 
### 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.

*

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 marks. In his hand he kept a shining rule. Thus Mangi Lal had all the appearance of a teacher of the traditional Hindu style.

He mostly came in the hot season, charging money from the upper caste parents of his student boys. Untouchability was strictly observed, and no child from the lower castes were allowed to come near.

Mangi Lal sat with his little group of ten to twenty children in the shady open space between the broad entrance corridor walls of the Thikana gate, keeping his little group under strict discipline, believing in corporal punishment. He was proud of his school, and his own efficiency. He claimed that any student who had studied under him for six months could successfully compete with Ram Dev, the Government teacher that had become his rival.

His pupils were rural in their manners and experience. A Charan child, Prabhu Dan, on the first day in his life at school after a while thought that the teaching went on for such a long time that he started to be restless. He was not used to keep sitting on one place like that, and he wanted Mangi Lal to let them free. He did not know how to tell, however. He did not know that the word for school break in the local language was _'chhutti'_ , so he shouted ' _gol kanak vei'_ to Mangi Lal, which meant, "When will you unyoke the oxen from the plough.?"

Mangi Lal lost his temper over hearing such an uneducated and silly word for school break as ' _gol'_. He started to shout at Prabhu Dan, asking who was his father, and how he could be such a backward and _'jangli'_ (i.e. jungle-like) child that he did not know how to speak properly. Prabhu got so scared that he run home as soon as he had an opportuntiy and hung his slate on a peg in the cattleshed and never dared to go back to Mangi Lal's class again.

Most months of the year there was no class at the Thikana gate, however, as Mangi Lal was at home in his own village, ploughing his own fields. In spite of that most Rajputs and Baniyas felt there was no need of any more teacher in Chelana, especially not of a teacher like Ram Dev, who was prepared to teach also children of the backward and uneducated classes of the village, and even untouchables.

Rajputs against the new school

Those among the Rajputs who were most active in the agitation against the new school were

• Doong Singh, personal attendant and adviser to the Chelana Thakur,

• Naval Singh, a guard of the Thikana, most of the time being around the Thikana gate ready to interfere with his lathi, whenever some fight or quarrel took place in the village.

• Chandar Singh, a retired soldier living as a landlord. He had about one hundred acres in jagir including land in Gujarat, in the 1970s he was also a moneylender.

• Sardar Singh, who later on, in the 1960s, became upsarpanch for a few years.

Ram Dev sat in the beginning with his children under a tree at the yard of the temple opposite the Thikana Gate, since this temple was for the whole village and did not belong to any particular caste. In three or four days the Baniyas had managed to get the Rajputs excited, by telling them it was no good to have a school for all the children of the village, as that might spoil the lower classes. They started to tell people that Ram Dev should stop his school and leave the temple.

Ram Dev replied they were fools to talk like that. He did not get his salary from them. Some days later a new mob of Baniyas and Rajputs came and then they throw out all the children from the temple yard and gave the teacher a beating. Children of Chamar, nat (dancers), and mochi castes, i.e. untouchable castes for savarn Hindus, also attended the school. Eight of the thirtyfive children were from untouchable castes. One of the complaints was that untouchable children should not be allowed near the temple, although in fact they were only sitting in the compound of the temple and not in the temple itself.

After the beating, when the Rajputs and Baniyas had left, Ram Dev told the children to wait near the Thikana wall until he comes back again. Then he went to Tej Dan to ask him what to do, as Tej Dan was the elderly man among those who wanted a school to be started in Chelana. Tej Dan went along with Ram Dev towards the place where the children were waiting. Some children had ran away, though. On the way he was stopped by Teja Ram, the dakot who got 40,000 Rupees in a loan from the Rebaris but did not repay, and also by Ram Lal, the father of Devilal Kalal.

They told Tej Dan that they would go instead of him, as they also were interested in the welfare of the school. They thought it unwise for Tej Dan to be in front of the Thikana.

They arranged that the class could continue to work at the house compound of a Muslim teli who was a friend of Teja Ram, and there the school continued for a week or two, but soon the Baniya and Rajput complainers about the school, most of them in their middle age, started to argue with the teli and wanted him not to let the school be in his compound. As he was in trouble, the teli asked the teacher to leave and then Mehar Dan and other school supporters arranged that the teacher and children could sit in a small Ramdwara temple on the other side of the teli for a small rent.

After a month the sadhu in charge of the temple told them to leave, as he did not want to have untouchable children at his temple.

Then the school was situated at a ruined house of an old Brahmin near the temple, but it did not have any roof, so it was difficult to sit there. The anti-school group of Baniyas and Rajputs, about twenty persons, now and then came threatening the teacher and the students and made things difficult for them in order to discourage the school. Therefore, Tej Dan and the others who wanted a school thought it was better to start the school in the nearby Baniya temple, where there was plenty of empty space on the ground floor, where nobody used to be. The keeper of the temple was a Brahmin, who had his little house on the front side of the temple, while the teacher and the children on the Tej Dan started to stay in an empty room on the back side of the temple, which was in three storeys and mostly only used by worshippers on the first floor and not the ground floor. The keeper of the temple was not fussy, and did not mind that they stayed in a room on the back side. His name was Hatiji Savag. He kept silent and was out of sight most of the time, except when the Baniyas and Rajputs came to kick teacher and children out of the temple, which they did quite often, but even then he was not active.

The antischool persons of the Baniyas and Rajputs were all the more active, and when they found that the school without permission had occupied a room in the Baniya temple of Chelana they called the police.

The pro-school group led by Tej Dan also launched a complaint at the police station, telling that the government employed teacher was harassed in the village, and that his records were in danger of theft. The police did not take any action, though, so the two groups were left to fight out the case themselves.

The Baniyas locked the rooms of their temple, so the children could not come in.

The next move was to steal the doors. Tej Dan hid them in a creek with deep sand, so the teacher and children could come in again. Once or twice a week, however, the anti-school group got together, went to the Baniya temple and chased away the children and the teacher. After they had cleared the room they did not stay for more than half an hour. As soon as they had gone the class continued again. This continued for several months.

The anti-school group reported to the police that the main door of the temple had been stolen. Then the police came for investigation. When Tej Dan and his sister's son got to know that the police had come to search for the door, they brought it back to the temple again in the night. They put the door on the roof of the temple where nobody searched for it, and after some time they told the police that it was all a trick of those in the village who did not want a school to be started at Chelana. In fact the door had not been stolen, they told, but was kept by the Baniyas on the roof ot the temple, and the police had been troubled unnecessary.

It happened when the school had stayed at the Baniya temple for five or six months. Then it became more peaceful, as the Baniyas did not want to be involved in more police fuss, and the school stayed at the Bainya temple for about five years. Then they moved into the new school building, the construction of which had started in 1954.

Tan Dan's schools

Tan Dan spent his first three school years in the Baniya temple under Ram Dev, who was the only teacher the first year. The second year one more teacher was employed. A few years later there were three teachers working at the school and nobody made fuss any longer.

There were only three classes of Chelana school for several years, with one teacher for each class.

From fourth class Tan Dan started to study at Anandpur Kalu. There he studied for two years, and then in sixth and seventh class at Devli, and eighth and nineth at Udaipur.

Tan Dan became one of Ram Dev's first pupils

When Ram Dev arrived at Chelana a new life started for Tan Dan and those of his friends who would be Ram Dev's students in the new village school.

Tan Dan was born in 1943, so he was about seven years at that time. He was one of the kids the grownups of the Detha clan had worked for so hard, when they tried to get a Government school started in the village.

Tan Dan was not that keen, though. Up to then he had been running around free as a bird in the village, satisfying his curiosity about other people and their ways by running around in every mohalla. He went in and out through the stone walls. He also helped the grownups in herding cattle in the pastures around the village. There he also had played with his friends. To him the grass, bush and stones looked tall, big and fascinating. The grassland seemed endless, especially when some cattle had run away and they had to search for it. For Tan Dan it was a carefree life and he liked it much better than sitting at one spot all the time together with a teacher. He soon discovered, though, that the new school could be quite exciting too, as Ram Dev and the children were not left alone in their studies. The villagers had become divided on the school issue, and there were frequent rows during the first year. As one of the pupils Tan Dan became a part of the drama.

Ram Dev was a Puskarni Brahmin by caste like Mehar Dan's teacher Mehtab Chand. Here follows a slight deviation about the Pushkarni Brahmins based on narrations which Tan Dan has heard with a few additions from literature sources.

Pushkarna Brahmins, the legend about their origin

The Puskarna Brahmin community lived in Rajasthan mainly. It was a kind of Brahmin caste, but its rank was not as high as the Brahmin castes which claimed a Vedic origin. The Pushkarna Brahmins had a very different story about their ancestors than most other Brahmins.

This one:

Pushkar near Ajmer has been a place of pilgrimage for all Hindus since very old times because Brahma, the creator among the Hindu gods, has meditated at Pushkar. Twelve hundred years ago there was a raja who went on pilgrimage to Pushkar in the month of Kartik. He ruled over a small Hindu kingdom somewhere in Rajasthan. The raja wanted to perform the customary worshipping ceremony in the way most Hindu rulers did, when they came to Pushkar.

He wanted to perform these religious ceremonials on the day of Kartik Purnima, which is considered to be a very auspicious day among the Hindus.

The cold dip at Kartik Purnima

Also nowadays the rural people of north India celebrate the Kartik Purnima.

Many does it by taking a dip in a sacred river or tank at sunrise after having spent the whole night singing religious songs, bhajan. As Kartik Purnima takes place in late November the chilly weather of the winter season has usually started. Wrapped in blankets they do their best to keep warm around open fires during the night. That way it was easier to have a bath next morning when a cold wind may blow from the Himalayan mountain range in the north. When they sat on ox carts, tractor trailers and trucks, returning to their homes in the morning, they could catch a cold or even pneumonia, if their bodies were still wet and they had too little clothes to keep warm.

That is what happened to Tan Dan's sister-in-law, Nath Karan's first wife, when she celebrated Kartik Purnima in the Rajasthan Canal area of Ganganagar District. Tan Dan tried to persuade her not to take a bath, as she was in a delicate health, but she did so all the same, and a short while afterwards she died of pneumonia. It happened in the late 1960s. Nath Karan owned some land in that canal development area like several of his Detha brothers and cousins.

Feeding Brahmins

The raja at Pushkar told about in the Pushkarni Brahmins legend wanted to feed thousands of Brahmins, the more the better, as it was a royal custom to do so at places of pilgrimage.

However, at the time of the raja's visit there were not many Brahmins present at Pushkar for some reason. Moreover, the raja and his party did not have any time left to call Brahmins from outside, as the day of Kartik Purnima had already come.

The raja thought he had better to increase the number of Brahmins in another way.

Nearby there were a large numbers of labourers busy digging the big tank that now exists at Pushkar. They were of the Beldar caste. It was the caste profession of the Beldars to remove soil and break stone on a large scale so they worked in large gangs.

The raja persuaded the Bheldars he met at Pushkar to split from their old caste and form a new one. He told them he would accept their new caste as a Brahmin caste straight away, they would become his Pushkarna Brahmins.

When they had been convinced that the raja really meant what he said, they happily accepted his proposal. They had no objection to become the chief guests at the royal feast the raja was to hold at that very day of Kartik Purnima, and at that feast the new Brahmins had a more delicious meal than they had ever had in their life.

The legend has been told to Tan Dan by a large number of persons of the Pushkarni Brahman caste all over Rajasthan. The whole caste regarded its content as historical facts, according to Tan Dan.

Even in the modern time the Pushkarna Brahmins were known among other castes in Rajasthan for their fondness of eating sweet and greasy things.

A Pushkarna Brahmin custom associated with the Beldar legend

Weddings among the Pushkarna Brahmins used to start with a ceremony peculiar to that caste only.

Before the real wedding ceremony starts, all the participants of the wedding worshipped two tools, a pick and a huge spade meant for soil digging. That spade is nowadays only used by beldars in the whole of western Rajasthan. It is taken by villagers as another indication, that the Pushkarna Brahmins hail from the Beldars.

Singh (1990) About the Beldar community

"The Beldars from Persian bel, mattock, are those who are employed in digging earth, quarrying stones and the like.

\- They also excavated the Pushkar lake during the time of Nahar Rao Parihar and thus according to Mr. Wilson gave rise to separate Brahman community called the Pushkarnas, who in commemoration of their origin still worship the kudali or pickaxe on occasions of their marriages."

"Among the Beldars, a woman named Jasma Odni had been of some renown. She used to live in Malwa, but was employed with her husband, by Sidh Raj Jai Singh of Gujrat, in excavating a tank at Patan. The Raja fell in love with the woman, and desired her to enter his harem. Jasma, however, refused the offer, and committed suicide, pronouncing imprecation upon the Raja to the effect that the tank in question shall never be capable of retaining water, which prophecy is said to have been fulfilled up to the present day."

(Singh, 1990, first published in 1894)

The last anecdote resembles somewhat the legend about the Banjara chief who took revenge on a small Rajah by changing the course of a river after his wife had been taken away from him. We have told about that legend in our Banjara writings.

Old time village teaching

During the feudal period ending in the 1950s most Chelana villagers were illiterate. But not all. There were small traditional schools run by private teachers, who taught reading and writing in the local language Marvari. The teacher used to keep his group at some public place in the village. He earned his living by collecting a small fee from the parents of his students. In most cases the teacher belonged to a Hindu priest caste, Sad or Brahmin, and the students to savarn Hindu families, the high caste feudal elite of the village.

Mangi Lal at the Thikana Gate was such a teacher in the 1940s. His type of school is called _baniavti posal_ and is very old. Such schools existed in one form or the other all over Rajasthan in the old days. They were based on an educational pattern suitable for Baniya merchants and others who kept account books and records. Therefore these simple village schools used to be called _baniavti posal_ which means Baniya type school.

These baniavti posal schools had a reputation of being efficient and well suited for villagers. Some of them carried on their activities also after the Government had opened schools in the villages.

In 1978 a man called Hanuman Das had run such a small traditional school at Chelana since the 1950s. He was in his forties and he belonged to the Sad caste of temple priests. He had a problem in one leg and one foot, so he could not move properly, but many parents liked his way of teaching, so he had many students, about forty to fifty.

Hanuman Das taught his pupils at a stonewalled compound in the northern part of the village. It was far from the Government school at the southern edge of the village settlement area. The Government school had become big and well established. It had many teachers who got their salaries from the Government. It did not cost anything to study there.

Still, there were parents who preferred to send their children to Hanuman Das, although they had to pay two to four Rupees per child and month in 1980. They did so for the following reasons.

The studies at Hanuman's poshal were in the local language, Marvari, whereas at the village school the children were taught in Hindi.

Studies in Marvari seemed more useful to most villagers. Hindi was an alien language to them. Although similar to Marvari, it was more urban like, they thought, more fit for those who wanted to work in offices behind a desk in some town than to simple villagers like themselves.

Besides, it was easier to get admission at Hanuman's poshal. There was no paper formalities to master unlike at the Government school, where they had to fill in forms, an unpleasant and embarrassing task, which sometimes took several days before all was in order. Administrative procedures frightened them. Parents who did not want face that, but thought their sons ought to become literate, preferred to send their children to Hanuman in spite of the fee he charged from them. Some parents took the fee as a proof that Hanuman's school was better than the free of charge Government school.

Many of Hanuman's student came from the northern part of the village. They lived in mohallas close to the compound where Hanuman and his pupils used to sit. Even small boys could easily reach there, whereas the Government school was far away.

Hanuman's place was situated in between the mohallas of the Sevag Brahmins, Sutars (carpenters), Jats and Lohars (blacksmiths). The Rebari mohalla was also near. That is why several Rebari boys studied for Hanuman Das. Most Rebaris at Chelana were illiterate and semi-nomadic, but fairly well off, and they could well afford the fee charged by Hanuman Das. They found it easier to talk to him, a villager like themselves, than to the school teachers at the real school, who were more urban and educated in style.

Also the Bhangi (sweepers) mohalla was in the north of the village, but no Bhangi children nor any other children of untouchable castes studied at Hanuman's school, nor were there any Muslim children in his class.

Some traditional Hindu parents thought that this was another advantage of baniavti poshal schools.

At the Government village school, children of all groups studied together. The teachers could not refuse anybody. All the same it happened that children of untouchable castes were discriminated against in various ways.

Tan Dan did not know, whether Hanuman Das actually had refused anybody admission. Probably no parents of low castes had ever tried to get their children admitted at Hanuman's, as all knew it was meant for savarn Hindu children. There were no girls either at his class. Hardly anybody thought it was necessary for girls to read in books.

Traditional education in Jodhpur state during the feudal days according to the Jodhpur Gazetteer

Early rulers of the Jodhpur State took little interest in education. The chiefs and nobles generally considered reading and writing as beneath their dignity and as arts which they paid their servants to perform for them. There existed some schools but they were private institutions such as Hindu posals or pathshalas and Muslim Maktabs. Reading, writing and simple arithmetic were taught in these to enable Hindus and Muslims, as the case may be, to read their religious books and the mercantile classes to carry on their different vocations. These schools were conducted by Gurus and Maulvis respectively and were largely attended. In the Poshals the boys were taught just enough Hindi and Arithmetic to meet the requirements of business.

(Agarwal, 1974, p.399-402)

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### Chapter 3 The Chelana Youth Club around 1950

In 1950 Tan Dan was a small child of six years but many of his cousins and some of his brother were in their twenties. They and their friends used to get together and have chats on their own. They were the young generation feeling curious about the changes taking place around them in Marvar and India. Somehow they got the idea to start a youth club open for all young people of the village. The youth club put forth requests to the government at Jodhpur to open a school in their village. They themselves were the first generation of Chelana youth to get a few years of secular education at Government schools in some other villages of the region. Useful when talking to government officers.

Many youth club members were village commoners but some were sons of Rathor jagirdars such as Praduman Singh, the son of Dhokal Singh, who had been a friend of Tej Dan in the disputes with their common enemy Umar Singh Rathor.

The attention of the young people in the youth club was on more constructive issues. The new opportunities and aspirations at the time of India's independence influenced also their thinking, although they lived in a far away village.

After the jagir abolition in 1952 the government set up democratically elected village councils in all Rajasthani villages in 1953. The youth club worked for getting the Mehar Dan elected as the chairman of the Chelana village council. He was the eldest Detha of his generation, all of them being granchildren of Jugti Dan. Mehar Dan won the election. The same year the youth club started to build a house where they could hold their meetings and carry out other activities. They built the house with their own labour and contributed money for buying building material and skilled work.

Then they bought a radio which they kept in the new house built at the entrance of the village near the village well.

It was the first radio in the village and attracted a lot of attention. The young men kept it in their club office. In the evenings large crowds used to gather outside the building, listening to the voice in the box and the music.

The Rajputs at the Thikana and their allies in the village elite got suspicious of this innovation. As usual they were afraid that the common villagers would get information that would encourage them to oppose the existing social order.

One day at noon a big gang of angry Rajputs from the Thakur's camp turned up. They entered the club house and demolished all the radio equipments, after which they throw the radio into the mud outside. They threatened to break the head of anybody who would try to take it away. After that the Youth Club members got more careful. They kept the radio (the next radio or was it repaired?) in a huge steel box weighing one ton, which they locked when they were not there, but they did not gave up listening to the radio programmes.

The box had once belonged to Ravi Dan's grandfather Jugti Dan. It was the heavy box in which he had kept all the money of his family. He always kept the key with him, also when he was out travelling. In Jugti Dan's box the radio was safe from all attacks.

The place where they built their club house was a busy part of the village, where people kept coming and going. The women fetched water from the village well nearby, and men passed by when watering their animals at the village pond. Travellers on Jalagarh-Merta highway also passed here. As it was the main entrance area of the village shops opened at this place later on, and it became the first bazar area of the village.

Up to the 1960s there were no separate shops in the village. Instead, the Baniya merchants used to deal with their customers in their own homes, the well enclosed haveli buildings of the Baniya mohalla, which also served as their godowns.

The optimistic development age of the 1950s

The club members were young during the first decade of India's Independence after 1947. It was a time full of great political visions under the national stewardship of Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress Party. It was an era of hopes, and promises of welfare and enlightment. The old web of harmful traditions would soon fade away, leaving room for ambitious young men keen on transforming their villages into flourishing egalitarian communities. That was the message from higher up given in pamphlets and speeches. And in the radio programmes they listened to in the youth club office.

Many Chelana young men such as Ravi Dan listened with hope, although they could not take for granted that the good fellows would always win in the end, as the feudal life they were used to was tough, and they had few illusions.

Still, when the new world dawned in the early 1950s they might have felt thrilled by the prospect that the whole village would prosper, collectively, and not only they themselves individually.

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###  Chapter 4 Village democracy and ex-Thakurs in the region

Former village lords as village sarpanch

It was common in western Rajasthani villages that the former village Thakur got elected as sarpanch, village council chairman, even if the Rajputs in the village were not in absolute majority. The sarpanch was the most important person in the gram panchayat village administration. He was elected directly by all adults of the village. The whole village elite used to vote for the Thakur as sarpanch, including the Baniyas and the Brahmins. Also former feudal dependents including untouchables such as Bhambis and Bhangis tended to vote for the Thakur rather than his rival candidate of a lower caste. In most villages of the Chelana area the feudal attitudes continued to be strong also after the abolition of the jagirdari system in 1952. Humble commoners continued to pay respect to their former Rajput lords for many years.

Large jagirs could cover several villages. The Thakur lived in one of them, the main village of the jagir, where there was a village fortress (thikana). The Rajputs used to be concentrated to the village of the Thakur, whereas Jats and other agricultural tenants tended to outnumber the Rajputs in the outlying villages. For example Nilkhedi south of Chelana was a Thakur village whereas adjacent Purban village mainly was inhabited by agricultural tenants of the Khetar Kumar caste, also called Patel.

On the whole, the rivalry of village power after 1952 was between the former jagirdar families and the former agricultural tenants, between Rajputs and Jats. Both camps rallied around their landlords, and both had the support of villagers belonging to a number of other castes smaller in size. In villages where Rajputs were many and their leaders alert, the sway of the Thakur used to continue. Villages with a large ex-tenant population, on the other hand, used to be led by a sarpanch of the main farmer caste, such as Jat, Sirvi, or Khetar Kumar.

Where the Rajput and Jat castes had about equal numerical strength it was common that the former feudal lords continued to dominate in village politics, as many villagers of other caste groups in the village thought they had more to gain from showing their loyalty to the Rajput candidate in the sarpanch election than from being associated with the Jat candidate.

Poor people of low caste to a large extent continued to work for economically strong Rajput landlords also after the land reform. Several jagirdars got a fairly good compensation for their lost jagirs by economic compensation from the Government according to the Nehru Award told about in an earlier section. Those who understood how to invest that money in a profitable way could maintain their standards quite well. Some members of ex-jagirdar families became half urban high status university educated professionals living in bungalows.

It took several years until the Jat landowners had reached such a good economic position that people of various marginal caste felt they had something to gain personally from supporting the Jat side in village politics.

In spite of the respect most villagers had for their former village Thakur, it happened to some Thakurs that they failed completely in the gram panchayat village politics after they had lost their jagirs. That was the case with the ex-Thakur at Chelana, who did not manage to generate any income worth mentioning after the land reform. His fate Tan Dan has narrated in the section about the end of jagir rule at Chelana.

The Mitargarh ex-Thakur

The former village ruler at Mitargath, though, was a Rajput who managed to become an important village politician also after the abolition of the jagirdari system in 1952. Almost three decades later Tan Dan took the following photos of the Thakur and the palace like building within his Thikana fortress. The Thakur and his family was still in a strong social position and very influential in his village as well as the whole Jalagarh tehsil.

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###  Chapter 5 Elections and development at high speed at Chelana

The first gram panchayat election at Chelana was conducted in 1953. It was organized by the Government in all villages of the newly formed Rajasthan state. The villagers were asked to present candidates both for the sarpanch post and for the posts as panches. The sarpanch was to be chairman of the gram panchayat, i.e. the village council, and the panches would be its other members. All adult villagers would vote for the sarpanch directly. As for the panches, they would vote for the panch candidates of their own ward only. The whole village was divided into a number of wards. with a few mohallas for each. As a rule a ward covered a few mohallas at the most.

The elite of the village was not happy about the many changes the government forced upon them, and they were suspicious against the gram panchayat idea. For them the Thakur at the Thikana was the natural leader of the village. They found it difficult to accept that the local administrative tasks of the Thakur and his people at the Thikana could be taken over by ordinary villagers elected by a majority of all adult villagers included even untouchables, farm servants and destitutes. The democratic procedure prescribed for local self-government was very alien to those who had lived in an authoritarian feudal tradition for generations. Up to then the role of the Rajputs as village masters had been almost unquestioned in the village, and they considered it their duty and right to keep the low ranked villagers humble and subservient by timely punishment, whenever some simple person showed disobedience to the feudal rules handed down by tradition from earlier generations.

The Detha candidate

The Dethas and their allies in the village put forward Mehar Dan as a sarpanch candidate. Mehar Dan was the natural choice for Ravi Dan and all the other Dethas of his generation, as he was the eldest of Jugti Dan's grandchildren, and used to shoulder responsible tasks together with Ravi Dan. He was also very active in starting the new irrigation farm of the Dethas. The gram panchayat scheme was started at about the the same time as the large irrigation venture was initiated by Ravi Dan. That the young men had started on their own initiative, and it was a much bigger task for the Dethas then the gram panchayat work. They realized that they had to engage themselves in village politics, too, in order to saveguard their own interests, and they saw the gram panchayat election as an opportunity, which they grasped with great energy. Mehar Dan won the election and several farmers friendly to the Dethas became panches. The Thakur was the other sarpanch candidate, but he and the other Rajputs did not take the gram panchayat very seriously. When the Dethas and their friends had won the election, the Rajputs talked about the gram panchayat as a bogus institution invented by the Dethas for their own benefit.

However, from the point of view of the Government authorities the sarpanch of Chelana was now the recognized village leader instead of the Thakur. The latter lost both his jagir land and his role as a village ruler. Hence, at Chelana the change of power in village politics was fast and clearcut, in contrast to villages which had elected their former Thakur as the new sarpanch.

During the three years when Mehar Dan was sarpanch, the panchayat held its activities in the Ramdvara temple between the Brahmin and the Mochi mohallas in the middle of the village. The activities of the panchayat were limited in scope and few in numbers. However, the community development programme launched by the Central Government in 1952 gradually influenced the work also of the Chelana village panchayat.

Many of the gram panchayat schemes had been initiated by the youth club

What happened to government initiated village development schemes to a large extent depended on the response of the villagers. As long as the Thakur was the administrative head of the village that response had been nil. When the gram panchayat (village council) had been formed in 1953 the government officers at Jodhpur and Jalagarh channelized there schemes through that organization instead of the Thakur and the Thikana.

For schemes such as new schools, dispensaries and cooperatives, the Rajasthan Government had funds and technical expertise, but the amount was limited, and villages with an active leadership were likely to get more subsidies and facilities and at a faster rate than the other ones.

