambridge area, so if you are around there and want to try to meet up, let me know. The actual meditation course runs from the 30th March until the 10th of April.

After the meditation course I'm going to spend a couple weeks with my parents - probably mostly in Amherst, but maybe also in Guilford. My parents' house was affected by a major natural disaster last spring: some kind of a microburst knocked down every tree on their property. The beautiful old maple tree that shaded the south side of the house collapsed onto the garage (thankfully it didn't collapse on the house!), and the result is a landscaping nightmare... and damages estimated around $50,000. I think my parents could use some strong hands to help move some dirt around and plant some new trees, and I know I could use the discipline of some heavy physical labor. If you're around Western MA in mid April and want to hang out, I might try to rope you into helping out.

I plan to return to Bloomington on April 24th, stopping the night of the 23rd to visit another college friend, Jenny, in Manhattan. If you're in NYC and want to meet up, let me know.

The plan is to stay in Bloomington all of May and June, and write. There is also a garden to tend, of course, and I've volunteered to open my garden to visitors as an educational practice on Thursdays in May from 4-6 pm, in association with the Bloomington Free Skool's spring classes. I'm also planning to attend the International Symposium on Society and Resource Management in Madison, Wisc on June 4-8.

At some point in July and August I will be back in India. At a minimum, I will be presenting preliminary results to known audiences in Hyderabad, Nagpur, and Delhi. There are possibilities elsewhere, and I am likely to revisit friends I've made in a couple of my field sites. The duration of the trip is very much up in the air, as are the full countours - there has been talk, for example, of a trip up into the Himalayas, which I'm still open to, but I think I've decided it is not a priority. I'd like to go visit Sean who will be at Dhammagiri again (even though I know it is very wet there in the rainy season), and I might try to sit another 10-day course there or at the lovely center in Nagpur, or maybe even in Hyderabad or at Nagarjuna Sagar, if I can find the time.

Some of this depends on weddings. There are rumors of weddings being planned in California. It has been a long time... but there is at least one I've heard about that I really am going to try not to miss. If I can make it to the West Coast, there are many folks I'd like to visit. Timings, though, are yet to be announced.

I'm planning on being in Bloomington for the entire 2011-12 academic year. I've got 1 year of fellowship support remaining, and my aim is to complete my dissertation during this year. Since this is the last year that I've got a guaranteed fellowship (I had 5 years so I can't complain), I will also be looking for a new situation. If you've got any ideas, do keep me informed.

Summer & fall 2012, and beyond: Error: File 404 not found.

Fieldwork

2010-12-30T07:26:00.009-05:00

In the early morning, I am riding down a narrow dirt road running through farm fields in an old Forest Department jeep, without seatbelts, shocks, or a proper door. Because I am an honored guest, I am sitting in front, next to the driver, a backpack with a notebook, camera, and water bottle crushed between my legs and the front of the vehicle (so it doesn't bounce out). On the benches in the rear of the jeep sit two forest officers - first is an older man who has spent his entire career with the department, at the lowest rank of the administrative hierarchy. Although he might be in his mid-50s, he looks strong and lean, as if he had spent a career outdoors. He stays alone in a small town here, at the edge of the area of forest he is responsible for. In our brief discussion in the early morning, I did not find out if he, like many such officials, keeps his family in some larger town in the region, seeing them only on weekends and holidays. The younger officer is a recent college graduate. He has entered the ranks of the service a step higher than the older man, and for the last year, he has been the man's boss. He has a wife and 2 little girls, who live with his parents in a town about 160 km away - a four hour journey by bus or motorcycle. Because of his education, he speaks some English. The driver is 20 years old, and tells me that he recently completed his 10th grade exam. He is from a village not far from here, and has been working as a driver since he was 14. He complains to me in Hindi that he has been hired only as a private driver on a contract basis, and thus gets paid only a quarter of what a regularly employed government driver would receive.
Out of the mist appears a caravan of 12 bullock carts. Men drive, or sit huddled on the back on a pile of rice straw, wrapped in shawls to keep out the morning chill (to a New Englander, it does not seem cold, but still, the temperature is only about 60 degrees on this late December morning, and the rest of their clothing, lightweight cotton, is designed more for the blistering hot summer than for the chill of winter). The jeep halts, and the officers hop out to discuss with the drivers: Where are they going? To the forest... to collect firewood. The officers remind them that they should only collect dead wood, and not fell any living trees, and we drive on.
At the edge of the forest, we find the remains of an attempted encroachment. Farmers from the local villages are desperate for land. There is a strong correlation between the presence of forests and the existence of severe poverty in India. Is this a causal connection? It is hard to say, since local conditions are so variable. But the landless poor - and those who have a little, but not enough land, often look to the degraded forest at the edge of their village as a source of new farmland.

This is not a new phenomena: for centuries, Indian governments encouraged the clearing of forest land for agriculture. Agricultural land could be taxed, increasing the treasury. Forests were a source of wild beasts: tigers and leopards ate people, while elephants, boars, bears, and troops of monkeys destroyed crops. Forests also provide a refuge for bandits and rebels. From what we can make out about the shape of forests prior to the British empire (which brought much more systematic record-keeping), the forests contracted when peace and economic growth encouraged the growth of agriculture, and expanded again when war and economic collapse wreaked havoc on the agrarian economy. As recently as the 1960s, the Government of India was still eager to give away forest land to farmers as part of its efforts to free India from dependence on imported food grains. This has changed, and the new emphasis is on forest conservation.

These farmers have built a watchtower in their field of Jowar (sorghum - one of the grains traditionally cultivated and eaten in the semi-arid rainfed agriculture of central India). At night they will sleep their, keeping watch for boars and other wildlife who may come from the forest to forage on their crops.

Who cut the trees in the picture above? It is possible that they were cut by villagers eager for farmland, but it is equally possible that they were cut by organized groups of timber harvesters. This particular area was severely affected by India's Maoist rebellion for about 20 years - ending a few years ago when police pressure pushed the "Naxalites" across the border into a neighboring state. The Maoists, I am told, encouraged encroachments and logging, and beat and killed those forest officers who opposed them. Forest officers are also not always innocent in such works. These forests are in the central Indian teak belt, where a single good-sized teak tree can fetch upwards of $1000 in the markets. With this kind of money, smugglers can afford some bribes.

I haven't written much about my work in this blog. In fact, it is somewhat of a struggle to maintain the blog. Although I have a cellular modem, internet speeds in many of these places are too slow for uploading pictures, and the work schedule keeps me busy. Most days I'm out in the field, with the forest officers, observing their work, or interviewing NGOs, villagers, and other government officials who interact with the forests. I travel almost constantly. After a long day in the field, I come home and type up fieldnotes, recording my experiences of the day so that I can draw on them when I write up my research, and labelling my photos. I'm averaging over 5000 words/day. Sometimes, riding the bus, or meditating in the morning, my mind catches hold of an idea, and I start composing an essay on what I am learning. I try to put these in my fieldnotes, and imagine putting them out in the world. But in the constant dialogue between theories and evidence called fieldwork, I am constantly rebuilding my ideas, challenging them, or confronting new circumstances. My findings are preliminary. What kinds of preliminary thoughts and findings can I write about on a public blog? These thoughts and findings are meant to be the subject of research papers and books, eventually, and I'm erring for the moment on the side of saving them for more polished works. In the meantime, I'm trying to share with you - my friends who read my blog - some of what it looks and feels like here.

As everywhere in the world, forests are protected primarily by their remoteness.
Sometimes I spend hours riding on incredibly overcrowded, rickety State Transport busses to reach my destination. The major roads are 1 lane wide, paved, with dirt shoulders, so on those occasions where we pass another large vehicle - a bullock cart making its way from the village to a farmers' field, a truck carrying cotton to market, or a car carrying a government official to inspect a new road - we swerve off onto the shoulder, and the bus seems to hang perilously over the roadside ditch. Then the great diesel engines fire, and we are up again, on the cracked and broken tarmac. We stop in a small town, and a crowd of 50 villagers push and shove to get on the bus to return from the market, while another crowd of 50, already on the bus, push and shove to get out.
Village squares are decorated with statues of heroes, and you learn something about the village from the statues. Ambedkar, the great leader of India's Dalits (or untouchables) and the author of India's constitution, is almost everywhere - a short fat man, one arm outstretched, the other holding the constitution. Ambedkar converted to Buddhism at the end of his life, and his statues are often adorned with Buddhist imagery. In the wealthier upper-class towns, you often see statues of more recent political leaders - such as Andhra Pradesh's YSR Reddy, the popular chief minister who died in a helicopter crash a year ago. In the forest areas, you sometimes run into more obscure heroes. This man is Kumram Bhim - a leader of the Gond tribe who organized his people against the Nizam of Hyderabad to demand rights to "Jell, Jungle, Jamin" (land, forest, water). He was killed in 1940, but his memory lives on. I'm told that in the more remote villages, you can also find statues of the Austrian anthropologist, Haimendorf, who was sent by the Nizam in the 1940s to study the conditions of life among the Gonds, and try to improve their situation.

A friend I have made through my research, an activist with a deep commitment to working for the poor and downtrodden, told me that every place in India has its own indigenous history of resistance, political protest, and the creation of alternatives. In some places, I see the footsteps of Gandhi and his followers, who taught non-violent civil disobedience and village development. Gandhi's organizing principle was "Swaraj" or self-rule. Modern nationalism interprets this to mean freedom from the British, but if you read Gandhi's work (Gandhi published a newspaper for much of his adult life - his collected works run to over 90 volumes), you find a more complicated view of swaraj, which emphasizes self-government, as well as personal growth and development. In other places I see the footsteps of violent suppression of the downtrodden, as well as violent revolts by peasants and forest dwellers demanding rights, land, and lower taxes.
In the era of forest conservation, how can the forest land near villages be "conserved," when the villagers depend on the forest for their firewood, the timbers to build their wall frames and roofs, the bamboo to build their walls, the poles to grow their beans on, the thorny bushes to fence the goats out of their fields, the wood to build their carts and tools, and perhaps most importantly, the fodder to feed their domestic animals (who in turn, provide them with manure to fertilize their fields?). This has been a major struggle of the last few decades of forestry in India, and it is by no means certain that adequate solutions have been found to address the problem. Perhaps, some think, if the villagers had more means of livelihood, and earned some money from the intact forest, they would more carefully regulate their own use, and also serve as a bulwark against the organized timber smugglers. In the picture above, the tribal department has provided the villagers with eggs of silkworms, and the forest department has made an arrangement to allow a group of villagers to grow silk worms on the Terminalia tomentosa trees in the forest surrounding the village. The silkworms are thick and fat, reminding me of the I used to pull off tomato plants in Maine.
By stereotype, the villagers living near forests are "tribals" or "adivasis" - people who claim to be indigenous to India, and to have long historical relations with the forest. The reality is often more complicated. This lovely village was settled by Hindu refugees from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in the 1960s.
Unlike the pattern typical of villages in the region, where houses are densely packed together in a small settlement, surrounded by large agricultural fields, the Bengalis plant trees and extensive vegetable gardens around their homes. Approaching this village, I thought I was driving into a forest, but instead found myself in a village shaded by tamarind, banana, neem, banana and drumstick trees. I suppose I could learn from these people that climate is not completely deterministic - I had imagined that the lack of trees was due to the arid climate, but the Bengalis showed me that the lack of trees was due to a cultural conception of what a village is.

Incidentally, one of the amazing things about India is its linguistic diversity. The Bengali refugees are poor and uneducated, but every one I met spoke at least 3 languages - their mother tongue, Bengali, the language of the state they now live in, Telugu, and Hindi, the national language.
I have already mentioned Jowar - one of the many varieties of millets grown in central India. In my experience, they are all rich, flavorful, and nutritious foods, but they are suffering a fate similar to the scorn that European derived cooks once felt for peasant foods like rutabagas, turnips, and parsnips. I am told that people would be ashamed to serve a guest - especially an honored guest like me, a foreigner, such lowly foods. I am stuck eating decent, but somewhat bland and boring white rice. Jowar is also grown - as in this picture from my research assistant's family's farm - as a fodder crop, mixed in with various legumes.
Ripe jowar stalks, ready for harvest.
Perhaps the most widely planted crop in the arid lands of central India is a remarkable legume called Toor or arhar dal in Hindi (English names include red gram and pigeon pea). A native plant to India, toor seems to have the ability to thrive in the driest and least nutritional soils, producing abundant protein rich seed, used to make dal - including the famous sambar of South India.
Toor in bloom. Toor is widely interplanted with cotton, the region's primary cash crop. Of course cotton is grown widely in the US, but not in places I had visited previously, so I find myself fascinated by the amazing tufts of fiber this plant produces.
Cotton being brought to market in a village's weekly market day:

Once the cotton is sold, the villagers have cash to buy clothes, spices, plastic sandals, and vegetables. Strangely, the vegetables come from traders who go to the city to buy them - farmers markets as we know them in the US are rarely found in India, and the ladies selling their vegetable wares in this market are traders, not farmers (this has always struck me as an opening for a different kind of business opportunity for the rural farmers).Eggplant is one of the few native vegetables of South Asia to spread widely outside. The eggplants are very diverse, and some are remarkably beautiful.
These are Jujubes, a fruit that grows wild on the margins of fields and villages, as well as in cultivated orchards. They taste somewhat like plums.
Crossing the Pranahita River on a ferry boat:
My essay so far might give off the misimpression that forests are used only by villagers. Forests are also used by industries. Teak is native to central India, and central Indian teak is still considered to be of the best quality (although I've learned that many Indian furniture makers have turned to teak grown on plantations in west Africa and Malaysia, due to domestic shortages and high prices). Bamboo is also used for paper making, as at this giant factory:
The man with the hard hat is my research assistant's brother, who works in a junior engineering position in the Sirpur Paper Mills in the town of Kaghaznagar (translation: paper town). Kaghaznagar is a stop on the main railway line, where you cover your nose to avoid breathing in the belching sulfurous plumes. The town itself is a mixture of orderly quarters occupied by the thousands of company employees, and rickety slums where the rest of the towns' residents live. You can walk from the mill to the bus stand at the far end of town in about 20 minutes.
My research assistant, shown here with one of his nephews, grew up in a small village about 5 km as the crow flies from Kaghaznagar. During the dry season, you can wade across the river, and reach the town relatively quickly, but during the rainy season, it is necessary to detour about 15 km around to reach the main road.

I have been reading Anirudh Krishna's fantastic new book, "One Illness Away: Why People Become Poor and How They Escape Poverty." Krishna did some of his field research in Andhra Pradesh, in a district near to where my assistant grew up, and found that few people in such rural villages aspire to, or attain, anything beyond the lowest levels of employment outside of their village. People may become village school teachers, or police constables, but few become high level professionals. Ramdas, my assistant, seems to be an exception to this pattern - he is currently studying for his MPhil in economics at a reputed institute in Hyderabad, and hopes to do a PhD studying sustainable agriculture.
Ramdas and 2 sisters-in-law shelling beans.
Although Ramdas' family belongs to one of the Scheduled Castes (the modern government term for the former "untouchables" or dalits), they are descended from the first settlers of this village, who arrived here 70 or 80 years ago. His grandfather owned over 40 acres of land, and was quite wealthy by local standards, but they sold alot of land to pay for medical care for his grandmother (Krishna finds that healthcare related expenses are one of the primary reasons that families fall into poverty - hence the title of his book - One Illness Away). They are fortunate, in that they still own 17 acres, making them still one of the wealthiest families in the village. Ramdas is the youngest of 5, and his eldest brother, the one who works in the paper mill, encouraged him to pursue higher study. Few other people from his village have achieved as high levels of education as he has.
Of course, this does not mean that they lack talent. More, it would seem that they lack opportunities and information about how to pursue them. Consider the young friend of Ramdas who painted these pictures of the Buddha and Ambedkar on the walls of his home. He has quite a talent for painting, and I've seen similar paintings for sale for 1000s of rupees outside of the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai. But how is a poor boy from Central India to reach those heights?
Ramdas' sister-in-law embroidering her sari.
The women of the family gathered in the courtyard in the evening.

One would like to think that in the future talented people from these villages would have the opportunity to make a better and more secure living, and to be free from the pressing wants of real material poverty. Not only their lives, but that of the rest of the world, will improve when their talents are able to reach full potential. On the other hand, it seems to me from my glimpses of life in these homes, that there are aspects of their lives that ought not to be lost. Children grow up surrounded by loving family. Neighbors respect each other, and people live lives that are orderly and predictable. They are embedded within a rich culture, one that is not merely "traditional" but also reinventing itself in response to a modern time with television sets, the spread of Buddhism among the scheduled castes of the region, etc. They eat healthy homegrown organic meals, and work hard with their hands. It is not that poverty is beautiful, but rather that in escaping poverty, I would hope that they will not lose sight of the things of value in the communities in which they came from. There is nothing perfect about the lives of the wealthy - be it in Hyderabad or in Bloomington, so perhaps our lives can also be enriched by what people who come from these villages have to teach us.
A couple of very hyperactive nephews.
A Bengali family returning from their fields by bullock-cart at dusk.

Giving Thanks

2010-11-24T22:48:00.004-05:00

In the last few months I've celebrated many Indian holidays that I had never experienced before. Although I've enjoyed all of the celebrations, I find that I do not really understand their rhythm. As they are new to me, I have no experience of anticipation of what is to come, and holidays bring no nostalgia for times past. It is a very different way to experience a holiday.

Today the tables are turned - since it is one of my favorite holidays in the US, but I am alone in a new city (as has so frequently been the case in the course of this research) where I have few friends, and don't know a single other American. It is just another regular working day here. I feel a sense of nostalgia for Thanksgivings gone by - but don't really have anyone to share it with. I remember a couple of years ago I went for a long bicycle ride on Thanksgiving afternoon, before dinner. I was struck with the pattern - everyone was already at their Thanksgiving destination, and the roads were very quiet. Out in the country it was striking to see most houses empty - and every fifth or sixth house packed with people.

When I was a teenager, my Thanksgivings began with helping my mother cook on Wednesday afternoon, after we both came home from school. I did not cook much growing up, and it was helping mom cook these special holiday meals that taught me the rudiments of cookery. We would often listen to my parents' old record collection - Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Judy Collins, and of course, The Beatles. Then Thursday morning we would pack our bags and leave early for our little post and beam cabin in the glacially scoured schist hills of Southern Vermont, so that we could light a fire and warm the place before our guests arrived. Being from a small and scattered family, we rarely shared Thanksgiving with relatives, but with other friends whose families were equally small and scattered. They would join us in the afternoon, bringing plates of lasagna or vegetables to add to my mothers' pumpkin pie, corn pudding, tofu-spinach pie, and cranberry bread. For many years my guitar teacher and his family joined us, and after dinner we'd go for a walk up the hill to the old commune at Packers Corner (it was on such a Thanksgiving walk that I saw a goat, housed in a building that had once been the commune library in its more crowded days, chewing on a copy of the Odyssey). Then we would sing songs and play guitar around the woodstove, and eat our dessert.

