A Lovesong for India

Farmer at village Kishanpur, Uttar Pradesh

Even beggars beg with power—they scan you, study you, watch when their pleadings have landed and then push for more. Not everyone can beg—it is an art and a science.

And yet somehow, we think of poor folks as “those poor things,” as hapless victims of decaying systems, as beings non-existent except in their misery. Not that systems are not decaying. Not that there is no misery. 

Not that they are not oppressed. Yet, how to ensure that rhetorically one does not inanimate them, dehumanize their life struggles to a mere object of pity?

When I set out to learn about India, my daughterland, and go where she exists most—in her villages, I had promised myself not to look for poverty and misery but to always ask the question—what makes her tick, what makes her throb.

As I close my eyes now and recall—I hear a voice insistent that I walk that extra bit and visit that home, that garden, that field, that temple and her bhajans, that child, that fruit and the flower—an India that threatened to overwhelm me in every village I visited. She did not hide behind that bamboo pillar or duck under the could-have-been rice fields and peep from a slimy lane corner. She came to me full blast, gorgeous and complete and unashamed—laughing and glowing and sometimes staring at me amusedly. Insisting I drink this cup of tea and then again one more cup and then again one more in this home and the next and the next. Insisting I try this milk extract from their own cows. Asking me to sit on rope cots and chattering endlessly. And bewildered when I cried—Enough! I can’t drink one more cup of tea, nor eat one more morsel of food nor listen to one more word in conversation! Bewildered and amused of my urban fragility. Of my need for space. Of my need for dietary discipline. Of my easy exhaustion.

She came to me as young children sometimes full of mirth in their little shorts and sometimes dresses—peeping eagerly, reciting maths tables with a smile in local language and in local dialect, singing songs and dancing at other times. She laughed through the eyes of village kids when one of my legs got stuck in knee-deep slush in a road shared with buffaloes.

Kids dancing to a local tune at an after-school initiative in village Jarkhi, Jharkhand

4year-old boy reciting math tables, village Jarkhi, Jharkhand

She came to me as old farmers haughty and respectful at the same time—proud and grounded. She came to me as women like that one who stared at me as an equal. She even came to me as a disabled boy—who rushed in from nowhere and gave me a hug as if I was a long lost friend. A hug that dissolved any fear I had of non-acceptance, of being an alien.

Woman at village corner, village Khera, Jharkhand

A lovable mentally-challenged boy, village Arjunpur, Uttar Pradesh

And yes, sometimes she was silent, painfully silent and absent. Like when that little boy appeared covered with flies. He stood there, flinching not one bit, not making that wee bit of effort to shoo off flies, nor a cry, nor a whimper. He stood there silent and absent. And when others had shoed away the flies, he still had one left under his eye as he continued to stare—empty faces, empty sky, empty hopes.

And those images haunt. And those images are also real. A lyrical desire to find hope and self-belief cannot gloss over real pain—it must always include those notes too.

And yet, for this introductory post, I leave you with smiles from a landscape of love called my country, my India or as she calls it--Bharat.

Children at village Kishanpur, Uttar Pradesh

[I thank my readers for your many wishes and messages and comments both on my last blogpost as well as on social media. I have returned from a 2-month sojourn through India-a very very brief trip in terms of the magnitude and magnificence she is and yet, like when during lightening, in a flash the landscape is revealed, I too have glimpsed my country. This is my introductory post from the trip]

Attention readers, almost all of the comments have disappeared due to commenting tool malfunction. It will take me time to retrieve them and re-paste the comments. Please know that I did not delete them...-:)