Government officers urged the gram panchayat at Chelana to take up the various schemes offered. Many of the village development activities discussed in the youth club for many years, were similar to these Government schemes.

At the youth club Ravi Dan was as a driving force. As the Dethas were active both at the youth club and at the gram panchayat it was easy to interact. Therefore, at Chelana the village council leaders did respond to the proposals of government extension officers.

Building a school house

In 1954 the newly started gram panchayat under the leadership of its first elected sarpanch Mehar Dan Detha decided to build a school building on an empty piece of land in the south-east of the village. Then a new fuss arose about the school building, and this time mainly Rajputs and Muslims resisted this goal. Muslims living near the plot where the school was to be built got afraid of not being able to expand their colony further, if a school would come up nearby, and they therefore opposed the idea that the school should be built there. The Rajputs in 1954 still lived in the belief that they were village lords and did not want any school, as it might increase the educational standard of the lower social classes of the village, and make them more opposition minded.

It was in this spirit that the Rajputs of Chelana tried to prevent the construction of a real school building in Chelana. In their opinion it would be much worse than the kind of improvised teaching which was going on already in the Baniya temple.

There was no Government funds for building the school, so the pro-school group of the villagers themselves made voluntary contributions and the gram panchayat also gave some money. A lot of work of pro-school villagers was given as shramdan, i.e. voluntary labour work carried out by these villagers themselves. First masons from Chelana village were employed, but the Rajputs threatened to boycot those masons that worked at the school, so Tej Dan went to Pipar to get new mason workers from there.

Those who contributed most of the cash needed for the school which was in total about one lakh Rupees, were

• Mula Ram, a Mali and Giga Baba's nephew, Anna Ram

• Anna Ram Badiar, a Jat,

• Chiman Dan, dr. Bhim Dan's father,

• Tej Dan,

• Ganga Vishan, and Sanwar Ram, two dakots

The first ones gave most money, but still Gram panchayat gave the major part of the money needed for building the school, money which the panchayat got by selling gram panchayat land to private persons.

In shramdan those who participated were Ganga Vishan, Sanwal Ram, a bavri, Kalu Ram, a bhambi, and several other bhambis, one Rayka, Uda Ram who was a sweeper, and several persons from the Detha family. Also Singh helped to a great extent in getting the school constructed.

In the beginning some Rajputs pulled down the plinths two or three times. They often came for quarrels with lathis and swords, abusing and shouting to provoke, but it did not delay the work much, and the school was ready in 1955 after about a year.

It was only a primary school of four rooms and up to the fourth class, but later the school building work continued by new constructions mainly financed by gram panchayat, and in the middle of the 1960s there were ten classes. The village had got a secondary school, which was considered a good achievement.

The 1956 village council election

In 1956 the second gram panchayat election at Chelana was to be held. Mehar Dan did not want to continue as a sarpanch, as he had so much to do as the manager of the Detha Brothers Farm. He suggested Ravi Dan as sarpanch candidate instead of him. Ravi Dan also got the support of the Chelana Youth Club, which worked for Ravi Dan during the election campaign. His candidature was supported by all the Dethas and many progressive farmers of other castes, i.e. farmers who wanted to implement new technology in agriculture. He had become the spokesman for that group in contacts with government officials.

Ravi Dan's only rival in the 1956 election was Kishan Singh, the former village Thakur. Although he was absolutely illiterate and lacked all experience of the modern world, he was the natural head of the village for those steeped in the old feudal traditions, i.e. the Rathor soldier families and other savarn Hindus including almost all Baniyas and many Brahmins.

Ravi Dan Detha defeated his Rajput opponent. He got a substantial majority, as many minor castes of the village voted for him.

Among these were Charan, Bhambi, Bavri (chawkidar), Kumar, Sonar, Lohar, Rebari (shepherds), Rao (genealogists of Brahimins), and Mali castes and the Muslims of the village. In the Lakhar caste all voted for Ravi Dan. Also the Mochi caste voted for Ravi Dan Detha.

There were only two really big castes in the village, the Rajput and the Jat. The total number of castes in the 1950s might have been more than thirty. Many castes were quite small, just a few families each.

An important reason for the victory was that the Jat families of the village were in favour of Ravi Dan, as they were anxious to reduce the influence of the Rajputs and the former village Thakur Kishan Singh. The Jat caste was a big one comprising about thirty percent of the village population.

About half the Brahmins voted for Ravi Dan, although the Brahmin caste had a high rank. It was not as integrated a part of the village elite around the feudal Rajput lords as the Baniyas used to be. Several Brahmin families subsisted as poor farmers, although with jagir land called doli, which their ancestors had got in the 12th century A.D. when they had moved to Chelana from the Malva area in the east. That is what the Chelana Brahmins tell.

The Thakur got the votes of the whole Rajput caste and all the Baniyas, most of the Bhangis (sweepers), and the whole Dholi caste. Also the Khati (carpenter) caste voted for the Rajput Thakur, as this caste lives in between the Rajput and Baniya mohallas. Within the Kalal caste (liquor sellers) five out of six Kalal families voted for the Thakur Kishan Singh. The Sad caste families, about ten, all voted for the Thakur Kishan Singh.

Ravi Dan became the village sarpanch with the help of the Jats and the many small castes at Chelana. For them voting for Ravi Dan was a way of getting out of the feudal grip of the Thakur after the abolition of the Jagirdar system in 1952. Jats, Malis, Detha Charans, as well as tenants of other castes became land owners at that time.

When Ravi Dan Detha became sarpanch of Chelana in 1956 he was thirtyone years old. He was considerably more actively involved in village politics than Mehar Dan had been during his term as a sarpanch from 1953 to 1956.

In the following years many of the schemes discussed for years at the youth club were carried out. There were also several other rural schemes initiated by the Rajasthan Government which the gram panchayat at Chelana implemented, such as building new residential houses for scheduled caste, especially the Bhangis.

The office of the panchayat was shifted from the Ramdvara temple to the youth club building near the village well. A few years later a bigger gram panchayat office was built. The gram panchayat stayed there for some time, but shifted back again, when the Chelana dispensary opened. After that the gram panchayat resided in the youth club building for several decades. It was good enough for the purpose, the villagers thought. The government was prepared to run the clinic, if there was a building for it, and the villagers offered their new gram panchayat office building, as they preferred a small village hospital to a big gram panchayat office building.

The youth club became dormant

When the youth club leaders in 1956 started to work directly in the gram panchayat of their village the role of the youth club as a village development promoter was over. Ravi Dan and his friends had got a new and more powerful forum. Besides, they were approaching their middle age. Tan Dan and other Detha youth of the 1960s continued some youth activities, but the spirit of the club was gone. It became more or less dormant, although it did not cease completely.

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

Tej Dan's agriculture after 1940

By the Hariadhana murder in 1929 the Detha family had been reduced from the status of a big and wealthy cattleherding family rivaling the Thakurs in the area to a comparatively propertyless tenant family having lost most of its cattle herd.

After Jugti Dan's death in 1939, his son Tej Dan again started dryland crop cultivation in the kharif season on rented land, but did not bother to cultivate on the Detha sanshan land near the hill.

In the early 1940s Tej Dan and other Dethas carried on in a small scale, partly living on livestock and partly on farming. Tej Dan leased some one hundred bighas (=16ha) and worked in a group together with five to seven other tenants, who also rented some one hundred bighas each.

They worked together in a joint tenureship from various landlords, mainly Rajputs and Mehru Charans. Eight seasoned family heads of several castes, high and low, who knew each others very well.

There were two concubine sons of Jugti Dan in the party, and two rebari tenants, one kumar, one chamar, and one rajput called Phul Singh. This team of tenants rented and ploughed a substantial share of the Chelana land in the 1940s. Each of them was poor and did not have enough ploughs and bullocks, but jointly they managed to carry on with pooled land, ploughs, bullocks and labourers, which mainly were there own relatives. They pooled and exchanged their resources.

Working with other tenants in a team, Tej Dan managed to run his farming operations on a fairly large scale. Tej Dan had taken the initiative and they followed some of the practices of the large Jugti Dan farm of the 1920s. They did not have so many cattle, though. There was no scope for largescale cattlebreeding any longer, the activity on which Jugti Dan had based his good economy.

Tej Dan had many young helping hands on his farm in the beginning. His own sons, and his seven fatherless nephews. They worked with Tej Dan when they were teenagers, but when they formed their own families, it became difficult to provide a living to so many from the fields of Chelana, as crop production depended on scanty erratic monsoon rains.

They had to look for jobs elsewhere. A few of them managed to get Government jobs. Sukh Dan, Tan Dan's eldest brother, became a police officer.

Therefore, a few years later it was Tej Dan himself, who worked with agriculture, not his seven sons, although Ravi Dan sometimes came and helped him.

In 1952 Tej Dan and his partners cultivated on rented land one thousand bighas (160 ha) in the same way as Jugti Dan had done with the help of his other sons. This group of hardworking tenants had the good luck to be rewarded with big chunks of land transferred to them from the earlier jagirdars at the land settlement. They were in a similar position as many Jats, when they as tenants got ownership rights. Tej Dan got about 35 hectares.

Tej Dan's group of tenants became betteroff, while jagirdars such as the Mehru Charans and the Thakur saw their prosperity declining in this era of newly achieved independence.

The attempts of the Detha youth to eke out a living in the 1940s

Some of Jugti Dan's grandchildren became ingenious in supporting themselves on new trades. Like the Banjara oxen caravan carriers in the old days, when they had lost their herd of pack oxen at some drought.

Especially Ravi Dan. He showed a great ability in making a living out of his own technical innovations.

Ravi Dan's bullock cart with inflated rubber wheels

The first venture was his rubber wheeled bullock cart. It had inflated rubber tyres, and he used it as a carrier. He earned money by hauling commodities for traders and others.

The wheels were second hand discarded bus wheels with pneumatic tyres. Ravi Dan got the wheels mounted on his ox cart with the help of a deft craftsman in the Pali District.

The story of the rubber wheeled ox cart

In the 1940s Sheni Dan's uncle Jogi Dan got employment in a village 150 miles away towards south-west in an expanding village next to Falna railway station. There he got a job first as a boy in a bus workshop and then as a busdriver. He once came home on visit to Chelana and told Ravi Dan that nowadays in the workshops of Falna some carpenters, who in that region also did blacksmith work, had started to make a kind of bullock cart, for which they used discarded bus wheels instead of the ordinary wooden wheels. These carts were much easier to pull, he said. Therefore they were faster and could carry thrice as heavy a load as the ordinary bullock carts with wooden wheels. Ravi Dan got interested. He told Jogi Dan he wanted to buy such a cart for carrying out transportation business at Jetaran and Anandpur Kalu, two small townships in those days of the 1940s.

He was the first person in the entire region around Chelana with such a modern ox cart. It draw the attention of crowds of villagers both in Chelana and in Anandpur Kalu, where he still studied when he bought the cart. He studied for a few years at the government school at Anandpur Kalu, and then he worked as an independent transporter for baniyas and others.

Ravi Dan learnt how to repair and maintain the bullock cart on his own, which was necessary, as there were no workshops nearby.

Very few persons understood how a rubber wheeled bullock cart with pneumatic tyres functions. Most farmers of the region were sceptical to wheels with inflated rubber tyres for bullock carts for many years. Also in Jalagarh, a rather big township, such carts were seldom seen. There, largescale wealthy landlords and baniyas for generations had used a sturdy type of wooden wheel ox cart adapted to sandy stony tracks.

In 1978 more farmers owned pneumatic tyre ox carts at Chelana than in most other villages of the region. Perhaps because people at that village had become more exposed to new things in agriculture, such as irrigation from wells with pumps. Innovation-minded persons such as Ravi Dan frequently disturbed the peace of traditional thinkers by bringing in new and unexpected things, which the villagers had to digest and accept as a part of life in their village, even if they for a long time did not want to have these innovations for themselves.

Many continued with their old wooden wheeled cart, thinking it was safer. What do you do if you found yourself stranded with a flat tyre on a bullock cart with a heavy load several miles from a place where tyres could be repaired¬¬? It was a vicious circle. As carts with pneumatic wheels were few the workshops were few and service poor. Hence even those who could afford such a cart and were fully aware of their advantages continued to use their wooden wheeled carts. The land was rough and thorny, and bullock carts went around everywhere.

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###  Chapter 7 Detha youth return to Chelana and start irrigation farming

The old method used at the Detha well

In the late 1940s Ravi Dan was about to start agriculture on rented land in a village near the town Beavar close to the Aravalli Hills. He had been told about that place, when he stayed at Anandpur Kalu. It was far from home, however. Most of all he wanted to live and work with his relatives at Chelana.

Would it be possible to grow crops with water from the Detha well? In the 1940s it was one of the three wells with water in the village. It was situated within the high and very long stone wall Jugti Dan had built as a fence for his large cattle herd. Tej Dan still used the enclosure for Detha cattle and for growing crops.

About one hectare was irrigated by the only method they knew for wells as deep as the wells at Chelana. A pair of oxen walked down a slope pulling a strong leather rope tied to a big leather bag. The bag had been filled with water at the bottom of the deep well and it was a heavy load which slowly was raised to the mouth of the well, where it was emptied in an irrigation channel. Then the long leather rope (paras) rattled up the slope on its own, while the bag sank down to the water surface again. At the top of the slope stood another pair of oxen ready to make a new trip when the rope had been tied to their yoke by the attendent up there.

Camels were sometimes used instead of oxen. The method was slow, slower than the Persian wheel method of irrigation used close to the seasonal rivers where the water level was much higher. Such wheels were used for irrigating garden crops at places such as Anandpur Kalu and Jalagarh. The underground water level at Chelana was about 42 metres, which was far too deep for the chain of buckets used in Persian wheels.

Since the time of Jugti Dan the Dethas managed to irrigate about one hectare by the slow traditional leather bag method, 3/4 ha in the winter (rabi) season and 5/4 ha in the monsoon (kharif) season on plots in rotation within the 8 ha compound surrounded by the long stone wall.

Ravi Dan thought he might have a chance to succeed as an irrigation farmer at Chelana, if he could irrigate more land within the eight hectares enclosure.

He decided to make a thorough investigation about water availability at Chelana before he made up his mind about becoming a tenant farmer in the Beavar area.

Tej Dan's description of the Chelana wells

Ravi Dan wanted to find out, if there was enough water for using a pump with a diesel engine. He asked Tej Dan, his father, if he thought the well would go dry. Tej Dan did not think so. When the well was dug he had worked down in the bottom of it. There they had cut through loose hollow rock which formed big cavities at various depths from 30 metres downwards. The underground water level was at a depth of 42 metres. There were several cavelike cavities below that level, which Tej Dan had seen while digging in the well, before they struck water further down. These must now be filled with water, he said. Tej Dan also told that there had sometimes been gusts of wind down in the well, when they had broken through the rock into new cavities, as if there were locked air pockets of high pressure in these caves and cavities, which were in the shape of long tunnels with varying width, from narrow space through which one had to crawl to large halls through which camels could walk. These cavities had been formed in soft limestone rocks.

Tej Dan knew about a well at Chelana which had dried up. It was situated 400 metres north of the village well. The dry well had a completely different kind of rock than the three other wells, which all seemed to hold large amount of water.

These wells were full of limestone cavities, whereas the fourth well, which had gone dry, was not of limestone and had no cavities at all, Tej Dan said.

The three wells with water were:

The village wells near the village tank.

The Detha well, built during Jugti Dan's life time.

The well at the ancient site of the abandoned Chelani village. This well is very old. For a long time it had only been used occasionally, mainly for watering cattle grazing in the nearby bushy grassland, where stones of old temple ruins and other remnants of the ancient village still could be seen.

Down in the cavities close to the bottom of the Detha well

What Tej Dan told inspired his son Ravi Dan to search for holes and cavities down in the Detha well. Equipped with an electric torch he and his cousin Bhir Dan decided to penetrate some long tunnels and caves to see for themselves.

They found a small hole in the stonelined wall near the water level surface down at the bottom of the well. It looked interesting and they decided to investigate it further. The two young men found a narrow tunnel filled with so much water that they had to crawl on their back to be able to keep their nose above the water surface.

Ravi Dan's baniyan (shirt without sleeves) got torn by some sharp rocks while crawling. The tunnel opened into a large cavity in which they could stand upright. Ravi Dan took off his torn baniyan and put it on the ground. Then they examined as much of the cave as they could see from that place in the dim light of their torch. The air was heavy, so they panted for breath. They slowly groped their way forward over the slippery rock in order to get an idea of the length of the cavity. While moving a big vertical stone slab fell down where they just had passed. They got afraid and decided to keep further away from each other to avoid the risk that both would get hit by a falling loose stone slab. On the other hand they did not want to loose touch with each others, so they decided to take off their loin cloths (dhotis), and tie them together. Then they continued and kept that rope in between as a security line, just like mountaineers.

It was a risky crawl. Besides the threat of falling stone slabs and the risk of slipping on wet stones there could be snakes around. But they were young and adventurous, and decided to explore the cavity in its full length. They managed to advance quite far. According to their own estimate the length of the cavity was about one hundred metres.

When the torch went off due to wetness their expedition became even more troublesome. After that they could only find their way by the touch of their hands.

On the return they searched for the tunnel opening into the well, but in spite of all efforts they could not find it. In great anxiety they took several more rounds of the whole cavity, feeling completely lost in the dark cave, until Ravi Dan suddenly touched the cloth of his torn baniyan, which he had left on the ground next to the entrance tunnel. Then they knew they were close to that tunnel. They found it, and squeezed themselves out of the narrow passage. At last they had reached the well again. Now it was night, so they could hardly see any light there either.

They enjoyed breathing normal air again. Inside the cavity the air was heavy to breath, and they had panted all the time. Completely exhausted they were helped to the ground by assembled villagers who had come to their rescue.

They had been in the cave for fourteen hours. To them it seemed many days. Relatives of Ravi Dan and Bhir Dan went down to the bottom of the 42 metres deep well several times. They shouted their names but did not get any response. The youths heard nothing inside their suffocating cave, the small entrance of which none of the rescuers noticed in the darkness.

Ravi Dan did a few more such explorations, but none of these so dramatic as this one.

Ravi Dan starts irrigation with a diesel-driven pump

Ravi Dan got convinced that enough underground water was available in the Detha well for a diesel driven pump. He had good hopes that the fields of the Detha family could be cultivated with ample irrigation water. He decided to buy such a pump, if possible.

At this time (1949) Ravi Dan's father Tej Dan lived as a dryland tenant, mainly, and he was in a weak financial position. Ravi Dan therefore had to buy the pump himself, out of his own savings. He bought a second-hand pump from a flour mill in a township of the area. At this flour mill he had been working as an operator for half a year. When he left, the millowner agreed to give him the pump instead of cash payment for his work. Ravi Dan brought the pump to Chelana, but the other members of his family, as well as other villagers, thought it was too risky a venture to start irrigation farming in dry and backward Chelana. They tried to save him from ruin and locked him up in a room as a prisoner. He managed to escape undetected through the backyard.

He had heard that in Bombay there were people who knew how this pump worked, so he went all the way to this big city by train. There he managed to find an engineer who wanted to help him. It was a qualified engineer, who knew how to install such pumps properly, but he did not have much experience of deep wells. Although he charged a lot of money he could not accomplish the task, as he did not want to go down in the Detha well, which was much deeper than he had expected. Before he realised his mistake, he had drunk whisky at the expense of Ravi Dan's family in the previous night. It is still remembered that for breakfast he had sixteen eggs. It seems an achievement in itself, but the eggs were of the small deshi type and he was a well built man with a good appetite.

Then Ravi Dan approached a village mechanic living in Pali District in western Rajasthan, who was more on Ravi Dan's level. His name was Daya Ba, an illiterate but experienced allround mechanic. He worked hard to get the pump running, and at last he succeeded.

Daya Ba belonged to the carpenter caste, but he had worked as a blacksmith and mechanics in the village near Falna Railway station, where Ravi Dan had bought his rubber wheeled ox cart around 1944. There Daya Ba had been employed at a workshop for automobile engines. He worked in Chelana for the Dethas at the Detha well from 1949 to 1968, after which he went back to his native village due to old age.

After the installation of the diesel engine they could irrigate 16 hectares, a considerable increase compared to the single hectare previously irrigated with the the traditional leather bucket water lifting technique. The young generation of the Dethas felt more and more hopeful about finding a living in their home village.

Installation and operation of the diesel engine pumping sets

Ravi Dan and his co-workers first installed a 27 horsepower diesel engine up on the ground. It turned an electric generator with a belt. The generator provided electricity to the pump down in the well. It was a centrifugal pump able to threw up water to the discharge channel on the ground 40 metres above.

This diesel powered pumping set Ravi Dan had brought from the flour mill. Two years later (in 1952) another such ground level engine of 27 hp was added.

Ravi Dan and his co-workers wanted to increase irrigation capacity and reduce the high fuel cost. Their idea was to connect the diesel engine directly to the centrifugal pump down in the well itself.

They were told that such an installation would not work. According to the engineers consulted, an engine placed more than ten meters below the ground surface could not take any load. (It had something to do with differences in atmospheric pressure at different elevations, the villagers were told.)

Such statements by professionals confused the largely illiterate villagers, and few of them felt the urge to find out for themselves, as mistakes could be expensive. Ravi Dan looked for farmers who had installed all the pumping set including the engine at the bottom of deep wells, but he did not find any. In his eagerness to make a living in his native village Ravi Dan did not mind to try, however, in spite of all discouragement.

Around 1955 they bought a second-hand bus engine of 100 hp. It was joined to the centrifugal pump in such a way that the latter was rotated directly by this powerful engine. The whole set was lowered into the well and installed on a platform a little above the water level. It did work.

The same kind of pumping set worked well in all the three Chelana wells of the 1950s. Ravi Dan, Singh, and Daya Ba, had on their own by trial and error found out this solution, which was considered a great achievement. It further added to the goodwill of the Chelana Dethas in development circles of Rajasthan.

There was an important snag when directly joining the pump with the engine. At the start of the engine the crank of the centrifugal pump faced such a large tension that it might break before the revolving parts of the pump could move at sufficient speed. Water therefore had to be pumped out at slow speed in the beginning. That they achieved by installing a second-hand bus gear.

By these powerful pumping sets a considerably water flow could be obtained for the expanding irrigation areas, although the water level in the well was more than 40 meters below the ground level.

Later on in the 1950s another second hand bus engine of 100 hp was bought in order to replace the two original 27 hp engines. They were all run on diesel.

In spite of the advantages of these underground pumping sets they were expensive to run, as the diesel fuel cost was considerable for so large engines.

The exhaust gas of these diesel engines deep down in the well might have been a pollution problem for those working down in the well, although that aspect has not been mentioned by the villagers. To start and stop the engine hired labourers had to climb down the long ladder to the bottom. Such climbing twice a day wore out several well workers and in some case resulted in ill-health and premature death. Poorly balanced diets and slowly killing diseases such as tuberculosis also contributed.

Ravi Dan's irrigation venture was independent of Tej Dan

In spite of his young age Ravi Dan managed his irrigation farm on his own in complete independence from his father Tej Dan, who did not want to interfere. He told Ravi Dan that he could do what he liked, as irrigation farming was his own idea, which he had been fighting for in opposition to all his relatives. Besides, Tej Dan said he did not want to work on these things, as they were all strange to him, and he felt too old to learn. Tej Dan therefore continued with his dry farming venture together with his seven tenant friends.

So it was Ravi Dan who employed people on the irrigation farm, and it was he who earned and spent money from the crops he himself decided to raise. Tej Dan never asked for any money from him as a share of the profit. The whole house benefited, though, as Ravi Dan lived together with his father and brothers in a big joint family house. It was the old ravla , which had served as the house for women and female houshold work also during the days of Jugti Dan. Although he was dead, the memory of his enterprising spirit still inspired Ravi Dan and the other grandsons. Moreover, the memory of the violent death of three of their fathers in the clash about land in 1929 was still like an open wound haunting the whole Detha clan. Tej Dan was the only one of Jugti Dan's five sons who was still alive.

Mehar Dan helped in land consolidation

Mehar Dan was Ravi Dan's eldest cousin. At the time of Ravi Dan's installation of the pump in 1949 he had protested vigorously, as he thought that a failure in that risky venture might ruin Ravi Dan completely.

When he saw Ravi Dan irrigating the Detha fields within the stone wall compound with much greater efficiency than before, he realized that irrigation was a possibility, and he did not try to prevent Ravi Dan any more.

In 1950 Mehar Dan started to work with Ravi Dan as his employee. Mehar Dan did not have much else to do, as Chelana at this time was a slow-going village with long periods of seasonal underemployment. Mehar Dan took upon himself the task of consolidating the land of the Detha family, by exchanging scattered plots with other farmers, so that larger chunks could be irrigated. He also helped in buying new land and in borrowing money for that purpose from private moneylenders with whom Mehar Dan was on very good terms.

Also Jugti Dan's other grandchildren got interested

Soon all Ravi Dan's cousins and brothers wanted to help him. For them the whole irrigation project was a great adventure. Jugti Dan's old pole building, which after 1929 had falled in status and in the 1940s had been used as an agricultural shed, again became the centre of a dynamic farm enterprise. There the youngsters spent the evenings dreaming and planning for the future.

The well doctors.

When the news about Ravi Dan's success in finding water and developing his farm went around in the region, many people approached him to get his help in finding water also in their village.

Ravi Dan Detha and his friends went around in the area within 30 kilometres from Chelana trying to find out the availability of underground water for irrigtion. They went down in wells and cavities of the limestone streak going through the region, and found plenty of underground water at most places.

He and Bhir Dan kept advising villagers from such areas to dig in the limestone rock, especially in the eighty kilometres long limestone belt. Ravi Dan and Bhir Dan became known in the region as 'well doctors'.

Traditionally the people of the Chelana region had always dug their wells at the lowest possible point in the topography. It was common experience that at such places the chance for getting water was greatest. Ravi Dan and Bhir Dan, however, kept advising people to dig on high ground, if it was of limestone rock, something people had difficult to understand, but still found to be correct most of the time.

The Chelana limestone belt

It is a long narrow strip of limestone rock running from north to south, passing Chelana half-way. The belt varies in width from one to six kilometres and has a length of about 80 km, which may extend to 130 km. To the west of it there is a parallell belt of sandstone. A Charan by caste in a neighbouring village across the hills to the south dug a well in this sandstone belt, but not a single drop of water was struck, although they dug to a depth of 115 metres. The hills around are also of sandstone. Ravi Dan and others think that the sandstone belt or grid acts as a barrier to further flow of the underground water, which thus get trapped on the limestone side, filling the hollows in that rock formation. At any rate, the situation of Chelana wells such as that of the Dethas, seems to be an extremely lucky one. Although the width of the limestone belt is only a few kilometres, there are many villages to the north and south of Chelana, which also are situated along this limestone belt.