For several years, we made it a tradition to climb Mount Greylock the day after Thanksgiving. Mount Greylock is the tallest mountain in Massachusetts, and while westerners may scoff at its height, it is still a massive chunk of rock, dominating over the valley of Williamstown and North Adams. The closest approach to our cabin was from the Appalachian Trail in N. Adams, and from there I recall the climb taking perhaps 3 or 4 hours. The Housatonic Valley, where the trail begins, is solidly in the temperate zone - dominated by maples and beeches, but as you climb, you enter a great boreal forest, dominated by spruce and fir. One year, as if to remind us of the difference between the warm valleys and the harsh summits of the Taconic Mountains, we arrived on the summit to find 3 feet of snow. Our trail was hard packed by previous visitors, and we were always prepared for the wind and cold, so we took it lightly, but it was impressive to see the difference with the valleys, where we had yet to see snow.

Like many well-known mountains, Mount Greylock has the misfortune of having a motorable road to the summit. I suppose if you climbed it in summer you might find it full of motorists, but we never saw any in late November. However, this particular year, we heard a car making its way up the snowbound road as we sat sipping our hot chocolate in a wind-free spot in the lee of a building. Although the road was not plowed, it had been packed tight by traffic from four-wheel drive vehicles, but still, we were surprised to see a station wagon appearing in the parking lot. Because the 4-wheel drive tracks spread out in the parking lot, the snow was less packed in the lot, and as the station wagon drove into the parking lot, it sank deep into the snow, and the wheels began to spin.

Out of the wagon poured a big extended family of Indians, taking advantage of their holiday to see some of the famous sights of the state. They were dressed as people in the city might dress for a cool day in the late fall - leather jackets, street shoes, cotton socks. The wind and snow howled around them, and they clung to each other for warmth. Being foreigners, they did not know that New England mountaintop in late November was a thing to be treated with respect, fear, and heavy down parkas. Things did not look good. Fortunately, there were a few other hikers on the mountaintop, and together we were able to push the car back to the safety of the beaten track.

Being here in India, I sometimes feel like that Indian family must have felt - dazzled by the beauty of the country I am visiting, but struggling to understand the customs, culture, ways of life, and dangers. So far, my car has not gotten stuck in any snow drifts. I have now been here for over six months, and every day I've relied on the kindness of strangers and friends to show me the way. I feel a deep sense of gratitude for all the help I've been given, as I've made my way through this challenging experience of living and conducting research in a foreign country. I also feel tremendous gratitude for all of those back home in the US whose support has helped make it possible for me to undertake this wonderful adventure. I hope you all have a warm Thanksgiving, and I look forward to sharing many more with you!

Last night, thinking of friends and family far away, I opened up my copy of "Selected Poems" of Rabindranath Tagore (Translated by William Radice) to a page with this poem:

Flute-Music

Kinu the milkman’s alley.
A ground-floor room in a two-storeyed house,
Slap on the road, windows barred.
Decaying walls, crumbling to dust in places
Or stained with damp.
Stuck on the door,
A picture of Ganesa, Bringer of Success,
From the end of a bale of cloth.
Another creature apart from me lives in my room
For the same rent:
A lizard.
There’s one difference between him and me:
He doesn’t go hungry.

I get twenty-five rupees a month
As junior clerk in a trading office.
I’m fed at the Dattas’ house
For coaching their boy.
At dusk I go to Sealdah station,
Spend the evening there
To save the cost of light.
Engines chuffing,
Whistles shrieking,
Passengers scurrying,
Coolies Shouting.
I stay till half past ten,
Then back to my dark, silent, lonely room.

A village on the Dhalesvari river, that’s where my aunt’s people live.
Her brother-in-law’s daughter –
She was due to marry my unfortunate self, everything was fixed.
The moment was indeed auspicious for her, no doubt of that –
For I ran away.
The girl was saved from me,
And I from her.
She did not come to this room, but she’s in and out of my mind all the time:

Daca sari, vermilion on her forehead.

Pouring rain.
My tram costs go up,
But often as not my pay gets cut for lateness.
Along the alley,
Mango skins and stones, jack-fruit pulp,
Fish-gills, dead kittens
And God knows what other rubbish
Pile up and rot.
My umbrella is like my depleted pay –
Full of holes.
My sopping office clothes ooze.
Like a pious Vaisnava.
Monsoon darkness
Sticks in my damp room
Like an animal caught in a trap,
Lifeless and numb.
Day and night I feel strapped bodily
On to a half-dead world.

At the corner of the alley lives Kantababu
Long hair carefully parted,
Large eyes,
Cultivated tastes.
He fancies himself on the cornet:
The sound of it comes in gusts
On the foul breeze of the alley –
Sometimes in the middle of the night,
Sometimes in the early morning twilight,
Sometimes in the afternoon
When sun and shadows glitter.
Suddenly this evening
He starts to play runs in Sindhu-Baroya Rag
And the whole sky rings
With eternal pangs of separation.
At one the alley is a lie,
False and vile as the ravings of a drunkard,
And I feel that nothing distinguishes Haripada the clerk
From the Emperor Akbar
Torn umbella and royal parasol merge,
Rise on the sad music of a flute
Towards one heaven.

The music is true
Where in the everlasting twilight-hour of my wedding,
The Dhalesvari river flows,
Its banks deeply shaded by tamal-trees,
And she who waits in the courtyard
Is dressed in a Dacca sari, vermillion on her forehead.

Finally, here are some pictures of the beautiful gardens at the Centre for Economic and Social Studies in Hyderabad, where I am staying this week:

The building in the background here is some sort of old palace, now a school for mentally handicapped children.

The rocks of Hyderabad are 2.5 billion year old gneiss.

In front of the library.

The building in the background is the old observatory of the Nizam of Hyderabad - the telescope is long gone, but the preserved campus is now a lovely place for me to spend Thanksgiving.

Hyderabad!

2010-11-21T07:38:00.010-05:00

Hyderabad is India's 6th largest city - with an official population estimate of about 6 million, and an unofficial estimate closer to 10 million. Like the other Metros (as India's 6-8 largest and most cosmopolitan cities are known), Hyderabad is a dizzying mixture of old and new, fantastic wealth and great poverty, and perhaps most of all these days, incredible aspirations. The wealthy are buying high rise apartments and BMWs, while the rural poor flock to these cities in search of a job carrying concrete in a bowl on their head up a rickety bamboo ladder to build those high rises, in the hopes that their savings might enable them to send their children to a proper school, or care for their aging parents. I've been in and out of Hyderabad for the last few weeks, and since I'm looking forward to welcoming many of my colleagues here next month for the IASC Conference, I thought I'd share some pictures and anecdotes about the city. I draw several of the anecdotes from Narendra Luther's charming Hyderabad: A Biography, published in 2006 by Oxford University Press, and highly recommended for visitors who want a flavor for the history of the place.
The pearl bazaar near the Charminar in the old city. Charminar literally means 4 spires. This beautiful building was built at the chief crossroads of the original city on the banks of the river Musi by Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, founder of the city of Hyderabad, in 1591. His Persian architect designed the city to be a model of heaven. The center of the old city remains a heavily Islamic district, and, strangely for a landlocked city, is one of the best places in the world to buy high quality pearls. The Qutb Shahi dynasty fell to Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mughals, in 1671. Aurangzeb greatly enlarged the Mughal empire, but his endless wars against the Maratha guerrillas and other South Indian chieftains exhausted his treasury, and his religious intolerance earned him the enmity of many local populations. After his death, his sons fought bitterly over the throne (this was the established means of succession - Aurangzeb himself became emperor only after imprisoning his father, Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal, and killing all of his brothers). The Mughal governor of Hyderabad gradually claimed greater and greater autonomy. His descendants, the Nizams, became vassals of the British - the largest of the hundreds of princely states - and ruled until 1949.

At one point in the mid 19th century, the Nizam was so in need of cash that the British forced him to surrender his control over the region of Berar (centered on the city of Amravati in what is now Maharashtra). This ended up playing an important role in the American civil war. The greatest fear of Lincoln and his cabinet was that the British might join the conflict on the side of the Confederacy. An effective naval blockade by the Union Navy had crippled the southern economy, cutting off the crucial export of raw cotton to the British cotton mills. If the British, had decided to protect this flow of essential industrial material with their superior naval power, there would have been little the Union could have done to stop them, and as a result, the Union would have had great difficulty defeating the Confederacy.

Instead, the British realized that they could grow cotton in Berar, which turned out to be uniquely well suited to the crop (cotton is still one of the major crops of this region). The British provided incentives to farmers to clear forests in Berar and plant cotton, and then forced the farmers to sell the cotton directly to the Manchester mills, who then had a monopoly on the sale of cloth to India. Gandhi would later target this monopoly in his campaign to revitalize khadi, or handspun cotton cloth, which he made a centerpiece of both his spiritual practice and the larger non-cooperation movement with British rule.

Although the 19th century Nizams struggled to balance their books, the replacement of feudal vassals with a bureaucratic modeled on the British revenue districts, and the birth of Nizams who were a little more thrifty, led to phenomenal wealth. The last Nizam, whose rule began in 1911, was widely believed to be the wealthiest man in the world for much of his life, and stories abound both about his wealth (last night at dinner I was told that once, in Britain, he couldn't decide which shoes to purchase in a store, so he just decided to buy the store's entire stock; I also heard that in 1949 his estate was valued at what would be, in today's dollars, 270 billion) and his miserliness (a British officer who had tea with the Nizam in Hyderabad described how the Nizam lived in a single, ill kept room in one of his giant palaces, and when he asked the officer if he would like biscuits with his tea, produced a single biscuit from a locked cupboard). The Nizam's associates also grew fabulously wealthy. When he fired his prime minister, Salar Jung, the man couldn't decide what to do with his life. A visitor suggested that he take up collecting art. He soon amassed the largest art collection in the world, a small part of which is now on display in the museum housed in his former palace. I went there expecting some nice Indian art, but was shocked by the vastness of the place - rooms full of Ming vases and 19th century European paintings compliment the sizable collections of Persian and Mughal miniatures and South Indian brass and woodwork.

This is my fourth visit to Hyderabad. The first time I came to Hyderabad was for the wedding of friends-of-friends (who quickly became upgraded to friends) in December 2006.
A Puja (religious ceremony) for the newlywed couple moving into their new home.
The newlyweds greeting guests at their wedding reception (the bride complained to me that with the throne-like chairs, the thick silk saree, and the heavy gold jewelry, she felt more like a temple than like a bride).
After the wedding, we spent a couple days wandering the city, and some of these pictures date back to that time. The groom was from Hyderabad, but the bride was from Assam, in the northeast of India. They met as junior lawyers working at a law firm in Hyderabad, and have settled here in the city, where the bride reviews contracts for a large American company's business process outsourcing company (she gets paid about 1/10 of what an American corporate lawyer would earn doing the same work, or about the same as her parents, both tenured professors, make combined).

In the picture above, we are eating at a Macdonalds in a giant shopping mall. The groom and bride are seated next to each other, while the woman in the foreground is the bride's parents' servant, a woman from an impoverished village in rural Assam. For those of us who grew up in a world without servants, the servant-employer relationship is rather hard to understand. At home, this woman cooked meals, cleaned the house, and ate her meals after everyone else, seated on the floor of the kitchen. The mother of the family told us that in India, women of her class (she is a nursing professor, her husband teaches at the Agricultural University) are more free than in the West because they have servants to take care of household chores. They offered to help their servant get married, but she told them that she did not want to marry. A man from her tribe would probably beat her, and she would be less free than she is, living in the home of these educated liberals. In Hyderabad, where she had no household tasks to perform, she simply was another member of the family. In this mall, she rode on an escalator for the first time, which she thought was pretty neat. Too bad we didn't make it to Snow World, another mall, where you can experience the "magic of snow" for a hefty fee.

Incidentally, I don't generally choose to eat in International fast food chains, whether at home or abroad, but I have to say that my one taste of McDonalds in India left me impressed. It was pretty good! Of course, they serve no beef, and their vegetarian food is largely modeled after mainstream Indian snacks - the veggie burger was suspiciously similar to an aloo tikki. McDonalds has been successful in India largely because it has remade itself here. While in the US we think of MacDonalds as being cheap and poor quality - a place where you wouldn't want to hang out - MacDonalds in India has pursued a higher end clientele of people who are wealthy and westernized. MacDonalds food costs about the same in India and the US, which makes it an expensive restaurant in India. It is not uncommon to walk by a western fast food outlet in a big city and see well dressed professionals working on their laptops there.

Perhaps because in my subsequent 3 visits I've always stayed in Begumpet, a fancy neighborhood about halfway between the old city and the modern corporate campuses at HiTech City (they call it Cyberabad for a reason), I think of Hyderabad as a city of flyovers, traffic jams, and shopping malls.
Hyderabad Central shopping mall is about a 10 minute walk from where I'm staying, at the Hostel of the Centre for Economic and Social Studies, in Panjagutta. At this crossing, there is actually a traffic light, and so you can wait for it to change, and get across the road without risking life and limb. By contrast, if I want to go to the German-owned Spar supermarket, I have to find a way across 8 lanes of traffic which seems to come in about 8 different directions, without the benefit of a stoplight. I like the place - not only does it stock imported bread and cheese and American snacks (Pepperidge Farm anyone? Nature Valley Granola Bars?), which I generally avoid because I like Indian food and don't like the prices (they cost about the same as they would in the US, which makes them very expensive by Indian standards), but I also found baked namkeens there. Namkeens are salty and spicy Indian snacks, which are generally made by deep frying various things. I love them but I'm not such a fan of deep frying.
Golconda Fort, about 8 km from the Charminar, and now swallowed by the great expansive city, sits on one of the many massive outcrops of 2.5 billion year old gneiss that dominate the city. Every once in a while you'll be driving through some concrete jungle, and you'll find one of these ancient, rounded obtrusions sticking out from the middle of the earth. Unlike Nagpur, which is covered with the basalt of the Deccan trap formation - a huge series of lava flows that cover much of central India, and whose volcanic origin about 60 million years ago is considered an important alternative hypothesis for the extinction of the dinosaurs - here in Hyderabad the ancient core of the Indian continent is exposed, some of the oldest exposed rocks in the world.

Golconda predates Hyderabad by at least 500 years. When Aurangzeb, the last and most powerful of the great Mughal rulers decided to eliminate the Qutb Shahi dyntasty in 1671 (technically they were his vassals, but they were too independent, and also to Shia, for his tastes), the sultan abandoned Hyderabad and retreated to his fort, where Aurangzeb sat for months and months, in and endless and unproductive siege. He finally captured the fort by bribing away all the generals except one, who stood in the final passageway, fighting the invaders, until he was completely incapacitated. He survived, and recovered, but refused to abandon his principles and serve under Aurangzeb.

Now the fort is a popular picnic destination.

I love multilingual signs!
The day that I visited Golconda there was some kind of festival. The whole place was full of Hindu pilgrims, and devotional music to the mother goddess filled the walls of the ancient Islamic citadel. Near the top of the fort, the pilgrims gathered to make their way through a tiny cleft in the ancient gneiss, which apparently held some sacred significance.

The Charminar up close.

Unique among the major cities of modern India, Hyderabad was never ruled by the British, and this has shaped its skyline. Of the 5 larger cities, 3 (Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai) gained prominence as cities entirely because their position as British trading posts. Hyderabad's great buildings are all Islamic architecture, and the language of the city is still largely Urdu - a language that is essentially the same as Hindi, at least as it is spoken on the street, but is written in a beautiful flowing script derived from Persian. The language of the rest of the state is Telugu, which has about the same number of speakers worldwide as German. One of my favorite buildings in the city is the legislative assembly - unfortunately a difficult building to photograph because it is surrounded by big roads and security fences - a giant old palace built by the last Nizam, full of towering minarets, with a huge statue of Gandhi meditating in front of it.

I have already mentioned the last Nizam's great wealth. He built many of the most beautiful buildings in the city. Unfortunately the post-independence Hyderabadis have not kept up the tradition. There is only one post-independence building worth visiting - the Birla temple, built by a charitable arm of one of India's several giant family-run industrial conglomerates. Perched on a hilltop overlooking the Hussain Sagar lake (which is decorated with a giant statue of the Buddha), the temple is all white marble, and contains beautiful statues of several Hindu dieties, and provides 360 degree views of the city. Photography is not allowed - so no pictures I'm afraid.

While the Birla's made their fortune selling everything from textiles to cars (they make the distinctive Hindustan Ambassador, commonly used as a taxi or a limousine for high level government officials) to cement to metals to cell phone services, the Nizams made their (larger) fortune by taxing a kingdom that must be one of the poorest and least promising places on the planet. Most of the Nizam's domain is the arid interior of the Deccan plateau - cursed with uneven soil quality and sporadic and sparse monsoons, the region remains one of the poorest in India in spite of its location in the midst of 3 of India's most rapidly developing states (the Nizam's domain was carved up between the modern linguistically based states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Maharashtra). While the Nizam and most of his functionaries were Muslim, 87% of the population of the principality were Hindu. The great poverty of the region, as well as the deep gap between rulers and ruled, was not a recipe for stability. In the 1940s, as the non-cooperation movement with the British in the rest of India came to a head, a large scale communist revolution rose up in large areas of the Telugu speaking parts of the state. The revolutionaries murdered or drove out the landlords and bureaucrats, and began redistributing land and setting up a new and independent administrative system.

Meanwhile, as British India gained Independence in 1947, the Nizam struggled diplomatically to maintain his political independence, lobbying Mountbatten and the British to support him, and being pushed by the radicals in Hyderabad to merge with Pakistan. In September 1948, Indian troops marched into Hyderabad state. The Nizam expected assistance from Pakistan, but as the Indian troops marched in, Pakistan's founder, Jinnah, lay dying, and whatever his plans might have been for allying with Hyderabad, they were not realized. The Indian army, which included many soldiers who had seen action in World War II, and possessed modern weaponry, quickly overwhelmed the Nizam's antiquated army. The Nizam discovered that his army didn't even have up to date maps of the roads that his other departments had been building. An Indian general described entering a town at the head of a column of tanks, which were attacked by teenage boys carrying sticks and clubs. Thinking of his own son, then a student in University, he stood up on his tank, and ordered the boys to go home. Hyderabad became part of India.

