Upcountry Tales
Once Upon a Time in the Heart of India
Mark Tully
Speaking Tiger
287 pages; Rs 599
We are often told, in newspapers and on primetime news, that India is changing, a self-evident reality that, in the national imagination, was largely set in motion by the reforms of 1991. While the fundamentals of the macro-economy have indeed improved over the decades, the situation on the ground, especially at the village level, has not changed dramatically.
In the introduction to this new collection of short stories, Mark Tully tells us that they are set in the India of the 1980s, the last decade before the country was forced to open up in the face of a crisis. “The Ploughman’s Lament”, for example, is about a farmer Tirathpal who goes to great lengths to avoid selling off his sturdy bullocks in exchange for a tractor.
Such a situation would be less likely today, but if there is another cliché about India that rings true, it is that several time periods coexist in this country simultaneously. One reason Tirathpal is averse to buying a tractor is the small size of his landholding, which he fears would make recovering the cost of the tractor unfeasible. The reliance on subsistence farming carried out on small parcels of land continues to be a bane of our agriculture.
Other long-standing divisions rear their head. In “The Battle for a Temple”, a confrontation ensues between the upper-caste Gosains and the Dalits of a Purvanchal village over a temple that the lower castes want to build in the vicinity of a Shiva temple belonging to the upper castes. The power of the story comes not from its central tension, but from how relevant it continues to be in today’s India.
This sense of the old versus the new and the blurred boundaries between the two extends to other stories. In “Murder in Milanpur”, the death of a Thakur landlord unleashes a string of events that are less about finding out the culprit than about showing assorted persons, from the maid who works at the Thakur household to the righteous thanedar who is keen to solve the murder, their place.
The importance of proximity to power to get things done is the other running theme of these stories. The Dalits in “The Battle for a Temple” are finally able to get their way not on the dint of the justness of their cause but because they are able to rouse the local MLA to their political importance. The thanedar in “Murder in Milanpur” is told by his superior to back off from the “sensitive” case lest his middling end up displeasing the Thakur’s family.
The most scathing story of the lot is “The Family Business”, which name-checks nearly every ill of Indian politics: dynastic succession, electoral malfeasance, public loot. Suresh Srivastava is the son of the Shivpur MP whose passing opens up the possibility of the emergence of a new leader. The politically ineffectual Suresh, having completed a degree in development studies from Britain, returns to Shivpur to reclaim his legacy.
The story is a tragicomic series of the ploys, each more outlandish than the last, that the young scion envisages to get the locals to believe that he can deliver what his father only promised. There is little talk of real development; what is offered rather is stop-gap arrangements that will last the season and garner, Suresh hopes, enough sympathy for him to enable him to best his opponent who has the ear of the “high command”.
It is all so relatable, and yet so egregious, it makes one wonder how we lost 70 years of Independence twiddling our thumbs while our villages waited for the most basic necessities to reach them. This is the reason that even as we discuss a falling growth rate and the buffeting effects of demonetisation and the goods and services tax, the Narendra Modi government is unlikely to lose favour with the vast majority of our countrymen because of the work it is putting in to fix the broken systems that have kept our villages deprived.
Not everything about this collection is grim, though. “The Reluctant Lover” is the story of a diffident village boy whose hard work ensures he gets admitted to Delhi University where he falls in love, hesitatingly, with a classmate. Mr Tully captures the dynamics of the relationship between a village lad and a city girl with tenderness, bringing out the anxieties and joys of a social interaction – romance – that too is undergoing a churn in modern India.
Mr Tully writes fast-paced stories that encapsulate both the vigour of rural life and the systemic inertia that mars its progress. India is often ridiculed for being perpetually on the cusp of “arriving”, and these stories remind us that unless development reaches the grassroots, that criticism is not entirely unjustified.