In 1953 the young Dethas formed a commercial farm

In 1953, when Mehar Dan and other relatives had been deeply involved in Ravi Dan's enterprise for some time, Ravi Dan suggested that they all should become partners and share both risk and profit.

Ravi Dan could see many advantages in having a big farm run as a commercial company, in which all the relatives were partners. His own risk would be reduced, more land would be available, he would not have to pay wages to the family members, as they would work for their own interest sharing the profit. Although the more senior ones like Mehar Dan would have access to the money box of the enterprise, the many youngster among the Dethas, who were good at working but might be immature in their spending habits, could also be controlled in this way. As these young lads belonged to one or the other of the joint households of the Dethas in Chelana, there was no need to pay any cash to them directly on a regular basis.

The four Detha households to which the fourteen cousins belonged in the 1950s were those of Tej Dan, Mehar Dan, Naru Dan and Ganga Dan.

All his brothers and cousins agreed to this proposal and they started a large commercial farm, which they gave the name Detha Brothers Agricultural Farm. It was English, the favourite language of the Indian elite, so it sounded great and modern to all concerned, although the Detha brothers like other villagers hardly knew any English. The name was written in Hindi script.

*

There was one clear difference between the Jugti Dan's and his grandsons' farm enterprises with regard to management. Jugti Dan had a joint family farm, where he was the unquestioned authority. All family members had to obey. He was an active managing director for his farm, but also a family head of the old patriarchic style, and as such he demanded respect and obedience. The joint farm started by Ravi Dan, on the other hand, was a commercial farm organization with relatives as its voluntary members. Any of them could step out and start his own irrigation farm, if he wished to.

But they were faithful to the Detha Brothers Agricultural Farm. It became their family company. Like a real company it got an office, a manager, a work organization and a book keeping system. As they later found out, their partnership company had no legal validity, however. Bank loans had to be signed by all, and could be claimed from any of them. The farm had no legal significance, as it was not a registered company.

Also this time Tej Dan, Ravi Dan's father, choose to keep away from the adventurous plans of his young relatives. He was sceptical, as the new agricultural enterprise meant a lot of investments. Tej Dan did not like the idea of borrowing that much money. He had lived in the old days, when borrowing money as such was a sign of degradation and humiliation. To his mind it was better to live in one's hut than in a palace built on borrowed money, as economic independence was more important for self-respect than to be rich. Tej Dan had seen himself to what extent families dependant on others had been exploited for generations.

Tej Dan understood that he had no power to stop his young relatives, as they could make their own money, and were not as much dependant on the elders of the family as young people had been in the old days. He warned them, however. He told them they would all run into trouble one day.

Three of the fourteen partners did not work on the farm themselves, as they had got employment in Government Service and stayed away from the village a large part of the year. They were Sukh Dan, Hamir Dan and Sumer Dan. Their contribution to the successful operation of the joint farm was also important, however, as they actively safeguarded the interest of the Detha family in Government offices by push, pull and contacts.

The strong Detha influence in the Gram Panchayat (village council) through Mehar Dan and Ravi Dan contributed to the smooth operation of Detha irrigation farm. In 1953 Mehar Dan had become the village sarpanch, i.e. the chairman of the newly started village council at Chelana. At this time Ravi Dan was still the leader of the Farmers' Youth Club at Chelana. In 1956 he succeeded Mehar Dan as village sarpach.

There were other Detha farm families at Chelana. They belonged to the clan, but they did not participate in Ravi Dan's irrigation venture. They were the families of Hem Dan, Chiman Dan, Chen Dan and a few others. These relatives were more distant, but had the same great-great grandfather as Jugti Dan's grandchildren. He was Kan Dan, the ancestor of all Chelana Dethas, as indicated on the pedigree graph below. Kan Dan lived in Mevi village far to the south of Chelana, and he never settled at Chelana, as told in the section about the history of the Detha clan.

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### Chapter 8 The farm of the waterlords

The powerful commercial farm

It was necessary for the Detha relatives to keep together at this time of the early 1950s, as they had enemies among Rajput families who threatened to harm them. The most dangerous family was that of Bhan Singh, the adopted son of Umar Singh. The Dethas had a conflict with that family and with the Kalyan Singh band of dacoits. The robbers tried to kill Ravi Dan, but were eventually killed themselves by a semi-military police force of the Rajasthan Government. It happened in 1958. After that the area got relatively peaceful.

The village atmosphere was thus very unsettled when the Detha Brothers Agricultural Farm was formed in 1953. The Dethas thought that such a farm would look powerful and united to outsiders such as Bhan Singh. It might reduce the desire for attack. Anybody contemplating attack had to reckon with revenge from those in a strong enough position to retaliate.

Up to 1962 the fourteen male grandchildren of Jugti Dan worked together on the same farm, which grew into a really big production unit by Chelana standards. The heart of it was the two 100 horse powers diesel engines in the Detha well. Large areas was irrigated with these two pumps already in the 1950s, but the main expansion came in the 1960s.

Around 1960 the Detha family appears to have irrigated more than 100 hectares. About half the irrigated area was owned by the Detha Farm, and the rest belonged to farmers, who bought Detha well water on a half-half basis. The Detha Farm also carried out water management operations in the fields of the water-buying farmers. The landowner did the other agricultural work, mostly through landless villagers working in labour teams under a sharecropper or tenant.

The big farm unit the Dethas could borrow plenty of money, as the financiers felt that a lot of profit could be generated on the farm. With pooled resources the Detha Brothers Farm could also deal more efficiently with the government officers they approached for assistance. Government officers usually preferred to deal with powerful big farmers to weak and small ones. The impact of the extension work and other services became bigger in the short run that way, and the trouble was less.

Assistance from development agencies

Irrigation farmers with production units of good development potential used to get the support of official organisations within the large development bureaucracy such as extension agencies, agricultural departments, rural banks etc. Also Ravi Dan and his relatives got such a support. They got valuable technical advice, new inputs such as high yielding seed, and credit at softer term than the private moneylenders offered. The cost of these inputs were often subsidized and regulated to reduce the economic burden and risk for innovative minded farmers.

Ravi Dan and other farmers along the limestone grid also got electricity on a priority basis, as the underground water potential was great enough to permit a substantial increase of agricultural produce from the area.

Those who bought water

The waterselling business had first only been a side activity. Then it became the major source of income for the Dethas and a few other Chelana villagers who also started to operate as large waterlords in the late 1950s.

Several water buyers, such as Jat farmers, owned land but lacked management experience in irrigation agriculture. They lacked confidence for starting such a big venture which required cash outlays.

Some dryland farm families owned as much as twenty to forty hectares of cultivable land. By Indian standards they could be called landlords, but without well water they had weak production units, as precipitation at Chelana is so irregular and insufficient.

Waterlord crop sharing

In waterselling business the crop was mostly shared half-half between the waterlord and the landowner. Ravi Dan and Mehar Dan started to sell water on that term already in the early 1950s and it became an unwritten rule for farmers in the whole neighbourhood for many decades, according to Tan Dan. The input costs could be shared in various proportions, though, depending on bargaining strength.

Although waterlord cropsharing business from mechanized irrigation was started by the Dethas at Chelana, they probably copied the principle of half-half cropsharing business from areas where smallscale traditional irrigation had been going on for a long time. Such as Jalagarh, where the farmers used Persian wheels instead of pumps and engines. These farmers only sold small amount of waters to their immediate neighbours, though, whereas the Dethas sold more water than they used themselves. The fields of their customers were spread out over a large area. To reach there the Dethas had constructed an elaborate system of water channels which they maintained themselves.

Selling water on a cropsharing basis was called ango kariyo (share done) in Jalagarh. Further to the north, at Merta, it was called bhavli kari (partnership done). Both expressions refer to the same ageold practice of sharing the harvest.

The cropsharing system of the new waterlords was in spirit close to the old feudal approach, although wrapped in a new technology - the irrigation agriculture of the progressive farmers. The whole jagirdar system was based on the idea of dividing the harvest between different categories of interest. Before the land settlements also revenue to the state was paid in that way.

Earlier the village Thakur also used to share a loot with dacoits and Bavris within his jagir, as we have told more about in the section about robberies and thefts during the feudal age.

Hence, crop sharing was a simple method with universal application, including that of the waterlord business at Chelana.

The contribution of inputs

The wellowner provided water to the farmer's field as well as labour and knowhow for surface irrigation to the extent necessary. He also brought other current inputs such as seed, fertilizers and pesticides.

The land owner was responsible for soil management and crop husbandry, and also managed other labour consuming work such as weeding, harvesting and threshing.

A powerful water supplier was likely to take advantage of a dependent farmer's weakness. For example, if the landowner had his field at a place, where he could not get water from somebody else, then he had to contribute a bigger share of the inputs himself.

The crop managing sharecroppers and their labour teams

Both the wellowners and their waterbuying landowners employed labourers for carrying out heavy physical work.

Landowners with plenty of land engaged a sharecropper, who employed the rest of the labour force. The sharecropper paid his labourers out of his share of the harvest. Many of the labourers were women of low caste and poor families. They were usually relatives and neighbourers of the sharecropper. Hence, the sharecropper acted as a contractor. Most of them belonged to the Mali caste and had irrigation gardening as their traditional occupation. With a long and thorough experience of irrigation farming before coming to Chelana they could be very productive out in the field.

Chelana sharecroppers got from one-sixth to one-eighth of the produce as a payment in kind. (Around 1980, but also in other decades.) At the Jat dhanis the sharecroppers got one fifth, an unusually large share. It was more difficult to attract sharecroppers to the outlying Jat dhanis. That is why Jats offered more of the harvest.

Fixed rent tenants

Some landowners without a well leased out land for a fixed rent to persons who could arrange irrigation water on their own. Some of these tenants were landowners themselves, but wanted more land for their irrigation farming venture. They took a larger risk, as they had to provide all inputs themselves, but as a rule they could stand that risk better than ordinary sharecroppers, as they had a better economy and a higher social status. Such a tenant dealt with his landowner on an equal footing, especially if both of them were savarn Hindus. The average fixed rate tenant had also better contacts with businessmen and extension officers than the sharecroppers had.

Bhambi labourers on the Detha irrigation farm

Those who started to work for Jugti Dan's grandsons in the 1950s were a different batch of persons than the ones who had been working for Jugti Dan. His feudal servants left for new employers during the difficult years in the 1930s and the 1940s. Many of them had died in the 1950s. So Ravi Dan and Mehar Dan employed a new team. About fifteen labourers of the Bhambi caste. Most of them got permanent employment on the farm.

Bhambis had been feudal serfs for jagirdars such as the Chelana Rajputs, but in the 1950s the feudal bonds loosened after the land settlement. As a result a lot of lowcaste labourers ready to work for new employers were available. The Bhambi mohalla was situated close to the that of the Dethas, and the Dethas had maintained close contacts with the Bhambis for some generations. At village fights with Rajputs and other dangers these two groups had come to each others rescue time and again in the past.

Dethas as wellwishers for Bhambis.

As the Detha clan belonged to the Charan caste, which was much higher than the Bhambi according to the village ranking system, the latter had often approached the Dethas at the time of distress. The Bhambis were in most cases unable to voice their grievances as individuals, since they had a completely depressed and voiceless attitude towards the higher castes. Such helpless Bhambis looked up to the Detha family as their wellwisher in the traditional sense, i.e. in the ageold habit of lowcaste and junior persons to seek the advice from senior ones of their locality.

About wellwishers

This kind of relationship was very common also between members of other high and low castes in Chelana. It was often misused by the so-called wellwisher (hitaishi), both sides feeling that the wellwisher was obliging the weaker side, as the former has spent some of his valuable time for solving the problem, while in fact in many cases it was a well utilized opportunity of the wellwisher to get the poor and ill informed help seeker to do things which also could benefit the adviser. This new kind of dependence instead of the old feudal one became more apparent from the 1970s in Chelana due to the widening educational gap between poor families and certain newly rich families. Betteroff families sent their youth to colleges to learn about the world and how to get things done. With the help of education, money and contacts they could become clever wellwishers for those families, who had been too poor and backward to get any of their members even to learn reading and writing properly.

In the new world government officers demanded written application and correctly filled in forms from any citizen who wanted something from them. To be educated meant being skilled in that.

Wellwisher of the poor became almost a new profession among this rural elite, who could sit in their rooms or on their verandas and help people, while chatting away the days at ease.

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###  Chapter 9 Electricity for agriculture

When electricity was brought all the way to Chelana in 1962

After a few years of irrigation agriculture at Chelana with the help of diesel engines Ravi Dan and other well-owners started to call on politicians and Government officers at Jodhpur and Jaipur for getting electricity to Chelana.

The farmers argued that their diesel engines were so expensive to run that their farms could not run on profit. Electricity would be much cheaper. Without electricity no further progress in agriculture would be possible, they told.

Up to 1960 there was no electricity at all between Jodhpur and Chelana, so it was necessary to draw the line all the way from Jodhpur town more than one hundred kilometers away.

Townships like Jalagarh and Pipar City were also situated in the eastern part of the district and these would be provided with electrictiy on a priority basis at any rate, but the officers of the Rajasthan State Electricity Board did not think it was such a hurry for far-off villages such as Chelana.

Seeing how keen Ravi Dan and some other Chelana farmers were on getting electricity, the engineers of the Electricity Board told the farmers they themselves had to provide labour and arrange the transport of the poles and other materials like wires and insulators. The material would be available at Bhavi, a railway station near Jalagarh. The station was about 40 km from Chelana. From there the material had to be transported to the construction sites along the electricity line.

Thanks to the voluntary work of the farmers the electricity line was ready much earlier than scheduled.

The engineers also managed to save labour and transportation expenses for the government. The farmers were told that they could not be paid, as there was no provision for voluntary work.

The Chelana farmers thought the engineer and his assistant put money in their own pockets and then manipulated the accounts of the government books.

The line reached Chelana in 1962. By then Ravi Dan Detha had become an influential local Congress Party politician on good terms with many Congress leaders in Rajasthan. It was largely with their help the officers of the Rajasthan State Electicity Board were pressed to construct the electric line all the way from Jodhpur to Chelana via Bhawi at a pace much faster than they had planned to.

Also other villages of the area were connected to the line. Electric pumps for irrigation water gradually became popular among farmers with wells along the whole Chelana limestone belt comprising some 14 villages.

The change to electric pumps cut the operation cost of water lifting to half. The initial outlays were quite big, though. They had to invest in electric pumps and other equipment. Another high initial outlay was the security deposit. It was demanded by the Electricity Board as an advance payment to cushion the risk of not getting payments in time later.

The water-cum-landlords of Chelana continued to complain about their high losses, and pleaded unable to pay the high electricity bills. They tried to convince Government officers and politicians that the fee for electricity had to be cut for farmers. Otherwise, they could not run on profit and further progress in agriculture would be impossible. In spite of this problem Ravi Dan Detha and his relatives as well as other wellowners of Chelana lived in increasing affluence, judging from the way they improved their houses, married away their daughters etc.

Power development in the district according to the Gazetteer.

I will supplement Tan Dan's narration of how electricity started at Chelana by referring to the Jodhpur Gazetteer (Agarwal, 1979).

Of the 700 villages in Jodhpur district, none had electricity up to 1960. During the period 1961-1966 fiftythree villages were electrified.

Jodhpur city had been electrified already in 1917, but it remained the sole beneficiary of electricity till the formation of Rajasthan in 1951. In 1960 another power house was installed in Jodhpur, which increased the total installed capacity in the district from 1000 to 1400 kW. It was evidently due to this increase in capacity that an electricity line could be drawn from Jodhpur to Chelana. As Chelana was situated at the eastern border of the Jodhpur district, it was the end of the electricity line, as far as the Jodhpur administrators were concerned. The section from Bhawi railway station to Chelana passed many villages, but most of them got connected later than Chelana, as the farmers there were slower in realizing the utility of this new source of energy.

In May 1969, hydro-electric power from Chambal became available and this hastened the electrification programme in the district. By 1972-73, 169 populated towns and villages, i.e. 22 per cent of the total had been electrified. At that time steam turbines and diesel generators of power houses at Jodhpur, Jalagarh and Phalodi supplemented the supply of electricity in the district. (Agarwal, 1979, p.152)

Some of the cousins were against the electrictiy project

Ravi Dan had succeeded in convincing many farmers and officials about the utility of drawing an electricity line all the way from Jodhpur to Chelana, a distance of more than one hundred kilometres. The work proceeded ahead of schedule thanks to the keen participation of a number of youthful enthusiasts friendly to Ravi Dan.

Others thought that electricity would be a too heavy investment for people living in the countryside. It was something completely new and sceptical persons thought that irrigation farmers such as the Detha brothers might be overoptimistic. Among them were also some of the partners of the Detha Brothers Agricultural Farm, especially Naru Dan and Sumer Dan, sons of late Sabal Dan.

After many discussions five of the fourteen cousins decided to withdraw from the partnership farm. They were the sons of Sabal Dan and Radmal Dan. Some of them worked outside Chelana and did not participate much on the joint farm, anyway. Sumer Dan worked as a junior clerk in a Government office at Jodhpur. Bhir Dan lived at Mevi, where he was village sarpanch.

They did not want to risk a lot of money on installing an electric pump and a big deposit to the electricity department. According to them the diesel pump in the Detha well was good enough. In case electricity would proved useful they could install it later, they thought. Therefore they preferred to wait and seed what would happen to the irrigation enterprise of the other cousins, i.e. the sons of Tej Dan and his late brother Mahesh Dan.

After the five cousins who wanted to leave the partnership farm had got their share of the joint property, the remaining nine cousins decided to continue to pool their resources. They changed the name of their waterlord farm from the Detha Brothers Agricultural Farm to Detha Bandhu Farm. Bandhu means brother in the local language. In 1962 they had managed to install a powerful electric pump with a capacity of more than half a million litres of water per hour.

When Naru Dan and Sumer Dan found that the electric pumps worked very well and more water than ever was removed from the depth of the Detha well, they got concerned about the water supply.

"How do you know there is enough water in the well?", they asked their cousins. "If the well goes dry we will all be ruined."

They argued that the Detha Bandhu Farm should pay them compensation for pumping out also their share of the water supply of the Detha well.

At that time Bhir Dan lived at Mevi village, where he was sarpanch. When he returned to Chelana in 1963, Naru Dan and Sumer Dan wanted also him to fight for getting compensation. Bhir Dan told them they were fools who would never get any money that way.

The partnership enterprise of Detha team number two

Bhir Dan convinced Naru Dan that all the five cousins who had become outsiders should start a parallell enterprise, instead of quarrelling with the others. After some hesitation they joined Bhir Dan and bought their own electric pumping system for waterlord irrigation, which they installed in the Detha well in 1964.

Their electric pump was a big one of 100 hp and it had a capacity of 500,000 litres per hour, about the same as that of Ravi Dan's enterprise, which had a capacity of 540,000 litres per hour. Hence, in the 1960s the two waterlord enterprises of the Dethas in total pumped out one million litres per hour from the Detha well when working at full capacity.

Bhir Dan and his partners had their office in the upper two rooms of the old Detha pol building, where the Detha Bandhu Agricultural Farm of Ravi Dan and Mehar Dan occupied the ground floor.

Detha waterlord land in the 1960s

Tan Dan estimated that the both Detha waterlord teams owned about 200 hectares of irrigated land in the middle of the 1960s. In addition they irrigated several hundred hectares owned by other landowners, many of them Jat farmers living at dhanis a few kilometres outside the village settlement area.

In the latter half of the 1960s it seems around 1500 hectares of the Chelana crop fields were irrigated. The Dethas irrigated a large part, perhaps about one third of the total irrigated area.

It was done in the winter when there was very little rainfall but cool enough conditions for growing temperate easily marketed crops such as wheat and mustard. The sunny winter weather was conducive to high growth rate in this semi-arid area. To Chelana irrigation farmers the rabi crops became more important than the kharif ones grown in the risky monsoon season.

The good reputation of the Chelana Dethas

In the 1960s the irrigation farm of the many Detha brothers became well-known in Rajasthan. That the original farm had been divided into two did not reduce the prestige of the Dethas, as both the partnership teams worked in harmony with each others. The split could be seen as a practical way of making the largescale waterlord operations more manageable. In the second half of the 1960s Bhir Dan was still the manager of the second team and he was known as an able peasant leader and experienced irrigation expert. That was his reputation both in the Chelana area and in that of Mevi, the village where he were sarpanch for several years in the 1950s and early 1960s.

His cousin Ravi Dan became even more popular among development minded Government officers, both as a model farmer and a progressive village sarpanch. High ranked officials started to keep in touch with him and his relatives in the dynamic Charan mohalla in the south of the village rather than the prestige conscious Rathore Rajputs at the Thikana who tried to live on in the feudal past, although new winds were blowing in the Rajasthani society.

The outsiders were happy both about the village hospital and the school which gradually expanded to a high secondary school with agriculture as a special subject.

Now and then even ministers came to Chelana. Most of the time visiting Ravi Dan, consulting him about local politics, i.e. politics in the Pali, Jodhpur, and Nagore region, and also about agricultural political matters. They considered Ravi Dan an experienced Congress leader on the grass root level able to put forward constructive ideas from a farmer perspective.

The Rajasthan Chief Minister Sukhadia and Ravi Dan became good friends. Sukhadia came many times and in 1958 he inaugurated a building of the village cooperative.

In the 1960s Ravi Dan became a member of the Rajasthan State Planning Commission. The government followed some of his suggestions with regard to rural development projects such as the Rajasthan Canal Project.

The Government scheme for settling landless labourer at Suratgarh in 1967

India suffered from severe drought in the years around 1966, and western Rajasthan was badly hit. Cattle died and poor people lived in starvation.

The Rajasthan Government launched a scheme to settle landless labourers from famine stricken villages of western Rajasthan in the tail area of Rajasthan Canal in Bikaner District in 1967 and 1968. Villagers from the depressed rural classes.

According to Tan Dan, the scheme to settle these landless labourers was first suggested by Ravi Dan, at the Planning Board of Rajasthan of which he was a member from 1965 to 1970, being nominated as he was a local Congress politician with farm experience.

It had not been possible to find any farmers willing to settle on the lands of the four chaks in Suratgarh, on which the landless labourers from other parts of Rajasthan later were settled.

The land was full of sand dunes, most of the land was on slopes. Where it was level, it was often saline. In addition it was an insecure area, where often robberies and murders were committed. The irrigation canal was seasonal, as it was at the tail end of the command area with water available only for about four months. During the other eight months it was a problem to get even drinking water.

As nobody else wanted this land it could be given free to landless labourers of drought stricken regions, and thus come to some use, Ravi Dan thought. It was this suggestion that started off the scheme, Tan Dan told.

Several important ministers of the Rajasthan Government came to Chelana many times in 1967 and 1968 in order to get Ravi Dan's help in implementing the scheme for providing land to landless labourers in the Command Area of the Rajasthan Canal. Ravi Dan and other local Congress politicians managed to settle about two thousand landless labourers from their own villages. About fifty of them were from Chelana.

At his brother Nathji's request Tan Dan joined a group of about 160 labourers alloted land in four Chaks, i.e. camps which were meant to grow into small colonies and then develop into settlement villages. The scheme failed for several reasons. In the usual spirit of Congress politicians at least in Rajasthan in the 1960s, the Chief Minister and his colleagues started this 'Harijan welfare scheme' without seeing the project through with any concern or care, leaving it in the hands of corrupt and indifferent Government officers. Instead of helping the new settlers they took advantage of the ignorance and innocence of this group of landless labourers about to start a new life as landowners. As it was a practice by the officers not to release water without bribe and these newcomers were too poor to pay bribes. Water did not come in time and in enough quantities. Therefore the crops failed. No extension officer was appointed to give guidance to the new farmers, who although having worked as labourers in agriculture all their life in many cases, only knew the traditional ways of dry farming, and desperately needed advice.

But the officers of the land revenue department and the irrigation department were active in collecting land revenue and water charges, from land which had not been possible to get a crop from, due to deliberate neglectance of the irrigation department, the officers of which still had the bad manners of keeping troubling the helpless victims of new settlers, telling them to pay both water charges and bribes. It is not surprising that the illiterate lowcaste labourers without any push from anywhere simply fled the field and returned to their native place happy of being freed from the difficult duties of farm management, feeling better off being exploited by their old masters in their own villages.

However, in 1978 they were still haunted by notices of due payments for land revenue and water charges from the years of 1967 to 1969. Tan Dan himself saw these notice papers at the home of these labourers, as he still kept contact with several of them.

In the late 1960s at Suratgarh, apart from harassment from Government officers, sometimes done unintentionally as a part of their bureaucratic procedures rather than on purpose, these poor settlers were also threatened by the established big landlords of neighbouring villages, who mostly had a negative attitude to the whole scheme, not seeing any point in bringing in all these poor, uneducated, lowcaste people to settle in their area and spoil the congenial atmosphere, as they looked at it.

Being powerful people and often very rich, in the category of socalled 'progressive farmers', these landlords had connections high up in the Congress Government of Rajasthan, especially through Manphul Singh Chaudary, who himself was a landlord at Suratgarh nor far away. He was the MLA from Suratgarh Constituency, and was also a minister of the Rajasthan Government. He and others managed to get the Chief Minister, Mohan Lal Sukhadia to realize that the government had to go slow on this project of settling landless labourers at Suratgarh, as anti-Government sentiments may otherwise develop among the settled villagers of the landlord class in this area, something which could be politically dangerous.

Manphul Singh began to agitate that this scheme should have benefited the landless people of Ganganagar district, and that land should have been given to them instead of calling in outsiders from other parts of Rajasthan, a theme which also was taken up by the Communist Party of Ganganagar District (CPI branch, friendly to Moscow), who started agitation among landless labourers within the district. Also most of the communist party leaders were big landlords of the area, according to Tan Dan. These groups of local Congress and CPI political leaders kept telling that this settlement scheme was planned by political leaders from other parts of Rajasthan such as Ravi Dan and Ram Singh Bisnoi, MLA from Luni constituency, also a Congress politician, and Kalyan Singh Kalvi, a local politician from Nagaur District who have often kept changing party. (In 1978 he was with the Janata Party.) According to Manphul Singh and his supporters, these outsiders wanted to strengthen their leadership by getting a hold also in Ganganagar District. Therefore they had started this scheme, and sent their people to Ganganagar to settle there.

After leaders had been agitating these ideas, mass meetings in the villages in Suratgarh area near the four chaks of the new lowcaste settlers often ended by the whole crowd marching to one or the other of the four camps of the outsiders, and attacked the settlers there. Sometimes it resulted in clashes. Sometimes the new settlers already had fled away leaving their belongings behind exposed for looting.

*

Feeling very concerned about what he had seen, Tan Dan decided to write about it.

In 1970 wrote a long story in Marvari about low caste people and their problems. He called it _'Reetan ro juddh'_ (war against tradition). The story was based on the abortive scheme in which most of the settlers returned to their miserable existence as landless labourers in their home villages, terrified by awkward experience.