The communist movement quickly faded away with the enthusiasm for joining newly independent India, but the region of the modern state of Andhra Pradesh that used to be part of the Nizam's domain (generally called Telangana) remains politically volatile. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the forest belt in northern Telangana was one of the headquarters of India's Maoist rebel movement, and only a concerted, and possibly largely illegal, effort by the state police has led to a decline in the violence over the last 5 to 10 years. Residents of Telangana have felt discrimanted against by the wealthier and more developed coastal region of the state, and there have been consistent calls to form a separate state. A major national commission on the question of separate statehood for Telangana is due to give its final report on December 30th. Finally, although the city seems to be a marvelous mixture of Urdu, Telugu, Hindi, and English - Islam, Hinduism, Christanity, and even some Buddhist iconography, the social situation remains volatile. Communal riots break out on occasion in the old city, and a friend of mine who is a long-time observer tells me that it is not a question of whether, but a question of when, another riot will take place. In May 2007, a bomb exploded in the largest mosque in the city, next to the Charminar, during Friday prayers, killing 9 people. 6 were reported to have been killed by police firing in subsequent riots. The bombings have purportedly been traced to a group of Hindu right wing extremists, associated with the RSS, but other sources claim the bombings were carried out by Islamic radicals. Which version you believe seems to depend on your pre-existing political leanings.

In any case, when I visited the Charminar a couple of years later, all was peaceful.
A man was selling mangoes in the plaza (it was June - Mango season)
And the only violence to speak of ws the great mob of people getting into and out of autorickshaws on the crowded shopping district - as seen from this picture taken from the Charminar itself. Still, when I hear people setting off firecrackers - which seems a popular thing to do on Sunday nights here, I always feel slightly nervous.

India is a strange place. I took this picture standing in a park overlooking hi-tec city, where the offices of every major IT corporation have been set up to take advantage of India's tremendous supply of inexpensive, educated, English speaking manpower, and where young people like me are earning salaries double or triple what their parents made, and are soaking up Western brands and cars like there was no tomorrow. In the foreground, a woman is carrying firewood to cook her dinner, harvested illegally from the city park. Here in India the contrasts between wealth and poverty are stark and glaring. But Actual levels of income inequality are dramatically lower in India than they are in the USA. Perhaps the glaring contrasts reminds the well off that some income redistribution is a good thing for maintenance of a stable and prosperous society - an idea that seems to have been forgotten in the US.

Pictures from central India

2010-11-03T09:21:00.006-04:00

As I anticipated, once my research really got going, I have had little time to keep a blog. I am in the field most days, conducting interviews and observing the practices of the Indian Forest Department. I come home and take notes on what I've seen and heard, and by the time I get to bed I've typically already written 5000 words or more. So I haven't had time to blog about all that I've been seeing. In addition, I am very hesitant to blog about my work for two reasons. First, I am still in the early stages of my observations, and all of my conclusions seem very tentative. Second, I am aware that a blog is a public forum, and thus my research subjects may potentially see my preliminary thoughts - which could cause them to change their responses to me in ways that might upset my research agenda. So for all of these reasons, I haven't been blogging much lately. However, my friends Collin & Kara, who convinced me to keep a blog, convinced me because they said - at least you can post us some pictures even if you are too busy to write! So here are some pictures of what I've been seeing, along with brief explanations.
Eastern Vidarbha, the region of central India where I've been for the last 3 months, is a rice growing region. Vidarbha is more famous as a cotton-growing region, but the eastern edge of the region - basically east of Nagpur - is wetter, and so more suitable for rice. Early varieties have already been harvested, and the entire harvest will come in soon. Here are 2 varieties of rice - the one in the foreground is a late variety, the one in the background is a middle variety almost ready for harvest.
The grain is filling out.

This temporary check dam is meant to try to store water for the long, harsh summer (in April and May average daytime highs are over 45 C - around 115 Fahrenheit). I arrived here just as the villagers completed building it, and someone promptly set a fishing net in the resulting pond. I found out later that this village is occupied by a traditional fishing community, although now they are mostly farmers.
Meeting with a village forest protection committee in the village schoolhouse. The young man to my right is my translator Siddhesh - a recent graduate of an engineering college who is joining a software company in a few months, but was temporarily unemployed. Although he grew up in the city, he always spent holidays in his grandmother's village, so he is able to speak and understand the local dialect of Marathi. The young women to my right is a representative of an NGO which has been helping this committee cultivate lac - (the antecedent of lacquer) which is excreted by an insect which eats palash trees (Butea monosperma).
A traditional house in the village - mud walls, wood frame, tile roofs. These houses are very good at staying cool in the summer - much better than the modern concrete and brick constructions - but people who have money always build the modern concrete houses. This typical house is actually a series of buildings surrounding a courtyard - I am looking through the entryway on the street.
One of my favorite fruits is the sitafal - or custard apple (related to Indiana's pawpaw), which grows wild, and is also cultivated, as this specimen that I found in a dooryard.

Most rural households have extensive homegardens surrounding their compounds. One of the most common sights this time of year is trellises - built above head height - covered with sprawling squash and bean vines, and providing shade to the house. Her is a bottle gourd hanging from one such trellis.
Members of a village protection committee showing off the forest that has regenerated naturally as a result of their efforts to protect the area from grazing cattle and firewood collectors from neighboring villages. Note the villager taking a picture of me with his cell phone.
Village boys wrestling to get in front of the picture I offered to take of them. Actually, first I wanted to take a picture of the cute baby goat resting in the shade, but the boys quickly took over.
A forest official showing confiscated material - illegally harvested wood, bicycles which were taken from people illegally using forests - that are stored in front of his office. A major activity of the forest department here is policing illegal activities.

Timber harvest - this was a windfallen teak tree. While the daily wage laborers cut up the tree, the government officials stand aside, making sure the cuts are mad properly. The trunk will be used for timber, the branches cut up for firewood.
I might be giving off the impression that I spend all my time in villages and forests, but since I study government, I probably spend more time in medium-sized cities, talking to officials who sit behind desks. This city, Chandrapur, is in the middle of a resource rich region of forests and coal mines. The smokestacks in the distance are supposedly from Asia's largest coal-fired thermal power plant. Combine that with several paper plants (processing bamboo into paper pulp) and steel smelters, and you have a recipe for really horrible air pollution. The village square has a monitor which shows local air pollution data (although I don't think anyone understands what the numbers mean - I've studied air pollution, but I don't know what the numbers mean), but the last time I went by, the power was out and there was no display.
On the holiday of Dusshera, hundreds of thousands of people converge on a modern stupa - a buddhist religious building - in Nagpur city. These people are the Ambedkar Buddhists. Ambedkar was one of the founders of modern India - he wrote the constitution. He was also the political leader of the people formerly called untouchables (though they would prefer to be known as dalit - or oppressed). He struggled all of his life to gain political rights for his people - a struggle which often brought him into direct political conflict with the other independence leaders and founders of modern India, including Gandhi, who once fasted to death in opposition to Ambedkar's political demands. Ambedkar came to believe that the Hindu religion was fundamentally flawed, a source of oppression for the dalits. On the spot where the stupa now stands, on Dusshera in 1956, Ambedkar formally converted to Buddhism, in the company of hundreds of thousands of his followers. Now you find that many of the poorer villages and urban colonies in the region have Buddhist statues, and Ambedkar's followers continue to gather in huge numbers each year in Nagpur to celebrate their conversion. Here, monks are delivering a lecture, with pictures of Ambedkar and Buddha in the background.
Diwali, which just passed, is a holiday analogous to Christmas, in that families exchange gifts and sweets. Here, crowds fill Bardi, Nagpur's main shopping district, a few days before Diwali.
A few weeks ago, I went for a walk in a rural area with a friend. We found this bullock cart carrying fodder out of the forest along a narrow cart track.
A beautiful lake at sunset, with forested hills in the background.
A local villager happened by, and told us about the temple on top of the hill, so the next morning, which happened to be my 30th birthday, we climbed the hill.

A little shrine with this horse-god stood on the summit. The shrine is sacred to the Gond people - one of the largest of the Adivasi or tribal groups of central India. I have heard that they worship horses because they were once wandering horsemen. Cities such as Nagpur and Chandrapur were founded by Gond kingdoms during the middle ages, but they were driven out of power gradually by the succession of rulers - Mughal, Maratha, British. Now most Gonds are farmers, and many of them live on the edge of the forests.
A flag waves in the hilltop breezes above the shrine.
In one direction we can see the outskirts of the small city of Gondia, but in the other direction, hills and forest stretch as far as we can see.

New publication from Forrest

2010-11-02T10:03:00.002-04:00

Dear friends -
My apologies for the lack of posts in October. You can take it as a good sign for my research. I wanted to write a post for my 3oth birthday, but was simply too busy with research work to find time to write. This week is the Diwali holiday here in India, and I hope to have some time to at least get some new photos posted, if not an essay or a good story. In the meantime, I thought I would announce my first peer reviewed publication, a joint publication with several friends from Indiana. The title of the paper is "Disturbance, Response, and Persistence in Self-Organized Forested Communities: Analysis of Robustness and Resilience in Five Communities in Southern Indiana," and it is published in the excellent open-access journal, Ecology and Society. If you are interested, you can read it online here.

Dancing in the Streets

2010-09-12T10:39:00.012-04:00

It is festival season here in Central India.
When I first came to India, I was puzzled by the apparent absence of public outlets for expressions of joy and wildness. In the US, of course, we have bars and football games. Traditional rural life, we are led to believe from old songs, cowboy movies, and Wendell Berry novels, centered around barn dances, and when I was in college we would hire bands to come and play and dance the night away. When I travelled in Latin America, I recall that every small town had its disco, where salsa music blared on Saturday nights, and in places which were too rural for this, the local elementary school would be appropriated. It was in one such place, on the Costa Rica Panamanian border in 1999, where I first heard the music that later became world famous as Reggaeton. On Friday and Saturday, a truck would drive through the mountainous countryside with a powerful PA system, announcing, "Sabado, Sabado, Sabado - Gran Baile Sabado!"

On Saturday and Sunday evenings in Thrissur, the first city I lived in in Kerala, throngs of people filled the shops, restaurants and roadsides. Then, sometime around 8 or 8.3o pm, I would notice all the throngs seemed to be moving in one direction. I would follow and find people packing into busses. By 9 pm a few stragglers (all men) would still be crowding onto the buses to go home, and by 10, you would be quite alone. There was nothing like a disco, and to the extent that there were bars, they were disreputable places, where no well-behaved woman had ever set foot, and where no respectable man would want to be seen.

Then the rains ended. In Kerala, the dry season is the season for local festivals. Every temple, church and mosque holds a festival, and although the Hindu festivals seemed to me to be the most colorful, there wasn't much difference between them and the Christian and Muslim festivals. The three elements by which the festivals were judged were (1) elephants (2) drums and (3) fireworks. A good festival featured lots of elephants, who stood in a row in the temple yard and were fed giant balls of cooked rice.

The chenda drum orchestra would hammer away, their rhythms and levels rising and falling, as men stood upon the caparisoned elephants, raising and lowering colored banners in time with the music. At the peak, the horn players would blast out a brief, loud melody. As the day dragged on, the drumming would grow more intense and feverish. At first it would seem that the 40-50 drummers were playing in unison, but as the hours grew longer, you'd start to hear back rhythms and syncopations sneaking in, until at last the music would reach its feverish pitch. The poor elephants stood in the hot sun peacefully at all the festivals I attended, but you'd read in the papers about elephants that would get fed up, and run rampant through the crowds, trampling people as they went.

At night lamps would be lit on the temples. Colored light displays would be attached to the front of churches and to the commercial buildings surrounding the temples that put the best American Christmas lights to shame. I recall one in downtown Thrissur which animated the lord Vishnu striking down a crocodile with his discus. And then came the fireworks. I saw some good fireworks displays, so I was interested to see the fireworks display at Thrissur Pooram, Kerala's largest temple festival. I had heard it was so big that it sometimes shattered windows in our suburban neighborhood, 6 km away. My friends advised me not to attend the main display, which was in the middle of the night and too crowded, but to attend another, earlier pre-display. We came to downtown Thrissur, and found all the streets blocked off, as a great mass of people struggled to find the best seats. My friends and I stood in a sweaty throng as we waited for the day to end and the display to begin. The display was spectacular, but not beautiful - the loudest noise and the biggest explosion I have ever seen, but not the brilliant Gandalfian colors I had hoped for. Afterwards we rode home in a bus so crowded that even when the driver slammed on the brakes, the neighboring bodies prevented us from shifting forward.

Last week it was Ganesh Chaturthi, a 10 day festival to celebrate the birthday of the popular elephant-headed god. India is often described as a traditional or timeless society, but it seems that every time I delve into one of these timeless traditions, I discover peculiarly modern origins. Ganesh's birthday has always been Ganesh's birthday, but the festival we were celebrating was invented by Lokmanya Tilak, one of the early leaders of the Indian National Congress. He sought to create a holiday that would unite the people of his region (western Maharashtra) beyond boundaries of caste, in opposition to British Rule. In the late 19th century, he began the tradition of placing a Ganesh statue in the home, and another larger one in the public square, to be worshipped for ten days, after which the clay statue would be immersed in water, where it would dissolve. Unlike so many other traditions, this one would be open to people of all castes, and would bring people together both as families and as geographical (as opposed to caste) communities.

The festival has been a success, and its popularity has spread across much of India. On the days before the festival, the markets were filled with Ganesh idols for sale.

On the first night of the festival I went to my neighbors apartment. We sat around, ate sweets (Ganesh is particularly fond of ladoos - balls of dough filled with sugar), and they explained to me the meaning of the various decorations. With the sweets and decorations and gathering of family and friends, I felt like it was Christmas, only with the Ganesh statue substituting for the tree.
Later in the evening, the community idols started arriving. These were much larger, and arrived on the back of trucks. A second truck often followed, carrying a generator to power bright lights and a sound system. Each idol was accompanied by a drum corps of 15-30 young men, playing a mixture of giant bass drums and smaller snare style drums, and a bevy of young revelers. Sometimes firecrackers were set off in advance of the statue The drumming was steady, and all the drum corps seemed to play the same few rhythms over and over as they marched past my house to the various neighborhoods where their Ganesh statues would be installed. The revelers danced and threw colored powders at each other. It has been my experience that women in contemporary urban India rarely have the opportunity to participate publicly in such revelry, but I was pleased to see that accompanying at least some of the statues were big groups of young women, dancing away, usually separated from the groups of dancing young men by the drummers.
The Ganesh in this picture is rumored to have been the largest in Nagpur. It was pulled by a team of gigantic oxen, and was accompanied by teams of men with long bamboo poles, who tried to push the electric lines up so that Ganesh wouldn't get tangled in them. The number of local Ganesh statues is quite large - I think there were half a dozen installed within a ten minute walk from my apartment.
It struck me, as I participated in these festivities as a curious outsider, that there was a striking contrast between those areas of Indian society that are orderly, clean, and predictable, and those that were chaotic and dangerous. The streets of most Indian cities and towns are filthy. There appears to be no functional system of public garbage disposal, and even in beautiful Landour (which had clean trash cans posted every 100 m along the road), I watched tourists who'd come to enjoy the clean mountain air dropping their chip wrappers on the street. Public restrooms are filthy at best. Traffic is chaotic (and India has the highway fatality statistics to show it). Public schools and health facilities are of abysmal quality, and in many regions of India, it seems that there is essentially zero provision of public goods.

But I've never been in a private home (even the homes of very poor people) that wasn't spotlessly clean. I remember sitting by the water in Mumbai once, watching a little slum of people living in tiny shacks made of plastic and driftwood, anchored to the beach-side highway. It was midday, and presumably the men were off trying to earn some money, because I saw only women and children. Although these people were obviously living in abject poverty, there wasn't a woman who wasn't dressed in a bright clean sari, and as they sat there cooking on driftwood fires on the tiny highway fringe beach, they scrubbed each pot they were using clean in the filthy urban ocean.

This contrast extends far beyond these obviously visible signs. For most of the young people I've made friends with in my years in India, life is quite predictable and orderly. While my American peers wander the world, trying one thing and then another, changing jobs every couple of years, back to graduate school in fields only distantly related to their undergraduate studies, My Indian friends follow predictable career paths. If their examination marks are good, they pursue careers in medicine or engineering. If they pursue higher studies, it is in the field in which they began, and they look for stable, predictable jobs. Although it would be misleading to think of this as a continuation of the caste occupational system that existed in rural India in the early 20th century, it remains the case that one's family situation has an overbearing influence on one's occupational goals and opportunities. A book I read recently described attempts to develop local school committees in the notoriously poor rural areas of Bihar, Jharkhand, and West Bengal. These committees failed to attract members of the lowest castes because such people assume that no benefit can come to them from education. By contrast there is a certain social strata - primarily among the wealthy in the largest cities - where an American education is an assumption. Studies of how people get jobs in India reveal the importance of family connections.

This orderliness of life progression extends to marriage and family. Although arranged marriage was once the norm among my own ancestors (at least if I can accept the stories of Sholom Aleichem & Isaac Bashevis Singer as based on a realistic portrayal of life among the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe), its influence has disappeared. Arranged marriage is no longer a viable option for American youth because we do not live lives which are predictable based on what our parents' lives have been. Most of my American friends would be terrified to allow their parents any significant role in choosing a mate. Arranged marriage continues to be dominant in Indian society in part because people's life roles continue to be predictable based on an ordered progression from their family. To be a respectable Indian adult, it is not necessary to demonstrate one's independence from one's family, and many of my friends expect to live in their parents' home for their whole lives - or perhaps to move into their husband's family's home on marriage. In such predictable circumstances, arranged marriages make perfect sense: if your parents know what life you will lead, and have more experience than you in observing human relationships, you would be crazy not to take their advice seriously.

This societal orderliness also applies to the ways in which people let loose, as I have observed during these festivals. Rather than anonymous concerts and bars, Indian celebratory revels are centered around the same features of family and community. I do not know Indians who go out dancing on Saturday night (some exist, I suppose, among the westernized elites of the big cities). I know Indians whose parties center around the Ganesh festival, the family wedding, the community feast. It is striking that even in places where the provision of public goods is remarkably weak (such as in Kolzari), the provision of public religious goods remains strong. One of the few successful examples of collective action in Kolzari since its relocation is the building of a new temple, built through voluntary contributions by people who say they don't have enough to eat.

