BY Iqbal Mustafa

Date:28-08-05

Source: The News

"Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country." --William Jennings Bryan (American Statesman, 1860-1925)

The Indus basin has sustained a rural-agrarian life style since the advent of history. Civilizations were born and died, many times over; dynasties rose and fell, conquerors came to India, became domesticated and melted in to the potpourri of the great Indian ethnic mix. The rural village, however, remained unaffected as time kept turning with the rusty creek of the Persian wheel. For centuries, every day, the rising sun heard the cowbells as cattlemen drove their herds out of the village at dawn in search of marginal flora to feed their lot. The village Mullah called the faithful from the little white mosque in a quivering and wailing phonation of the azan. The ploughmen were half finished with their daily half acre ploughing stint by the time the sun rose above the horizon. The birds began to create a din on the huge old village trees, as children flocked to the mosques to begin their daily chanting of the holy verses under the vigilant gaze of the mullah. The village routine in the irrigated Punjab was as set as the path of the stars in the night sky. You could visit one village and you could have visited them all. Only the feudal patronage varied from clan to clan; nothing else differed. And this went on for centuries until recent times. It was only as recent as 1971 that I visited some village in southern Punjab where, apart from the Wapda pylons on the horizon and a small canal distributory, nothing had changed since, perhaps the times of Asoka.

There was a quaint, simplistic uniformity to village existence. Life was spun around seasons, Rabi and Kharif, measured in Hindi months of sawan, bhadoon, chaiter, assoon Katein and such sonorous names for the months. Despite a thousand years of Muslim domination, villagers kept track of time on the Hindu calendar. Daily life rotated around field chores for the crops and tending to the cattle. Clothes were dull, Khadar white for the menials and bright shimmering white for the landlords. Women wore flamboyant tapestries of flaming colours. Ghaghras and lachas swayed with the sensuous swing of the hips as womenfolk sauntered around the village and in the fields providing thankless labour. The hard, Spartan life couldn't bridle the instinctive, carefree spirit of a near-savage existence; women's laughter rang incessantly through the day; young men sang their hearts out in the fields and through the nights. Occasionally, instruments, mostly woodwinds, echoed across the flat, fertile lands of the Punjab, playing sad, mournful melodies that felt like a sweet, enticing pain. Years, decades, even centuries passed by in the perpetuity of this bucolic equilibrium. Folks remembered events on the scale of moon risings.

Beneath this pastoral bliss, a brutal socio-economic system thrived. There was lordship for the few who had been lucky in the cosmic lottery and there was serfdom for the rest of the mass -- a state marginally better than slavery. Social status, even professions, was fixed with the certainty of divine ordination. A barber's son could only be a barber and a carpenter's son only a carpenter. Solid structures of castes and vocations pigeonholed human existence.

Yet, there was an order to life, despite the inequitable circumstances. There was harmony between man, land and wild life. Soils were tilled for subsistence, not for profits and with a serious concern for conservation. Fallow land, organic manuring, were a routine part of crop rotations. Tillage (with bullocks) was gentle and adequate that didn't harm the soils. Ground water, through wells, was only exploited where it was salt free. Villages were simple mud hut affairs with thatched roofs but there was an age-old wisdom to civic concerns. Animals were penned out side the villages in special pens. Their droppings were collected regularly and used for either fuel or manure. Drainage was a serious concern and village elders ensured that no litter or stagnant water collected in the village area. People were conditioned to keep their courtyards and streets spotlessly clean. Regular sweeping and mud plastering was a backbreaking chore but that was part of life. I remember, as a child, wondering at the spotless and pristine village courtyards. Even the kitchen utensils were polished and adorned on the mud mantle-piece with a rustic pride.

Food was simple but nutritionally balanced: Whole grain cereals like wheat, maize, millet, sorghum eaten as fresh bread with pulses, fresh vegetables and milk by-products. Other food supplements included seasonal delicacies like sugar cane in the winters, and seasonal wild fruits. It was not rich but quite a wholesome diet. Village folks were generally healthier than their city counterparts. Hard work, lack of tensions and simple diet kept their dispositions enviably robust. Village communities, being physically isolated, remained immune from infectious diseases. Of course, when epidemics spread, then there was no medical support and loss of life was phenomenal. The essential tenor of rural life was slow paced, peaceful and healthy, and these qualities have become metaphorically associated with a rustic life.

All this is no more! Within the past four decades, a vile kind of urbanisation has polluted the whole fabric of rural bliss. Population has exploded with a vengeance. The intense competition for land between people, crops and domestic animals has left villages crowded like city slums. Education has become subservient to the solitary god of material gains with no concern for the qualitative aspects of life. Every household in the village is overcrowded, and has some members commuting to the nearest city for employment. The influx of foreign remittances since the seventies, along with the development of rickety infrastructure of roads, electricity and telephones has transformed the village profiles beyond recognition.

Badly designed brick structures that are neither pretty nor functional have replaced mud huts. Drainage problems have become beyond the means of individuals and there is no civic organisational arrangement to invest and maintain drainage systems. Therefore, most villages have big cesspools of stinking drainage water all around. Houses, especially those belonging to affluent farmers or traders, have acquired modern toilettes that spew filth into the streets. Security has become a problem and for that, the animals are housed within the villages. Manure is a redundant commodity since few people have the labour to bake dung cakes or make farmyard manure out of it. It piles up in heaps in the streets creating stench and filth.

Villages have lost the pastoral tranquillity and adopted an urban panic but without the compensating trimmings of services, comforts or culture. Economic compulsions drive people like demons to remain above the poverty line, while the macro-policy dice is loaded against them. A layer of dust hangs over villages as the din of tractor trolleys, overloaded vans, carts and jeeps plod through crowded bazaars full of urban filth and flies. People are undernourished as the traditional food habits have given way to urban fast foods; natural drinks to aerated beverages; hookah to cigarettes and so forth. Today, villagers carry a tired, sallow appearance.

There is an unkempt, unwashed, frustrated look to the villages. Even the trees, what ever are left, look pale and sad. Soils are tired, water is turning saline, skies are murky with dust from the over-tillage of soils and the people look like panic-stricken ants escaping from a predator. Our villages are dying today. What will become of them, who knows? More than that, who cares?

P.S.
Keyed in, with great envy, from a window overlooking the pristine, pastoral grandeur of Iver Heath in the outskirts of London, where the local council has ensured preservation of its environment and population for the past hundred years while allowing all modern services to reach here.
The writer is a consultant for agro-economy and organisational management to public and private sectors.
Email: mustafa@hujra.com
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