He bought a bundle of fullscrap size registers to write on, and used two of them.

Then he wrote another novel.

The Detha grandmother and her orphan grandson (The story has ended)

He wrote about the sister of Bhim Dan Detha, the doctor at the small rural hospital of Chelana. Her name was Chandar. She was a sweet girl who had lived happily with her husband and two children, when her husband got robbed and murdered on a railway platform, as he was visibly rich wearing a golden necklace, an expensive finger ring, a wrist watch and ear rings of gold, going in his best clothes on a journey to his in-laws to bring home his wife.

When Chandar got to know about the tragedy she fasted for fifteen days. Then she jumped into the water reservoir of the house of the family and drowned herself, leaving one small boy and one little girl behind to be taken care of by their grandparents. Tan Dan's novel was about the grandmother and the little grandson. Every evening the grandmother told stories to her grandson before he went to sleep. Various small stories which children like, mostly folk stories and religious stories about Karniji, as the grandmother came from Deshnok, Karniji's village.

One night it was the birthday of the grandmother's dead son, and she kept thinking about him. Automatically the stories came to be about him only. The night was spent in telling about his life up to his death, without telling the boy that it was the story about his father. The small boy was about seven years, but he had never been told about his parents and their tragic death in such a way that he could understand, whom the story was about, and as the story became very long, he got tired in his grandmother's lap. He fell asleep and was asleep during most of the story, and he did not wake up until his grandmother had finished, when disturbed by the sudden silence he woke up and asked her to tell more. But his grandmother replied, "Kahani khattam ho gaya" (i.e. the story has ended), and it became the title Tan Dan gave this novel.

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### Chapter 10 Ups and downs among the Dethas

Continuation about the second Detha waterlord team

The second Detha team maintained a book-keeping system up to 1970, when the accountant died. Until then they were almost as efficient as the Mehar Dan team, but then the misfortunes started. The enterprise began to run on loss. Crop yields were no longer as stable as before due to crop management problems such as increasing pest incidence. Bhir Dan lost interest in the venture at that time for other reasons, too.

Tan Dan's cousin Bhir Dan at Mevi village

Detha ancestors came to Chelana from the west. Many generations ago they lived in Sindh, Pakistan, as a nomadic cattlebreeding tribe. Gradually the Detha clan migrated into Rajasthan. Five six generations ago the forefathers of the Chelana Dethas moved with their cattle herds from Mevi village in Pali District to Chelana in search of pasture and water, and settled in the southern outskirts of the village, first living as cattlebreeders, then more and more as cultivators. The Chelana Dethas continued to keep in touch with their kins further to the west, especially at Mevi. Tan Dan lived at Mevi as a student in 1955 and 1956. The first year he lived in the house of his elder cousin Bhir Dan from Chelana, who had been adopted by Detha relatives of Mevi in his childhood.

Bhir Dan was a partner of the Detha Brothers Agricultural Farm in Chelana from 1953 to 1962, and then the leader of the Detha waterlord team number two in the 1960s, but he was also active at Mevi some 100 km to the southwest, where he was the sarpanch for many year, i.e. the elected chairman of the village council.

Bhir Dan was known as a progressive leader at Mevi in the 1950s. He was one of the intitiators for starting a school, to which he had donated land. Tan Dan stayed at the hostel of that school during his second year in Mevi.

In village politics Bhir Dan supported Tiri Lal, a Gandhian village leader who was a Maheshvari Baniya by caste. It is an old vaishnav caste of the business community. Much thanks to Bhir Dan's active support Tiri Lal managed to defeat the village Thakur in the first panchayat election in the early 1950s. A few years later Bhir Dan succeeded him as sarpanch.

Later on Tiri Lal's son campaigned as an independent candidate for the state assembly, and won. Also this time Bhir Dan helped in the election campaign. Tiri Lal's son got considerable influence in the Congress Party after the 1971 Assembly Election, as that party had difficulties in forming a state government on their own. Villagers believe he got more than four lakh Rupees for joining the party.

In the 1960s Bhir Dan had a big joint agriculture venture going on in a nearby village in partnership with Tiri Lal's son and a big industrialist from the area living in Madras, South India. They had a dispute over account and management in the early 1970s. The other partners wanted to get rid of Bhir Dan by forcing him to sell his share to them. They bought Bhir Dan's share by giving a cheque, which he could not use, as it turned out to be false. Bhir Dan tried to persuade Tiri Lal, the father of his MLA ex-partner, to help him, as Tiri Lal had been the leader of the negotiations when Bhir Dan sold his share. Besides, he trusted Tiri Lal, who had been his friend for decades. Bhir Dan did not get any replacement of the useless cheque, however. He spent many months in appealing for justice to the persons concerned, all the time moving between the two ex-partners and Tiri Lal, which was quite difficult, as they lived in different towns, the industrialist living as far away as in Madras in South India. At last when Bhir Dan found that nothing helped. He took revenge on Tiri Lal by shooting him to death.

After the murder in 1972 Bhir Dan absconded for two years. Eventually he surrendered to the police in Barmer, after having spent part of the time in Pakistan with some dacoits. One of these, Shakti Dan, belonged to the the Detha gotra, and originated from the original Detha village in Sindh in Pakistan.

Bhir Dan returned to India after having received the message that Sukh Dan, Bhir Dan's cousin, had been harassed in his job as a police officer in Jaipur. Also other Detha relatives faced problems, as the M.L.A. ex-partner of Bhir Dan was a powerful one, who had come close to the chief minister in state politics.

Bhir Dan also surrendered himself, as he had got sick, according to Tan Dan. He was in jail for several years, while the court proceeding were going on, but was released on bail before the sentence was given in the lowest court in Jodhpur.

He got sentenced to life imprisonment, but appealed to a higher court. In 1980 Bhir Dan was in jail, where he had many years to serve.

Bhir Dan died in the 1990s.

Opinions about the murder

Several Mevi villagers seem to think that Bhir Dan acted in the only way possible, when he killed Tiri Lal. They told Tan Dan that Bhir Dan had given Tiri Lal life and he had taken it back. It appears that Bhir Dan was popular in Mevi also after the murder, being considered a hero among villagers with old feudal values, for whom it was a matter of honour to take revenge for unjustice. Persons coming from a Charan feudal family were not expected to bow down to others. On the contrary, a Charan should live up to his proud heritage belonging to a pastoral group used to an independent way of living.

At Chelana, however, Detha families related to Bhir Dan including remote relatives such as Chiman Dan did not appreciate what Bhir Dan had done, feeling he had given a bad reputation to the Charan community in Chelana, Mevi and elsewhere.

The attitude that it is necessary to live up to a proud reputation does not seem to originate so much in landlordism or ancient feudal rights given by the king, as in a clan feeling, the idea of belonging to a particular genetical line. The people now living regard themselves as a link in an endless chain of past and future generations.

The national award

The climax of Detha prestige occurred in 1967 when Tan Dan's brother Ravi Dan got the prestigious Padma Shri Award at a big function in New Delhi.

It was a national award given once a year to persons considered outstanding in their respective field. They were selected by a committe appointed by the Government. To signify the importance of this prize it was handed over by the president himself. (In 1967 dr. Radhakrishnan was the President of India.)

In the speeches held in his honour after getting the Padamshri Award, Ravi Dan was praised for his dynamic and enterprising nature. He had been a driving force in the task of bringing irrigation and modern agricultural methods to his native village, which until then had been a poor backward desert village.

A few years earlier new high yielding varieties of pearl millet and sorghum had been introduced in India and the Detha waterlord farm had been among the first farms in Rajasthan who had learnt the technique of hybrid seed multiplication on a large scale.

Ravi Dan had done much more than just developing his own farm. He had been instrumental in starting a village school, a cooperative, a bank, a hospital, and a youth club. Thanks to him and his friends electricity had been brought to the Chelana area already in 1961, several years earlier than the Government had planned.

Ravi Dan was told he had been a spearhead in introducing modern technology, scientific approach, village welfare and cooperation along the lines of the progressive policies of the Congress Government of that time.

What had happened at Chelana was an example of what villagers could do out of their own effort without waiting for the Government's initiative, the speakers told Ravi Dan. By showing the way, the enterprising Chelana waterlords had sped up irrigation agriculture also in many other villages along the same limestone ridge. Even those living in villages with neither water nor limestone benefitted by the increased employment opportunities available for migratory labourers.

In short, Ravi Dan was told he had set a great example. He had inspired the whole nation.

Social life management

New upper class living habits for the Dethas from the 1960s

From around 1960 Ravi Dan and his relatives worked less out in the fields together with the farm labourers than before, as they were busy in the farm office or were out on journeys. Another factor influencing the changing work habits of Ravi Dan and Mehar Dan in the 1960 was their attempt to adjust themselves to a life more similar to that of those with whom they were dealing. In addition to the powerful Government officers, they also had to adjust to the behaviour of businessmen in order to benefit from good relationships based on mutual trust. The Detha Farm of the 1960s mainly dealt with six big business families; two families each in Jodhpur, Jalagarh and Merta. With the Chelana baniyas they had rivalries and therefore business relations with them were out of question. In addition the Dethas had their political friends and urban contacts, who also served as an inspiration for changing living habits, especially with regard to the desire to get bigger and more fashinable homes equipped with modern apparatus and furniture. The members of these friendly urban families had nice clothes, and everybody got fascinated by new and unknown luxuries such as nylon shirts, wrist watches, radios and scooters. Other more destructive habits were also copied from the urban high society with which they were developing personal links, such as drinking wine and ushering silk clothes and golden ornaments on their women.

Caring for female luxury items became the main hobby for these workless Detha women, who hardly had any other hobbies, apart from going on pilgrimage and observing religious customs. For running their households they got the help by lowpaid servant boys, who were kept very busy and always were at their disposal. These boys were mostly of low castes.

After the new affluence and status came to the the Detha clan in the 1960s some of the men had started to drink so regularly that their economy and work efficiency got affected. Ravi Dan was not one of them, however. Earlier the Dethas had no tradition of drinking, although it was not a religious matter to them, in contrast to some of the vegetarian high caste communities such as the baniyas.

The attempts of the Dethas of getting powerful friends in the 1960s

From 1960 onwards the many good crops from the irrigated fields for several years had increased the affluence of the Dethas, who used their money for buying many new things, which might have made their life more comfortable and interesting, but also made them busy in many new things. Ravi Dan and Mehar Dan as well as many other relatives got less time and interest in being out in the fields, where they could directly supervise the labourers. For the sake of their further progress Ravi Dan and his relatives found it more important to spend their time in dealing with influential people, realising that such persons could be very useful as friends, and create a lot of problems if not properly attended to. In addition to government officers and businessmen, they had to make friends also with politicians, as this group of powerful persons emerging on the rural scene also could help or threaten the family welfare. That was even more important since the Dethas had few friends within their own caste. They belonged to a low gotra among the Charans, and had for generations lived a more ordinary rural life than many other Charan families.

The urbanized life style of high gotra Charans from the 1970s

Many Charan families lived like rural lords. They belonged to the same group of oppressors and exploiters of the depressed village classes, as the rich landlords among the Rajputs. They were often fighting on the side of the Rajputs in village clashes. In many villages the Thakur and his family were Charans. In spite of the abolition of the feudal land ownership system in the 1950s their power and glory in many cases still continued in the 1970s, but then they were reaping wealth far away from backward villages, having established themselves in bungalows in Jodhpur, Jaipur, Ajmer, Udaipur, and Bikaner, where they lived a more civilized life, as they themselves looked at it. There they were employed in well paid urban gentleman professions such as the Indian Administrative Service, being proud of their modern superiority as well as the old one, and seldom having any understanding for the many struggles of the Detha family against the Rajputs. Neither had they any liking for the rural behaviour and ruggedness of the Dethas of Chelana, and the attempt of these Dethas to find a better place for themselves within the rural society, as that was a society many of the more lordly Charan families had left behind altogether.

Ravi Dan in Rajasthani politics

For Ravi Dan and other political strategists of the Detha family it therefore became important to make new alliances among emerging 'progressive farmers' of the landlord type, families of increasing importance in the area around Chelana, and particularly families within the four MLAconstituencies, which all are close to Chelana, as Chelana village is situated in a border area, and therefore is close to all of them. These constituencies are Jalagarh, Bhopalgarh, Merta, and Jetaran. As Chelana village is situted in the middle of all these towns, it seems that Chelana have good possibilities to develop into a new urban centre in a few decades, considering the fast rate of growth of various services in the village, and its strategic location at the crossroad between the adjacent centres enumerated above.

Ravi Dan is therefore active in the Congress Party since the 1940s, and his close friends of local politicians rose in status in their villages in a way similar to that of Ravi Dan at Chelana. Many of them belonged to the middle strata of castes such as the Sirvi, Jat, Kumar, and Mali castes. They helped each others in the political field, both by jointly forming pressure groups for presenting various kinds of demands to Ministers, and on an individual level by helping each others with favours from friendly political leaders willing to oblige local politicians.

It appears to Tan Dan that the habit of asking favours of a personal nature from bigger politicians did not develop in Ravi Dan's case until the beginning of the 1970s, as Ravi Dan up to the 1960s were quite successful in maintaning his influence by coming up with proposals for various kind of collective projects beneficial for many groups in the village. Schools, hospitals, electricity etc. Facilities that many persons of various castes were prepared to struggle for. Hence, there were excellent leadership opportunities for a person such as Ravi Dan, who came from a small community. Political leaders from larger castes such as the Jat and Mali castes could agree to support Ravi Dan without fear of thereby loosing ground to any of the big minority castes with which they were competing. Ravi Dan availed himself of these opportunites, acting as a balancing force between various local political factions based on caste affiliations.

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### Chapter 11 The awakening of the Jat community

The Jats constituted the largest of all these middle strata castes, which at this period emerged as rivals to the Rajputs for power. The Jats saw the Rajputs as their traditional enemy, as they had been suppressed by the Rajputs for centuries. Now they were no longer tenants, but increasingly confident landowners. By the late 1960s the Jats had become firmly established as the leading caste within the Congress Party in Rajasthan, and after that Congress politicians became less interested in yielding favours to local politicians of other castes. Ravi Dan had to adjust to the decreasing opportunities for him to be a catalyzing force and a mediator in Rajasthani politics as a Charan. With improved educational standards of the Jat community, the lines of friendship among the growing number of Jat leaders became more direct.

As a community the Jats of western Rajasthan had been slow in realizing their political opportunities compared to the innovative-minded Detha family of Chelana. For two decades, the 1950s and the 1960s the Dethas had taken full advantage of this, but in the 1970s it became increasingly clear that Government schemes for rural assistance in the first place was to be utilized by Jat politicians, their caste friends and relatives. With an increasing number of college educated Jats, the political future of Ravi Dan did not look bright. The situation became difficult not only for Ravi Dan but also for many others belonging to the category of 'progressive farmers' of small castes. In the late 1970s they might get less than before of Government resources for farm development, as these were scarce and therefore only could be obtained by personal favours. Earlier the most active innovators including Ravi Dan had been among the first ones to get important services such as electricity, but now also those who had been slower to see the advantages of these new things came forward in large numbers in search for extra favours regarding installations of subsidized utilities such as gobar gas plants. To belong to a caste community in political power at the state level thus became a clear advantage. The long queue of favour seeking friends and relatives at the houses of most ministers clearly indicated in what direction scarce resources were being allotted and on what criteria.

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### Chapter 12 A young widow and the family honour

Tan Dan at schools far from Chelana

Tan Dan spent his first three school years at Chelana. As there were no fourth class at the Chelana school in the early 1950s Tan Dan continued his studies at another village some twenty kilometres away for two years up to the fifth class. He stayed with a Mali family headed by Yogi at Anandpur Kalu. A simple poor family which Tan Dan got on very well with. For the sixth class he had to move to Devli where his cousin Bhir Dan lived about 100 km from Chelana. Tan Dan stayed at Bhir Dan's home for a year, and then at the school hostel for another year.

Tan Dan at Devli

Bhir Dan had been adopted by distant Detha relatives living in Devli, the old ancestoral village of the Dethas from where Tan Dan's forefathers migrated to Chelana. A few generations earlier members of the Detha clan had migrated to Devli from the village of Kharoda in Sind. Kharoda is somewhere in between the towns of Mirpur Khas and Umarkot in what is now Pakistan. (Akbar, the Moghul emperor was born in Umarkot.)

Nand Lal was good at volley ball

At Devli Tan Dan got to know a young man who was a teacher at Malava village. He also got to know Nand Lal, a teenager boy who lived at Malava. The village is situated about twenty miles to the south of Pali town in the Pali District of western Rajasthan.

Nand Lal had been married by his parents to a young girl called Nirmala. He belonged to a baniya family of orthodox Hindus. Nirmala was only thirteen or fourteen years, when she got married to Nand Lal. As is the custom in rural Rajasthan, Nirmala only lived with her in-laws for a few days after the marriage, and after that she was sent back to her parent's house.

Nand Lal was good at playing volley ball, which he played in the evening together with Tan Dan's friend, the school teacher from Devli, and many others, mostly from the upper strata of the village, like baniya and rajput children, who are not compelled by circumstances to work as labourers.

Playing kabaddi

Child labourers in Rajasthani villages seldom play volley ball; a modern game introduced with modern education. These illiterate children, who work all day, have no time to play in daylight and seldom have a chance to play in electric light either, but they do play their games in the darkness of the night, especially when there is moonshine. Then they enjoy being together with friends in freedom, without being ordered around by grown-ups. They play kabbaddi and other ageold games, which older children have taught younger ones since time immemorial, without any help or grown-up people of the village. Grown-ups at the most come to the playing-ground now and then to tell their child to come home and not to waste their time, forgetting that they themselves heartily enjoyed playing in the same way a few decades earlier. Kabbaddi is played on an open ground about twenty feet wide and sixty feet ong, divided into two equal fields with a team of seven players on each side of the dividing line. Each player in turn runs over the middle line to reach a line on the middle of the field of the opponent team and then to run back to safety over the middle line again to their own half of the field, where the opponents are not allowed to chase him. He has to shout "Kabbaddi, kabbaddi, kabbaddi, kabbaddi" continuously without taking a new breath from the time he enters the opponents half of the field until he has reached the middle line coming back to his own field again. If he gets caught and has to take new breath, while repeating the kabbaddi word before he comes back to the middle line, then he is out of the game. When all the players are out on one side then the other side has won the game. It is a lively game, and it is easy to get hurt and it is very popular. Sometimes it takes the whole night, and it can happen that the children have to go back to their work at dawn with the game still undecided, as their parents are waking up going to the fields for latrine, when they see their children still playing and come running after them with a stick boiling in anger. Many mothers complain bitterly, when they wake up finding their child's bed empty and provoke their husband to give their child a beating, in order to improve. Sometimes other children see a father of a friend rushing towards the playing ground ground with long strides and a determined face, and manage to warn the friend that "Psh, your father is coming, better you run away." Then the father will find a lof of other children than his own, who tells him they do not know anything, but often get a beating all the same. When he at last finds his son in his home at return he is told by the child that he has been staying at some friend's house last night as he got sleepy there, when listening to story telling.

When the boys gather again at daytime grazing their cattle or doing other work, then they compare with each other what kind of punishments they got when coming back home after the game. One of them might say, "My father gave me two strokes with a shoe, but then mother interfered, so I did not get any more." His friend got a beating with a small stick on his back by his father, while another one got slaps, and also a kick when withdrawing out of reach of his father. But they did not stop playing kabbaddi.

Games played by girls

Girls are also out playing in the nights, especially in full moon nights, when the light is good. But girls play by themselves, and they play their own games. In western Rajasthan 'andal goto' (the flock of the blind in Marvari) is popular among girls. In this game a piece of cloth is tied over the eyes of one of the girls, who then is let loose to chase the other girls participating in the game witin the border line of the small patch on which they are playing. When a girl is caught or has crossed the line trying to escape from her chaser, then she has to be the blind chaser instead, and among laughter and loud chatting, they tie the cloth around her face instead. All rules are followed very honestly and strictly without any partiality or favouratism, in striking constrast to the rules and behaviour of the society of the grown-ups. The games of the children is the only place where equality is practised in the feudal world of western Rajasthan. Children from different castes and social background often like to play with each other, but they know from their parents and other adults what caste and discrimination means, and realise that they can be punished if they mix up too much. People and gods will become angry.

Another interesting game Tan Dan saw in the Chambal Valley near the eastern corner of Rajasthan, in a village on the banks of the river Chambal some thirteen miles from Joura in Madhya Pardesh. This game is called 'bhunai chireya'' which means the hidden bird in Hindi. It was played by a mixed group of boys and girls, as the children were quite small, but when boys and girls get older they play separately under the pressure of the adults. In the bhunai chireya game the children are divided into two teams equal in numbers. Then a child from one of the team is covered under a big cloth like for example a bed cloth or a dhoti by the other children of their team who then runs away and hide themselves, except one child, who remain sitting by the side of the hidden one. Then the other group comes up to them, one by one, to guess who is inside. The child sitting beside the bundle of cloth says, "Bhunai chireya bol.", which means 'talk you hidden bird'. The 'bird' then says 'Ooo' in a shrilled voice, as different from her normal voice as possible, to make it more difficult for the other team to guess who is inside the cover. If their guess is correct then the hidden child is out of the game, but if the guess is wrong, then the child who made the wrong guess is out. The team which is out first is defeated, and the others enjoy their victory.

Nand Lal died and Nirmal become a widow

About a year after marriage he fell ill in persistent fever, which was thought to be typhoid. His condition became serious, and they summoned his wife Nirmala, who came to stay with her husband and in-laws, as is the custom in rural India when a husband gets sick. She had not stayed for more than about a month, when her husband died. Nirmala had become a widow at the age of fifteen years.

Highcaste and lowcaste teenage widows

As Nirmala belonged to a baniya caste, she could not marry again in spite of her young age, but had to live as a discarded person without a future. She had to live in strict pardah in honour of her dead husband and could never talk to anybody of the opposite sex, except her brothers and father, and perhaps some other close relatives. In her in-laws house she was only allowed to talk to women. After Nand Lal's death Nirmal was not allowed to make herself attractive any longer. She was not allowed to wear anything else than black very ordinary clothes. When she would become old she could wear white clothes. Ornaments or any other decorations were out of question, as well as the use of perfume, hair oil or facial make-ups of any kind. As a widow she was not even allowed to use soap. Anything like that is taken as a sign that she has lust in her heart and wants to get remarried. She is not even allowed to smile or to move around quickly with youthful alertness. She is always at the risk of getting an abuse for misbehaving herself, not being conscious of her state as a widow. Her mother-in-law and other women of her in-laws family always reminded her not to do anything, which might harm the reputation of her in-laws family. She would hear things such as, "Now it is the only purpose of your life to honour us and your dead husband." Although still at the blossom of her youth, life had left her and she was only waiting for her death.

Nirmala had had the bad luck of being born as a girl in a baniya caste, as it is a custom among the baniya castes that a widow should live a shadow life mourning her husband and doing nothing else regardless of her age. The old custom of burning widows alive in the cremation fire of their husband was a custom more convenient to the established and influential in the traditional village society, but that was a custom of the rajputs rather than the baniyas. Besides, it is difficult to carry out nowadays without police interference, so the only alternative action for upkeeping the prestige of a her in-laws is to let her live as if she was only waiting for her death. If she in her depression and misery jumps into a well, when she cannot stand it any longer, then her in-laws will get a bad name, and they will curse her for not being able to bear her fate with grace.

Strict prohibition of remarrying of widows is a custom among high caste Hindus in Rajasthan as well as the rest of India. In western Rajsthan it is a custom among kshatriya castes like rajputs and charan, among brahmin castes, among all baniya communities, both Hindu baniya castes and Jain baniya castes. Also the Kayastha caste (also called the Mathur caste) observe strict widowship without remarrying. It is a caste which traditionally has been engaged in clerical professions, and in the old days many members this caste worked in the administration of royal rulers.

It has never been a custom among lower castes, however, where women generally have a freer and more independent position. Sometimes even divorce on the initiative of the women is possible, and happens now and then among lower castes, if the caste panchayat approves. "I don't want to take care of his household", she may tell in front of a caste panchayat gathering, and that is often enough for a spearation.

In the old days it was a very clear demarcation with regard to treatment of widows belonging to the ruling class and other widows. A living widow to a dead ruler was a potential threat to the new ruler. She might claim property rights, she might start conspiracies, she might be more loyal to her own family than to her in-laws. There is also a risk that she would indulge in love affairs to the disgrace of all relatives.

Even if she did not do any harm to anybody, it was of no advantage to have a widow as a drag on a family life into which she did not fit any longer. On many occasions it was considered a bad omen to see a widow. For example, if you were going to your fields to plant a crop, it would surely lead to a bad crop, and you would curse her for the whole year. With so much disadvantages related to widows, widow burning was the most practical and most expedient way to get rid of young unwanted widows with no future, with no children or only small children. Wives who became widows at old age, and who had grown-up children, were less embarassing for her in-laws and had also more power within the family. It was therefore seldom anybody tried to put such old widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands, according to Tan Dan.

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With the feudal system loosening its grip in Rajasthan several agricultural tenant castes like Jats and Sirvis (and Patels in Gujurat and parts of western Rajasthan) and Malis (gardening caste) are coming out of its ageold sefdom to the Rajputs and other ruling castes, and those of them, who now have land can try to exploit the new possiblities which exist in the now developing capitalistic rural economy, where the newly attained land property of previous agricultural serfs has become the basis for this new class of independent farmers to generate wealth out of agricultural production based on land, labour and capital. The unreasonably small share to hired labour of the generated wealth has resulted in exploitation of those who now labour without property of their own. This exploitation is in practice done with the support of legal force, in spite of all protective laws like minimum wages acts. The legal force has replaced previous crude reliance on brutal force in the shape of Rajput military strength for extracting agricultural produce generated from land and labour under feudal control.

In the process of social liberation from the Rajputs these middle strata groups tries to enhance the social status in their own and other people's eyes by adopting the old rigid customs of their former rulers, now when nobody can stop them from doing so. This way of learning new habits results in a spread of outdated habits, often with detrimental social consequense for weak social groups such as women. With the innovation spread of suffocating old customs, social repression tend to increase in a number of low and medium status castes, even if international influences on attitudes and behaviour open up new venues to the members of upper classes with access to higher education, though change towards individual independence may occur more slowly on a deeper level than on the surface also there.

The earlier practices and habits of low caste people were more liberal and flexible than the new ones and would have had a greater chance to change in a progressive direction, when with that expression meaning the socialistic cooperative commonwealth that Nehru and the other freedom fighters of his generation tried to visualise in their speeches.

On the whole, maltreatment of widows and prohibition of remarriage is on the increase within the rural society in Rajasthan, Tan Dan thought. (In 1978)

Nirmala and Sunari Behanji

Nand Lal, Nirmala's husband died in 1958 or 1959. After that Nirmala continued to live with her in-laws, but during the first years she was often on visits to her parent's home. As the years passed by, her visits to her parents became less frequent. She tried to reconcile with her fate, and stayed at her in-laws house most of the time.