There is a theory in contemporary social science that the core institutions of modern society depend on the development of generalized trust. In traditional societies, one does not exchange goods with those one doesn't know. Trust is based on continued reciprocal exchange. We know our neighbors won't steal from us because they know that if they do, we can effectively retaliate against them. Such societies may seem harmonious, but they can also be incredibly confining. Not only does it limit the kinds of exchange you can participate in, but it is also based on a sort of mutually assured destruction. Our neighbors may be good people, but if they are not, we may spend our lives tied to people whose actions are constant threats to our well being.

Generalized trust allows us a much greater level of interaction. We can go to the grocery store, and assume that the anonymous clerk will not cheat us. We order goods using our credit card online, and trust that the vendor will deliver the goods to us (while the vendor trusts that our credit card numbers are legitimate). We pay our taxes and assume that the government will provide us with useful services. If they fail to, we believe we can protest without negative consequences to ourselves.

In India, it seems that the level of public, generalized trust is limited. Instead, people trust their families, their acquaintances, their connections. I have found, in my research, that it is very difficult to walk into a government office without a proper letter of introduction. If I am not recommended by their boss or friend, the government official will not want to talk to me. On the other hand, with the proper introductions, doors swing open. On the other hand, relative to the society I grew up in, Indian society's family and community bonds are much stronger and more dependable. I could hardly depend on my family's connections to make my career or to find me a wife. I have to do these things on my own, almost regardless of my family's wealth or social position. In India, many of my friends can depend on their family - even if their family is only of modest means and status - to smooth their way through life.

I have often wondered if more could be done to build on these powerful societal foundations. There is a tendency in contemporary India to look to the US as a model, but I happen to think that there are a multiplicity of ways to alleviate systematic human suffering (and in any case, I hesitate to see the US as a model, as in spite of its great wealth, it contains persistent deprivation and discrimination). Instead of assuming that it is necessary for a human society to become atomized and privately chaotic in order to become publicly "developed."

At the end of the Ganesh festival, the parade is reversed.
People bring their household idols to the lake, for a final puja.
The big community statues are loaded back onto their trucks, and to the accompaniment of the same drummers and dancers (but it seems, with a bit more of those colored powders and a bit more wildness), make their way to the lakes. At the lakeside, people gather, and one by one, the statues are immersed.

The end of this festival bears a remarkable resemblance to littering. The traditional statues are made of clay and natural dyes, and dissolve in the water, but in recent years the market has been flooded with cheap plastic molds, which, of course, do not dissolve in water. This year there was a big campaign to prevent such idols from being dumped. Even with the clay idols, I wonder how much clay this city's 7 lakes can absorb each year. The water afterwards is covered with plastic bags filled with flower garlands (the garlands are removed prior to dumping, but I saw many people then take the garlands, stuff them in a plastic bag, and throw them in the lake.)
Larger Ganeshes are taken out in to the middle of the lake by raft.
In the evening I have to go out to buy milk. The milk comes in a thin plastic satchet. I will boil it and then culture it to make yogurt. There was a sharp thunderstorm earlier, which is why I didn't make it out in the daylight. Now it is raining lightly, and everything is wet & cool - the temperature on my digital alarm clock/thermometer reads 80 - about as low as the temperature has been since I came to Nagpur in early August. The rains are coming to an end now, and the air is becoming drier, as the temperatures start to climb. I see through a window a woman rolling out chapatis for dinner. Someone is burning incense, and the air smells like sandalwood and roses. Men are sitting in the motorcycle shop downstairs. Across the street, the proprietor of Sri Sai Hot Chips is slicing potatoes into a wok of boiling oil. he also has fresh banana chips, and green beans, and rice crackers, and various other deep fried chips that I can't identify. As I step out into the street, a jeep almost rolls over a boy on a motorcycle making a turn. I watch for an opening to cross the street. I think I've found one, but then an autorickshaw rolls by with its lights off. You can hardly see it. It is a good thing the traffic moves slowly, because it never stops... I've always been terrified of the traffic here.

Down at the corner, someone in the temple is ringing a bell incessantly. It seems to be in a curious rhythm with the constantly honking horns, making a chaotic sort of music reminiscent of early New Orleans Jazz, or late Coltrane, or the brass bands that play in wedding processions in North India. It is worshipful music, but also joyful and disordered and urban and gritty. Lights blaze out from the temple onto the flower wallahs, with their great garlands of marigolds. Across the street, there are carts selling bananas, apples from the Himalayas, chai, and fried snacks. I get my half liter of milk, look at the ice cream advertisement (this milk stall, unfortunately, does not carry kulfi, but he does have various kinds of chocolate covered bars, a childhood flavor, and unlike in the US, the serving size on Indian ice cream bars is reasonable), find another gap in the traffic, climb up the stairs, and push the humidity swollen door open to my apartment.

Everyday Life in Nagpur

2010-09-12T08:55:00.016-04:00

For the last month and a half I have been based in the city of Nagpur. According to one tourist bulletin board website, Nagpur has nothing to attract the traveler unless you like highway flyovers. I think this demonstrates the kind of workaday beauty that we miss when we go off in search of the spectacular.
Fruit stall, Dharampeth Bazaar

Nagpur claims to be the geographic center of India, and although I'm not sure which India it is the center of (British India? India including the areas occupied by China & Pakistan but claimed by the Indian government? India as shown on maps in the west, excluding these areas occupied by other countries), it is still true that if you look at the dead center of a map of India, you are pretty much looking at Nagpur. It was the capital of the British Central Provinces, and is thus blessed with a number of very beautiful British-era administrative buildings. In his later years, Gandhi located his ashram at nearby Sevagram (Seva = service, gram = village), in part because the poverty of the area enabled him to devote himself to service of the poor, and in part because from here, he could hop on a train and be anywhere in India within 24 hours. It continues to be a major transit hub and administrative center, although it is now the 3rd city in the vast state of Maharashtra (about the same size as Germany). Mumbai and Pune are a 15 hour train ride to the west, and although the state capital is in Mumbai, one does not feel its influence in these distant provinces. To the north, you'd have to travel to Delhi or the other cities of the Indo-Gangetic plain to find a bigger place (again, a 15 hour journey), while to the east, Calcutta is even farther away. Even Hyderabad, the other great city of the Deccan, is a 10 hour journey to the South.

Dharmapeth - I was surprised to learn that Nagpur has its own, 100 year old daily English newspaper. The other day I hailed a sitting autorickshaw to go to a friends house, and was surprised to find that the rickshaw-wallah had been reading the Hitavda.

Nagpur has played an important role in the political history of India, although in strangely contradictory ways. The militant Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a volunteer organization closely tied to the assassination of Gandhi and the rise of the modern Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP - the largest national opposition party today and the ruling party from 1998-2004) was founded here in the 1920s, modeling itself after volunteer organizations rising in Germany and Italy around the same time. While it has drawn its support primarily from the Brahmin castes, Nagpur's other great political movement draws its support from the Dalit or oppressed castes - formerly known as untouchables. The great untouchable leader Ambedkar, who also wrote the Indian Constitution, converted to Buddhism here in 1956, a year before his death.
When you walk through the slums of the city you frequently come across small shrines such as this one. Over the course of a life spent fighting for the rights of the dalit castes (like the RSS, often in direct opposition to Gandhi), Ambedkar came to believe that Hindu religious beliefs held back his people, and adopted Buddhism as an older, anti-caste religion of India. Hundreds of thousands of Ambedkar's followers joined him in his conversion, and today there is a great modern stupa marking the place of conversion. Unfortunately, Ambedkar passed away shortly after his conversion, and, at least from what I've heard, his followers had little knowledge of the teachings of the Buddha - their Buddhism was a defiant political gesture more than a religious one. I hear from my friends at the local Vipassana Meditation Center that many of the Ambedkar Buddhists have started coming there for teaching.

Being in the midst of the Deccan plateau, far from the ocean, Nagpur is very hot. When I first came to Nagpur in June 2009 for an exploratory visit, the monsoon rains, which typically arrive in mid-June, were three weeks delayed. Summer in Nagpur is miserably hot - beginning sometime in March, and lasting until the arrival of the rains, daytime highs stay above 40 C, and regularly reach 47 - 120 F. Being a New England boy, I had never experienced heat like that. I remember getting up before dawn to go jogging - when it was still a relatively cool 90 F. Summer ends with the arrival of the rains, and July, August, and September are hot and humid, but not that hot. It isn't that different than a wet summer in the midwest. Some days it rains, some days it pours, other days the sun comes out, things dry out, and the temperatures climb up into the 90s again, but most days stay in the mid 80s. At night, at least in the city, the warm air stays and I run the fan all night when I sleep. Occasionally, on very rainy nights, the temperature drops below 80, and I turn the fan off, and wonder how I will dry my clothes without the benefit of sun or the electric wind.

There are several temples clustered near my flat, and cultural associations for the many south Indians who have settled here. The temples and cultural centers, like everything else, are unimpressive concrete block buildings. One directly across the street from me offers morning and evening tuition (we'd call it tutoring) for first year engineering undergraduates. At 6 AM, when I go to my yoga class, I find crowds of 18-20 year olds arriving on their scooters (the boys park on one side, the girls on the other) for their classes, which last until 8 AM. There is another batch in the evening. Unlike in the US, where top students commonly aim for a liberal arts education, and engineering is only one of many respectable professions, engineering here is The profession towards which young people aspire. When I tell people that I'm from Massachusetts, I commonly hear a note a recognition: "Ah yes - Massachusetts, home of the world's greatest university." This part is not surprising. Many people in the US also think that the greatest university in the US is located in Massachusetts. The next part is surprising: "Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT." Surely MIT is one of the world's great universities - but greater than Harvard? Well... of course Harvard doesn't have Massachusetts in its name, so maybe they just don't realize that Harvard and MIT are neighbors - but no - when I mention Harvard they often give a note of non-recognition.

The predominance of engineering is probably related to the phenomenal growth of the IT sector in India over the last 20 years - I read in a recent newspaper that there is a severe shortage of civil engineers in India, as all of the best civil engineers high paying jobs in the IT sector instead of building roads and bridges. Nonetheless, I find it a little disconcerting. I'd like to think that there are smart, privileged Indians going into other professions that are crucial for building a strong and free society - such as the arts, journalism, natural sciences, social sciences, and perhaps most importantly, education. Yet I frequently hear from young people that these professions are only chosen by those who can't get into engineering school. Natural sciences at least can lead to a medical career, which still seems to be highly valued, though not as popular as engineering, but I also hear that social science programs are starved for talented students, and I've observed that many of India's most prominent contemporary intellectuals are engineers, at least by undergraduate training. I'm disturbed by the low value given in mainstream education to India's incredibly rich linguistic, cultural, literary, musical, spiritual, and artistic heritage. I think that engineering is crucial to a successful modern society, yet I worry that basic engineering education has a strong tendency to promote linear thinking that is insufficient for problem solving in a complex, non-linear world. I'm most deeply disturbed by the low value given to careers in education, even lower than in the US. I can't think of anything more fundamental to the development of a healthy society than elementary education, but I've never met and Indian who aspired to teach 3rd grade.

That said, my neighbor is a retired high school science teacher. Her husband passed away recently, but I had the privilege of meeting one of her daughters recently, and she illustrated the value of having a teacher for a mother: she is a professor of physics at IIT-Delhi, one of India's most elite institutes of higher education, while her sister teaches and practices as an ob-gyn in Dubai.

A five minute walk through the temple area brings me to the yoga mandal. I grew up in a segment of America where yoga was pretty normal. I can remember my parents practicing yoga. When I was a child, and I knew several people who made their living as yoga teachers, and several of my housemates in college went for yoga trainings. But yoga in the US never made a strong appeal to me. I liked to stretch, but I found something not quite right for me in the effort to integrate spirituality into physical exercise that most yoga teachers made. It seemed like they wanted to do something spiritual, but only knew how to teach me how to move my body.

I feel very differently about this yoga center. To begin with, the spirituality is front and center. The yoga studio features a shrine in the front, and every session begins and ends (and is sometimes interrupted in the middle) with singing of devotional songs and chants. Not being a Hindu, and not understanding Hindi very well yet, I can't tell you exactly what the songs mean, but I love that an integral aspect of the class involves people singing together. Instead of having teachers who are overly flexible young hippie women who want to be dancers, my yoga classes are taught by very normal seeming middle-aged men (classes are gender segregated), who will later go to work in normal jobs. One teacher I met is a doctor whose family owns a large local grocery store. Another, perhaps more relevant to me, is a retired forest officer.

The classes here have been offered for decades. The swami who founded the center was one of the first to teach yoga to women, and he established this center to offer all of its classes free of charge. When I think of it, I have a hard time imagining a real spiritual teaching that requires up-front payment. When was the last time you heard of a church or synagogue with an entrance fee? The fact that this yoga center has thrived and grown (long outliving its founder) implies that people find the classes of great use, and are willing to donate their time and money to support the place. I'm impressed when I see older middle-class men sweeping the floor: one doesn't often see such people doing household chores. (I could say the same about the Vipassana meditation center here, although it is less surprising to me, since I grew up in that tradition and am aware of its strong presence even in the US).

This morning, for the first time since I began taking classes there about a month ago, I was able to meet the Guru - a quiet white-haired who looks more like a long retired civil servant than a typical swami. I've struggled with back pain ever since I was rear-ended by an emergency room doctor in 2003, and this last year I developed a persistent pain in my right shoulder from working too hard on my dissertation proposal. I've seen alot of health practitioners in the US for these problems, and I think I've learned a little about how to judge their practice. Daily yoga sessions have certainly helped, but the pain doesn't seem to completely go away. The guru spent about 5 minutes massaging my back (and also an area on my upper chest and on my palm), and I could tell I was in the hand of someone who knew alot about soft tissue. It was only temporary, but for a few hours afterwards, I really felt no pain. It moved me to think that one of the best treatments I've had for my back was given to me as a gift, free of charge, with nothing asked or expected in return. I feel very fortunate to have found this place.

In the nearby dharampeth bazaar, I can find anything I might need:
Chile, ginger, lemon, garlic, cilantro...
winter squashes, summer squashes, cucumbers and warty bitter gourds...
Mirrors, combs, and other household paraphenalia...
Incense, dyes...

And of course, garlands of marigolds to decorate the household gods. I might add that Haldirams, one of India's largest maker of sweets and namkeens (salty snacks), has an outlet here.
The traffic isn't particularly bad here, but there are no crosswalks to speak of, and I'm generally a pedestrian. It is not easy to reach the other side of the road. The neighborhood cows sit on the street (the streets are dryer than the sidewalks, and really, where else would they go? they belong to a neighborhood dairy, but there is no grazing land here for the dairy cows. Asphalt-fed milk anyone?), and people zip around them on their Honda scooters and Bajaj motorcycles and aging bicycles, or in their little Maruti cars. As in the US, the wealthy have taken to big jeeps and SUVs. Unlike many other cities I've been to in India, women drive. A friend suggests that the necessity to drive is driven by the poor public transit available in this sprawling city. Most of the women drive scooters (women don't drive motorcycles), and they take their dupattas - the scarves that are part of their salwar kameez - and wrap them around their face for protection from the sun and dust. With only their eyes visible, I think they look like some kind of strange figures, transposed from the Arabian Nights onto their Hondas.
I like to jog up to the university. The campus is free of the busy cars, and has a bit of greenery. One day I found this handsome buffalo grazing on the main quad of the Laxminarayan Institute of Technology.

On the edge of the campus are slums, who throw their trash into this field, where the cows and pigs and dogs rifle through it, searching for edibles.

Farther afield, but within distance of a jog or a long walk, are two lakes. There are parks on their banks, and in the evening people gather to catch fish, socialize, watch the sunset, enjoy the cool breeze, and eat chaats (snacks made of little bits of fried things, spices, chutneys, and chopped onions and tomatoes - possibly the best food in India, but full of untreated water, so I avoid them), ice creams, and fried noodles.
Sunset at Telankhedi Tank.

Kolzari: Rebuilding a Tribal Village

2010-08-15T06:07:00.017-04:00

When the residents of the village of Botezari were relocated from the interior of the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve in April 2007, most were sad to leave their homes, but many apparently hoped that their new village might provide them a better way of life, closer to markets, schools, and health facilities, and for the poorer villagers, more land. Things did not work out well. The farmland for the new village, located on about 500 Hectares of land cleared from forest by the Forest Department, was full of big stumps and rocks, making tillage difficult, and irrigation facilities were insufficient. Collecting forest produce, particularly bamboo, had formerly been an important source of income (although it was also illegal inside the tiger reserve). The forests around their new village were much more heavily used, and did not provide as well either. Although they were closer to other villages, it was still difficult to find paid labor working on others' fields. They had been promised that government work would be available improving the road to their village, but the work was not forthcoming (technically, the government is legally obligated, under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, to provide work to anyone willing to perform it, but as has been found elsewhere in India, unemployed villagers rarely have the power to force the local government to provide such work as envisioned under the law).

When I first came to Nagpur last July, at the beginning of the second of two poor monsoons that followed the village's move, my colleagues Rucha Ghate & Mukund Kulkarni of SHODH, a small research NGO, were very concerned about the new village, which had been named Kolzari. They had heard that many of the people in Kolzari were close to starvation. A small group of villagers decided to return to their old village - although the government had bulldozed the village after their departure, at least there they could take advantage of their old irrigation facilities to grow some crops and collect forest produce so they wouldn't starve. The villagers were promptly arrested. After I returned to the US, Rucha & Mukund drove down to Chandrapur to visit the jailed visitors and talk to village leaders.

Traffic Jam on road to Kolzari - about four hours drive south of Nagpur.

Rucha & Mukund had first met the villagers of Botezari in the late 1990s when they had conducted a survey of forest dependence among the six villages inside of the Tiger Reserve. The Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve was expanded in the 1990s to an area of about 650 sq km - or 150,000 acres, and in the process, swallowed six new villages (two other villages were relocated out of the older park boundaries in the 1970s). This includes some of the best quality dry tropical forest (and tiger habitat) in central India - it is home to roughly 50 tigers, as well as many other wild animals - leopards, sloth bears, langurs, several species of deer and antelope, hundreds of bird species, etc. To get a sense of the kind of forest, you might re-read Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book, which is said to have been set in one of the forest areas a little to the north of here. Although they expected to find that the villagers were poor and living harmoniously with the forest, the picture that appeared from the research was more complex. Although the villagers were poor, they were able to harvest many things from the forest which greatly supplemented their income from working for the Forest Department and the rice they grew in their paddies. Much of what they harvested was done illegally (basically no extractive uses are legal inside protected areas). They were not necessarily harvesting things "sustainably," although subsequent research showed that the villages on the periphery of the forest outside of the reserve - which had access to good roads and markets - were having a much greater impact on the forest than the interior villages, which had difficulty transporting the goods they harvested.

