The Young Desert Farmer

The young desert farmer

Rural life in northwestern India after 1950 as experienced by Tan Dan

By Son Lal

Copyright 2013 by Son Lal

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This is a work of fiction. The names and characters come from the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Similarly, the locations and incidents in this book, which might resemble real locations and events, are being used fictitiously and are not to be considered as real.

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The young desert farmer

Rural life in northwestern India after 1950 as experienced by Tan Dan

Behind stonewalls at dynamic Chelana, a desert village in western Rajasthan

Tan Dan about farm development and social interactions in his youth. As narrated to his friend Son Lal around 1980.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Tan Dan

Chapter 2 The youth club that started a school

Chapter 3 The Chelana youth club around 1950

Chapter 4 Village democracy and ex-Thakurs in the region

Chapter 5 Elections and development at high speed at Chelana

Chapter 6 The rubber cart and other Detha ways of earning in the late 1940s

Chapter 7 Detha youth return to Chelana and start irrigation farming

Chapter 8 The farm of the waterlords

Chapter 9 Electricity for agriculture

Chapter 10 Ups and downs among the Dethas

Chapter 11 The awakening of the Jat community

Chapter 12 A young widow and the family honour

Chapter 13 Tan Dan was sent to a public school

Chapter 14 The Detha farm and the Baniya merchants

Chapter 15 Buying pumps and tractors

Chapter 16 Tan Dan tries to diversify farm production

Chapter 17 Tan Dan's journey to USA

Chapter 18 Tan Dan and hybrid cereals in the 1960s

Chapter 19 HYV wheat from scientists to progressive farmers

Chapter 20 Tan Dan's attempt to bring HYV wheat to Chelana

Chapter 21 Traditional wheat cultivation in western Rajasthan

Chapter 22 The change to a money economy at Chelana

Chapter 23 The movement of the Rajasthani economy in 1980-2010

Supplement

Indian words used in this book are explained here

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Chapter 1 Tan Dan

Who is Tan Dan?

Tan Dan Detha was born in a farmer family of the Charan caste in 1943. His native village is Chelana in Jodhpur District of Rajasthan in northwestern India. Tan Dan has lived in the midst of his strongly traditional environment all his life. He is a critical observer rather than a follower of that tradition.

Who is Son Lal?

Son Lal is my pen name. I was born in a Scandinavian country of northern Europe in the early 1940s. I have lived in India off and on for fifty years, since I first arrived to the Gateway of India at Bombay by ship in 1963. In the 1970s I met Tan Dan. We soon found we shared many views on the world, and had the same curiosity of village life. I saw a chance to learn how he experienced his rural environment. He did his best to explain, and I am grateful to him for having shared his knowledge and thoughts with me.

How this narration was done

Tan Dan told in English and I typed, while we sat together in long sessions. His many photos became a starting point for our discussions. Our knowledge of English was on the same level and we formulated the sentences together. Sentence after sentence, day after day. Most of it we wrote around 1980, but some additions were made in later decades. Afterwards I have edited the material and supplemented some sections with information from elsewhere. Still, it is Tan Dan's voice that is heard on these pages. It is a personal narration by a village farmer, and has no connection to any university.

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Chapter 2 The youth club that started a school

When Jugti Dan's grandchildren and their friends started a youth club at Chelana

Around 1947, when both the British rule in India and the rule of the Jodhpur maharaja was about to end, the young Dethas and their friends started a youth club at Chelana. Tan Dan's brother Ravi Dan became its secretary.

At that time village life was still feudal and stagnant. Agriculture was entirely dependent on monsoon rains. The jagirdars still controlled the land cultivated by the tenants.

Important changes took place in the country and the Detha youth hoped that conditions would change also in their village. The youth club became their way of transforming that desire into an organized effort.

Starting of a school at Chelana - a youth club initiative

The earliest community development activity in which the youth club was involved was starting a primary school. The school had a modest beginning in 1950 or perhaps 1951 when an urban Brahmin youth from Jodhpur was employed by the Rajasthan Government as the first teacher in Chelana. The school was started at the request of youth club leaders and adults who supported these young men going to Government offices in Jodhpur to get the officers to agree on starting the new school, which they after much pressure and persuasion really did.

These supporting family heads were:

Tej Dan (Tan Dan's father), Mehar Dan, Pema Ram, Teja Ram, Jasji Ram (a Rav Brahmin geneologist), Mulaji Mali, Ram Lal Kalal, Bhagirath Ram, and Jasji Rayka. Also Bhikaji Deval, and two other middleaged bhambis were keen on sending their children to school. Most of them belonged to the middle income bracket of the village. They formed a group of ten to fifteen middleaged farmers still living a straightforward life as hardworking tenants.

As tenants they had their loyalties on the side of those in the village who were exploited by the jagirdars. They did poorly paid physical work themselves. They were closer to the labourers of the village at that time than later on when they had become landowners. In 1978 they hired low-paid labourers for heavy work on their irrigated farms of between eight and forty hectares.