It is considered the responsibility of the in-laws to take care of widows and not of the girl's parents in rural Rajasthan. Her parent's house gradually gets filled up with a new cadre of women, her sister-in-laws. When she gets older, she does not come back home, she is received as a guest.

In Nand Lal's family's house of Malava village Nirmala was doing household work from morning to evening living in the same monotonous rythm as the rest of the family and the village as a whole. She was still in her late teens, and she was a very pretty girl. Mostly she was confined within the walls of the house, a spacious enclosed joint family haveli (baniya residence) which did not have any windows. She could have gone up on the top of the house for a change to enjoy the view of the village and the fresh air, if her husband had been alive, but as a widow, she was not allowed to expose herself from the roof tops, and had to stay downstairs and keep busy in domestic work such as cooking food and cleaning floors. In the afternoon she is out of the house for collecting cowdung in the fields around the village, as they need fuel for cooking and dried cowdung cakes are used for that purpose. She also enjoys the freedom of outdoor life, of course covered by an udhni cloth over her face, when she goes to the well to fetch drinking water. However, as she is a young and in addition a widow she seldom has a chance to chat away her time at the well in a few moments of happiness, as is done by many women of greater age and maturity than Nirmala. Only if nobody else from her family is there, and there are persons at the well younger than herself she can say a few words. To look happy and laugh in other people's company is not to be thought of for a teenage widow. It would have been looked upon with dismay, as if she had been indulging in sex.

Nirmala had an uncle-in-law who started to take interest in her, when she had lived in the house for a few years. He was around forty years and married, but as Nirmala was a beautiful girl full of youth he liked to buzz around her. In a baniya house of a joint family like that of the Nand Lal family it was not easy to live in secret. In forbidden relationships of this kind there is seldom scope for more than a few moments of sexual excitement. There is anxiety and fear of being discovered by somebody else in the house, as there are always so many around.

In 1963 Nirmala got pregnant. When the ladies of the house got their suspicions confirmed by checking her body, they started to beat her and pressed her to disclose the name of her lover. She told them in tears after a lot of resistence that it was her uncle-in-law who had forced this relationship upon her. They did not believe her, they could not. She was told it was monstrous allegation and a proof of her total wickedness. In order to save the family from further disgrace they took Nirmala to her parents, and left her there, telling their in-laws that Nirmala had scandalised them. They did not want to have anything to do with such a woman.

Nirmal's family got deeply shocked over what had happened. They refused to let her enter their home. Her parents did not give her any support or consolation, but made her understand that they would be happy, if she killed herself, as it was an embarassment to the whole family to have a woman like her around. They had to show her a stern attitude in order to show everybody that their family was not of that kind,and thus save its reputation. The ability to marry away other daughters of the family was at stake.

It is very rare that a widow gets pregnant in India. Most women in such situations cannot bear the mental agony, the contempt and abuses from all sides. Seldom there is any other escape from mental distress than suicide in rural Rajasthan. They jump into a deep well, and in western Rajasthan the wells are really deep, the depth mostly ranges from 40 meters to 200 meters, so the person falling down dies immediately, and there is no chance to save her.

Suicides among rural Rajasthani young girls are rather common. In Chelana, for example, during a five years period up to 1977 three girls died by jumping into wells. It was therefore expected that also Nirmala would kill herself through jumping into the gap of a deep well. If she had done so, her relatives would have cremated her according to the customary Hindu rituals, and they would have been weeping loudly and bitterly beside her body. During the twelve days after death when the memorial rites are being carried out, the assembled women do not just sit crying in silent sobs, they are wailing their woes, so that all the neighbours can hear, and they shout their story of sorrow straight out into the air, in a rytmic way, as if they were singing a song of mourning punctuated with sobs and sudden cries. At each activity of the day like eating, grinding the grain and filling the water pots, they would tell how nicely she used to help them and in sobs and cries ask who will keep them company now. The assembled group of women relatives would remind each other how diligently she used to clean cartloads of brass pots. The women elders would also praise her for her radiant smile and affectionate embrace when coming back after journeys, and cry together at the memory of all other sweet and charming things she used to do.

But Nirmala did not die. She left her home, but she did not jumb into a well. She went to Sunari Behanji, a lady teacher in her parent's village, whom she trusted and she opened her heart for her. Sunari Behanji belonged to the goldsmith's caste, and she was a widow living alone, after having separated from her in-laws as well as her own relatives. After having become a widow, while still living with her in-laws Sunari Behani once got a letter from another woman she knew. The letter was opened in her absence by her in-laws, who wanted to know, who had written the letter and why. Her in-laws were all illiterates, so they went to someone that could read it for them. The person they consulted were not very good at reading either, but as he did not want to show his shortcomings in that respect, he tried his best to spell through the letter and filled the gaps in understanding with his own imagination. As Sunari Behanji's in-laws were full of anxiety and suspicion, and already was more or less convinced that it must be a love letter, it was convenient to him to confirm their suspicion, after having gone through the letters a few times. He told them that the letter was from a 'bhayal' (i.e. beloved or boy friend in Mavari), which seemed to be very close to her. The letter was very bad for the reputation of their family, he said, and advised them not to show the letter to anybody.

It is very common that letters to women are read by menfolk of the family in Rajasthani villages before they are given to the adressee. Sometimes it is read out aloud, so that the whole family can listen. If the girl or woman resists, it is considered bad behaviour, which is resented by everybody. Regardless of the content of the letter such a resistance from a woman is considered to prove that she has something to hide. The original cause of the dispute is then often forgotten, and her shameless way of replying in-laws becomes the new topic of discussion.

If the relatives really get convinced that a lady of their family has a love affair in secret with somebody, and if she protests and starts to argue with them, she is likely to face both abuses and physical punishment to an unbearable extent. If such a woman is really adamant and independent in her nature, and does not yield, the hatred of her in-laws simetimes reaches such a pitch, that they catch her and forcibly cut her nose with a knife which leaves an open wound and ugly look. It is considered a just and proper punishment for a rebellion woman by all those villagers, who get to know about the incidence. Not only a widow but also another woman risk a nose cut by her relatives, if they think they have been insulted by her, or that she has spoilt their reputation in the society.

But it is more common that men get their nose cut in this way than women, as most village women of Rajasthan know how to be meek and submissive, especially when they are young.

It is difficult to know how many women, who silently suffer with a cut nose behind her pardah, and how many have committed suicide in despair after having got their nose cut. Tan Dan Detha has seen several hundreds of men, who have got their nose cut in Rajasthani villages during his many travels around western Rajsthan, and also several womn with their noses cut. In the hospitals of western Rajasthan patients are hospitalised for plastic surgery of cut noses, according to Tan Dan.

Assaults like cutting noses of others are certainly a criminal offence, according to the law of the Indian government. However, it is often difficult to know for sure even by the one who has got his nose cut, by whom the crime was done. He might have been caught by many strong arms in the darkness of the night, and then left with a bleeding nose, while the sound of footsteps die away in different directions. Often there are no witnesses. Even if the offender gets arrested and and there is a court case, he does not get more than six months imprisonment, and is soon out again, while the victim has to walk around with his face disfigured for the rest of his life. A similar punishment would have been meted out also if another small part of the body had been damaged by an act of physical violence, for example a toe, a finger, or a tooth. Cutting somebody's nose, however, is a deliberate act, which goes far beyond the suffering from a physical disability. It is a life punishment meant for humiliating the person concerned. Everybody shall see that this is a person, who has committed the sin of offending his enemies, and that they have taken revenge on him. Nobody is supposed to have respect for such a degraded person. His cut nose is considered the proof of his weakness, his inability to resist the power of his enemy. For the British, who introduced the present system of legal punishment, it might have appeared reasonable to mete out the same punishment for those who cut a finger of somebody as for those who cut a nose. For the offended person, however, it makes a world of difference, at least for a Rajasthani villager, who hardly can find any justice in this kind of indifferent legal treatment of a crime, which is so loaded with social values. Neither did the inheritors of British power in India in the 1970s seem to give any special attention to such aspects. For somebody who does not want to get a life imprisonment for murder, cutting the nose can be a safer alternative, which in traditional rural Rajasthan almost achieves the same effect.

Sunari Behanji got to know there was a letter for her, as soon as she returned home. As she did not have any 'bhayala' (boy friend) she did not believe her in-laws, when they told her that the letter was from a male person, and she wanted to see the letter. Unlike her in-laws she had been to school for a few years, and knew how to read properly. She was sure the letter was from a lady she knew.

But the in-laws did not want to show her the letter. All the in-laws from the smallest child to the oldest adult considered themselves as powerful bosses in front of their daughter-in-law. They were used to order her around, and not to get demands from her. They felt it was improper of her to ask them to show the letter, as if she had any right over them. She was told she lacked humility. The fuss went on for many weeks, and at last Sunari Behan decided to live an independent life, if possible. Somehow she manged to get the help of others to become an teacher of a girls' primary school in another village, and she left her in-laws secretly. Her in-laws were boiling with anger over the blow to their prestige. However, she belonged to the sunar (goldsmith) caste, which was a lower caste than that of Baniyas, and somewhat less strict with regard to widows. Like other castes dealing with wealth and business also the goldsmith caste had a less violent tradition than the Rajputs and ordinary farming castes. Hence, nobody tried to take revenge by cutting her nose or injure her otherwise, although they came several times to her new village and give her beatings.

Sunari Behanji took care of Nirmala, and told her to be courageous, to bear the child and try to live on. She took Nirmala to an orphan's home in Ajmer, where she was allowed to stay during her pregnancy. Nirmala stayed at the home for several months, but bad luck continued to follow her. Both she and her baby died at the premature delivery which was caused by a fall in a staircase.

Chelana castes and their family honour

The Jats of Chelana constitutes about one third of the total village population. There are a total of eight hundred families living in Chelana of which 200 families are agricultural labourers from other villages migrating to and fro between their original village and Chelana for the last two decades. They belong to a large number of castes united in poverty and in search of work, except a few baniyas, who have come to make business. Most of the labourers are Malis. Of the remaining 600 original Chelana families about 140 to 150 families belong to the Jat caste and an equal number of Rajputs. There are 15 to 20 Charan families and an equal number about of Mali families. The Bhambis (traditionally leather workers) have 40 families, and also the Chawkidars (previously traditional thieves, nowadays stonecutters, agricultural labourers, and owners of small farmholdings), and 8 bhangi (sweeper) families.

The old established upkeepers of feudal habits and customs in Chelana are about two hundred strongly dominating families, mostly of Rajput, Charan, Brahmin, and Baniya castes. Including migratory Mali labourers there is another group of about three hundred families, who feel themselves to be better than the shudras, and are full of admiration for their still powerful former feudal lords in the first group, and tries to imitate their practises rather than challenging them with the self-confident of the liberated. It is this group of families, mainly Jats and Malis, who now takes an increasingly keen interest in protecting the reputation of their families by preventing their young widows to remarry, and such families, who have adopted Rajput practises of this kind, are highly appreciated within their caste and by the village as a whole. The remaining 300 families living in Chelana belong to touchable and untouchable shudra castes and other lowranking groups, and hardly any of these families have yet any ambition to improve their reputation in the society by preventing their widows from remarrying, although some of them try to stop other practises looked down upon by the higher castes. For example, the bhambis have stopped doing any leather work, and a few low caste families have stopped eating meat.

The increased strictness against widows among Jats and Malis in recent years may also be due to the fact that many families of these castes earlier were propertyless tenants through generations, but since Independence 1947 they have become owners of the land they earlier cultivated as feudal tenants. Now when they also have property like the Rajputs, these families feel more strongly than before the need to keep their families together for protecting their property, prosperity and reputation. It has strengthened the joint family way of living among these castes, and more relatives wants to have a say in proposals of remarrying widows of the family. It is more likely than before that respectable persons feel that there is a risk that they themselves and the family as a whole will be put to ridicule, when other get to know that a former daughter-in-law of their family now has become the wife and property of a stranger, who can enjoy a sexual relationship with her.

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### Chapter 13 Tan Dan was sent to a public school

After his two years at Devli Tan Dan's family at Chelana thought he should get really good education so that he could become a government officer. They sent him to Vidya Bhavan at Udaipur, an expensive boarding school, where he studied in the eighth and nineth class.

Ravi Dan did not go to any secondary school, as the family in this childhood around 1940 lived in scarcity still healing the wounds after the Hariadhana disaster. Ravi Dan therefore only went to a primary and middle school at Anandpur Kalu, the Mali village at the river Luni. Although on his own acquiring considerable engineering and technical skill and knowledge in spite of his scanty education, he has never taken any interest in reading books, not thinking that books can do any good to him or to anybody who lives a farming life and has to live among realities.

Some of Tan Dan's cousins and his eldest brother Sukh Dan got enough education in the 1930s and later to get government jobs later on.

Tan Dan being 18 years younger than Ravi Dan had the good luck of getting his education in the 1950s, when the Deth family's economy again was improving, much due to Ravi Dan's efforts, and the family could afford to send Tan Dan to such an expensive school as Vidya Bhavan for his studies. It was of the public school type for upper class children coming from homes all over northern India.

Tan Dan expelled from the public school

In 1959 when Tan Dan was in the 9th class his family married Tan Dan to Chanda. He was then fifteen years. Vidya Bhavan had coeducation and therefore the school did not want to have married students and there was a rule that married students were not allowed to study at the school. So next year Tan Dan was not allowed to continue. He was forced to leave the school. It came as a surprise for his family, in which there were many experts on caste rules but did not know about public school rules. It had never occurred to them that it might be objectionable to be married, as they came from a backward rural environment where marrying at fifteen years of age was considered as late if anything, especially as many Chelana children got married at a very tender age. The parents of most other children of the Vidya Bhavan school were much more socially advanced, so the question of marriage was not a problems to any other student.

Rules of public schools in India are as inflexible as caste rules, and it was not possible to change the decision to expel Tan Dan in spite of the fact that he and his friend and fellow student Narendra Chhajed kept arguing with the teachers. Narendra Chhajed was a hotheaded boy full of rebellious ideas. He told the teachers that if Tan Dan must be expelled then also married teachers should be expelled. Such arguments only annoyed the teachers even more, as they thought that it was also a part of the rules of the public school that students should keep quiet and not argue with the elders.

Narendar Chhajed of Vidya Bhavan, who became an active communist

Narendar Chhajed completed his schooling at Vidya Bhavan, but continued his rebellious ways. He became a political worker for the Coummunist Party, and a strong admirer of Mao-Tse-Tung of China. He became involved in various agitations and clashes in Indore and Bombay and was arrested and put to jail several times.

Tan Dan left school but not his reading habit

After Tan Dan had left school against his wish in 1959, he lived at Chelana where he started to work on the Detha Brothers Agricultural Farm. The seven cousins were also thought of as a kind of brothers, chachere bhai, i.e. uncle brothers, hence they were fourteen brothers in all.

Tan Dan continued to read and to satisfy his curiosity in various fields through books, which he kept reading on his own without getting and diploma or other worldly gains, something which Ravi Dan and the others could not understand. In their opinion studies should be done in such a way that degrees and graduations were obtained, and after that a Government job. Then Tan Dan could be useful to the family, as he would be able to give a helping hand in a way similar to that of Sukh Dan, the eldest of the brothers. They did not like that Tan Dan should sit in a corner and read for himself for nothing, while Ravi Dan and the other men spent the evenings chatting with each others, and the youngsters of the joint Detha family kept listening. Unlike Tan Dan they were attentive and tried to learn from the elders.

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### Chapter 14 The Detha farm and the Baniya merchants

Farm management

The young Dethas worked together with their field labourers in the 1950s

Up to 1960 Jugti Dan's grandsons were all young and simple enough to go out in the fields and work themselves together with the hired labourers, supervising and instructing them on the work site itself.

After 1960 the difference on the farm between the Detha farm owners and the hired labourers became more clearcut. Both with regard to the kind of work they did and social status. Those with property could afford chatting away their time in the shade during working hours, but their working hands could not.

Tan Dan and the Detha Farm account work in the 1960s

From around 1960 the labourers on the Detha farm were left alone in the fields, as Mehar Dan and Ravi Dan were busy either in the office of Jugti Dan's 'pole' building or on journeys. Tan Dan had by then in 1959 come back from Vidya Bhavan and worked as one of the younger brothers on the joint Detha farm. Mehar Dan and Ravi Dan wanted Tan Dan to work with the accounts in the office, which Tan Dan did for a few months, but he did not like it, as he had to follow the instructions of the accountant. He got employed as an accountant by Mehar Dan and Ravi Dan when the Detha Brothers Agricultural Farm started in the early 1950s.

The accountant came from another village, and he had earlier worked as a private teacher. He changed profession when a government school opened at his village, and his future as a private teacher became uncertain. He belonged to a caste close to the baniyas.

Tan Dan objected to the instructions of the accountant, which he in turn had got from Ravi Dan and Mehar Dan, because he thought there were various kinds of manipulation entries as well as a number of meaningless account operations, like crediting various members of the family with income, as if they could lift their shares like partners in a business enterprise. In fact they could not, as Tan Dan had found out himself, because the cash books were under the custody of the accountant, who only gave money to anybody with the permission of Mehar Dan, who was the main person in the office, as Ravi Dan did not involve himself in the office routine.

Mehar Dan only gave money to others, if he himself liked the purpose for which it was requested. Otherwise he was very strict and did not bother what was written in the accounts with regard to partnership shares of the relatives.

In the 1950s and 1960s it was as if Jugti Dan's big money box had come back in the family, the one which he only opened himself with a key which he never handed over to anybody, not even when he was out out travelling. But now the accountant was the key, Tan Dan felt.

Mehar Dan management and Tan Dan in the 1960s

From 1960 Tan Dan had been working on the farm. In the beginning he was still a teenager, and therefore very much junior to Mehar Dan. At that stage Tan Dan was busy learning things, and he went on fairly well with Mehar Dan, and also with Ravi Dan, as it was a matter of assisting and executing orders about things on which he in the beginning did not have much of his own opinion. Out in the field he assisted Raju Ram, the foreman, and in the office assisting Babu Lal, the accountant, in the task of transporting crops to the baniyas on ox carts and tractor trailers. Mostly these transports went to Merta, and sometimes to Jalagarh. At the house of the Baniya, he met Mehar Dan, who had reached there before Tan Dan and entertained the Baniya with talk and business conversations and friendliness in general.

Journey to Merta market in Tan Dan's youth

Tan Dan has gone to Merta market many times to sell agricultural produce of the Detha farm. In his childhood he went along as co-travellers sitting beside the driver on one of the ox carts, being sent by mother to buy clothes for himself, mostly on his own request, as he wanted to enjoy the adventure of a long journey together with all the grown-ups. Later in the 1960s Tan Dan was a part of the team of relatives and neighbours who went to Merta to sell their produce. They used to go in ox cart caravans of about forty carts, starting in the evening after dinner, sitting driving the carts the whole night in order to reach Merta at sunrise next morning when the auctioning started at the agricultural wholesale markets of Merta. Mostly they went in December, as the kharif cash crops got threshed and ready for marketing in the winter. It was cold to sit on the ox carts the whole night, especially as the journey went towards the north, so they had to face a chilly northerly wind blowing down from the snowy Himalayas far away. Sitting on the cart in the winter night with the stars above and a free horizon over the desertlike grassland, Tan Dan tried to protect himself from the cold by sweeping his blanket around him, and by sitting sidewise on the cart not to be hit by the cold wind in his face, reluctantly taking out his hand from the warmth of his blanket, whenever he had to pull the rope of his oxen. At noon they had sold their produce and turned back home in the bright sunlight. They arrived at Chelana in darkness.

Baniyas and farmers and sinful work

The baniyas would tell the commercialized Chelana farmers they developed more and more intimate business relationships with that they should adopt very clean, sinless, and sacred ways of living, and avoid 'papodaro', i.e. the sinful act of killing insects and other small life. Only by avoiding 'papodaro' would they be prosperous. As such killing was to some extent unavoidable for a farmer, he was in fact condemned to a life of perpetual sinning.

As the baniya, on the other hand, only lived on his money, and therefore faced no risk of committing any physical violence himself, the baniya got his clients to feel they were inferior sinners not worthy of a better treatment than the one they got.

There is a joke among farmers in Chelana and the rest of Marvar which Tan Dan has heard from his father, which is about a baniya and his profession. A baniya dropped his pen on the ground without noticing it and a farmer at his side wanted to tell him, but being uneducated and illiterate he did not know what such a thing as a pen should be called. Anxious to be polite he smiled and pointed at the pen while saying in a soft voice, "Sethji, apri chhuri pargi", which means Respected merchant, you have dropped your slaughtering knife. Getting surprised Sethji quickly looked up from his papers, picked up his pen and asked the farmer what he meant by calling it a chhuri, i.e. a butchering knife. The latter pointed first at the pen and then at his own throat saying, "Mari gale to aeej phiree", i.e. My throat is cut with this one.

Chelana baniyas mixing dust in foodgrain

In 1964 in Chelana, Merta, Jalagarh, and Jodhpur ordinary wheat was sold at about 20 Rs per maund (40 kg), i.e. fifty rupees per quintal. The price per quintal was only a Rupees higher in Jodhpur than in Chelana. The consumer who bought grain in Chelana in the retail shop had to buy 65 to 70 Rs per quintal for the same uncleaned grain, which mostly had got more unclean after the baniya had mixed the wheat of ordinary quality and price with some sacks of low quality wheat grain which might have been bought for half the price and also mixed with dust and other rubbish, such operations mostly carried out outside the godowns of the baniyas, with the help of labourers who are especially trained in this, often taking out fifty good bags at a time and ten to fifteen bags of cheap inferior quality making a big heap of such various sacks of different qualities, the content of the good bags being put on the bottom, and the contents of the other bags spread over it, and then a few shovels of dust and sand are thrown over the heap to give it added weight and in this way compensate for the labour expenses which the baniya has had for doing this mixing operation, after which the whole heap is throughly mixed and put into bags again sold at a uniform price as first class grain, which in fact is the only grade of grain mostly available in 1964 as well as 1978, although sometimes the retail shops also have purely inferior grain of only low quality to sell at extra low price to those who are most poor, but very seldom any pure unmixed grain, apart from the bags meant for the baniya family's own consumption.

Tan Dan has seen these mixing practices carried out at Chelana by practically every grain merchant. He has seen it being done twice a year for decades not only for wheat, but for all foodgrains and cash crops.

Although Tan Dan knows and all other villagers also know that these manipulations are illegal they are carried out openly in front of everybody. Most people find nothing wrong in it, neither the farmers of Chelana, who in fact get cheated indirectly and the consumers, mostly poor labourers who are the ones who buy most of the foodgrain in the shops, having no foodgrain from their own farm. They get cheated in the shop itself, unnecessarily buying a lot of dirt and dust, but all with which Tan Dan has been discussing this problem in Chelana have told him that they do not want to get involved in any action, as they know that the baniyas are able to harm others. He can easily give a bottle of sharab (liquor) to some poor labourer, against a promise from the poor person that the should do one thing or the other to harm the one who is trying to oppose the baniya.

Most people tell Tan Dan that mixing of foodgrain with other material and similar practices is the whole life of a baniya, who is only doing his work. They tell there is nothing wrong in it, and it is mean of Tan Dan to meddle into other people's business.

Mehar Dan's friendly relations to baniyas

Mehar Dan had helped some baniyas in the early 1940s when there was a big food scarcity. As a transporter Mehar Dan had helped them to send wheat from Jalagarh to Merta where the price was twice that of Jalagarh. It was wheat of Government procurement quotas meant for public distribution, and these black marketing activities of the baniyas were therefore illegal. Mehar Dan has always been close to the baniyas, who in his eyes are the real friends of the people. He thinks the baniyas are unnecessary harassed by Government officers and bureaucracy. In his opinion it is the latter who prevents the baniyas to work efficiently and keep down their prices. This philosphy has been carefully taught to him by his many baniya friends, most of them living outside Chelana.

Mehar Dan also believes in the moral obligation to pay back debts at any cost, regardless of the terms on which the loans were given, and regardless of the amount of interest requested.

Borrowed money

From 1953 onwards the Dethas started to borrow money, for the development of their joint farm, while earlier Ravi Dan only had used money which he had saved in advance. They wanted money for having better pumping sets, constructing irrigation channels to the fields, leveling their fields so they could be flood irrigated and to buy organic manure and chemical fertilizers. They wanted cultivation equipments of various kind for mechanized agriculture.

In the first years of the Detha Brothers Agricultural Farm they spent about 20,000 to 30,000 Rupees per year, including both investment expenditure and yearly running expenditures. All the time they had to borrow money, as they did not have this much cash themselves. They went to friends and relatives all around Jodhpur District in order to find persons who were willing to give loans. Such friendship loans were only temporary, however, and they were not of sufficient amounts. Therefore, Mehar Dan and Ravi Dan had to approach more regular moneylenders for a longterm solution to their financial needs. Most of them were baniyas with whom Mehar Dan had contacts earlier. Especially the six friendly business families Mehar Dan had got acquainted with in the 1940s. From these traditional moneylenders the Dethas borrowed most of their money for almost two decades, all the time paying back old loans, and getting new ones for new equipment needed for new daring ventures on the Detha farm, as the baniyas felt convinced that the enterprising and successful Dethas would handle the money in such a way that they would be safely returned. They never got disappointed. Mehar Dan and Ravi Dan always paid back in time, and they always paid the large sum of interest which was to be handed over every six months. The Dethas paid the customary rate of interest which in the 1950s on paper was 24% per year but in reality was much higher, as all the produce of the farm had to be sold through the financers. They paid them a lower price than the price the Dethas would have got, if they had sold their crop on their own in the market. Moreover, they had to agree on various kinds of deduction for services of handling the sale. It was services which were never asked for but still had to be accepted.

Mehar Dan himself had always paid back his private loans, on which he paid the customary 44% interest per year in the 1960s. He made the joint Detha farm to do the same. Up to the time when Mehar Dan left the joint farm in 1968 the joint farm enterprise from 1953 had paid twenty lakh Rupees to baniyas in the form of interest alone, according to Tan Dan.

Tan Dan got his own ideas on farm management

In 1963 and 1964 Tan Dan started to feel more experienced, both as he got to know the work better, and as he had the habit of reading literature on many subjects related to agriculture and also because he travelled around a lot on his own, seeing both rural life and other farmers. He visited research stations and universities for looking at their trials and crop experiments. So he started to tell his own ideas, which others considered to be bad behaviour.

Among other things Tan Dan did not want Mehar Dan and Ravi Dan to pay so much money in interest to the baniyas for the loans borrowed from them. Apart from quarreling with Mehar Dan and Ravi Dan directly, he also wrote to Sukh Dan and Hamir Danabout it. He told Mehar Dan that he did not like his policy of showing so much leniency to the Baniya. They all had to suffer from parting with so much money, which was done only for keeping up their reputation among this group of people, who in fact did not deserve the money. These Baniyas only fooled others by their talk about business morals, duties and rules, which they all had made themselves to their own advantage.