In addition to their research findings, Rucha, Mukund, and colleagues discovered that the people of Tadoba were warm and friendly. Spending a few weeks in each of the villages, they made many friendships. They found the people of Botezari particularly welcoming. Over succeeding years, they continued to return to the area to conduct research, and also to provide a little help to the people. One summer they organized a set of summer camps for the children living in the reserve - they brought down art teachers and other experts from Nagpur - some of the childrens' watercolor paintings won national recognition. Rucha also organized her friends in Nagpur to provide new clothes to some of the women of Botezari.

The issue of relocating villagers from national parks, in India and elsewhere, is fraught with controversy. Are these relocations just? Is it right to privilege tiger conservation over the rights of the traditional inhabitants of an area? How would you feel if you were told that you were being kicked out of your home to make way for the conservation of an animal? We might hope at least that appropriate compensation would be given, but it is all too common for the inhabitants of wildlife sanctuaries in developing countries to be given minimal compensation for their lost land - to become, as it were, ecological refugees. The story isn't so different from the removals of native peoples that happened in the US to make way for farming, mining, and other developments in the 19th century.

Do relocations serve the purpose of conservation? There are certainly studies showing that inhabitants of wildlife sanctuaries harm the cause of wildlife protection, and that wildlife populations improve after relocation, but there are also studies showing, for example, that the farming activities of sanctuary inhabitants improve the habitat for the protected species. There are cases where wildlife populations have declined following removals. There are also cases where the removals have had little impact because the real threat to wildlife came not from the poor villagers living in the park but from the well armed poachers or loggers or miners living outside, and venturing in to steal resources. In these cases, park residents may in fact provide protection for the wildlife by serving as monitors and wardens. Given that people have been living alongside wildlife for tens of thousands of years, it ought not to be surprising that some wildlife are adapted to live alongside some kinds of farming practices. But both the number and intensity of these practices has changed dramatically, particularly in the last 100 years, and it should also not be surprising that removals can have positive impact. Given the deep moral questions that removal policies raise, I would like to at least know that when they occur they are based on sound, in-depth studies exploring the likely ecological and social implications, and making sure that (a) the removals are actually likely to have a positive impact on wildlife protection, and (b) the needs of the oustees are carefully considered.

I don't know if either of these analyses were conducted in Tadoba. It has been documented, however, that the villagers of Botezari left voluntarily. They may have felt they had little choice in the matter - by law, all of the 6 villages in the reserve are to be relocated. Since the designation of the reserve, their means of livelihood have become illegal, and their villages have been unable to receive improved services - the government will not build roads, schools, or health centers in villages slated to be relocated, even if the relocations are not scheduled. Even without these restrictions, their village was remote, isolated, poor, and subject to alot of disturbance by wild animals (no one wants their cattle eaten by tigers). Thus, they may have hoped that by leaving, they could find a better place to live. Some of the landless villagers may have been tempted by a promise of land in the new village. There also appears to have been some complicated (and possibly not very appropriate) last minute pressure by local officials on the village to move.

Back to the present, or rather to last August, when Rucha & Mukund were driving back to Nagpur after visiting the disheartened villagers. The new village had not realized their hopes. They were even poorer and hungrier than they'd been before, and if they went back to their old village, they would be thrown in jail. Rucha & Mukund felt terrible for their friends. After decades of working and writing on tribal issues (Rucha is an academic economist, Mukund a journalist with a PhD in history), they felt like their work still had not had the positive impact they wanted to see. Perhaps it was time to do something different - more hands on - more direct.

Another visit to the village, and they found that a group of young men had started a youth club. They had the will and inclination to do something about the village's plight, but largely lacked the means to get started.

Young village leaders meeting with Rucha & Mukund

1 year and 52 visits later, and much is going on in the village. Although the Forest Department had cleared 500 Ha of land for the new village, not all of it had been given away. They agreed to loan 8 Ha to the new collaboration between Rucha & Mukund's NGO, Shodh, and the organization they helped set up in the village. The landscape is a strange one.

On one side of the road is the rough open forest that is the result of heavy human use of the land for grazing, firewood, bamboo poles, and other non-timber forest products. On the other side is a big clearing that looks like a shelterwood clearcut - the only trees the forest department left are the big Mahua trees which produce valuable flowers and fruit. Except for the project's land, no crops are being cultivated (remember the problem with irrigation and tillage?), and so the land is a mixture of grass and little shrubby trees (many of the forest trees here will resprout vigorously from their stumps).

Then there is the project land. A big piece of it is in rice - rice is the dominant crop of the region, grown during the four month monsoon when abundant rains make its cultivation possible. Few areas have sufficient water to grow any crops during the long hot dry season - for four months the daytime temperature rarely drops below 40 C (about 105 F), and regularly tops 47 - close to 120 F, and nighttime lows are hot enough to be a hot summer day in New England. I'm a farmer, but I find this ecosystem puzzling. Can you really grow crops in standing water? and I know about tough perennials, but what kinds of trees can survive months of such scorching?

They have built a large tank - in part to store water, but in part to raise fish. In the picture, Bhaskar and Mukesh, two of the key leaders of the group, are releasing the fish we brought from the government hatchery into the tank. By March, when we plan to harvest them, they may weigh 4 pounds, but now they are just tiny little fry, 1 thousand in each little garbage bag.

Then there are 100 half-grown Emus! The goal of the project is not, in fact, to start a collective farm, although that is the work that is being done now, but rather to use the demonstration farm as a base for helping the members of the village become financially independent. Rucha told me that in 10 years, she'd like to see at least half of the households in the village earning 10000 rupees per month - that is about $200. It doesn't sound like much, but right now the villagers are working for the project at the rate of 80 rupees (less than $2) per day or 2000 (about $40) per month. And those wages are good relative to what they could get working as agricultural labor in neighboring villages. The shoes I was wearing - American running shoes - would cost these people 2 months of wages. The emus, it is hoped, will become one of the bases of financial independence for the villagers - a few pairs of emus for each family will produce a regular income in eggs, which fetch a good price in Nagpur. The farm will serve as a hatchery, perhaps eventually selling emus to other neighboring villages. It is a business model that has yet to be tested, but Rucha and Mukund seem optimistic that they can make it work. They are also working on developing a poultry operation, but during the summer heat, the poultry they had did not do well, and they sold them. I suggested developing a design for pastured poultry to be combined with vegetable production, and all seemed eager to try it out.

There are various plots of vegetables and grains - here you can see corn in the foreground, okra in the background, and then the traditional mud hut which serves as a kitchen, the covered enclosure which is the dining/meeting area, and the under construction house, which will eventually serve as an office and a place for guests (i.e. people who don't live in the village a kilometer away) to stay in. They had had a second mud hut serving this purpose, but it collapsed at the start of the rains, and so they decided to build something more permanent - this is a normal looking small Indian house, but constructed with hollow bricks which have similar cooling properties to the traditional mud homes during the hot summer. I have heard that there are designs for traditional mud huts that are more sturdy and permanent like brick, but do not know where they can be found. They have sunk several borewells which, thanks probably to the abundant surrounding forest, have plentiful water even in the heat of May, and can be used to irrigate the vegetables. The cost of sinking borewells and getting a transformer to convert powerline current for pumps is prohibitve for local people - hundreds of thousands of rupees. With government subsidies, it has proved just as cheap to install a combined wind/solar system for pumping and general electric as to connect to the electric lines, which are anyway quite unreliable.

Many areas, including the sides of paths and the bunds around the irrigation tank, are planted with toovar - also known as pigeon pea - one of my favorite dals. As you can see, weeding is done laboriously with short-handled tools and bent backs. I would love to get a design for a long-handled hula hoe or other long handled weeding tool that could be fabricated locally (they have plenty of long bamboos here that make strong handles).

As some of you know, I'm rather obsessed with growing vegetables. The first seedling is called "palak" as in palak paneer. This is always translated as spinach, but I've never seen spinach growing in temperatures this high (in my experience, there is no variety of spinach that will stand more than a week at temperatures above 80 F without bolting).

I think this looks exactly like a swiss chard seedling, which confirms the impression I've had in marketplaces, that palak is actually and not spinach, or else is a more general term for green vegetables than commonly imagined.

This is purslane, a common garden weed back home. This upright version is obviously a cultivar - in my garden it creeps along the ground, forming a mat rarely more than an inch or two high. The Gond villagers said that they do not eat this, but Rucha claims that she buys it in the markets in Nagpur.

We planted some trees - some for fruit, and some that are sacred trees.

For digging planting holes, mixing concrete, moving construction debris, leveling land, and clearing weeds, they use the same tool - a heavy a broad hoe with a short handle. It is a very practical tool, and I wish I could find one in the US.

One of the laborers was a very tiny woman - I come from a family of small people, but I don't think I've ever met such a short adult.

In the picture, she is standing while another woman stoops over washing dishes. Rucha told me that when they had started the project, in addition to the three men I saw taking leadership roles, there was a fourth man - her husband. He was also tiny - even smaller than her, and couldn't do heavy labor, but was still a big contributor to the farm. They had a seven year old son. A few months ago, he fell sick. At Rucha's urging (and funding) they took him to a doctor, who prescribed antiobiotics, but his condition did not improve. He was taken to a hospital, then transferred to a bigger hospital in Chandrapur, where they were told he needed a blood transfusion in order to stay alive. The cost (rs. 600 - about $13) was prohibitive, and no one could afford to stay with him in Chandrapur (public hospitals in India do not have much in the way of nursing care - relatives have to provide food and care for and clean the sick). They took him home, and a few days later, he died. Rucha told me that she had asked the woman why she hadn't sought help to pay the hospital bill. The women replied that the hospital would have been of no use. Her husband died because he was possessed by devils.

One of the many reasons I have chosen to work in India at this stage of my life is that on previous visits I was moved to try to do something to help people who are less privileged than I. Of course there are many ways to do this. Working as a teacher at Indiana University, I have tried to raise the awareness of my students about linkages between poverty and the environment, and about some of the things they can do to help. My research also aims to help develop ideas about how policies can be improved. But the linkages here are weak and indirect. Policy research rarely has direct impacts on policy-making - although in the long-run it can result in significant changes in the ways that people think which can have very positive impacts. Raising the awareness of 60 IU undergrads felt good - but what will the impact of that be? I've always wanted to complement this work with more direct involvement in helping people. In the past I've donated money to a wonderful school in Sarnath (a suburb of Varanasi and the site where the Buddha gave his first sermon) which serves children who otherwise would probably not have an opportunity to go to school. But I've also wanted to do something more directly connected to my environmental interests.

The Kolzari Project fits my vision. It is a project that is designed to help people who are deeply disenfranchised and impoverished - but who also have potential. All of the villagers now own land, even if they don't have the means to cultivate it. And the villagers I interacted with were strikingly intelligent and eager to improve their situation. There was no lack of motivation here.

Bhaskar, the treasurer of the youth group, and his wife.

Rucha & Mukund are not development professionals, and have not run a project like this before. They have known these villagers for years, respect them, and are eager to learn alongside of the villagers. They seem to share my belief that improvement in the lives of the poor need not follow a prescribed pattern, and that the role of aid-givers should be to facilitate the development of independent minds and incomes. They worry that it will be difficult to gain the trust of people who have been betrayed so often in the past - a genuine concern - but it seems that at least some of the villagers have taken ownership of the project. The project is also highly uncoercive - unlike many development interventions, those who wish to participate can, but those who wish to go their own way are largely unaffected. Finally, there is a clear ecological consciousness at work.

The help that I can give the Kolzari project is in some ways limited. I cannot, for example, give much practical advice about how to start a successful agricultural enterprise - I might be able to provide a little of this in the northeastern US, where I know many successful and not-so successful farmers, and where I am familiar with the strains the climate puts on agriculture. But here I am out of my element. Although I can spend a day working alongside these people, perhaps helping them see that even a white-skinned sahib thinks that agricultural labor is (or ought to be) a dignified profession, there is no scarcity of strong & skillful hands here, eager to work for a pittance, and the contribution of my labor itself is negligible.

I can, perhaps, help bring some technical expertise to the project, and almost certainly I can help raise some money. We don't know exactly how much it will cost to develop this project so that it can achieve its goals over the next 5-10 years - perhaps half a million dollars will be needed. Rucha & Mukund have successfully raised a decent amount of money from local sources, but I know that there is much more money in the US than in India. I'm trying to think about organizations that might be interested in funding a project like this - and would appreciate ideas.

Monsoon sunset with rainbow, seen from Kolzari, August 11, 2010

Final photos from the Himalayas

2010-07-24T07:13:00.007-04:00

The Himalayan segment of my journey is over - I've returned to Delhi to consult with various experts and government officials, and will be moving south, to my field sites in central India, at the end of next week. I thought I'd share a few pictures I took my last few weeks in the Himalayas.
The monsoon brought incredible displays of clouds, light, and rain.
And lush growth of everything, including these beautiful dahlias in my landlord's garden.
When it rains, it really rains. If you can see white stuff, that is a thick layer of hail. It was so dark in the midst of this storm that I couldn't take a picture until the rain let up a bit. Everything was water & noise.
But the storms lift to incredible sunsets...

Mountains shrouded in fog...
At the bottom of the river valley (which took 3 hours of hiking straight downhill to reach) were small rice paddies, fed by irrigation works diverting the warm water of this little river. While the heights of Mussoorie were temperate, the vegetation down here - I forgot to bring my GPS but it must be at least 1000 m lower in elevation - was very tropical.
The irrigation canal, a well maintained concrete structure. Women are transplanting rice out of nursery beds and into the main fields.
This plant was growing wild all over the place. It looked and smelled quite familiar... Apparently the Himalayas are its native habitat.

There was a small water powered grain mill. Apparently farmers come from at least 10 km away (and in these hills, 10 km is a LONG way) to grind their wheat into flour here. My Hindi wasn't good enough for me to find out who owns it. I imagine this is similar to the grain mills, now ruined, that I find along New England streams.
Everything is lush and green
and clouds roll in and out.
Another sunset.

A mountain village. You can see both traditional and modern homes here. This village is a one hour walk from the nearest road so the concrete in the modern houses has all been carried here on the backs of donkeys.
More rain. It was so damp that the mattress in my room started to mold, and I woke up every morning with a sort throat (I'm allergic to mold). This made it easier for me to return to the hot and arid plains - maybe they are hot and humid, but at least you can dry your clothes!

Maize seems to be the major crop in the uplands.
And the main cash crop is milk, carried up the mountain to the city, from buffaloes such as this beauty.

A cute local dog, for those dog lovers in my audience...
The 4th of July!

Gangetic Worship

2010-06-30T07:39:00.008-04:00

The Ganges River leaves the Himalayas and enters the Gangetic Plain at the city of Haridwar. A long time ago, during a war between the Devas and the Asuras, the lord Vishnu dropped four drops of sacred nectar over India – one of which landed at Haridwar. This combination of spiritual and modern geography makes Haridwar one of India’s most sacred cities. In a land of increasing water scarcity, it is easy to understand the worship of India’s greatest river, which carries the cold glacial meltwater of the Himalayan plateau to irrigate the sun drenched plains. Just upstream from Haridwar, where the river winds through forested foothills, numerous sages and yogis have built their ashrams in Haridwar’s twin, Rishikesh. Rishikesh is only a 2.5 hour drive from the language school where I’ve been studying, so last weekend a fellow student and I decided to take a break from our studies and see the holy river. We originally intended to include Haridwar in our itinerary as well, but Rishikesh turned out to be more than enough for a weekend, particularly with the scorching heat of the dry season still in full force down in the lowlands. The monsoon has arrived here in Mussoorie, bringing wandering mists and drenching rains, but down in Rishikesh, the lowest temperature I recorded (at dawn) was 90 F, and it must have been about 110 in the midday sun. Rishikesh is known as a hang out for western spiritual seekers and traumatized young Israeli ex-soldiers, but they must leave when it gets hot – I saw plenty of businesses which seemed to cater towards westerners, but the streets were packed with Indians. This is the summer holidays in India, and also the peak of the Char Dum pilgrimage to the high mountain temples which mark the sources of the Ganges. After studying at a quiet school in the mountains for 5 weeks, the crowds were overwhelming.

Traffic jam on the road to Rishikesh

Washing away sins in the Ganges. It is brown now, due to monsoon rain, but I hear that in the dry season it is clear in Rishikesh.A few of the topics you can study in Rishikesh's ashrams

The Ashrams have beautiful gardens and facilities.

I don't know anything about Swami Omkarananda, in whose ashram we stayed, but I liked the motto by the gate.

I’m afraid my pictures hardly capture the visual festival of Rishikesh. I don’t have any pictures of the Sadhus and Sanyasis who fill the streets - some are educated men who have retired to devote their life to studying ancient texts and worshipping god. Others are young men who have deep spiritual callings – while others remind me more of the homeless lost souls who wander the streets of west coast cities like Berkeley and Eugene. Many receive food at the ashrams – Rishikesh’s ashrams seem quite prosperous – while many others beg on the streets. Some are resident, while others are wanderers, here, perhaps, for the Char Dum, or still left over from this year’s Khumba Mela. Their world is foreign to me, and I feel uncomfortable taking their photos without having a chance to get to know them. I would like to learn more about this world.

A view of Ram Jhula - one of the two pedestrian suspension bridges crossing the river here. Unfortunately, they seem to think motorcycles are pedestrians, so you are always at risk of getting chased off the bridge by a racing motorcycle.

I didn't particularly like the gaps between the cracked and worn paving stones. These bridges were built in the 1980s, and show some signs of wear.The baby monkey on the Lakshman Jhula bridge looked pretty cute, but then he grabbed my leg and wouldn't let go. I kicked back, and then the rest of his family started chasing after me, grabbing at me.

Next time, I took the boat.

Actual conversation between me and a Sadhu outside of a temple:

Sadhu: Which country you are coming from?

Me: USA

Sadhu: USA – America?

Me: Ha (means yes in Hindi)

Sadhu: Barack Obama – President?

Me: Ha, Ha

Sadhu: Michelle Obama – Wife?

Me: Ha, Ha

Sadhu: Two children (uses his hand to indicate that they are small children)

Me: Ha, Ha,

Sadhu: New York City?

Me: Ha

Sadhu: Washington DC?

Me: Ha, Ha

Sadhu: Yuba City?