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Jogiji worked as a weaver at the 1952 land settlement, and therefore did not get any land unlike most of the other parents keen on starting a school. Jogiji was still a weaver in 1978, and as poor as ever. He only earned enough to eat.

In the 1950s Jogiji's brother Setanji and his other relative Suntaji belonged to the group of progressive thinkers in the village, but none of them have been able to benefit much of the age of modernity, which reached Chelana in the next few decades.

At the time of the 1952 land settlement they worked as begari labourers for various jagirs of Chelana. Begari is a kind of slavelike work relationship, in which the worker always are at the disposal for whatever kind of labour work is to be done. For example, cutting fuelwood, clean the cattle yards, making cowdung cakes, breaking stones, harvesting crops, thrashing, winnowing, and cleaning the grains from other material.

As these Bhambis were so poor the jagirdars were not prepared to lease out land to them. Thus the fruits of development coming up in agriculture slipped away from them.

The isolated Chelana in the 1950s

Most of those who supported the boys of the youth club to get the school started at Chelana were thus simple illiterate villagers working as tenant farmers and craftsmen. All they did was going to meetings arranged by Chand Dan and the other youth club leaders. Mehar Dan was the only one among the adults who did something more. He used to accompany Ravi Dan to Government officers in Jodhpur in order to give added weight to the repeated requests for starting a school by the Government.

It was difficult for the Education Department to find a teacher prepared to live in such a remote village as Chelana. The officers therefore evaded the issue and the young men had to make many journeys.

Going from Chelana to Jodhpur in the late 1940s was a risky venture that took long time.Therefore nobody else than Mehar Dan and Ravi Dan went on these school promoting expeditions.

Chelana had still no connection of a motorable road. When going to Jodhpur in those days most people went on foot to Umed, a railway station on the Merta-Jodhpur line, a part of the Delhi-Jodhpur line. Umed is about 20 km from Chelana, and the traveller has to pass through an area of ravines, hills and heavy sand. The 1940s and 1950s were anarchic days in the Marvar region, and the ravines between Chelana and Umed were full of wild animals, dacoits, and less organized thieves and looters.

In spite of that travellers from villagers of the whole neighbourhood took the train from Umed to Jodhpur, Jaipur, Bikaner, and other far away places, and they all faced the risk of meeting dangers such as dacoits on the way to the railway station. The alternative was going some other route on horseback or camel or even on foot all the way to the final destination.

Camel rides were risky in the rainy season, as they easily slipped on wet surface, and could break their legs. Sometimes the rider got killed in the fall.

Those few villagers, who owned horses sometimes went on horseback to Umed, when they travelled light. When they had a lot of luggage, or if they were many, the villagers travelled by ox cart to the station. Then they were less visible for the dacoits and could easily run away and hide. The dacoits were mostly Rajputs, especially the gang leaders, and as an old practice, they never attacked any Rajput or Charan travellers. For them the Baniyas, who often carried wealth with them, were the main target. Whenever a Baniya had to go to the Umed railway station from Chelana he used to ask some Rajput to accompany him. Before they started the Baniya would pay the Rajput for it in a respectful way. Rattan Singh, who was still alive in 1978, often did this work. He prepared himself by putting on a new turban, brought his sword along, and twisted his big mustaches with extra care. They covered his cheek, and he tried to make them as big as possible, so that he would look as furious and dangerous as possible.

If the Baniyas would be attacked the Rajput would go in between the dacoits and the baniyas. Mostly they would refrain from attacking him, but sometimes the Rajput had to hand over some money, as a kind of compensation to the dacoits, who otherwise would feel cheated on their rightful livelihood. That money the Rajput would get from the Baniya.

If the dacoits would have seen the Rajput many times on such protective missions, they might say, It is all right, if you go with your friends like this two or three times, but if you start going with every Baniya, then you yourself can understand our problems. We suffer heavy losses in our business. After such a complaint the Rajput and the Baniyas would feel even more obliged to hand over some gift as a compensation.

Mehar Dan and Ravi Dan used to leave after the dinner around eight or nine o'clock at night, going on foot in the darkness to Umed in order to avoid the dacoits. They would reach Umed railway station after midnight. The train for Jodhpur would come some time during the small hours, and they had to board quickly during the short stop at this small railway station. Neither these two nor most other Chelana villagers had any watches, but they managed to get in time for the train. Probably they kept a generous time margin, as the exact arrival of the steam-engined narrow gauge train varied. They followed the passing of time by watching the clear star-studded sky. They knew the movement of the star constellations, which are on different places of the sky, depending on season. On the glittering sky of clear dark nights the stars disappeared below the horizon in the west one after the other, urging the travellers to move on fast enough for catching the still distant but approaching train.