Gradually Mehar Dan started to avoid bringing Tan Dan along on his trips to businessmen for selling commodites.

Expensive credit in high demand at bustling Chelana

In the 1960s more farmers expanded their production by applying modern farming methods. Such increasingly well-off farmers became known as 'progressive farmers' among Indian intellectuals and administrators. Then the demand for agricultural credit increased. The services of the moneylenders became more in demand than ever, and the rate of interest on their loans increased to 44% per year in Rajasthan, although the rate of price inflation in the 1960s was still very low in India, about 4% per year. The need for increased credit supply to Indian farmers from sources with greater social responsibility than private moneylenders became evident.

Since the 1950s Ravi Dan had belonged to the group Rajasthani Congress politicians that consisted of increasingly modern and affluent farmers. They urged the Government to launch new schemes of rural finance with Governmental support

In their speeches prominent politicians promised to replace privat moneylending with cooperative credit and other Government schemes, and to strictly enforce punishment of illegal practices of private moneylenders.

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###  Chapter 15 Buying pumps and tractors

Buying machine equipments for the Detha farm in the 1960s

Until 1967 Tan Dan was still sent to shops and dealers of farm machinery. Especially to those in Bombay and Kotah, but also to Delhi, Jodhpur and Jaipur. It was mostly emergency visits for buying some spare part, which had broken down in tractors and electric pumping sets. The Detha farm had big pumps of up to 100 horse powers. In those days of the 1960s very few such pumps existed on farms in entire northwestern India, and they were not for sale in Rajasthan. The pumps were manufactured by Kirloskar on special orders by modifying pumps which this company manufactured for industrial purpose. For this task the mechanic Daya Ba and Kishore Singh went to Tamil Nadu to the factory there. Tan Dan himself bought together with Daya Ba all the pumping sets which at the end of the 1960s were used in the Detha well, and the village well. They bought the equipment according to specifications given by Ravi Dan.

Tractor development in Chelana

In the early 1950s Ravi Dan bought a 35 horspowers Ferguson tractor for the Detha farm, and replaced it with another Ferguson 35 horsepowers a few years later. It was the only tractor on the Detha Farm and in the whole village of Chelana as well as neighbouring villages. The nearest tractor was the one owned by the Thakur of Khejarla. No other tractor was bought in Chelana by any villager until 1960, when eight new tractors were bought at the same time by several farmers under the leadership of Ravi Dan, who bought two tractors for the Detha farm. Jattan Singh bought one tractor, Chiman Dan bought another one. Chiman Dan bought his tractor together with Harka Ram, a Daroga of Jugti Dan's concubine. Harka Ram owned 40 acres together with his two brothers. The fifth tractor was bought by the the children of Naru Dan's sister. They lived in another village, but took the opportunity to buy their tractor in the same batch as the Chelana villagers. The tree other tractors were also bought by farmer of other villagers, who were friends of Ravi Dan and took advantage of his initiative of buying a whole batch of tractors. The tractors were bought from a machine shop in Kota, who had imported these tractors from Checkoslovakia. All of them were 42 horsepower tractors of Superzetor brand, which were driven by the proud farmers themselves all the way from Kota. When they came to Chelana, they were received as heroes by a big crowd.

They had returned from their long journey, riding on their big tractors which were noisy, shining and locked impressive in the muddy and dusty village environment.

At the _bhandavo_ , the welcoming ceremony, puja worship was performed by the womenfolk of the Detha family. They put colour marks on the shining surface of the bonnets, and tied the sacred thread around the head lights. Each tractor driver also got its colour mark and sacred thread.

The first in line was Ridmal of the Bhambi caste. It was unusual also to honour an untouchable in this way, and some persons objected to Tan Dan's mother putting a mark in Ridmal's head, an act which people later kept talking about in the village. Most people, high and low, disapproved of it as something improper. Those who objected wanted that Ravi Dan should sit up on the tractor instead of Ridmal, but he insisted that Ridmal should get the honour. No Brahmins were present to the good luck of Ridmal, who definitely would not have been worshipped by a Brahmin. Ridmal was the first one to get prasad, i.e. the sweets given at Puja. After that all the others were given their piece of gur. Ravi Dan did this on purpose as a demonstration against the Brahmins, who were not invited, as Ravi Dan and some of his male relatives did not like them. However, there were also Detha men friendly to Brahmins. Among these were Mehar Dan and also Naru Dan, who was fond of Manu. The women of the Dethas in Chelana were all without exception extremely loyal and submissive to the Brahmins, enjoying their visits in the daytime, when their less friendly husbands were away. They accepted the praise and blessings of the visiting Brahmins, and were happy to have the privelege to give the pious visitors some donation. Also Ravi Dan's and Tan Dan's wife behaved like that. In this respect they were completely outside the control of their husbands, as the ladies felt they had greater obligations to the representatives of the Gods than to their husbands.

Next year (1961) Ravi Dan again arranged an expedition of tractor buyers from Kota. This time Tan Dan participated, and travelled on one of the tractors. He was then seventeen years of age.

This time they bought four tractor of fifty horsepowers each. One tractor was kept on the Detha farm, another one was bought by a relative near Jalagarh, and the third by a Jat in Ransigaon village situated on the Jalagarh road between Khejerla and Hariadana.

The Dhanji tractor story

The fourth tractor the Dethas also intended to keep on the Detha farm, but a Jat farmer from Bhadana village near Nagaur, about seventy miles from Chelana, unexpectedly turned up the day before this second batch of tractors came to Chelana from Kota.

His name was Dhanji, and he had come to buy a tractor, which he wanted to have straight away. He said he had come to know that the Dethas had a lot of tractors. He wanted to talk to the person of the family from whom he could buy, he told, and he did not want to waste time on others. He was brought to Ravi Dan, who asked him why he wanted the tractor. Dhanji looked very concerned and serious, when he replied that it was a life and death matter to him. His prestige was at stake. "Maro to nak jave he", he replied, implying that his nose was about to get cut. It was a symbolic way of telling that his prestige was in danger.

At home he had a younger brother's wife, who often had insulted him by pointing out to him that he was unmarried, as he could not get a wife. He disliked her very much for this arrogance. She and Dhanji's brother lived next door to Dhanji. Now they were busy building a stone wall around their house compound (angan). They had built the wall a bit on his side, which he had complained about. Again she had abused him, asking him in scorn, if there was not space enough for his tractor. He could not stand such talk and wanted to give her a lesson.

He had come to buy a tractor in order to get her silent.

While pouring out his heart to the Dethas, he told them it had been his good luck that his sister-in-law this time did not scorn him for being unmarried, as he now felt so angry that he would have been forced to get a wife just to close her mouth, and he really hated the thought of having a wife after having seen his sister-in-law.

Ravi Dan tried to dissuade Dhanji from the idea of buying a tractor, telling that such family quarrels soon passed over. There was no need to buy a tractor just to put one's relatives on place. Dhanji did not want to listen to such talk. He told them firmly, - If I don't use my money when my prestige is at stake, what is the use of having money at all?

He had money and he would use it.

Ravi Dan then changed the topic, and asked if he knew how much money a tractor would cost. Dhanji was not interested in knowing that. He told them he would pay, whatever the price was. He wanted them to give him a tractor straight away, so he could bring it home and park it on his yard. They could take as much money as they liked. He had a whole room full of money, he said. - Please, come along.

It was no use trying to persuade him, so Ravi Dan told some new tractors would come to the village next day. He could buy one of them, if he wanted to pay 12,000 Rupees, which was the full price. Dhanji replied he would give them more. - You should not to talk like a Baniya, for I have not come here to haggle.

Next day when the tractors arrived, Dhanji got his brand-new tractor. Nathji and Chhotu Singh, a tractor driver at the Detha farm, drove the tractor all the way to Dhanji's village and parked it on the courtyard in front of Dhanji's house.

Dhanji was happy. He took them into his house and showed them an inner room, in which there was a heap of one Rupee coins forming a slope from the wall down to the floor. Most of the floor was covered by coins. Dhanji was a shepherd of the Jat caste, and he had a flock of eight hundred sheep. Each year he sold their wool, but only to those persons who were prepared to pay in silver coins. He did not like paper notes, as these could be eaten by rats and ants, and might mould away in dampness in the rainy season. Moreover, notes had a script he could not read. It was all valid reasons for an illiterate farmer living in a straw hut.

Being a bachelor with simple habits, Dhanji's life was full of toil but hardly ever required any cash outlays, except in emergency situations like this one.

Nathji and Chotu Singh spent many hours in counting coins. At last they had got 12,500 one Rupee coins, which they put in jute bags meant for foodgrain. All the coins weighed about 100 kilograms. They took only the amount of coins which had been agreed upon.

Dhanji did not move the tractor from his backyard for a long time. Later on he gave it to his sister's family as a gift.

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###  Chapter 16 Tan Dan's tries to diversify farm production

Tan Dan and the many mail orders in the 1960s

In 1960 Tan Dan ordered a book in horticulture called 'Ferminger's Guide to Farming', from the Sutton Seed Comapny of Calcutta. He got it by mail against advance payment of 80 Rupees. Tan Dan got by mail another parcel, which he had ordered from Sutton Company with papaya seeds at the cost of about 120 Rupees, but then Mehar Dan and the accountant of the joint family farm got alarmed. They objected strongly, and called the other brothers and cousins of the joint family enterprise of the Dethas.

They all came down heavily on Tan Dan scolding him for wasting the money of their joint enterprise on all sorts of pamphlets and parcels coming by post from all parts of India and also from abroad; material which not only dealt with agriculture but also social science and all sorts of things in a very diversified field of interest. They asked each others why such a young and immature person as Tan Dan should send for all these things, most of it scientific writings which was meant for scholars, scientists and engineers and not for village lads such as Tan Dan, who at that time after having left schoool in the nineth class worked with various jobs in the village and on the farm.

Tan Dan's travelling experience in the 1960s

In addition, in the lean season he kept travelling on his own with whatever money he could get hold on from the farm and the joint family.

He lived a simple travelling life, going by whatever vehicle that was ready to give him a free ride, as he often had very little money in his pocket. He went around in rural Rajasthan to satisfy his curiosity about various odd habits of small forgotten ethnic groups, floating around in the large human ocean of Rajasthan and the rest of the Indian subcontinent. He went around chatting with people hearing about their life stories, finding out about their livelihood practices, their farming practices, herding practices, and stories about the past history of the groups of people he met. He used to make notes about them in his diary, feeling it was interesting, and hoping it would be useful some day. Coming to Chelana after some weeks of travel and sometimes longer, he kept company with his father Tej Dan telling him what he had seen and listening to what Tej Dan had experienced on his journeys around Rajasthan and adjacent areas as a cattleherder, when he was young of about the same age, around twenty years, mostly in the 1910s. Inspired by his father's stories, his father in fact being the only one in this Charan family, conscious and proud of its superior status in Chelana having a good caste and influence, with most family members striving for recognition in the emerging upper class of socalled 'progressive farmers' and urban elite, which are leading India of today feeling themselves to be more modern and intelligent than the communities of rural poors and backwards, whome Tan Dan had come across during his journey and kept pestering the family by talking about, feeling somewhat ashamed of having a relative so quaint that he spoils his career opportunities by keeping company with people who definitely have no respect in ordinary people's eyes, and only get ridicule for having backward habits. They told it was foolish of him to waste his time and life like that.

The successful management of the Detha Bandhu Farm in the 1960s

Mehar Dan, being the eldest of the cousins working in the Detha farm and having an active nature, was the main head of the farm, and he directed everyday life on the farm.

Ravi Dan was the one with new ideas and active in implementing new ventures, especially in irrigation and engineering. They worked closely together and cooperated well. All the others of the Detha Farm, both relatives and employed labourers took orders from them, and held them in high regard, considering them wise and experienced and felt grateful for working under such a good leadership. The Detha Farm was considered a model farm not only by the Dethas themselves, but also by the other Chelana villagers. Moreover, the farm was well-known all over Rajasthan. Several times in the 1950s and the 1960s the Rajasthan Chief Minister visited the Detha Farm.

The climax was when Ravi Dan in 1966 or 1967 got the prestigious Padam Shri Award from the President of India at a national function in New Delhi.

The Detha Farm specialized on cash crops

In 1964 Mehar Dan and Ravi Dan thought the Detha Farm should go in for largescale ventures. Therefore they wanted to specialize on cash crops to maximize profit even at the risk of increasing the economic vulnerability of the farm. They preferred to buy vegetables as well as foodgrains from others, and only grow cash crops such as jeera, sarson (mustard), and mirch (chillies).

The risk in foodgrain production due to the lack of grain market in Chelana area in the 1960s

Each area in Rajasthan had its own local strains of various foodgrains, i.e. cereals and pulses. These strains often had a low response to increased inputs. As yield and profit were low, Mehar Dan and Ravi Dan thought they should avoid growing foodgrain altogether.

The reason was also that in the 1960s in Rajasthan there was no organized grain market to which the landlords could sell their grain at assured prices, so they risked being stranded with a lot of grains, which they could not sell.

Foodgrain was a bulky commodity with a low value per weight unit compared to cash crops such as chillies. As transport facilities in the hands of the farmers was poor, the geographical range for selling foodgrain was narrow and they got dependent on a small circle of merchants. Dealing with a few colluding businessmen made his bargaining position weak and the price low. Chelana farmers with a marketable foodgrain surplus sold it at Chelana, Merta, and Jalagarh.

In the 1960s also the other landlords of Chelana felt it was a waste of valuable water to irrigate such ordinary crops as jowar and bajra, which only was used by the traditional dryland farmers without wells in the 1960s. The waterlords did not bother to cultivate any land at all in the kharif season, as they believed it would not give any profit.

However, they sometimes grow chillies. In the cash crop market for easily transported high value crops the market position resembled more that of pure competion with many buyers and therefore safer for the sellers, the farmers.

That was the position in 1964, a few years before the high-yielding wheat varieties were introduced into India. According to Tan Dan, these wheat varieties became known as the new triple gene varieties of wheat (socalled Mexican dwarf wheat) with many times higher yields than the ordinary local strains of wheat.

Tan Dan's attempt to grow foodgrain on the joint Detha farm in the early 1960s

After a few years on the Detha farm Tan Dan developed his own ideas about how the farm operations should be done. He became more independant in his work, which led to conflicts with Ravi Dan and Mehar Dan. In addition to complaining about office routines and the way business was done with the Baniyas, Tan Dan also told them it was wrong to grow cash crops on the whole farm. He wanted foodgrain crops instead, which would be more healthy for the village economy as a whole. It was important that the village should become selfsufficient in foodgrains. It would make the villagers less vulnerable to the manipulations of the baniyas and other exploiters of shortages and weakness.

He also thought it could be profitable. In order to prove it, he himself started to cultivate foodgrain in a corner of the big Detha Bandhu Agricultural Farm.

On the orders of Mehar Dan and Ravi Dan these crops were ploughed down again shortly after they had been sown and the space was given to some cash crop. But Tan Dan did not give up.

He sow bajra and jowar in the kharif season 1962 on an area of six acres, although nobody approved of it. Neither did Mehar Dan and Ravi Dan gave their permission. He sow one acre of jowar and three acres of bajra of commercial seeds for demonstration to his relatives and other farmers. For both these crops the seed grown were of selected strains of local varieties.

Tan Dan's trials with the sorghum strain Chavandia

Chavandia is a jowar strain meant for dry farming and used in Chavandia village in Nagaur district, which has been specializing on growing jowar, while surrounding villages have not grown this grain, and therefore it has maintained its purity, perhaps for hundreds of years.

The Chavandia villagers told Tan Dan that during a drought five generations ago, Jat villagers had gone to Malva with their kit and kin in search of food as nomads. There they got to know this strain, which they liked. That strain is nowadays cultivated by all Chavandia villagers, he was told. In discussion with villagers on his journeys around Rajasthan he was told by three or four farmers in other villages that the Chavandia strain was the best. In 1961 he therefore had a look at the standing jowar crop in Chavandia, which looked good with big earheads, yellowish green stalks and free from smuts. He was told by the villagers that this strain never was attacked by smuts, a disease which is common in Chelana and attacked all the varieties cultivated there.

Tan Dan tried and found it good and smut resistant. It did not get attacked by red rot either, which is a common disease on other local strains of Chelana. The yield of the Chavandia strain was two to three times as much as the local Chelana strains, which under normal conditions only yield 6 to 7 maunds per acre. Also the leaf and stalk production for fodder was about double and the animals ate it far better, which Tan Dan took as an indication of higher quality.

Tan Dan considers it to be the best local deshi variety he has tried, and he still grew it in the 1970s, when he was short of money for inputs, as the new sorghum hybrids require a lot of fertilizers, water, and most important of all, the right kind of pesticides, which were difficult to get and to operate.

With all these inputs the sorghum hybrid variety CSH-1 yields 20-25 maunds per acre under normal weather conditions if given 60 pounds (1 lb =0.454 kg) of nitrogen, 30 pounds of phosphate and 30 pounds of potash per acre. Tan Dan took it on trial in 1963, 1964 1965, 1967. These doses were half the ones recommended by the Government extension officers. While applying recommended doses i.e. 120, 60, 60 pounds per acre of N, P, KO2, Tan Dan got 32 maunds per acre.

For Chavandia Tan Dan gave 30 pounds of N per acre, and 30 pounds of P and no potash in order get the above mentioned 17 maunds per acre.

He found the Chavandia strain more profitable than the hybrid CSH-1 considering all costs. Even in those days of the 1960s when the fertilizer prices relative to foodgrain prices were less expensive than they became in the 1970s after the oil crisis.

Tan Dan was the first to start both Chavandia and the hybrid grain sorghum for irrigation at Chelana. He used to give three waterings to CSH-1, and one watering, if necessary, to Chavandia.

Chavandia sorghum got popular among some Chelana villagers

After a few cropping seasons he managed to get his Chavandia jowar to catch the attention of other farmers, and they started to place orders with Tan Dan for seed. About fifty farmers did that for cultivating small patches in 1964. Although Tan Dan stopped growing Chavandia for many years, as he got busy growing other crops, several farmers on their own continued to grow the Chavandia sorghum variety. They multiplied the seed on their own. Some of them went back to the Chavandia village in order to get new stocks of the same seed.

Tan Dan's desire to diversify the Detha farm in 1963

In 1963 Tan Dan argued they should have many lines of production on their joint irrigation farm. There should be poultry, piggery and horticulture in addition to foodgrain and cash crops. Such a diversification and intensification of the agricultural production would make the farm more balanced and stable and provide more employment.

Tan Dan starting poultry and pig units in Chelana 1963

He started his poultry and pig units in 1963, as a part of the Detha Bandu Agricultural Farm, after having seen such units on his vagabond journeys and reading about how to install and manage them in some of the many pamphlets, which constantly kept trickling in to the family farm enterprise. Tan Dan started and completed a small building of two rooms, where he started his small poultry and pig units against the wish of the rest of the brothers and cousins, himself financing the project by selling bags of foodgrain from the store of the Detha Farm and keeping the money in his own pockets to finance the pig and poultry branches of the Detha Farm, which nobody else wanted to approve, except Tan Dan's father Tej Dan, who now and then came to have a look and enjoy the sight of piglets and chick.

When the brothers and the rest of the menfolk of the joint farm started to get more strict with Tan Dan he was forcibly challenged about money, as he himself carried out many transactions, and told them he wanted this or that amount to be to his account, which they always disagreed to, but Tan Dan simply kept the money he wanted and had got from some sale, not caring for on what account they would write it.

One day the first dayold chicks ordered by Tan Dan from Arbor Acres arrived. Arbor Acres is a big pioneering hatchery farm outside Bombay, which had sent the chick by air to Jodhpur, and Tan Dan had received them at the Jodhpur Airport and then brought them by a jeep, which was going to Chelana anyway, for some other business of the Detha farm. At the arrival in Chelana with his four cardboard boxes half by half metre in size with fifty day old chicks in each box, each chick costing two Rupees and the whole lot 400 Rupees, the others on the farm got furious, thinking that both poultry and piggery were sinful enterprises, and that such things might be good for his highness the Maharaja of Jodhpur, but not for Tan Dan, asking him if he thought the hens would lay golden eggs now to make up for all the expenses. They thought he had a lot of nonsense ideas and was bent on implementing them at any cost at the expense of the others, who had to put up with his obstanacy, joking with each others that now Tan Dan had started to walk on his head, thereby meaning that he surprised them by doing the unexpected.

Tan Dan's relatives such as Mehar Dan and Ravi Dan said that piggery and poultry both were very dirty and sinful work and that a farmer should never adopt such things. Mehar Dan told him in stronger terms than Ravi Dan, being more influenced by Hindu religion and devotees. Mehar Dan said it was very sinful to live on raising animals in order to kill them. They called it papodaro, which meant to depend on something which is sinful (pap is sin in Hindi and Marvari). Such Hindu-influenced ideas of Brahmin and Baniya had started to get a strong hold in the Detha group since their new economic progress started around 1960. Especially it was the closer association and contacts with Jain baniyas such as the Osval as a result of more business transactions both with regard to moneylending and selling of the increased production. Many baniyas could sit chatting for a long time with big farmers such as Mehar Dan and Ravi Dan. Especially Mehar Dan, as he was more religious.

Local hens, according to Tan Dan

Local hens, in India called desi murgi, only lay about ten to sixteen very small eggs per month. The total laying period is only a few months per year consisting of intermittent laying periods of a few weeks each and in between short and long breaks. Such hens roam around in the open and pick whatever they can find. They are resistant to diseases, and small in size like their eggs.

Tan Dan's poultry unit at the Detha Bandhu Agricultural Farm in 1964

In 1964 at his small poultry in Chelana Tan Dan got from Abor Acre 200 chicks of the Abor Acre strain, 100 of which Tan Dan kept for his own poultry. He knew three persons who also wanted to start poultry with exotic breeds, and the rest of the chicks he sold to them. One lived at Jalagarh, another one in Jodhpur, and the third one in a village near Pipar.

Tan Dan had got the adress to the Abor Acres hatchery in Bombay from an American Peace Corp volunteer, who worked on poultry for the agricultural extension department of the Rajasthan Government. He had come to know about the Peace Corp volunteer and his extension work from a big private poultry farmer in Jodhpur.

Tan Dan also bought 50 day old chicks of the Highline strain from a hatchery in Ajmer. Before buying the chicks Tan Dan had thoroughly studied all his pamphlets on the subject, and talked to various poultry farmers in Jodhpur, Ajmer and Bikaner. With regard to exotic breeds he got to know that the raniket disease was an epidemic one on the north Indian poultry farms. Most breeds were affected on these farms including the Ranishaver breed, the most popular one in North India in those days. Certain other breeds kept by poultry farms in North India were resistant and therefore did not get infected. Abor Acre and Highline were such resistant breeds. In fear of the Raniket disease Tan Dan tried to avoid north India hatcheries and strains he knew were susceptible.

Tan Dan found that the Highline breed gave better profit then the Abor Acre, as the birds were smaller in size and did not consume so much feed for their maintenance. They lay between 240 and 280 eggs per laying period, which has a length, which has a length of ten months. Then follows a period of molting, i.e. not laying eggs, which may vary from sixty to eightyfive days, during which period the birds are restless. They keep quarreling and do unnecessary things. Birds which are too active during that period may never start laying eggs again.

From the time the dayold chicks arrived Tan Dan used to keep his birds for 28 to 30 months, after which he culled them and sold them alive to a merchant from Jodhpur. He came with his big basket and collected them at Chelana. The man resold these hens to non-vegetarian restaurants as socalled table birds. Although they were useless for this purpose, being too bony, restaurants kept buying them, as they were cheaper than fleshy poultry birds such as broilers. Besides, the supply of broilers was very limited. Hence, at restaurants many guests were served a heap of bones called tandoori chicken for which in the 1970s he had to pay something like 15 to 20 Rupees per bird, which the restaurant had bought for only 3 or 4 Rupees, according to Tan Dan.

Many other poultry farmers which Tan Dan has met, cull their birds after three years or more, selling even more skinny socalled chickens. However, Tan Dan thinks it is a better economy to cull already after 28 to 30 months, as the hens with advancing age eat less feed. Tan Dan thinks it is better to replace them with younger birds, which eat more and and convert feed into eggs more efficiently.

Abor Acre birds lay about 210 to 240 eggs per laying period of about ten months. These eggs were bigger in size than that of Higline birds, but that was of no advantage to the farmers with regard to marketed eggs, as the price was the same for all eggs regardless of size.

Tan Dan's experience of three types of poultry breeds

When Tan Dan started his poultry unit at Jodhpur in 1970, he tried the Keystone breed, which he found to be better than the two breeds breeds he had tried at Chelana in 1964. Highline and Keystone have under ideal undisturbed conditions the same egg producing capacity ranging from 240 to 280 eggs per laying period, and the same total length of productive life. However, the Highlines are more easily disturbed. They stop laying eggs or at least give less eggs for several days, when getting frightened by some animal such as a dog or a cat or even a crow coming close to the net. After such an event the whole flock of Tan Dan's Highline hens kept flying from one corner to another, and they did not eat anything. Tan Dan has met other owners of Highline birds with the same problem, so he thinks it is the nature of this strain to be highly nervous. If a tractor passed by, which sometimes happened, or if some children were playing or if some grown-ups were laughing nearby, it was a problem for the birds and for Tan Dan, who came running telling people to be careful and not disturb his hens, something which sounded crazy to other villagers, and further added to his reputation as 'bevkuf', i.e. a fool, who could not be taken seriously.

The Keystone birds had better nerves and did not get much frightened to the satisfaction of Tan Dan.

Tan Dan selling eggs and vegetables to Jodhpur 1964

Tan Dan sold his eggs to the same private merchant in Jodhpur who bought his culled hens. Once every fourth day Tan Dan brought his egg baskets by bus to Jodhpur, about four to five hundred eggs each time. The merchant was a Singhi, who are meateaters and less influenced by the non-killing philosphy of other baniyas such as the Jain baniyas and north Indian Hindu baniyas such as Aggarwals, who could never dream of trading in something as sinful as eggs. Also Muslim merchant buy eggs in Jodhpur and elsewhere. Inder got 17 to 25 paysa per egg and estimated he made a profit of 3 to 7 paysa per egg after deduction of the direct running costs, namely feed, labour wage of the assistant working in the poultry and piggery, as well as transport cost, mainly bus ticket. However, in this calculation he had made no deduction for the poultry shed and equipment, as these hardly incurred any cash outlays. Tan Dan used material found on the farm yard without much alternative use.

The bus trips for selling eggs at Jodhpur were mostly made by a labourer of the Detha Farm belonging to a community which did not mind handling non-vegetarian food such as eggs. Mostly he was a Muslim, sometimes a Chamar.