The river is powerful and fast moving here, and is popular for whitewater rafting. I thought that since I grew up among the great whitewater rivers of New England, I could skip rafting in India, but I don't think any of our rivers back home carry this much water through their whitewater sections.

I also don’t have any pictures of the beautiful shops, filled with bangles, brass and bronze idols, carved wooden boxes, and ayurvedic medicines – or the vegetarian restaurants packed with pilgrims, or the little carts selling tiny mangos that make your mouth pucker like you ate a sour lemon – or larger long sweet mangoes that melt in your mouth. And I don’t have many pictures of the crowds of pilgrims – one feels uncomfortable taking pictures of people bathing or sleeping on the ghats (steps leading down to the river).

Full moon over the Ganges

Depending on your perspective, Haridwar & Rishikesh are famous for different things. For most westerners Rishikesh is best known as the place where the Beatles went on a retreat together in 1968. Ringo disliked the vegetarian food and left after a couple weeks, but the rest remained for a few months, studying with their teacher, Maharishi, and composing many of the songs on the White Album. For others, Rishikesh is known as the yoga capital of the world, full of famous ashrams and yoga teachers. The ashram where we rented a quiet, clean room with a view of the river for about $7 offered yoga classes taught by a Swiss woman who had been confined to a wheelchair until several years of study with B.K.S. Iyengar himself had enabled her to walk again.

But for Indians, Haridwar is better known as one of the four sites where Vishnu dropped that sacred nectar – and as a result, one of the four locations in India where the world’s largest gathering of people, the Khumba Mela, is held. Each of these cities (the others are Allahabad, Ujjain, and Nasik) hosts a Khumba Mela once every 12 years – so there is one Khumba Mela every 3 years. This winter was Haridwar’s turn, and the giant religious festival attracted approximately 50 million pilgrims. There is a part of me that deeply regrets missing what must be an amazing and moving gathering. Imagine the population of 2.5 New York’s invading a city about the size of Eugene, OR, or Portland, ME, all intent on worshipping the sacred river. I’ve seen pictures of hordes of the naked wandering Naga sadhus, who seem to be the strangest and most exotic of India’s spiritual orders. But I don’t know where those 50 million people use the bathroom, nor who brings them clean drinking water… and it seems that every Khumba Mela some pilgrims are killed in stampedes, as millions try to bathe in the river at the most auspicious hour.

One of the Ashrams conducts a Ganga Aarthi (worship ceremony) every evening, in front of their statue of Shiva. Most of the service is led by the boys from the Ashram school. It is very beautiful, and I've heard that although it is not as elaborate as the one in Haridwar, it is nicer since the crowds are smaller. Incidentally, the sign on Shiva's pedestal, with the Dalai Lama and L.K. Advani, asks people not to pollute the sacred river.

The musicians were excellent.
Especially this drummer.
Everyone was singing along.
Shiva meditating in the river at dusk.
Old man meditating on a rock in the river at dawn.

Stories from Mussoorie

2010-06-21T07:08:00.002-04:00

1. The language school

It would seem to me that after a few years, the job of conducting endless drills on grammatical fundamentals (“Translate: ‘He had a green pen.’ Now ‘She had a green pen’. Now ‘they had a green pen’. Now ‘he had a green book’… Now ‘he has a green book’…” You get the idea) would get quite boring, but the teachers at the language school conduct their drills & lessons with enthusiasm & skill. The Landour Language School has been offering formal classes in Hindi out of the Kellogg Memorial Church in Landour for over 100 years. Many of the teachers have been there for 25 or more years, and there is a familial atmosphere. To my knowledge, there are at least 3 married couples on staff, one parent-child combination, and one set of brothers. Everyone is friendly, and seems happy to be there.

Many people have told me that Hindi is an easy language to learn, and in many ways they are correct. The script is entirely phonetic, the grammar is relatively free of exceptions & irregularities, and there are loads of familiar words – English words adopted into Hindi (eg computer, train platform, doctor, ice cream, taxi), Hindi words adopted into English (pajama, jungle), Arabic words adopted similarly by both languages (monsoon), Portuguese words adopted by Hindi, and familiar to me from Spanish (mez for table), and Hindi words in widespread usage in Indian English that I’ve learned on previous trips (daal, roti, barfi, kurta, sari). On the other hand, there is a 53 character script to learn, loads of confusing conjunct characters that combine the 53, several new sounds to make, distinctions between sounds not distinguished in European languages (palatal & dental, aspirated & non-aspirated) which means there are 4 different “t”s and 6 different “d”s, and a grammatical structure that turns the logical order of things we learn in European languages on its head (the verb is always at the end of the sentence, there are postpositions instead of prepositions).

I can’t really speak Hindi after 4 weeks (20 hours/week of tutorials), but I can communicate and understand quite a bit more than I could 4 weeks ago.

The students at the school are a diverse bunch, but all share deep interest in India and a fairly long-term commitment to the country. Given the school’s Christian roots, many of the students are working or volunteering at various Christian-run charities in North India – most are primarily service oriented, but a few seem to have come more with the intention of preaching their gospel. There are also a lot of people starting or running various small businesses – primarily exporting handicrafts & fabrics to the US. There are a couple of young Indian-Americans who grew up with a basic command of the spoken language, but are trying to learn to read & speak with greater grammatical fluency. There is an Australian documentary filmmaker, and an American anthropology PhD student who is translating documents about NGOs that work with sex-workers in Varanasi. Finally, there are other students, like me, working to acquire a basic command of the language – for their masters programs at Johns Hopkins or SOAS in London (the SOAS student already speaks Mandarin and wants to study China-Indian relations – an important topic!), and a dozen undergraduates from Brown who will be enrolling in St. Stephens college, Delhi University, for the fall semester.

There are a couple women in Chardukan who make thalis by prior arrangement for lunch. By coincidence, both women are named Maneesha. Those of us who’ve been here for a while sit in the quiet little shops, eat our Daal, roti, rice, and sabzi, and feel very lucky to be here. Monday and Friday mornings, a cheerful man comes and delivers homemade whole-wheat bread to our guesthouse. We’d probably learn faster if we weren’t in a city which has deep British roots, where English is widely spoken, and if we weren’t hanging out with each other & speaking in English, however it is very nice to have company, and hear others’ stories.

2. The wedding of the daughter of the cook and the chowkidar

The eldest daughter of the cook at one of the other guesthouses that accommodates language school students got married last week. The cook’s husband works as a chowkidar – a guard – and so we have to presume that the couple doesn’t make a whole lot of money, but the elaborate wedding went on for days, with festivities apparently drawing hundreds and hundreds of people. I heard the music late in the night. Rumor has it that the cook’s employer had given her money to educate and marry all three of her daughters – but all of that money has been spent on the eldest daughter’s wedding – along with a hefty loan. There are rumored to be families here who can never earn enough money to pay even the interest on the money they borrowed for their daughter’s wedding. One curious aspect of the dowry system here in Northwest India is that it persists (and is in fact growing, in spite of it being illegal, as is the preference for having sons) in spite of a well-documented scarcity of women. In many parts of NW India there may be as few as 4 women for 5 men (for more on this, read this old article by Amartya Sen. The cook’s daughter is marrying a soldier – definitely a man of higher status – in a love marriage – and it may be that they felt pressured into the exorbitant expenditure. We can only wonder what will happen with the 2 younger daughters’ education or weddings.

3. Squatter’s deeds & lawsuits.

There is a very friendly Sikh family whose two sons run an internet café in town and live in a beautiful house in Landour. I wondered how running an internet café could get you enough money to buy a beautiful house in a place where most land is owned by corporate CEOs or famous actors. I heard this explanation from another student who had been renting a room from them before he was kicked out, as we shall see. I doubt that he has the full story, but it is an interesting illustration of what life can be like here.

Apparently, many years ago, the internet café family noticed that a house in Landour was no longer occupied. It was owned by a couple, and when the man died, the woman had stayed in the UK and stopped coming to Mussoorie. The internet café family filed a petition in court for squatter’s rights – apparently there is a provision in Indian law stating that abandoned property can be occupied by people in need of housing. The court case dragged on for years. Apparently the main opposition came not from the woman who lived in the UK, but from her neighbors, including the business family that owns the nearby store (famous for its diversity of imported food, serving the foreigner & wealthy clientele in Landour) and several hotels and boarding houses (famous for their dilapidated state – apparently the family does not believe in investing heavily in maintenance, but since they own most of the hotel space on the hilltop, they still get plenty of business). The neighbors were happy to see the land used, but thought that they, not the internet café people (who anyway owned a place in town already) should get the rights to use the property.

The court battle dragged on for years, but eventually the internet people won the case, and received an exclusive “squatters deed,” enabling them, and only them, to squat on the house. The deed restricts them from doing any construction, or from profiting from the property – by farming, renting rooms, opening a store, etc. The result is they now live in a beautiful house, with a view of the high Himalaya, and some very annoyed neighbors who complained when they started leasing out rooms to language school students, and made them cease the practice. One rumor is that the long-term plan may be to forge a deed, then wait for 30 years, until everyone forgets the court case, and then assert full ownership of the place. Neighbors tend to have long memories, and this place has a very small town feel, so I don’t know if this strategy is likely to be successful.

The other way to get property here is to be lucky, like my landlord. He grew up in the plains, where his father was a Sanskrit professor, but they were from the hills, and he always used to come to Mussoorie, even teaching here at the college for several years before going to Europe to earn his PhD in English literature. Later he taught for many years at a university in Ethiopia, where he met his wife, but he would always return to Mussoorie for the summer. Eventually he started looking for a property to buy, and found this piece in Landour, which he bought in 1980, just before, in his words, the area was discovered by the “Delhi Mafia,” and land prices went through the roof. He could never afford a property like this now – but he has done an amazing job of developing it, building gardens, and cottages to rent to language students, a major source of retirement income.

Not all is safe and easy in his retirement, however. The military, which owns most of the surrounding land, has been trying to take the property from him. I don’t know the details of the case, but it has dragged on for 25 years. The Supreme Court in Delhi is scheduled to make a final judgment in mid July this year, and then we will know if this elderly professor can stay in his mountain paradise, or will have to move somewhere else (and where else could he go? His children live in Australia now, and he talks of returning to his remote ancestral village, but one doubts that his wife would want to live in a remote village, nor whether an old man would choose to live so far away from medical care.) I for one hope that the Professor gets to keep his garden – I see & understand the happiness it brings him to watch his plants grow, even if most of the heavy work must now be done by his gardener, who earns a salary of rs. 6000 per month, about $130, for working almost every day, including Sundays, from 8-6 pm.

4. Hard lives on terraces

On the weekend I like to take long walks. Living on a Himalayan hilltop, everything (even the fruit stand) is a steep walk downhill. When I first got here I walked on the roads into and out of town, but I noticed that there were pack mules and porters, laden primarily with milk jugs or dry goods. I concluded that there must be trails down into the villages on the lower hills, and I soon had directions. Several trails lead down the mountain – and a walk of about an hour, most of which is steep switchbacks, leads down to the beginning of the villages, which extend down as far as the bottom of the nearby river valley, which I haven’t reached yet – it is probably 3 hours of downhill walking – where I can see irrigated fields. The fields I see, however, are rainfed terraces, carved into steep hillsides. A few villages have concrete irrigation ditches, but either these are unmaintained, or there is simply not enough water for them to be useful at the end of the dry season (there is, however, enough water for us rich folks on the mountain top – I found the pumping station at the bottom of a steep valley, which took me an hour and a half to hike out of (past three supplemental pumping stations). As the pre-monsoon rains have come, the farmers have planted their fields, and so while my first hikes I mostly saw dry stubble, I now see maize, beans, some smaller grains, peppers, and a large leafed tuber crop that might be taro or a related crop. There are scattered fruit trees – small pears, some of which may be wild, and a few plum trees. I also see apricots, peaches, and starting this last week, small apples, in the markets, but have not seen them in the villages. Walnuts are common - apparently the Himalayan walnut’s shell is thin enough to be crushed between the fingers.

The people in the villages are friendly, if a little prone to staring at the strange pale-skinned foreigner with a broad-brimmed hat (no one in India seems to wear sun hats…), but my Hindi is still poor enough that I can’t ask them the questions I would like to ask – what crop is this? How does it grow? Where do you find firewood & fodder for your cows? How does the water supply work? How long have you lived in this house? Where did you find the timber, the clay, and the slate it is made of? How is it built? Have members of your family left the village seeking work? Where do they go? How, in these remote villages, does it happen that a few families are building modern concrete homes, complete with satellite dishes on the roof? Do you like your life here?

While walking through a village last Saturday afternoon, a man wearing a well worn “I love NY” t-shirt hollered hello to me in English. I came over, and he invited me to share chai with him, again in English. I followed him up the steep path to his home – a typical low mud house with a slate roof. A couple very healthy buffaloes & cows, and two mules were tethered in the front yard, a puppy lay chained in the shade, and several children ran around. He sat down to make some tea, and told me his story.

This was his father’s house, where he was born. They were poor, and after he completed the 8th grade, his parents could not afford to keep him in school. This was 1993, and he decided to see if he could make his way on his own. He left the village, and eventually made his way to Delhi, where he must have found whatever work he could to start with. He learned driving, and worked as a driver, and then learned English & computers, eventually obtaining some kind of computer degree from NIIT. Now he had a job as a quality controller in an export company. Earlier he had done this work for a European clothing manufacturer, but now he works for a company that exports coffins to the US. He earns rs. 20,000 ($450) per month at this job – 4 times what he could earn as a skilled laborer in Mussoorie – and lives in govt. subsidized housing in a nice part of South Delhi. He dislikes the heat, dust and crowds of Delhi, but he doesn’t know how he could find similarly remunerative work closer to home. And after nearly 20 years away from his village, living in the big city, it is not clear how much home these hills are to him – he could not remember the names of some of the crops his family was growing, and he complained about how difficult it was for a city resident like him to hike in these steep, high altitude hills.

He was home on a holiday, but he was supposed to have returned to Delhi. Instead, he had gone to Mussoorie – a 2 hour hike – to get medicine for his father, who lay near the little wood fireplace where he was preparing the tea, coughing horrible body wracking chest coughs. His father’s face was sunken and it looked like it was difficult for him to move. The hope was that the medicine would help him enough that he could walk to the hospital on his own. The son told me that in his 55 years, his father had never seen a train or an airplane – had never been farther from his village than Mussoorie, a few hours hike away. I’m no doctor, but the not-so-old, but very weak looking man did not look very good. I have no doubt, however, that with access to proper medical care, his health would be quite different.

Life in these villages, my new friend told me, was very difficult. Of course it is beautiful, and there are none of Delhi’s crowds and filth and heat. But there are no services or facilities – beyond a grade school – except in Mussoorie, a long and tiring walk away. Children after 5th grade walk there for school. There is no medical care, water supplies are erratic, electricity is weak. The land is steep and rocky – hardly suitable for growing anything – and crops are dependent on erratic rainfall. I can see, from the people I’ve met there, that aging comes quickly, that teeth are lost. Seeing this through the eyes of my Delhiite friend, I see that these villages would not be the most wonderful place. It is strange, and I think deeply ironic, that these people live an hour’s walk from some of India’s most valuable real estate, in Landour, and the vacation homes of some of its wealthiest people, yet seem to get little benefit from their neighbors’ wealth.

I can’t assume that there aren’t people in the village who are happy to live in a spectacularly beautiful place, to follow the traditions of their family, to work hard physically for part of the day, and to sit and relax at other times. I see people carrying big milk jugs up the mountain with tump lines on their foreheads, but I also see people sitting by the trailside, chatting and in no rush. My view of the village comes only from the man who left, seeking other opportunities, and learned to speak my language, and from my own ignorant prejudices. To me living in a place with such impaired access to services, and in a home possessing so few material goods, would seem incredibly difficult, and I'm an American who grew up in a way that taught me to be comfortable without many of the normal amenities of American life. On the other hand the view is uplifting. Is this meaningless to people who live a fragile life, close to subsistence? Or do they, like me, appreciate the value of the things that they do have? Once I've learned more Hindi, I hope to at least be able to ask these questions.

2010-06-10T06:44:00.006-04:00

Here are a few pictures from Mussoorie. Mostly I'm busy studying Hindi and preparing for field work, however I've taken time on the weekends to explore.
In addition to walking on the roads, which don't have much traffic, there are trails leading down into the villages lower down on the hills. The trails are remarkably well maintained, and as one goes down, and weaves between different slopes, one encounters different habitats. This chir pine-oak grassland reminds me of the ponderosa pine forests of the inter-mountain west.
Although I rarely encounter other people, the trails are quite well-maintained, and favor switchbacks over steep Vermont-style staircases, perhaps because of the frequent use of these pack mules, which seem to mostly carry milk up from the villages, and dry goods back down.
It is good that there are switchbacks, because these mountains are steep, and agriculture relies on extensive terracing.
Langurs are big (30-40 lb) acrobatic monkeys which are primarily vegetarian. Although they don't come into your house, they do like to eat gardens - they ate all the leaves off my landlord's plum tree, and also uprooted all of his carrots.
The rhesus macaques are much more aggressive, and will come into your house to steal bananas. They are smaller, and more of an urban than agricultural pest.
When it is really clear, you can see endless mountain ranges, and to the north, very distant snowcapped peaks.
As is so common in India, there is an eccentric mixture of high modern and traditional technology. I was amused by the roof of this building - part traditional slate, part modern tin, part modern cement, complete with a tv satellite!
These kids were out in their yard feeding their buffalo & cows when I walked by. The oldest girl (on the right as you look at the picture) started a conversation with me. I tried out my still very hesitant Hindi, while she spoke confidently in fairly fluent English - impressive, since she is only enrolled in a local village school (8th grade). Public schools have poor reputations here, but this girl was excited about her classes, and if nothing else, has at least learned alot of English.
They were excited to show me their newborn calf. I wanted to take their picture with the calf, but they insisted that they take my picture with the calf. Like so many domestic animals I've met in India, the calf was extremely skittish. Of course cows are sacred here, but the predominant means of herding them (and horses, goats, and dogs...) is to hit them, often painfully, with a stick, or throw rocks at them. So they learn early on to fear people. I'm reminded of the saying, current in the draft horse community in the US, that horses are much better off now that only those people with a natural inclination and love of horses are working with them - rather than everyone - many people who used to work with horses never understood them, and so consistently mistreated their animals.
A little temple near a village barn.
I came across a wedding last Sunday in a village, 1 hour walk downhill from the nearest road. But that doesn't mean they don't want the whole event captured on video.
And what would a wedding be without a bagpiper?
Lunch was cooking when I came by. It looked good, but I had to meet someone, and couldn't stick around.
A scenic spot for a wedding for sure, but one of the boys I spoke with told me that it wasn't a very good village - "the infrastructure here is no good." He attends high school in Mussoorie, a couple hours walk away.