The beginning of bus service

Chelana was not connected to the world by roads and buses until ten years later. Buses started to run prior to the construction of proper roads. The first bus started to ply the route Merta-Jalagarh via Chelana in 1957, a small and sturdy bus open from the back side. It slowly rattled ahead on the partly non-existing mud roads. For many years there were very few passengers. On many of its journeys it was absolutely empty. It started from Merta in the morning reaching Jalagarh 60 km to the south in the afternoon, and returned to Merta at night.

It was in traffic for only seven to eight months in a year, as the tracks were badly damaged for many months after the monsoon rains. In the 1960 the number of buses per day and the crowd in the buses started to increase as a result of the expansion of economic activities of the area.

In search of a teacher

When the Education Department told Mehar Dan and Ravi Dan, that it was difficult to find a teacher who wanted to stay so far away from the world as Chelana, they tried to find one themselves.

Then Mehar Dan remembered Mehtab Chand. Some years after the Hariadana fight in 1929, Tej Dan, under the direction of Jugti Dan, had employed a family teacher in reading and writing for the group of young Detha boys in their pre-teens such as Mehar Dan, Kum Dan, Naru Dan, Ganga Dan, Bachan Dan, Vijai Dan, and Sukh Dan.

His name was Mehtab Chand, and he was a Pushkarna Brahmin. He had stayed a few years in Chelana in the middle of the 1930s teaching the Detha boys and a few of their sisters, as well as some sons of Detha family friends. Then he returned to Jodhpur and joined some Government service.

In 1950 Mehar Dan went to his old teacher Mehtab Chand accompanied by Ravi Dan. They told him that the Government had agreed to start a primary school in Chelana, and now they looked for somebody who would like to fill the vacant post.

Mehtab Chand put them in contact with Ram Dev, who was a Pushkarna Brahmin, too. Ram Dev was a teenager, who started his new work as a teacher with youthful zeal.

Apart from providing a salary to the teacher and some equipments such as a blackboard, the Education Department left the new school on its own.

Baniya opposition

The most burning issue for Ram Dev and his group of kids was to find a place where they could sit. It was not as easy as it might appear to find a corner which was quiet and undisturbed, because the villagers had become divided on the school issue. When the Rajputs and Baniyas of Chelana came to know that a school had started they got worried and tried to stop it. Men of these closely associated upper castes of the feudal ruling class did not want ordinary villagers to become literate. Especially some of the baniyas such as Suraj Mal, his son Bhanvar Lal, Mag Raj, Sugan Chand opposed the idea.

Many baniya families of Chelana had been engaged in moneylending business at large mercantile cities such as Madras, Bangalore, and Hyderabad. They had been active there for at least a century and perhaps much longer. In the cities of South India, they were known as Marvari merchants. Some of them managed to become rich. Part of the fortune was sometimes lost in gambling before the money reached the families in Chelana.

In Chelana itself there was not much business before the 1960s, and the Baniyas only had a few small shops there. These shopkeepers lived in moderate circumstances.

Also Jhoomar Lal, the accountant of the Chelana Thikana, and Hanuman Chand, the biggest and strongest among the baniyas with big curled mustaches, so that he looke like a Rajput, belonged to this group of furious baniyas. They got alarmed at the prospect of having to face educated common villagers in the future, who would be able to read and write and argue with them. Perhaps they would try to check the accounts, consult the laws, and refuse to repay their loans. This group of Baniyas got together on a group meeting. There they decided to act jointly. They also got the Rajputs to understand what a serious threat to the established classes of Chelana a new school might become.

The Baniya group got the support of the Chelana Thakur and the whole Thikana, especially as the Thakur himself was illiterate. The Rajputs and the Baniyas started to quarrel with those villagers, who had sent their children to school, and other villagers who also were active in getting the school started. They asked how they could go ahead and open a school without first asking the Thakur for permission.

Mehar Dan had gone to the Thakur many months earlier, and on that occasion the Thakur had agreed to the school. The activists within the anti-school campaign had got the Thakur to change his mind.

At that time Ram Dev, the teacher, had already started his school. First Mehar Dan and Ram Dev arranged a place on the yard within the walls of the village temple compound. There they sat in the open under a shady tree at the temple. The temple was situated in the middle of the village at the open square in front of the Thikana gate.

Mangi Lal at the Thikana gate

When the Government school started in this humble way, there was already a teacher in the village by the name of Mangi Lal. He belonged to the Sad caste (the traditional temple priests), and he came from a village 35 miles away. In his own village he was a farmer, but now and then he came to Chelana for a few months to teach some savarn Hindu children the basics of reading, writing and counting. Most of them belonged to the Rajput, Baniya, and Brahmin castes.

Mangi Lal lived with an outfit that made him look like a Brahmin priest of the Vedic type. He had a light orange turban, a red shirt and a white dhoti. He wore the janeu (the sacred thread), and pasted his forehead with sandalwood