In order to improve the utility of the journeys, Tan Dan started vegetable production on a small scale. He sold his vegetables to another merchant in Jodhpur. It was the first time any Detha in Chelana started to grow vegetables for sale.

With regard to growing vegetables the other relatives had no objection for religious reasons. Still they thought it was unnecessary to start growing vegetables for sale on the joint farm of the Dethas, as as they did not believe it would give any profit, considering that the market was insecure and even more in the hands of the middlemen than the foodgrain market. Perishable vegetables must by disposed of immediately and the only place to sell them was Jodhpur, a place 67 miles (107 km) away. Too far.

Tan Dan's visits to agricultural research institutions in the early 1960s

In 1961 to 1963 Tan Dan made trips to various agronomic divisions and research farms and visited their libraries. Tan Dan found American books on sorghum in the library of the Jobner Agricultural University near Jaipur. (It was a branch of the Rajasthan Agricultural University, the main instititution of which is situated in Udaipur.) He also found books on sorghum at the Agricultural University Library in Udaipur and at the library of Pusa Institute, the IARA in New Delhi. These he studied on his own, being mainly interested in desert crops.

At neither Udaipur, Jaipur nor Delhi, Tan Dan could find any research findings from which he felt he could benefit from as a farmer. At least not with regard to millets, sorghum, and pulses

He also went to Ahmedabad and Palampur, an arid place in Gujarat. At both places the government of Gujarat carried out some trials on bajra. He also went to the Shivaji University of Agriculture at Amravati in Maharashtra, where he found good field trials linked to extension and local farmers in sorghum and groundnut and cotton. He also went to Agra Agricultural University, but found no trials on bajra nor of any other plants of interest to him, although some students did conduct some experiment which might be of scientific interest. At Agra they had large trials on sugarcane but that did not interest Tan Dan, as he did not grow it.

(Tan Dan told me that sugarcane is related to sorghum, and also sorghum has a high sugar content in its stem, the stem therefore being useful as fodder, if it is harvested early enough.)

Tan Dan also made a visit to the Ludhiana Agricultural University in 1963, and also to its research branch at Hissar, which later became the Haryana Agricultural University. First he went to Ludhiana, and asked for information on research findings on bajra, jovar, and pulses, dairy cattle and desert fruits, especially dates and pomegranates, trying to find out the possibility of cultivating these two fruits at Chelana. At Ludhiana Tan Dan asked if there was some results of their trials and research which could be directly applied and used by farmers growing these plants. At Ludhiana they had extensive research and experiments on these crops and especially on wheat, which Tan Dan's family also was growing, but it was difficult for him to find anybody who wanted to explain or to show him literature on these subjects. In 1963 Tan Dan was 20 years and could read English to some extent, but could speak very little, and apart from not getting much attention due to looking very young and having a village appearance wearing dhoti and shirt, he also had the handicap that most persons he wanted to talk with in those agricultural research and experiment institutions insisted on speaking in English with him, with the result that most converstions were finished in very short time, as he had no fluency in the language.

At Ludhiana they told him to most of his questions that he could go to their branch institutions at Hissar, as the person who had done some or the other study was there, although the report of his work was in Ludhiana. Therefore Tan Dan also went to Hissar in 1963, where they were more working on fruit research. There he was shown grapes on experimental plots, and Tan Dan got some cuttings of grape vine, which he carried home to Chelana..

At Hissar they also had dates, but not pomegranates. Tan Dan was advised to visit Abohar Fruit Research Station, so he went there also.

Grape cultivation on the Detha farm in the 1960s

At Chelana Tan Dan started a small grapevine nursery on a plot of a quarter of a bigha on a rocky land, in order to find out which variety was best suited for Chelana.

Next year, in 1964, the Detha farm in Chelana was selected as one of ten pioneering vineyard growers to be assisted in the area around Jodhpur, due to Ravi Dan, who was a well known person among Government officers and considered as a progressive farmer. The head of the Department of Horticulture of the Rajasthan Government together with some assistants went to Nagpur, where they got grapevine cuttings, which they then developed into their own nurseries run by the Rajasthan Government. From one of these Ravi Dan and his Detha family farm was supplied with grapevine cuttings by the senior horticulturist who came on a personal visit. He was a senior and dedicated worker keen on extending grapeyard farming. Government also supplied money and technical guidance and even kept a Government paid gardener at the four acres plot.

But the Department of Horticulture had not been careful enough, and a few years later when Ravi Dan's grapeyard was already fully developed and had yielded three or four crops it turned out that the cutting already from the beginning at Nagpur had been diseased with a deadly nematode species. All the ten grapeyards in the area selected as pioneers for grape cultivation had been contaminated. All the ten farmers had to cut down their grape vines completely to avoid any further spread of the nematodes.

In 1978 the four acres grapeyard plot was owned by Tan Dan's brother Kishore Singh. He could not grew anything there, as whatever he grew wilted away, being attacked by the nematodes.

Tan Dan's grape plants from Hissar continued to give good fruits and were healthy, but the grapevines were on Kishore Singh's land, and Tan Dan could not touch them, as Kishore Singh and Tan Dan were not on good terms. In the 1970s Kishore Singh uprooted the grape vines on the trial plot, telling he did not want a lot of rubbish on his land.

Tan Dan's pomegranate plantation in the 1960s

Tan Dan also started a trial orchard of four hundred trees of pomegranates of various varieties on the joint Detha farm. In 1962 he started to plant a few trees and then in 1966 and 1967 he planted the rest. In 1962 Tan Dan went to three different orchards, a private one at Jalagarh and another private outside Pali town, and a Government orchard at Jodhpur belonging to the Horticulture Department. Pomegranates of the same kabuli variety was selected from all the three orchards, although each of them had local ecological modifications. The orchard at Pali earlier had belonged to Jasvant Singh, the Maharaja of Jodhpur at the time of Aurangzeb. Aurangzeb once sent Jasvant Singh to Afghanistan to participate in a battle in against a new invader.

As he lived there for quite some time, he came across several very good pomegranate orchards. Also today Afghanistan is famous for its good pomegranates, both in India and other countries. Jashvant Singh liked the fruits and saw that the trees grew in an arid environment similar to that of Rajasthan. He therefore decided to start pomegranate orchards also in Marvar state. For that purpose he brought ten Afghani pathan families (muslims) who were professional gardeners specialized on pomegranates. One of the ten gardeners started raising a pomegranate orchard in the royal garden at Pali directly owned by the Jodhpur Maharaja. Now his offspring live there. It was from that garden Tan Dan cut about fifteen 'gooti' cuttings , one from each of the tree that Tan Dan selected as especially good fruit trees. He got the help of the gardeners. Tan Dan had learnt the 'gooti technique' from a book in horticulture called 'Ferminger's Guide to Farming', which he in 1960 had ordered from the Sutton Seed Comapny of Calcutta. (Gooti means grafting?)

The white grub problem in Chelana

In 1967 Tan Dan went to the office of the deputy director of agriculture in Jodhpur for asking about ways of protecting the fields from the white grub, which in 1965 had appeared as a pest in a Chelana field belonging to a Brahmin landowner. The field was adjacent to fields of the Detha Farm. The white grub kept spreading in Chelana, and it seemed this insect pest would invade the fields of the whole village, if nothing was done to stop it.

In 1978 white grub was still a problem in Chelana. Up to then the Government had provided no extension assistance to any Chelana farmer to stop this pest, in spite of Tan Dan's many visits to the Agricultural Department of Jodhpur in 1967.

In 1967 nobody believed Tan Dan, when he told the villagers that the wilting away of the crop was due to the white larvae. Tan Dan suspected that the grub cut the roots of the crop. When Tan Dan explained his hypothesis for the cause of the wilt the villagers considered it to be another brain ghost of Tan Dan, and one more example of his eccentric nature. Earlier the wilt had not been so clear, and those Tan Dan talked to therefore thought it was nothing to bother about.

However, since 1970 some of Khum Dan's and Kishore Singh's fields have became so badly affected by white grub that in September each year the kharif crops in these fields have wilted completely. Therefore, in the 1970s also Hamir Danapproached the Department of Agriculture at Tan Dan's suggestion. But the government officers working there had in 1978 still not taken any notice of this serious pest problem, as they were used to get orders from above, and hardly ever took any action in response to observations of individual farmers, unless some powerful person such as a politician had given a push, or the reporting farmer has some special connection to the officer concerned, for example being a relative.

In 1974 Tan Dan told an entomologist of the Central Arid Zone Research Institute about the white grub problem, and they got interested. He was told they intended to carry out field research on this topic. Tan Dan thinks that these studies still were going on in 1978, as research officers from CAZRI now and then come to Khum Dan's fields to make observations, but up to then no explanation or suggestion for remedy had been given, at least not in Chelana.

Tan Dan's description of white grub behaviour

Tan Dan made the following observations and conclusions on his own:

At the adult stage the white grub is a brownish red beetle of the size of the first one third of a finger of a grown-up man. The insect hibernates as a pupa down in the soil, including the soil of winter cultivated fields (rabi) sown in the end of October, when the wheather starts getting chilly, and then again sown in July immediately after the first Monsoon rains.

Immediately after the first rains in the monsoon season the pupa starts breaking through their cocoon shells, having by then become a beetle, which dig itself a tunnel up to the soil surface, and fly up in the sky, which they do in the evening just by the time of sunset. They fly with a mighty humming sound, which in itself is a beautiful music in harmony with the illuminated sunset scenery of the approaching darkness of the warm night in the oasis-like greenery of Chelana surrounded by vast stretches of dry fields and wilderness in pale ochre. Ample well water both for trees and crops through modern irrigation facilities is the main reason for the new greenery, which is also enjoyed by the white grub. After about half an hour the insects have all landed on one or the other leaf or twig of the bushes and trees around the fields of the village and there they will sit chewing all the night until dawn. At dawn they are out flying again, filling the air for some half an hour with their humming music while they search for suitable places where they can bore themselves down in the ground. They prefer a wet place or a cowdung dropping, or something else which is soft and easily penetrable. After boring themselves down to a depth of eight to twelve inches (2-3 dm), they spend the day laying eggs until the evening. Then they again come up to the surface and fly away for their night meal. This daily cycle continues for about one and a half week, after which they disappear. But new batches may come up after new spells of monsoon rain.

Four to six weeks later the eggs down in the ground hatch, and the larvae start moving around in the ground eating soil, growing from a few millimeters to about five centimeters. When the larvae still is small they move down in the soil to a depth of four to six inches (1-1.5 dm). Horizontally they may move a distance of five to six feet (1.5-1.8 m) and when they grow older and bigger move from thirty to fifty feet depending on soil texture. (In heavy clay soils they move slowly and with difficulty.)

These data are based on Tan Dan's own observations while digging in the soil.

In 1967 Tan Dan dug soil profiles in the crop fields in order to show other villagers the existance and behaviour of white grub. However, they did not believe him much, as Tan Dan's reputation as bevkuf i.e. an eccentric fool, was already firmly established. He dug at various stages of crop growth, and could see how the larvae increased the mobility rate by increasing age of the larvae.

Tan Dan thought the mobility of the larvae in the soil was facilitated in arable cultivated soil with a loose soil structure for the crop. He found that in the months of September and October the white grub, i.e. larvae, were most active. Then the infested fields were crisscrossed by the tunnels made by the grubs before they hybernate at the end of October down in the soil. They move around like earthworms but are must faster. Tan Dan also thought a white grub ate the soil through which it moved, in this way getting its nourishment.

Unfortunately the kharif crops gets into advanced growth stages, when the white grubs mature in the soil during these months at the end of the kharif season. Standing in the way for the larvae the plant roots are just cut off. According to Tan Dan's hypothesis, the plant roots are not especially attacked and eaten by the white grubs. The plants just died away by accident without having been to much benefit even to the larvae.

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### Chapter 17 Tan Dan's journey to USA

Tan Dan happened to see a circular

Tan Dan was busy with the white grub problem in 1967. On one of his trips to Jodhpur for finding out ways of protecting crop fields from that pest, he happened to see a circular about a study journey for farm youth to the United States hanging in the office of the Deputy Director of the Department of Agriculture in Jodhpur. The journey would be arranged by the 4H Foundation.

Tan Dan read in the circular that any farm youth could apply for the journey. The application should be submitted to the office of the Deputy Director of the Department of Agriculture in Jodhpur who would send it forward to the appropriate office at Jaipur.

Tan Dan applied.

First the Deputy Director at Jodhpur did not want to forward Tan Dan's application, as he thought Tan Dan did not have enough education. Not until Tan Dan demanded to get his refusal in writing, and threatened to write directly to the concerned Jaipur office that his application had been refused in Jodhpur, did the officer agree to send it.

It was sent along with other ones to be processed at the office of the Development Commissioner by the Director of the Section for Training. After some time Tan Dan was called to Jaipur for an interview.

The Vidya Bhavan brotherhood

In Jaipur several officers of the Development Commissioner office already knew Tan Dan, as Tan Dan in the late 1950s had studied for two years (8th and 9th class) at the Vidya Bhavan. It was a secondary school in Udaipur of the public school type for upper class children coming from homes all over northern India. This school had a good reputation in the circles of senior Government officers. Many of them had studied at that school themselves. After finishing the school the former students were united in a brotherhood, in which they all felt morally bound to oblige each other, wherever they were in the world.

Although Tan Dan had only stayed at Vidya Bhavan for two years, where he had been a problem to the teachers many times, it was now useful for Tan Dan to have been a student of that school.

The Development Commissioner himself had a son, who had had his bed next to that of Tan Dan at the dormitary of the Boarding School.

Selection procedure at New Delhi

As Tan Dan had a good backing in Jaipur his application was sent forward to New Delhi, the all-India capital, where the final selection would be done at the Directorate of Extension, Ministry of Agriculture. All applications were scrutinized by a Selection Committee appointed by the Director of Extension. It also included a rural youth adviser from UNESCO, an American by the name of John Boyd.

After some time Tan Dan was called for interview. The Selection Committee had only five members, but the room of the interview was full of people, as many of the interviewers were accompanied by assistants and colleagues. They were all officers of different specializations, designations and qualifications, and they were there to ask questions on all topics of agriculture. In that way the interviewed person could be judged from all possible angles, and the selection committee would be able to get a complete picture of each person. It was a big job to screen so many keen youngsters. For several days forty persons per day were interviewed. Most of the interviewed hardly got a chance to speak for more than a few minutes, according to what Tan Dan could understand by talking to youths already interviewed. Even during this short time the talk was in many cases neither in depth nor serious. All the experts in horticulture, dairy, home science, agronomy etc. seldom asked anything, so on what criteria the marks were given is difficult to say, but judging from the selected candidates it did not have much to do with agriculture.

When Tan Dan was interviewed, the routine was broken, perhaps because he was dressed as a farmer in contrast to the other candidates who were dressed as urban educated youth. He was the only one of the whole lot of candidates wearing dhoti. Even more important was perhaps the way he replied to the first question. He was asked from where he came. Tan Dan replied that he came from a semiarid part of Jodhpur District in Rajasthan. Dr. Barooah, the Director of Extension at the time of the interview, wanted to know what he meant by semiarid. Tan Dan replied, "In the arid part of Rajasthan the rainfall is less than five inches, but from where I come the rainfall is about ten inches, and therefore we have better chances of keeping green things." Somebody asked, if Tan Dan thought it would be possible to make also the desert green. He gave a long reply, which was to some extent controversial, and provoked many of the interviewers to ask him more questions about various agricultural specialities. They tried to get Tan Dan to agree about the important role of the scientists for India's agricultural development. They wanted him to praise scientists for their contribution to the Green Revoloution, a popular topic among the Indian elite in those days. The general feeling was that the scientists had given the final solution to India's agricultural problems, and thereby had saved the country from famine and other disasters.

Tan Dan did not quite agree, and the discussion became a lengthy one. His interview lasted for more than an hour and dealt with many different subjects, and towards the end they talked about other things than agriculture. That Tan Dan managed to get so many questions from the interviewers was his good luck. If he had been finished of in a few minutes with a few general questions like most of the others interviewed, he would not have got the attention of Mr. John Boyd, the American rural youth adviser from UNESCO.

First it was decided that eleven candidates should go. They were selected, but Tan Dan was not among them. However, two girls who were daughters of IAS officers got selected. How they could get so high ranks is difficult to understand, except for the fact that their fathers were good friends of the Director, Dr. Barooah, who was the chief interviewer. It might also have something to do with the fact that Dr. Barooah was the boss of several of the other interviewers, and that they were expected to share the opinion of their boss, also when sitting in Selection Committees.

John Boyd, the American rural youth adviser from Unesco was not happy. He told all his Indian colleagues that in his opinion it was a big scandal that a person like Tan Dan had not been selected. He had seen himself that Tan Dan had been able to give good replies on agricultural issues for an hour. If anybody was to be selected it was Tan Dan.

Boyd could not understand, why Tan Dan had got so few marks at the interview. It was possible to get a maximum of one hundred marks, as there were five members in the selection committee and each member gave the interviewed person marks on a scale from zero to twenty. He got particularly angry at those selecting officers who had given Tan Dan zero points out of twenty.

After several hot discussions the number of delegates of the troop was extended to fifteen, and Tan Dan was among the new additions.

The selected candidates

Most of the youth had been selected for the trip because they had some relative in the Ministry or in the selecting staff or some relative who was an influential politician, Tan Dan found out from the participants during the journey to the United States. Apart from Tan Dan and one more, the whole troop of seventeen persons came from urban areas, only superficially attached to some farm, which their family might have in its possession.

Satinder Kaur Cheema was the daughter of the Production Commissioner of the Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India. Her father wanted her to go to the United States and find out if she could find some well settled Indian boy to marry, as she had finished her college education in New Delhi. She had nothing to do with agriculture.

Shakti Prabha was the daughter of the Director of Industry of Punjab, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh. Her father was a close friend of both Mr Cheema and the Director of Extension, being all senior IAS officers, and socializing with each others in their spare time. They were keen to oblige each others to the benefit of all.

Shakti Prabha and Satinder Kaur Cheema were childhood friends. Satinder wanted her friend to come along, as she did not want to make such a long journey alone. They were both postgraduates. None of them had anything to do with agriculture, nor had they studied agriculture.

Yamuna Prashad Gupta was an advocate in his late thirties. Hence, he was much older than the others. He came from a wealthy family in Bihar. He had nothing to do with agriculture, and he had never studied agriculture. His family were personal friends of Jagjivan Ram, an important Congress politician and for many years a minister of the Central Government. Yamuna and his relatives were strong and rich supporters of this important minister, and they lived in his parliamentary constituency.

Yamuna's inclusion in the group was considered at a late stage of the selection procedure, but as there were only tickets for fifteen farm youths provided by the 4H Foundation, the selection committee first decided that Tan Dan's name should be cut off from the list. That Tan Dan was told by a clerk already at the stage of negotiations, and he got it confirmed by other staff members later.

The clerk advised Tan Dan to try to get a push from somebody or provide some money, as he was the one most in danger of being deleted. He was the only one selected purely on merit without any push or pull, he was told. He was also the one with least education. All the others except one were university graduates.

Tan Dan's relation to his Detha clan at the time of going to the United States

In 1967 Tan Dan's elder brother Ravi Dan got the prestigious Padamshri Award from the Indian Government for his pioneering work in rural development in his home village. It might have improved Tan Dan's chances to get selected for the trip to the United States, although Tan Dan often was at loggerheads with his brothers, having his own ideas about farm management and agriculture.

At this time they had a dispute about the education of the new generation of small children, Jugti Dan's greatgrandchildren, which in 1968 was approaching the schoolgoing age. As the Detha family thanks to irrigation farming enjoyed a new affluence, they had become keen on sending their children to an upper class boarding school already from tender age. The school was at Pilani and it was run by the Birla family, one of the richest industrialists in India. Tan Dan strongly resisted this idea, thinking that the children should study at Chelana instead. There were enough schools in their own village, schools which the Detha clan had helped in getting started some fifteen years earlier.

Tan Dan thought they should learn about their own rural environment instead of leaving it and get a snobbish kind of education only meant for desk work in some Government office. His protests were of no avail. His well-off brothers and cousins sent their children to the Birla School. Not only the boys but the girls, too. The latter were more in number, which was unfortunate in the eyes of most Detha relatives. They anticipated that the many girls would create a headache in a decade or so when they had to be married away. By expensive, urban education for their daughters they hoped to find good matrimonial matches to the benefit not only of the girls but also of their parents at Chelana.

At the time of his journey to the United States, Tan Dan worked as a foreman of the big Detha farm. He had left being a partner of the farm, as he wanted more economic independence. He and his wife Chanda had also left the big joint household of his father and settled in a house nearby. They were a young couple with small kids who tried to make their own life without being overwhelmed by their relatives. It was not easy for Chanda to live alone when Tan Dan went abroad. Fortunately her sister had married to a Chelana family, too. Her husband was also a Charan, of course, but of the Mehru gotra instead of Detha. The two sisters gave each others company, but Chanda did not get any support from her in-laws, as they thought her husband Tan Dan did not behave properly, being too obstinate and independent minded.

As a result of the family discord no relative accompanied Tan Dan to the bus stop on the day he left for his long journey to the United States in early May 1968. He went on a farewell visit to the big ravala household building of his brothers and parents, but none of them followed him even to the gate of their own building.

Tan Dan insisted that Chanda should accompany him to the bus stand at the outer edge of the village bazar, but she refused to obey him. She resisted all his persuasions, as there was no relative around who could accompany her on her way back from the bus stop.

Chanda was an upper caste woman strictly adhering to customs, and for her it was impossible to return alone from the bus stop, a distance of a few hundred metres. She was in pardah like other married Charan women in rural Rajasthan.

Tan Dan's family going to Delhi in 1968 to see Tan Dan off

In her heart Chanda did want to see Tan Dan off at the bus stop, although she felt she could not, as none of her in-laws wanted to come along. Tan Dan had to leave her at home, desperately weeping. Standing at the bus stop he got a second thought. He went home and told her that she had to come along whether she wanted or not. He did not bother at all what their relatives would say. They went out of their house. Like all other women when walking in public with their husband, Chanda followed Tan Dan at a respectful distance of several meters. They walked in silence. Chanda walked with Sushila, as she was a baby at this time , and was suckling.

When standing at the bust stop Tan Dan asked Chanda, if she had come prepared, if she had brought some clothes. He wanted her to come along to Delhi, and stay with him until the day when he would leave for the United States seven days later. She objected she could not leave their children, who all were small kids, but Tan Dan told that he would arrange for them later by asking Chanda's uncle's son to bring them to Dehli. He would write to him the same day he said, and meanwhile the children could stay with Sagar, Chanda's sister, who also lived in Chelana married to Gulab Dan, a Mehru Charan and Sheni Dan's younger brother.

Now everything was arranged with a whirlwind speed, Tan Dan directing the show from the bus stop, anxiously hoping that the bus would not come too soon. When the bus finally arrived, firtyfive minutes later, everything was arranged, and Chanda realised that she was about to make the longest journey of her life. They did not have enough money, though, a matter Tan Dan did not discuss with Chanda, so they did not go all the way to the railway station in Jodhpur, but stepped down from the bus at a village called Khaijarala. There Tan Dan had a friend with a farm which in those days had started irrigation agriculture. Tan Dan had worked as a rock driller on the farm.

Tan Dan asked if he could borrow one hundred Rupees, as he and Chanda were going to Delhi. The wife of Tan Dan's friend replied it was crazy to bring Chanda along to Delhi with only one hundred Rupees. Next day the couple arranged six hundred Rupees, which they gave to Tan Dan without any conditions fully realizing that it would take a long time until they would see that money again.

Tan Dan and Chanda continued their journey. They reached Delhi, where they stayed with an American agricultural consultant of the Ford Foundation, Dr. Robert Wilcox. Tan Dan, Chanda, and little Sushila, who was still in Chanda's lap, stayed in his house when on the third day their sons Govind and Narpath also arrived, escorted by Shakti Dan, Chanda's uncle's son who was very attached to Chanda, Tan Dan told. They all stayed in Delhi until Tan Dan left for the United States by airplane from Palam airport, an event which they all vividly remember, especially Narpat, who was three years of age and many months kept saying "Bhabha, bhrrrrrr", while moving his hand up in the air.

Tan Dan as a guest of the 4H organization

Tan Dan went to the United States as one of the IFYE Exchangees from India in 1968. IFYE means International Farm Youth Exchange and it was a program under which farm youth from a large number of countries went to the United States under a kind of scholarship. They visited American farmers and experienced the life on their host farms. They learnt about rural youth organizations, especially the 4H Foundation which arranged the program with the support of the U.S. Government.

In the biographical sketch of Tan Dan made by the arranger of his IFYE Program it was stated that Tan Dan was 24 years old, had a wife , two sons and one daughter. His religion was Hindu, but he would eat any meat. His main language was was Rajasthani, and he also spoke Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and Marathi. It was added in the biographical sketch that he spoke and understood English well. As for special interests:

"While in the U.S., Mr. Detha would like to learn about:

A. Rural Youth Programs

1. Organization, projects, and activities in 4-H

2. Leader role in 4-H club work

3. Demonstration and teaching methods

B.Agriculture

1. Irrigation systems

2. Soil tillage equipment - other farm mechanization

3. Swine raising management

4. Dairy industry

C. Nutrition and Child Care

D. Rural Community Life

E. Education

1. Education programs for adults and rural youth

2. Professional and vocational education in states

Leisure time interests: Dance, music, walking in the countryside."

Hence, Tan Dan displayed as wide a range of interests as usual.

Funds for Tan Dan's international travel costs were provided by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State. Sponsors were the Directorate of Extension in India, in cooperation with friends of 4-H in the United States.

What Tan Dan experienced in the USA

Tan Dan stayed for half a year in the United States, first going to the 4H Office in Washington, where youth from many countries, including Scandinavian countries, had assembled for attending a four days orientation programme.

In the batch from India there were thirteen boys and four girls, whereas from other countries there were mostly one or two only.

His first host state was New Mexico, and the second one was Iowa. He would visit farm families in both states.

Tan Dan was sent to New Mexico on his own choice, as it was an arid country similar to Rajasthan. The extension department of the land grant university in New Mexico then chalked out the program for his visit in that state. First Tan Dan asked to see the research program of the agricultural sections, and then opted to see more carefully the trials and findings of sorghum (jowar), pearl millet (bajra), and other millets, grassland species, wheat, chillies and onions. Now he saw his chance to study trials of agricultural research. Several research workers were much more helpful and friendly than the ones he usually met in India. They treated him as a guest, and nobody bothered about his degrees, designation and qualifictions, apparantly taking for granted that a young farmer also may understand something about the science of agriculture.

In New Mexico Tan Dan stayed for two and a half months, from 9 May to 26 July. He stayed at eight different family farms.