There is some debate over whether the big storms we've been having are pre-monsoon storms, or whether they are an early start to monsoon. Either way, they bring beautiful clouds.

Studying Hindi in the Clouds

2010-05-28T03:51:00.006-04:00

If Mussoorie is the queen of hill stations then Landour is the fairy princess, at least according to the neat tourist information signs posted at several locations in Landour. Landour is perched on a high hilltop above the horseshoe shaped ridge of Mussoorie, and due perhaps to its height above the main town, and perhaps due to its continuing association with the military – it was founded by the British in the 1820s as a soldier’s rest home (and named after a town in Wales – thankfully with simplified spelling) and is now the location of the Military Institute of Technology Management – Landour is much quieter and more peaceful than the busy tourist resort below.

I’m not sure why, but it seems that 6000 ft is a magic number in the Himalayas – the height at which malarial mosquitoes disappear, and where the climate, at least when the worst summer heat holds the Gangetic plain in its thrall, is idyllic. The main mall in Mussoorie – a 2 mile road running along the ridgeline, crowded with restaurants, 300+ hotels, and stores selling the kind of chatchkas that Indian tourists like to buy when on vacation – is located just a tad higher than 6000 feet. Again, according to the tourist sign, the top of Landour hill is 7800 feet, although my GPS registers only 2250 meters at my cottage, which seems pretty close to the top. Since the shops in Landour don’t sell mangoes (a major constituent of my diet these days), nor other fruits and vegetables, I have a strenuous walk to go grocery shopping, and a more strenuous walk back loaded down with okra, roma tomatoes, mangoes, and bananas.

Kulri Bazaar, Musoorie

The British really had two criteria for locating their hill stations. First, they wanted to get out of the hot, dusty, malarial plains, and second, they didn’t want to go too far. Mussoorie satisfies both criteria admirably, going a long way to explain its continuing popularity. A 1.5 hour taxi ride, consisting primarily of switchbacks and hairpin turns, separates Mussoorie from the state capital of Dehra Dun, a bustling city that is a scant 6 hour train ride from Delhi. Dehra Dun is famous for two things – the Doon Valley is reputed to grow the best quality basmati rice in the world, and the city is home to the Forest Research Institute, India’s premier forestry school. The British established the Forest Research Institute in the late 19th century and it quickly rose to prominence as the most important forestry research center in the world. In the early 20th century the Indian Forester was the most widely read and well reputed forestry journal in the world, and Indian trained foresters, British, French and German, spread their ideas back to Europe, to other colonies, and even to the US, where Gifford Pinchot followed models tested in India in setting up the U.S. Forest Service. If the FRI has faded from the international scene, it is still a major center for domestic forestry research.

Mussoorie has its own famous educational institutes: the Lal Bahadur Shastri Academy of Public Administration is the training school for India’s most elite civil servants – the Indian Administrative Service, as well as the related Indian Forest Service, Indian Police Service, and Indian Foreign Service. Landour has its own Hogwarts - a boarding high school named Woodstock, which supposedly follows an American model, although it has a suspiciously large number of English place names. Woodstock also hosts an environmental education center, and I’ve seen posters advertising for a Wilderness First Responder course, run by NOLS, to be held there in August. Finally, there is the Landor Language School, which is why I’ve come here – it is reputed to be one of the best places in the world to study Hindi.

Landour, it seems, is elite, albeit small, and is a curious mixture of military personnel, wealthy Indian vacationers, missionaries, and students. The few shops (the ones that don’t carry mangoes) do carry loads of the two things apparently most desired (and most difficult to find) by western travelers: toilet paper and peanut butter. As I mentioned, Mussoorie is filled with shops selling the kinds of chatchkas Indians buy on vacation. There are only a few shops specializing in westerner oriented chatchkas, and they are all near Landour. The chai shops I walk past every day on my way to the language school, at the little market called Chardukan, feature western junk food – fries, pancakes, and pizza – rather than Indian food, and the wealthy Indian tourists, the Woodstock high school students, and the Language school students, gather under the tree to enjoy one of the cleanest, most smog free markets I’ve seen in all of India. Fortunately, I found one shop that offers a veg thali in addition to the western comfort food – which I wouldn’t eat at home so why would I eat it here? By and large, Mussoorie is short on the two things I expected from hill stations – perhaps from friends’ stories from Dharmasala & Manali – Tibetans and western hippies. Although the Dalai Lama’s first exile capital was here, and there are a few Tibetans, this is primarily an Indian resort, run and oriented towards Indians, and perhaps due to the absence of Tibetans, marijuana, and major treks in the immediate vicinity, seems to be off the hippie trail.

Chardukan. Chardukan, incidentally, literally means four shops, so of course, there are five shops in Chardukan.

The church in Chardukan dates to the 1840s, and occupies the largest piece of flat land I’ve seen in Mussoorie. Landour seems heavily Christian – there are three churches (including one which the language school is actually located in – it seems that the language school has taken over the church – I have classes in the belltower - but apparently services are also held there on Sundays), and I’ve met a number of American missionaries, along with some other folks who seemed to be missionaries, but didn’t identify themselves as such, perhaps because it is much easier to get a tourist visa than a missionary one, a tradition that dates back to the British, who wisely saw that making money and saving souls in India were incompatible activities (except in Kerala, the rich people were Hindus and Muslims, while the likely converts were the poor), and chose to focus on the money. Landour’s churches, however, appear to have been, at least originally, built by the British for the British, who were the first permanent residents of the area.

I’ve often wondered why previous north Indian rulers did not build hill stations. The British were not the first rulers of India to come from colder places. Most of the Muslim invaders, beginning in the 10^th century, arrived via what is now Afghanistan, including most importantly the Mughals, descended from the Timurids of central Asia. All the information I’ve been able to find about past inhabitants of this ridge was that there were migrant pastoralists who grazed their cattle on a bush known locally as Musoor – hence Mussoorie. Perhaps one explanation is that only the British were crazy enough to imagine building towns in a place like this. The road up to Landour is one lane, and all hair-pin turns. In places, they have built walls 30 feet high to guard from landslides, and I’ve seen homes on the downhill side of the road with parking on the roof, and four or five stories going down the hill all in the same building (including the building in which Chardukan’s five shops are located).

A view through the oaks of a typical road. You can see how steep the land is here. There is basically no flat anywhere.

At the moment, Landour seems like paradise. The view from the cottage I’m renting features several stately deodar trees – the Himalayan cedar which is the dominant vegetation in wetter areas here, along with deeply sculpted oaks, reminiscent of California’s live oaks, although the leaves are long and pointy, much like a tanbark or chestnut oak. According to my tree book, deodar can grow to heights of 75 meters and girths of 10 meters dbh, although the biggest I’ve seen are no more than a meter in diameter. Still, their size and growth pattern remind me a lot of Douglas fir, and combined with the steepness of the surrounding mountains, I’m reminded of the interior coast ranges of northern California and southern Oregon, which I’ve always thought were among the most rugged and beautiful places I’ve ever been. Through the trees, one catches glimpses of the city of Mussoorie below, and when it is clear, endless ridges extending to the north and west. I’m told that on very clear days, the snowcapped peaks show behind these ridges, but it has been hazy, and the only glimpse I’ve gotten of the high Himalaya was early morning, jogging on the other side of the mountain, where the snowpeaks are closer. Every night I sit and eat mangoes, review vocabulary, and watch the sunset, until I hear the dusk call to prayer from the mosque down in Mussoorie, the signal I’ve adopted for beginning my evening meditation.

Elsewhere, particularly on drier slopes, I find huge rhododendrons, 30 feet high, whose brilliant red blooms have mostly dropped to the ground. The horse chestnuts are blooming now, and I’ve found trees of many familiar genera, including maple, fir, spruce, walnut, and pine. At 30.5 degrees north, and 7000 feet, it shouldn’t be surprising that the vegetation is deeply reminiscent of the temperate mountains I’ve called home. Blue whistling thrushes warble in the dawn, when the temperature is a pleasant mid 60s, and the other day, while hiking, I was buzzed by one of the largest birds I’ve ever seen – I think it was a Himalayan Griffon Vulture. The temperature does not rise above the low 80s, and it is almost always crystal clear and sunny with a light breeze, although my Sunday hike was interrupted by a big thunderstorm which dropped dime sized hail. Fortunately I was able to take refuge in a little chai shop by the side of the road.

My landlord is a retired professor, who purchased the mostly ruined Wolfsburn Estate as a summer home in the early 1980s, just before Mussoorie was discovered by wealthy Delhites. He tells me he could never afford a place like this now. In addition to repairing his home, he has built seven little cottages, connected by stone pathways and gardens, which he rents to language school students.

My cottage. Note the rain barrel, used for flower watering.

Prior to retiring he taught English literature & applied linguistics in Europe and Ethiopia, where he met his wife who now works at the Woodstock School. After retiring here he taught some classes at the Academy of Public Administration here (I’m hoping he will take me there at some point), but now he spends much of the day attending to his gardens, or perhaps I should say, supervising his gardener, because his arthritic knees prevent him from doing hard labor. One day I watched the gardener spend all day digging up the grass that has grown up between the stones of the stone paths – work that never gets done in my garden, where I can’t afford a full-time gardener. He uses the sun porch of my cottage (a nice place to sit in the morning, but too hot when it catches the afternoon sunlight) to grow petunias, begonias, and sweet peas, so my room is always fragrant.

A gardener learns something new about plants wherever he goes, and here I’ve learned about a new kind of pest. Back home, I have to worry about deer, who can jump high fences. But at least I don’t have to worry about langurs (big monkeys)! The langurs like to eat fruit trees, and have completely defoliated the professor’s plum tree. Obviously, it is fairly difficult to build a monkey fence. The apples are surviving, but only due to the constant vigilance of professor, gardener, and tenants, one of whom has purchased a slingshot to scare away the langurs who hang out in the deodars just out of stone-throwing range, waiting for an opening. The dogs also help chase away the langurs, but the langurs have a dimensional advantage over the grounded dogs. The more aggressive rhesus macaques seem to leave the fruit trees alone, but I did see one eating someone’s house plants this morning, and they will steal food left ungarden, even from inside of your kitchen.

My real reason for being here, of course, is not to revel in the temperate weather, the beautiful hills and trees, nor to chase monkeys, but to study Hindi. I was able to sign up for four hours of daily Hindi one-on-one tutorials this week, and hope to continue for several more weeks. The teachers are experts, and they work out of a textbook that they themselves wrote. Learning a language is hard work, and I’m using parts of my brain that have not been exercised for many years. Already this week I’ve learned most of the 53 character alphabet (but then there are endless permutations of “conjunct characters”, and can say useful things like, “whose red pen is that?” and “the book is on the big table.” I also have figured out why Indians always ask you for your good name (a better translation would be auspicious name), call you sir, and add only to the end of half their sentences. With so many hours of one-on-one time, I feel like I’m progressing very quickly. It is exciting to be on the verge of understanding a language spoken by so many people who I’ve met in the past, but been unable to communicate with. But after hours of trying to piece together a new logic and push my tongue into a new shape, it is a relief to come home and write in a language I already have some mastery of!

Observations from Delhi

2010-05-18T04:42:00.004-04:00

I am in the blistering hot construction site that is India's capital. Today's paper reports yesterday's high at the nearby International Airport as 45 Celsius, which is approximately one bijillion degrees Fahrenheit. And even more so than when I was here last summer, everything here is under construction. The chief reason is the construction of Delhi's rapidly growing Metro system, which according to last week's New York Times, is emerging as one of the world's best urban public transportation systems. It is slated to be completed this fall, prior to the Commonwealth Games in October, and if it is, it will be a remarkable accomplishment, doubling the size of the network that is functioning today, and connecting the distant airport and suburbs into the urban core. Compared to our aging east coast subway systems, the Metro is a breeze - fast, clean, efficient, well air-conditioned, and not even all that crowded. And way cheaper - it costs me about 40 cents to take a train from where I'm staying, at the north campus of Delhi University, to where the line currently ends, in central New Delhi. An autorickshaw ride over an equivalent distance might cost four times as much, and take four times as long.

Even aside from the Metro, Delhi is under construction, with streets and sidewalks being dug up for repaving, apparently as an additional beautification effort prior to the Commonwealth Games. With the weather so hot, and the rains still a month or more away, everything is dry, and dust swirls everywhere. In the morning, crews of street sweepers sweep the dust that has settled on the street back up into the air, where it hangs as a dense, unbreatheable fog, before settling again. The leaves of all the trees are coated with dust. I'm wearing a dust mask, and I'm still congested, but somehow life goes on for the 20 million people who live here. I need air conditioning, and sweat profusely while sitting in the breezy shade in the back of the cycle rickshaw. The rickshaw-wallah, meanwhile, barely breaks a sweat while he cycles the km from the Institute of Economic Growth, where I am staying, to the Metro station.

Today my big errand was to register at the Foreigners Regional Registration Office. This formality is required of all foreigners staying in India on visas longer than 6 months, and of all Afghani nationals, regardless of the length of stay. Apparently, the Indian government feels that it is important to insure that any foreigner staying in India for an extended period of time be familiar with long lines and arbitrary bureaucratic procedures. The foreigners in the office came from all over the world. I met people in line from Korea, UK, Congo, and Uzbekistan. As I proceeded through the various lines (I had to speak to 4 different officials to get registered), each one became progressively friendlier and more helpful, until the last one handed me back my passport and registration card, and asked me where I was going to stay when I went to Nagpur, which was where she grew up. The whole process took about 3 hours, which was only slightly longer than it took to check my bags and go through the security line at Newark International Airport a few days ago. I guess India isn't the only place with long lines.

My next task is getting a mobile phone number. Since terrorists use mobile phones, there is now a complicated registration procedure required to purchase a sim card. I think it is now more difficult to get a mobile phone connected in India than it is to purchase a sub-machine gun in the United States.

In the morning, the Koel, an Indian relative of the European cuckoo, wakes me with its ringing song from the Cassia fistula trees, now nearly leafless and covered in a profusion of yellow flowers. Rose-ringed parakeets scream across the sky. As the sun sets, throngs of people fill the streets, buying mangoes and saris and mobile phones.

No pictures yet...

Observations of climate change in southern New England

2010-05-07T14:42:00.004-04:00

When my parents were married in mid-June, 1974, near New Haven, Ct., they gathered a bouquet of wild oxeye daisies. I took this picture this afternoon. More than a month earlier, and nearly 100 miles north. Of course, I believe this daisy, which is spreading rampantly from a few my mom planted many years ago in our backyard, may be a hybrid, which could explain some of its early blooming. I have not been privileged to live in one place continuously as an adult, so I have not been able to make careful observations of how the seasons are changing as a result of climate change. Returning to Amherst in May for the first time in 12 years has offered a bit of a shock. Somewhere, I have some fairly detailed naturalist notes I made as a middle and high school student, and could verify these timings, but my memory is that the apple orchard bloomed in mid May - maybe peaking between May 10th and 15th. Trees were definitely not leafed out in early May, perhaps reaching full leaf only by May 20th. Daffodils would be blooming in early May. Bobolinks returned around the same time as full leaf out - around the 15th or 20th. Hermit thrushes, black-throated green and blue-winged warblers, and chimney swifts returned a little earlier - perhaps corresponding to the apple blossoms on the 10th to the 15th.

I came back to Amherst on May 4th. That morning, I jogged down the Lawrence Swamp access road, behind my house. The apple blossoms were finished, the trees were fully leafed out, the daffodils in mom's garden were finished. I heard bobolinks bubbling in the meadows, blue-winged warblers calling from the hedgerows, and black-throated green warblers and hermit thrushes singing in the hemlocks.

These informal observations seem to indicate that the onset of spring in New England has advanced approximately 15 days since I was in high school - a startlingly rapid rate of about a day per year.

Louis Bromfield, Wes Jackson, and America

2010-05-04T12:08:00.020-04:00

My land is a good land
The grass is made of rainbow waves
Its fields & its rivers are blessed by God
Its a good land so they say

My land is a rich land
Its hills & valleys abound
Its highways go to many good places
Where many good people are found

My land is a free land
its a free land so I'm told
Freedom is a thing that money can't buy
And its worth even more than gold
-Eric Andersen

I left Bloomington on Saturday morning. The pendulous honey locust flowers were spreading their thick honey fragrance, the leaves were fresh and green, and the air was thick and cool. It was a typical spring day in the midwest - the night before I was awoken by massive thunderstorms, and the morning was thick and grey, but threatened no further rain. The sun poked through holes in the clouds occasionally, and when I pulled over to eat lunch at a rest stop on I-70 in eastern Indiana, the wind whipped by, wet, warm, and luscious. I listened to Balzac & The Little Seamstress by Dai Sijie, and the miles flew by.

The destination for my first night was Malabar Farm State Park, in Ohio between Columbus and Cleveland. My parents and I had noticed this place the last time we drove from Amherst to Bloomington, and my parents stopped there on their way back from Bloomington, and urged me to do the same, so I made a reservation to stop at the IHA hostel in the state park.

Louis Bromfield was an extremely successful novelist of the 1920s and 1930s. He won a Pulitzer for one of his first novels, and many of his novels were made into well known movies. He also wrote the screenplay for the first Dracula movie. Like many American artists and intellectuals, he lived during the interwar years in France, where his home outside Paris was a hangout for the great intellectual flowering of that period. In the late 1930s, with war gathering on the horizon, Bromfield left Europe and returned to the United States, and bought a farm in the rolling hills near his childhood home of Mansfield, Ohio. It is not entirely clear why he named his central Ohio farm after a region on the south coast of India - the host at the hostel told me that his well-known novel, The Rains Came, was set in Malabar, but I found a copy of it & it appears to be set in Gujarat. In any case, Bromfield set several novels in India, and may have travelled there.

Malabar Farm became the center place for Bromfield's experiments with soil conservation and progressive agriculture, and Bromfield spent most of his later years plowing the money he earned from his fiction into his agricultural experiments & innovations. He worked closely with people such as Aldo Leopold & J.I. Rodale, and appears to have been a pioneer of conservation tillage practices now standard in much of the US. The property is now a State Park, and continues to be a working farm & museum monument to a great, though largely forgotten, writer & conservationist.

Did I mention that it is spectacularly beautiful? The flowers were a few weeks behind Bloomington, so I got to reacquaint myself with lilacs, dandelions, and apples, and see the honey locusts still lifeless.

As you can see, Bromfield could afford to build quite a farmhouse, and quite a barn. In fact, his farm was three old farms, which he consolidated into one. He had made quite a bit of money with his writing, and his estate was a sufficient attraction that apparently his friends Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall held their wedding there in 1946. I've always wondered about these gentlemen farmers - are their proposals for improving farms practical for the farmer whose farm has to feed the family? Thomas Jefferson is widely credited for being an agricultural innovator, and I still read in plant catalogs how he favored this or that variety, but it is worth remembering that he lived most of his life, and finally died, deeply in debt. According to a park interpreter I spoke with, Bromfield used his literary talents to explain how his ideas for changing agriculture could be implemented by the common man. But I do not know enough to know whether his goals were achieved. Often it seems to me that what is practical for a cash limited farmer, and what is desired by idealistic dreamers who don't have to pay the bills by selling corn or tomatoes, is quite out of sink.

Another thing you can see in these pictures is how incredibly luscious and beautiful this part of the world is. Rolling hills, fertile soils, plenty of rain. The New Englanders who settled Connecticut's western reserve surely thought they had found paradise, and they brought with them to Ohio their traditions of political and religious freedom and dissent, and abolitionist activism. Long before Bromfield purchased it, his property had been a stop on the underground railroad, and Oberlin, to the north, was a center of abolitionist activism. Bromfield might be considered to be just another stop in Ohio's long tradition of political and cultural engagement - one that to my mind, continues today when Ohio is a center of Amish culture and other radical approaches to alternative agriculture - as is well documented, for example, in the writings of Gene Logsdon. Given that I've flitted through these same movements for a dozen or so years now, you'd think I would have heard of dozens of young couples or communes - eager for inexpensive, fertile land, close to major cities (Malabar farm, halfway between Cleveland and Columbus, must be within a 2 hour drive of 5 million people - yet the stars shine crystal clear there at night, and one cannot hear the interstate 10 miles away) - moving to beautiful Ohio. But to the contrary, I have heard self-righteous leftist activists and farmers on both coasts tell me how the Midwest is lost to corn, soybeans, reactionary politics, and roundup - how the coasts will thrive when the rest of the country sinks due to whatever the latest apocalyptic nightmare is (most recently peak oil) - and how superior their harsh, unforgiving climates and terrible soils are to the fertile Midwest. This all seems rather ridiculous, but it is real, and I am reminded of a friend of mine who recently spent a couple years as a post-doc at Ohio State, complaining about the lack of natural beauty, and praying for the day he could return to the left coast. It seems like the hip wanna-be farmers are still foundering in Berkeley and Brooklyn, while the fertile heartland remains a frontier for my generation of alternative agriculturalists. This is really a shame, as we would probably have more success if we moved somewhere where land prices were more modest, and where the climate and soils are really well suited for crops. (and just to add to my point - I kept thinking this all the way from Southern Indiana across upstate New York - all great farmland, much of it in beautiful areas, and much of it with very cheap farmland prices, at least relative to the prices I knew on the coasts, and nearly all being ignored by today's new agricultural movements in favor of areas with far less agricultural promise)

A couple days before I left Bloomington, I received an email from the hostel host at Malabar Farm, asking me when I was planning to arrive, and mentioning that the Malabar Farm Foundation would be holding an annual barbecue benefit on Saturday, where Wes Jackson would be the keynote speaker. Wes Jackson is a pioneering plant geneticist, and the founder of the Land Institute , a research center in Kansas whose goal is to revolutionize agriculture by introducing perennial grain crops that would allow grains to be grown in ways that would mimic the nutrient cycling, soil building properties of native prairies.

Of course I wanted to see Wes Jackson speak! So I headed up from the hostel (a "small" beautiful Sears kit house that Bromfield lived in while building his mansion) to the big house, where I took a tour, and then got my ticket for the dinner.

I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, but Jackson wasn't quite who I thought he would be. He looked more like a slightly chubby professor than some wild visionary farmer pirate. And the audience was also not quite what I expected. It looked like there might be some farmer pirates there, but at the table I sat at I met the editor of Ohio Farmer, a trade publication which makes its money hawking agro-chemicals to corn and soybean farmers, and a man wearing a Scott's Miracle-Gro jacket and a Pebble Beach Golf Course t-shirt - whose wife, sitting next to me, kept on reapplying her makeup. This was not the hip young farmer crowd, nor was it the radical hippies - it was more the standard white bread America, and as if to confirm my suspicion, the food was about as bland as American food could get. Ribs, Chicken, scalloped potatoes, grey limp "green" beans, airplane lasagna, and iceberg lettuce with croutons. In a way I was relieved to get away from the hip gourmet every ingredient has a story world of Bloomington. But couldn't we find a middle ground where the food was both unpretentious and also good?

Jackson began his talk with a famous quote from one of FDR's brain trust, and a former student of Scott Nearing from his years at Penn, Rexford Tugwell: "Make no small plans, for they have not the power to move men’s souls." Although this quote made me think of my friend Amy, and the Bloomington Community Orchard, Jackson was talking about his own plans to revolutionize agriculture. He read heavily from the agricultural writings of Bromfield. This passage is from the preface to The Farm, written as a dedication to his 3 daughters:

Dear Anne and Hope and Ellen:

“The Farm” is written for you, who were all born long after the war ended, so that you may know a little what it was like to have lived before 1914. Something came to an end about that year and I fancy it was the nineteenth century. You will never know that it was like at first hand, and you will never know the country from which your father came, because even if you ever went to visit it, you would fail to find it. You might discover a stream or hill which you would recognize from hearsay and legend, but that is all. The rest has vanished. One thing you would never find, and that is the feel of the country as it was thirty years before you were boern, anc certinaly you would never find people like greataunt Jane and Old Jamie and Zenobia van Essen. …. In your father’s childhood, the eighteenth century was just round the corner. For you, born after 1914, it has become as remote as the tenth centuty…

“The farm” is the story of a way of living which has largly gone out of fashion, save in a few half-forgotten coreners and in a few families which have stuck to it with admirable stubbornness in spite of everything…. It has in it two fundamentals which were once and may be again intensely American characteristics. These are integrity and idealism. Jefferson has been dead more than a hundred hyears and there is no longer any fronteier, but the things which both represented are immortal. They are tough qualities needed in times of crisis.

According to Jackson, when Bromfield was criticized for being a romantic, he proudly reclaimed the label - yes! a romantic, like Da Vinci, Rosseau, Einstein.

Jackson is a great visionary and idealist, like these other romantics. I do not know enough to know if his dreams are practical. I also thought it was strange to speak of imitating the native prairie ecosystem in eastern Ohio, in the depths of what was once the greatest hardwood forest the world has ever known. Perhaps a grain prairie would require less energy and chemical inputs, perhaps it would build more soil than it would exhaust. But it would not be any more natural in the forests of Ohio than the hay and corn that dot it today.

Jackson pointed to the great attention focused on the problems of soil conservation in Bromfield's time - not only by Bromfield and Aldo Leopold, but also by the pioneering generation of the Soil Conservation Service. He then spoke with sadness about how little was accomplished by these men - how the problem of soil erosion remains substantially the same today as it did back then. Thinking of Piers Blaikie (who played an important role in founding the discipline of political ecology by arguing that discourses of soil erosion in developing countries were more often attempts by certain adminstrative elites to channel the practices of peasants into practices from which rents could be more easily extracted than genuine concerns about soil losses, which were at best undocumented, and at worst nonexistent), and of the implementation literature in public administration (which attempts to understand why policies fail to have their intended effects), I asked Jackson after his talk if he could point me to any history which might explain this failure. Jackson told me that his forthcoming book addresses this issue head on. The problem, according to Jackson is annuals. In other words, our agricultural technology - annual plants - is doomed to create soil erosion, and there is nothing social institutions can do about it.

As a student of Elinor Ostrom (and less directly, of Piers Blaikie!) I find myself pretty skeptical. First, one has to ask why, if perennial agriculture is so promising, the USDA or land grant colleges or the Farm Bureau have not pursued funding it. It is not hard to imagine that all of these institutions could be disempowered by Jackson's radical approach, and therefore might look unfavorably upon it. And if this is the case now, will similar forces stifle the next stage of related innovation? Is soil erosion really such a serious problem, as Wes Jackson has argued, or is it, as Piers Blaikie has argued, an excuse for bureaucrats and well-meaning elites to dominate over peasants and extract their wealth from them? At the same time, I still am not sure that perennial agriculture would solve the problem of soil erosion if it is serious. As I pointed out, perennial agriculture is no more natural to Ohio than soybeans. And perennial agriculture would still require weed controls - an increasing problem, as noted by today's New York Times piece on the rapid evolution of roundup resistant pigweeds and ragweeds. I admit, however, that I remain fairly ignorant of the details of Jackson's plans, which sound pretty amazing (he brought with him a bag of wheat flour ground from a new perennial plant created by long breeding work with wild wheat relatives). I hope to learn more in the future, although at the moment I've got a bunch of other projects on my plate.

Setting off

2010-04-30T17:58:00.006-04:00

Tomorrow morning I leave Bloomington to begin my dissertation field work. Although the first stop is my parents' house in Amherst, MA, it still feels like a big first step. All is beautiful here - a fantastic spring. I have three thoughts on setting out on a journey:

Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day - farther and wider - and rest thee by many brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played.

-Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ch. 10

AFOOT and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune—I myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Strong and content, I travel the open road.

The earth—that is sufficient;
I do not want the constellations any nearer;
I know they are very well where they are;
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens;
I carry them, men and women—I carry them with me wherever I go;
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them;
I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)

Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

(Note that this is just the beginning of a long, but very wonderful poem, the rest of which can be viewed here)

I guess Whitman & Thoreau are considered more "serious" authors than Tolkien, but I think Tolkien captures even better the feeling of setting out on a journey, when one feels great trepidation, as well as great excitement and joy (note that this is a composite of songs found in several parts of the Hobbit & Lord of the Rings).

Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains of the moon.

Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known.

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.

Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate,
And though I oft have passed them by,
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.

'That sounds like a bit of old Bilbo's rhyming,' said Pippin. 'Or is it one of your imitations? It does not sound altogether encouraging.'

'I don't know,' said Frodo. 'It came to me then, as if I was making it up; but I may have heard it long ago. Certainly it reminds me very much of Bilbo in the last years, before he went away. He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. "It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door," he used to say. "You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to. Do you realize that this is the very path that goes through Mirkwood, and that if you let it, it might take you to the Lonely Mountain or even worse places?" He used to say that on the path outside the front door at Bag End, especially after he had been out for a long walk.'

Writings about the US-Forest Service

2010-04-29T09:02:00.008-04:00

Before I started grad school, I spent two years working for Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, an advocacy organization that works to improve forest policies in the US National Forest system. While there, I wrote a number of articles for FSEEE's publication, Forest Magazine. Here are links to some of my articles:

Strangely Like Fire: The Pacific Northwest's Invasive Species Management Strategy. Spring 2005
Some Like it Hot: The black-backed woodpecker and burned forests. Summer 2005
Planning without Purpose. Summer 2005
Monitoring Timber, Not Wildlife. Fall 2005.
Don't Judge a Tree by its Color. Winter 2006.
Unfettered Salvage Logging. Spring 2006.
Dismantling the National Forest Management Act. Summer 2006.

I also made some contributions to a forest policy blog run by FSEEE board member and retired Forest Service economist Dave Iverson.

A class paper I wrote based on my work at FSEEE during my first year of graduate school was selected for posting on the Workshop in Political Theory & Policy Analysis website. I plan to revise it and submit it to an academic journal when I find the time.

While I'm talking up my past work at FSEEE, I should mention that my former boss there, Andy Stahl, has written a very intelligent series of articles on the future of forest planning in the US National Forests, which I recommend for all the other forest policy nerds out there...

Past writings about India

2010-04-28T09:31:00.004-04:00

Some writing I have done in the past about India is still available online. Looking back on it, it seems to be work I did a long time ago:
An article for the excellent travel forum "India Mike," on travelling in rural Kerala.
A blog I kept about my travels during my first year in India

Things to read about travelling in India

2010-04-28T09:00:00.002-04:00

I haven't gotten back to India yet - in fact, I'm still sitting in my office in Bloomington, Indiana. I do know, however, that many of my friends are curious what my life will be like while conducting research in India. I just happen to have discovered a wonderful blog being kept by NPR reporter Phillip Reeves on his current journey down India & Pakistan's "Grand Trunk Road," the road built by the British to link the great cities of northern India. Apparently this will be followed by a special series on Morning Edition in the next few weeks, but the blog is really good - pictures, stories, and an attempt to answer the puzzling (to a foreigner) question of why it is so hard to get directions.

More pictures

2010-04-27T19:58:00.002-04:00

Most of the digital photographs I have taken in my life are viewable on my shutterfly account. These include pictures from India, Bloomington, Amherst, Oregon, hiking the Long Trail in Vermont, the Common Ground Fair in Maine in 2004, and my grandma Etta's 100th birthday in 2006.

Dissertation Research Proposal Summary

2010-04-27T10:34:00.000-04:00

(view in pdf)

Seeing the Bureaucrat Through the Trees
Understanding variation in implementation behavior among Forest Department Officials in forest sector reforms using case studies from Maharashtra & Andhra Pradesh

Investigator: Forrest Fleischman, PhD Candidate in Public Policy at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Bloomington, Indiana, USA. fleischf@indiana.edu, mobile in India: 9xxxxxxxxx
Supervisor: Professor Elinor Ostrom, Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University, USA.
Funding Agency: USA National Science Foundation, Graduate Research Fellowship.
Affiliations in India: The Institute of Economic Growth, University of Delhi; Shodh: the Institute for Research & Development, Nagpur.

Purpose:
Many studies of forest policies in India have noted that there is a high level of heterogeneity in how policies are implemented both between and within states. The vast majority of these studies have focused on how this variation impacts forest users at the village level, but few studies have been undertaken to investigate why policy implementation varies within the Forest Department. This study aims to fill this gap.
This study is designed to serve two purposes. First, it aims to contribute to policy design in the specific context of Indian forest management. Understanding why implementation varies can help policy makers design better policy. It may be that implementation varies as a result of variation in local conditions. If so, such variation may be quite desirable. If, on the other hand, variation occurs because there are differences in the effectiveness of implementation strategies, it would be wise to learn from the most effective strategies.
Second, this study aims to contribute to broad theories of how public agencies function in the management of public programs. Academic literature on policy implementation focuses on the implementation problems facing bureaucracies in the US and Europe, and it is not clear if hypotheses derived from this literature are relevant in the Indian context. This broader theoretical learning could have substantial practical implications if it helps policy makers in India and other developing countries understand why some policies work better than others in some contexts.

Methods:
This study relies on a comparative case study design. The first comparison is made between the states of Andhra Pradesh & Maharashtra – states with distinctive histories in forest policy. The focus is on the regions of Telangana & Vidarbha, which share a border & have relatively similar ecological and social conditions. A second comparison is made between different types of policies implemented on Forest Department lands. Joint Forest Management was designed by the Forest Department in consultation with international donors. Key stated aims include reforestation, improving relations between the Forest Department and forest users, and improving livelihoods for forest users. By contrast, the Forest Rights Act, which aims to improve the rights of forest users, was written by activists outside of the Forest Department, decreases the authority of the Forest Department to make decisions about land use on forests, and is reported to be unpopular with Forest Department officials.
Within each state, I intend to make extended visits of 2-3 weeks to 5 different forest divisions. Within each division, the focus will be on understanding how these 2 policies are implemented, and why they are implemented in this way. In each division I will interview and observe the daily activities of Forest Department managers over a period of up to 2-3 weeks. I also plan to talk to other employees both in field and supervisory roles, forest users involved in Forest Department programs, and other stakeholders and observers, including politicians, local leaders, activists, NGOs, businesspeople, journalists, and academics. I will also conduct interviews at the regional and national level with officials and others who influence policy implementation in the Forest Department. Involvement in all interviews is voluntary on the part of interviewees, and I greatly appreciate the time taken by interviewees to inform me about their work & lives.
Every effort will be made to insure the confidentiality of all participants in this study. I cannot guarantee absolute confidentiality. Personal information may be disclosed if required by law. Individual identities will be held in confidence in reports in which the study may be published, and databases in which results may be stored.

Forrest's Bloomington Garden

2010-04-27T10:21:00.000-04:00

I have a large garden in my backyard in the Bryan Park neighborhood in Bloomington. Since I moved to Bloomington to start a PhD program in August 2007, I have grown nearly all of the vegetables I have eaten, and have fed housemates and friends as well. The area devoted to vegetables is approx. 2000 sq ft. The first picture shows the hoop tunnels I built with electrical conduit and 6 mil plastic. Anthony gave me the electrical conduit, which someone else had salvaged for use on his farm (otherwise I could have bought pvc pipe), Amy helped me cut re-bar stakes to anchor the conduit in the ground, and I bought the 6 mil plastic rolls in the hardware store. They provide enough protection to overwinter cold-hardy crops including many mustards, kales, lettuces, carrots, etc. I purchase most of my seeds from Fedco, which provides recommendations of crops that survive with levels of protection in central Maine winters - far colder than southern Indiana!
For more information on eating fresh vegetables out of a winter garden in the climate of the northeast and midwest US, I recommend the books by Maine garden-writer Eliot Coleman.
I eat the best salads in Bloomington all fall, winter, and spring.

And of course, the garden explodes in the summer with all kinds of vegetables.
My sunflowers are "Mammoth" from Fedco. They grow 10-15 ft. tall in 3 months, a spectacular display, and attract critters. They are really hassle free to grow.

I think the question I'm asked most frequently about my garden is how I find time to do all of it. The answer is that, once you learn the basics of how to do it, it really isn't that much work. I rarely spend more than 10 hours a week in the garden, and most times of the year I spend much less. If you subtract out the time I would spend going to the market to buy vegetables, and the time I would spend doing other kinds of exercise, and the time I would spend mowing the lawn in the same area, it really is only 5 hours a week.

Did I mention that I love and am entirely addicted to my garden? Plants are truly miraculous.

Lately I've been spending more time on my perennial patches. I'm trying to figure out how to make them beautiful all year round, how to grow more native plants, and how to grow more useful perennials - vegetables, herbs, etc. I still have alot to learn about annual vegetables, but I'm a real novice with the perennials.

In addition to my garden, I have been involved in two really cool garden-related projects in Bloomington: The Hoosier Hills Food Bank Garden Project and the Bloomington Community Orchard. These are both fantastic new projects and I am proud to have played a very small role in helping them out!