Then Tan Dan attended a conference of the 4H Foundation with participants from seventy countries discussing how rural youth organizations could be activized. The conference did not interest Tan Dan much, though. It stressed the usefulness of the 4H Organization without much concrete talk, as he saw it. Moreover, the main program of the conference was mixed up with special programs sponsored by private commercial giants doing business in various agricultural inputs such as machinery, fertilizers and drugs. There were special days for each company, so that each got its turn to show their hospitality and kindness in the best marketing management spirit. Tan Dan thought it was a completely capitalistic approach, with each company hoping to get many new supporters and customers among the delegates from the host of countries represented. Most of these were newly independent developing countries of the Third World tropics.

The common theme of the spokesmen of these companies was, that countries with large populations of poor people, but too small private sector, would have a bright future, if big business of the American style would be allowed to flourish. Several delegates and most of those from India had been financed by private American companies doing business in agricultural input manufacturing. Each of these exchangees had a special relationship to his/her particular company during the training period. Tan Dan used to tease the other Indians, that they had become the son-in-law of their particular sponsoring company.

Tan Dan himself had stated already in Delhi, that he did not want to be sponsored by any private company. He had realized in what kind of capitalistic spirit the IFYE Program would be carried out, but he was keen on going all the same, as he wanted to experience the world outside India.

After the mid-term conference Tan Dan stayed for two and a half month in Iowa. He lived on farms and participated in farm work from 8 August to 21 October.

After that the programme was over. Tan Dan had twelve days at his disposal to travel around on his own. First he went to Canada, where he visited an Indian friend studying in that country. From there he went to New York, where he stayed for some days with a negro family in the slum area of Harlem, following his habit of getting in touch with unusual and genuine environments where simple people with an interesting background lived.

Tan Dan in Mexico.

The Olympic games of the summer 1968 was going on in Mexico, when Tan Dan moved around in New Mexico, the U.S. state to the north of the Mexican border. Friends advised Tan Dan to take a few days off to get a glimpse of the Games. They helped him to go by air to Mexico City. There he got in touch with a young Indian student owning a car. During most of Tan Dan's visit in Mexico they went around in the countryside. He got the opportunity to visit American Indian settlements in rural area and they saw some sites of the ancient Maya civilization.

Tan Dan compared the remnants of that Mexican culture with objects of India's Hindu culture today and discovered similarities, especially with folk art of South India.

The monkey man figure he saw on many old stone carvings of the Mayas resembled him of the worshipping statues (murti) of the Indian monkey God Hanuman.

The Olympic games he did not find any time to see, however.

Tan Dan got a glimpse of the Philippines, too

Via Washington Tan Dan left the United States in early November. On the way back to India the group stopped over in the Philippines for fifteen days. There the 4H Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation had organized a joint training programme for Asian rural youth leaders. They stayed at an institute in a rural area, where communist guerilla activities were going on in villages nearby. Tan Dan was told there had been frequent clashes between communist and government supporters.

Tan Dan thought the course was rather boring, dealing with academic theories and abstract concept. He could not figure out how it could be related to Chelana, so he started to get restless. He was curious to find out what was going on in the barrios (villages), and he often slipped away from the lectures for touring around on his own. He went by the country bus, and walked on foot, sometimes ten to fifteen kilometres at a stretch. It happened many times to the dismay of the teachers and other staff. In Tan Dan's opinion they were as rigid and bureaucratic as the Government officers he used to meet in India.

At Krishi Bhavan, Delhi, after the return in December 1968

Back in India the whole Indian delegation of youngsters had three days of debriefing at the Directorate of Extension, the Ministry of Agriculture, New Delhi. They had morning and afternoon sessions in a big hall in Krishi Bhavan where the youth one by one were asked to tell what they had been doing and what they had seen on the journey to the United States. A lot of joint and deputy directors of various designations and specializations as well as doctors of other designations attended these meetings. They were supposed to ask serious questions, but the group of youngsters were still in a holiday mood, and much bolder now than before the journey. There were jokes, laughters, and comments about things more interesting than agriculture. The group behaved like Americans and they were dressed in recently purchased American clothes. On the table in front of them there was a row of shining American fibreglass briefcases.

In their absence dr Vidyarti had become the new director of Agricultural Extension. He told the delegates that they were to write a report about their experience during their stay in the United States. In the report they should put forward their proposals about how rural youth in India could be mobilised for the development of the country. Each delegate was requested to write a separate report of ten to fifteen pages. It should be submitted to the Ministry at the end of the third day of depbriefing at New Delhi.

In front of Dr. Vidyarti, the exchangees, and all others present at the meeting, Tan Dan questioned the utility of such a report. Tan Dan told Dr. Vidyarti at his face that he did not believe that anybody would read these reports. In his opinion there was no purpose of such a pseudo-activity. He told he had sent a report to the Ministry every tenth day while in the United States but he never got a single reply or acknowledgment. These reports had been about his journeys and experiences and he had sent them on his own initiative.

Tan Dan asked Dr. Vidyarti to explain the purpose of getting these reports written. Would the reports be used as background material for starting some project or for writing a survey? Did they have anything else in mind?

Dr. Vidyarthi did not want to go into such details. He simply told Tan Dan that he as well as the others had to write the report. It was nothing to discuss about. Then Tan Dan asked, if he could have a look at some report from earlier batches, so he could see how such reports should be written. He thought it would be useful in his case, as he had already sent a lot of reports that nobody had read or appreciated, as far as he could see. Dr. Vidyarthi told Tan Dan to contact the clerk concerned for assistance.

Together with the clerk Tan Dan later on inspected the heaps of papers and reports of various kinds lying around the office rooms adjacent to that of Dr. Vidyarthi, but none in the office could tell in which heap he could find the final reports of previous batches of Farm Youth Exchangees for the United States. They told Tan Dan to go back to Dr. Vidyarthi and get new instructions. He went to Dr. Vidyarthis room, which was empty. Looking around trying to see such a report somewhere, he found a big heap of various kinds of reports and agendas over a steel almara. Many of these reports were of ten to fifteen pages, but he could not find the kind he was looking for.

Tan Dan picked up a copy of ten pages from the middle of one of the heaps, tore off the front page, and went away to find a typist who could write a new front page with Tan Dan's name and other particulars required for the the Farm Youth Exchangee Report. Next day before lunch he went to Dr. Vidyarthi's room. He was busy, as he had a small meeting with six of his colleagues. Tan Dan quickly interrupted, handed over the report and told he was in a hurry, as he was leaving for Chelana. Dr. Vidyarthi thanked him, put the report in a tray on the table, and continued his conversation with the other officers. Fortunately he only had a glance at the front page.

Tan Dan handed over the report to Dr. Vidyarthi himself, so that nobody else would be blamed for negligence, in case the fraud would be detected. But nothing happened. Tan Dan left for Chelana, and nothing more was heard about the report until some months later, when he got a cyclostyled letter from the Directorate of Extension. In one short paragraph he was thanked for having participated in the three day session of evaluation of the Farm Exchange Programme at the Directorate of Extension, New Delhi. They also thanked him for his report. Finally they hoped he would participate in the national build-up.

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###  Chapter 18 Tan Dan and hybrid cereals in the 1960s

Background

Study tours to USA were arranged for selected Indian farm youth to get them acquainted with modern farming techniques and organization management. That way Tan Dan visited farms and agricultural institutions in the states of New Mexico and Iowa in the summer and autumn 1968.

In the 1960s many Indian agricultural scientists were trained in the United States, and a number of American specialists worked for a few years at Indian agricultural research centres. Indian scientists worked on hybrid varieties of coarse grain such as bajra and jowar. (Bajra, pearl millet, Penisetum typhoides and Jowar, sorghum, Sorghum bicolor)

Tan Dan wanted to promote foodgrain cultivation in his village and on the big commercial farm of his many brothers and cousins. There the farmers with irrigation water were more keen on cultivating cash crops, which made more money. Tan Dan tried to learn the technique of hybrid seed multiplication from scientists at north Indian research centres, as such foodgrain production could be highly profitable on the irrigated farms of Chelana village in western Rajasthan.

The Chelana farmers and Tan Dan's hybrid seed discussion

Tan Dan explained to the villagers the importance of growing male and female seeds in separate rows when cultivating for hybrid seed production of jovar and bajra. Anybody participating in such seed multiplication schemes of the government had to abide to that basic rule.

Many Chelana farmers were keen to participate, as they could fetch very good prices for their crop, many times more than in the ordinary foodgrain trade. But such a disciplined cultivation was difficult to follow.

To raise a crop from hybrid seed, i.e. the next generation of seed, is much easier. The problem to such farmers is that they must buy their hybrid seed from the market each year, as hybrid seed cannot be spared from previous crops due to sharp decline in production potential. The reason is genetic recombination for each generation resulting in loss of the heterosis effect, i.e. loss of hybrid vigour.

When telling the farmers in Chelana about the possibility to grow hybrid seed for sale to the National Seed Corporation of India, or to the State Government under the certification of the NSC, then Tan Dan also told that only farmers who followed the prescribed technique were allowed to sell their seed and make the big profit. He told that a part of the cultivation practice was to sow male and female seeds in different rows. Nobody in Chelana had ever heard about male and female seed, or that there could be anything male or female in plants at all. There was a talk in the village that Tan Dan had told there were men and women also among plants. The villagers joked about it, and it was taken as a new proof of how irrelevant he spoke.

Tan Dan participate in coarse seed multiplication of NSC.

However, Tan Dan showed his ability to grow such hybrid seed to the seed inspector of the National Seed Corporation. At this time he had his office in Delhi, as the year was as early as 1964, and there was no special seed inspector for Rajasthan, as the National Seed Corporation was in its initial stage. Tan Dan had tried to learn the hybrid seed multiplication technique at his visits to the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi, to Agra University, and to Tabiji State Research Farm of Rajasthan for a period of several years since 1962. At all the three places Tan Dan had been working on the trial fields assisting the research workers as a volunteer, often for several days each time. Such visits Tan Dan made quite often these years, and he got to know several research workers in plant genetics from whom he could learn. However, as Tan Dan was quite young, around twenty, and had a rural appearance dressed in dhoti and kamiz just like an ordinary farmer, some scholars thought that the step between their own qualified activities and that of farmers in the field personified by Tan Dan was too short. They told him he should try to learn from persons on a lower level instead, preferably from the gram sevaks (i.e. Government village level workers) and the Block Development Office that served his own village, something which Tan Dan without success had tried long ago. In fact he himself understood considerably more than them about new agricultural techniques, which nobody was prepared to accept, as he had not as high educational qualification as they had. He had no papers to show his ability to benefit from combining detailed field observations with various kind of research literature, which he with difficulty read on his own, trying to get help in understanding these pamphlets by asking the only ones in India who could give any answer at all, i.e. scholars at agricultural research institutions situated in New Delhi (Pusa Institute), Ludhiana, Hisar, Agra, Udaipur, Jaipur and Jodhpur etc..

In the kharif season 1965 Tan Dan grow HB1 hybrid bajra on three acres of the six acres plot which he had leased for demonstrations and trials together with R.C. Sharma, school teacher at Chelana. He was a graduate of Agra Agricultural University, and in 1965 was in his late forties. Tan Dan had arranged a contract for seed muliplication with the National Seed Corporation and he sold his crop for 9,400 Rupees. The yield was in total 9 quintals per acre compared with twelve quintals per acre in commercial production. Larger distances had to be maintained and roguing, i.e. weeding out off-type plants and pollen shedders among the female plants. They were about one tenth of all plants. The nine quintals per acre, contained both male and female plants and as the National Seeds Coporation only wanted the female plants, they bought six quintals per acre about, or a total of about 20 quintals of HB1 seed for certification and resale by the NSC to farmers engaged in commercial production of foodgrain. The price of this very special kind of bajra was more than ten times as high as the price of ordinary bajra grain sold at the markets around Chelana.

The Detha Farm starts hybrid seed production

Also Ravi Dan and Mehar Dan had to admit that foodgrain production could be profitable, and could be a cash crop even more profitable than the sesamum crop they grew on the Detha Bandhu Agricultural Farm in the middle of the 1960s. Tan Dan was one of the first village farmers in Rajasthan to grow hybrid bajra for seed production on contract with the National Seed Corporation. Hybrid Seed was very scarce in India at that time, hence the very high price of some four to five hundred Rupees per quintal. (One quintal is 100 kg.)

Hybrid seed production in Chelana 1978. Bribes.

In the next few years the price went down, but in 1978 it was still much more profitable than ordinary commercial production of bajra. Many big farmers at Chelana in 1978 carried out seed multplication programmes on contract with National Seeds Corporation and the corresponding state body. According to Tan Dan there is at least in Chelana falsification and corruption also in this scheme to an increasing extent. In 1978 many farmers did not follow the cultivation practices prescribed by NSC well enough, but still got their seed sold and certified by visiting inspectors against bribes. With regard to some other farmers the seed inspector from NSC did not want to accept the crop, although these farmers had carried out their work perfectly. They were threatened with rejection for one false reason or the other, which nobody came to check. At last farmers in such a desperate situation tended to yield, letting the inspector understand that he had a gift to expect, after which the crop would be cleared and sold to NSC. As a result almost every farmer in Chelana participating in the seed multplication scheme in 1978 gave bribes to the inspector, according to Tan Dan, who thus maintained that willingness to bribe rather than the seed quality had become the main criteria for acceptance by NSC.

Hybrid seed multiplication by Detha Farm in the 1960s

In 1965, however, this kind of trade was in its infancy. Seeing Tan Dan getting so much cash from such a small plot, Ravi Dan soon realized that he had made a mistake in ploughing down the bajra crop which Tan Dan every year tried to grown in a corner of the Detha Farm. With the help of Tan Dan, Ravi Dan signed a contract with the National Seed Corporation in 1966 for selling the crop of one hundred acres of HB1 to NSC. From that year the Detha Farm produced bajra on a big scale for seed multiplication with very good profit. Hence, Tan Dan's idea of growing foodgrain crops on the Detha Farm finally became a reality. This initiative was appreciated by everybody, both among the Dethas and among other villagers.

Tan Dan's trials for comparing performance of deshi and hybrid bajra varieties

From 1962 to 1965 Tan Dan conducted bajra trials in the kharif season on the six acres plot leased by him and the school teacher. Tan Dan tried seventeen deshi varieties, which he had collected at his visits to agricultural research institutions at Ahmedabad, Pusa in Delhi, Hissar etc., and research farms of the state Governments of Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra. He also got seed from private farms. He tried the performance of the varieties with regard to irrigation response, draught resistence, and ability to withstand attack from birds.

This ability depends on the length of the cob hair, i.e. the awns. Long hair are better as it irritates the eyes of the small wild sparrows, who live on these grains.

Tan Dan talked in the mid-1960s with some research workers of Palanpur State Agricultural Research Station about the advantage of long hairs. Other officers who Tan Dan had talked to had not shown interest in the issue, but at Palanpur they asked for seed from longhair bajra earhead varieties of Sikar and Jhunjhunu districts of northern Rajasthan. 'Hairs' are more like hard needles than long soft hair. Bajra with these long needles are mostly in these areas and are not common elsewhere in India. They are deshi varieties with a yield of 6-10 quintals per acre which is much more than most other deshi varieties commonly yielding 3-6 quintals per acre on average.

It is good for farmers not to be compelled always to chase away birds such as sparrows from the bajra fields. The sparrows of western Rajasthan semi-desert lands such as the Chelana area fly in big flocks. Such flocks sometimes resemble locust forming clouds, which can darken the sky and the sun, especially in drought years.

Locust in western Rajasthan desert area

The problem of grasshoppers has been under control in the Rajasthan desert area since the 1960s. In 1976 and 1977 kharif seasons locust has been on the increase again, to the dismay of the government locust control officers who for about a decade only draw their salary and enjoyed a carefree locust free life. In late 1970s they got some work to do again, although the attacks were not very intensive. They ocurred in the Barmer area.

According to Tan Dan, the locusts fly from areas in Pakistan, where they hatch. Therefore it is thanks to Pakistani efforts, rather than Indian ones, that western Rajasthan has become comparatively free from locust, Tan Dan thinks.

Bajra tillering

Another quality which is important to check for bajra is its ability to give many stalks (stovers) from the same root and seed, as the number of stalks can vary from 20 to 100 in good years. The number of earheads from a single plant affects yield.

The grainsetting is not very compact in earheads of such desert varieties.

Each stalk may in turn produce between one to five earheads among the desert varieties of western Rajasthan. In total therefore per plant the number of bajra earheads in western Rajasthan varies between thirty and three hundred earheads.

The effect of bajra plant density

Tan Dan tried the effect of different plant population densities on grain yield. He found that row sowing was superior to broadcasting, as the plant population then was less. The best row to row distance was two feet (6 dm) for all local deshi bajra and hybrid bajra, and much better than the traditional ten inch distance (2.5 dm), which most farmers practiced in Chelana and all over Rajasthan. Tan Dan made demonstrations for the farmers in 1963 and 1964 kharif seasons in a farmer's field in Chelana. In the plot Tan Dan cultivated side by side bajra sown with the two feet and the ten inch distance, as well as other distances. The plants were sown in the ordinary way by which the seed fall densely, but when they did weeding a plant to plant one foot (3 dm) distance was left, which also proved to be better than the traditional six to eight inch (1.5 to 2 dm) between each plant.

Demonstration trials at the school for farmers related to the students

The school teacher together with whom Tan Dan conducted his tests and trials was a teacher in agriculture at the Chelana Secondary School. He was the friend with whom Tan Dan had leased the six acre plot. He called the male relatives of the school children and showed them the demonstrations, so every tenth day a group of about thirty Chelana farmers came out to look at the trial plots of traditional plant density and the new plant density experiment of two times one feet carried out by Tan Dan and the teacher. Many of the farmers who came and had a look got convinced, as they could see that at the densely planted plot the leaves turned yellow and spotted with fungus, especially lower down where the sun could not reach.

Some useful local bajra varieties

Two of the local bajra varieties were very good, and one of the hybrid ones. One deshi variety of bajra was called 'bap' and was brought from Jaisalmer, and the other deshi variety of bajra was from Kathiavar in Gujarat.

The Kathiavar variety had no special name. It became popular in Chelana and is used also nowadays, where it is know as 'sulanli bajri'. Tan Dan brought the seed from Kathiavar, and Genvar Ram, a Mali farmer who took keen interest in Tan Dan's experiments got seeds from Tan Dan and muliplied on his own 'sulanli bajri', and from Genvar Ram many farmers booked seed, and in 1978 'sulanli bajri' deshi variety and some hybrid varieties were the most common ones.

The deshi variety was used by poor farmers, who could not afford the heavy cash outlay required for hybrid crops.

Some observations from Tan Dan's hybrid bajra trials in the 1960s

HB1 has about 60 earheads per plant, which is not so many. However, each earhead is long, thick and compact with many grains per earhead. The grains are big and heavy, and they sit tightly, so they were difficult to pick for the birds. The deshi varieties 'bap' and 'sunlali bajri' had 300 and close to 100 earheads, respectively, with small and thin earheads which had loose grain setting on the earheads so they were easy to pick by birds. However, the deshi variety 'sunlali bajri' has a 'hairy' earhead and therefore is better protected from birds than ordinary deshi bajra.

Tan Dan was not allowed to grow foodgrain in the Detha Farm fields, but he had foodgrain trials on plots at the Chalana school, which he managed together with a teacher of the school. He also used parts of a ten acres field near the school owned by the gram panchayat and leased by the Detha Bandhu Farm.

From 1963 Tan Dan had tried to cultivate only a corner of one or two acres of the ten acres field. He finally managed to get the whole field planted with bajra for hybrid seed production. (Told in 1981)

Bajra planting practices at Chelana

In 1978 most ordinary farmers in western Rajasthan and Chelana did not give any fertilizer to bajra. It is a risky crop grown in the kharif season, mostly relying on monsoon rains also in villages with irrigation water from wells such as Chelana. In most villages of western Rajasthan there was no irrigation water at all.

A difficulty in using fertilizers for bajra is that it has to be sown as soon as the first monsoon rains has fallen in order to get a good germination, according to Tan Dan. Ploughing and sowing has to be done fast, not to risk any drying up of the soil, so the farmers do not want to risk futher loss of moisture by having an intermediate operation of ploughing down fertilizers, after first having broken the soil by ordinary ploughing.

Most farmers in western Rajasthan do not plough before the first monsoon rains start. However, some farmers till the soil already in the hot summer months, which is easier to do in many of the coarse-texture soil of this area than in soils with more clay in other parts of India.

Jovar needs less soil moisture for germination of seeds than bajra, and for that reason fertilizers are more often applied in Chelana and western Rajasthan for jovar than for bajra, Tan Dan told.

The performance of selected deshi and hybrid bajra varieties

Based on his experiments Tan Dan estimates that Sulanli bajri yields about six quintals per acre (1,500 kg/ha) at Chelana on a typical farm with semi-sandy soil under rainfed conditions with normal rainfall.

Ordinary bajra strains which had been cultivated there for decades yielded under normal rainfed conditions about three quintals per acre (750 kg/ha), and may give four quintals per acre (1,000 kg/ha) in rainy years.

The bap variety yields almost seven quintals per acre (1,750 kg/ha) on semi-sandy soil i.e. soil which is not good enough for hybrid varieties without application of fertilizers. The hybrid variety HB1 had a yield of eight quintals (2,000 kg/ha) on the same semi-sandy soil and under normal rains for the region. There fertilizers were difficult to apply.

Tan Dan measured the yield by weighing on the threshing ground keeping his notebook under his arm, as he also did while measuring all the other trials.

Under two irrigations, good soil and 5.5 kilogram of nitrogen per acre (15 kg/ha) broadcast as topdressing when the plants were one month old and in the tillering stage, then the HB1 crop yielded twelve quintals per acre (3,000 kg/ha), and bap yielded almost nine quintals per acre (2,250 kg/ha), sulanli bajri eight quintals per acre (2,000 kg/ha) and the local Chelana bajra strains 5.5 quintals per acre (1,400 kg/ha).

Deshi bajra varieties are generally very little susceptible to rust or other plant diseases, and this was the case also with bap and sulanli bajri

The hybrid bajra varieties Tan Dan tried were more susceptible. The yield of HB1 goes down in a few years, if not treated with pesticides, which cost money both in equipment, chemicals and labour. Moreover, several of these inputs are difficult to apply. Difficult diseases are rust and smut. Insects looking like mosquitos suck the leaves, and are locally known as karra.

New hybrid seed has to be bought every year for sustained yield.

For fodder bap is the best bajra variety in spite of its low grain yield, as it is leafy and the stalks /stovers/ at harvest are green and sweet. That was the opinion of the Chelana farmers who came to evalutate the crops in the demonstration plots kept by Tan Dan and the school teacher.

Hybrid bajra consumes large amounts of plant nutrition, leaving the soil exhausted for the rabi crop unless it is given additional fertilizers. It thus reduces the profitability of the rabi crop to some extent.

Considering all aspects bap was more profitable than the HB1 in spite of its lower grain yield, Tan Dan told.

Hybrid bajra and sorghum cultivation at Chelana for seed multiplication

Tan Dan learnt a lot about the procedure used in hybrid seed production. Then he tried to get his relatives and other Chelana farmers to understand, which was more difficult, as they were sceptical to his 'bookish knowledge'.

The cytoplasm of the seed grains must first be treated with gamma rays, socalled nuclear radiation, so that seeds can be differentiated in two kinds. The plants are hermafrodites (bisexual), so that the female organ called gynoicium may both be pollinated by pollen of the same plant and stand, and pollinated from a plant of a different stand with different qualities, and give new qualities to the grain of the female planted, if fertilized by them. Full crosspollination effect requires that the plant with the female organ gets its male organ called _androecium_ taken away. If the _androecium_ is not removed most plants are pollinated by its own male organ. Such removal is in practice impossible in commercial production of bajra and jovar under field conditions.

Therefore there is a method of preventing the male organ to develop by treating the genes in the cytoplasma by gamma rays and thereby damaging the gene required for development of the male organ with the result that seed of jovar and bajra treated with the gamma rays only develop the female organs. That treatment is done of the seed in the female rows. Some bajra and jovar varieties have bigger and better developed female organs like the TEFT 23A, a variety of bajra originally from Africa for female row seed, which Tan Dan used in Chelana for the female seed for producing the hybrid HB1 bajra grain, while other varieties have bigger and better developed male organs. Seed from plants with such good male organs will be planted in the male rows for producing pollen in the hybridization crossing.

Thus the farmer has two kinds of seed to sow in separate lines with some distance in between, which for both bajra and jovar is the two male rows, then female rows, again two male rows etc.

Row layout of Chelana hybrid seed multiplication

In the 1960s the seed production inspector recommended field layout of alternately 2 male rows and 4 female rows in the hybrid seed multiplication scheme. From the 1970s the inspectors allowed 6 consecutive female rows instead of 4. The reason was partly pressure from farmers, who wanted to get more seed to sell to the NSC (National Seed Corporation). It is possible that shortage of hybrid seed at NSC made that organization to agree on the changed practice. In the late 1970s Tan Dan also saw 8 female rows alternated with the two male rows, as a practice permitted by NSC.

With regard to jovar, the hybrid seed multiplication program of the National Seed Corporation in 1978 had not increased the group of female rows beyond the original rule of four rows of the 1960s. Four female rows were still alternated with two male rows. Tan Dan thought the difference between jovar and bajra row outlining was due to the difference in pollen behaviour. Jovar pollens are more delicate and less mobile than bajra ones.

Bajra pollen flies longer than jovar pollen, which means larger risk that deshi crop pollen contaminate seed in bajra seed multiplication schemes than in jovar schemes. Although longer distances are maintained as per NSC rules still the problem of contamination is bigger in bajra.

Jovar male and female organs come at stages several times during the flowering period. Therefore, there is always some jovar yield, although small, even if male and female row development does not coincide, but in bajra there is just one time flowering of female and male organs uniformly, and if out of phase with each others no grains are formed. Care must therefore be taken that all seeds are sown at the same depth, so that the plants emerge and develop at the same time. Then the reproductive organs of both categories of plants mature at the same time.

Also to produce hybrid jovar seed is difficult, as roguing is necessary. (In bajra, too.)

The effect of different sowing depth on hybrid bajra production of the Detha NSC scheme

In the 1960s the Detha Brothers Agricultural Farm under the leadership of Mehar Dan cultivated bajra for the hybrid seed multiplication scheme of NSC.

In one year they planted HB1 bajra seed, but no grains at all were formed in the female rows. (The 2:4 row grouping was practiced.)

Tan Dan was at that time working in the fields as a foreman of the Detha farm. He called his brothers and his cousin Mehar Dan. Also the seed production inspector of NSC came.

The male seed and female seed rows had been planted with different ploughs. They all agreed that this was the cause of the absence of hybrid grain, as the two ploughs had placed the seed at different depth. That in turn had resulted in a non-synchronous plant emergence. Consequently, development did not occur simultaneously, so flowering and pollination got out of phase. Hence, there were no male row pollen available when the female organ of the plants of the mother plant rows were receptable.

The seed multiplication scheme

Hybrid seed production both of bajra and jovar requires good quality seed from NSC (both male and female seed), i.e. high efficiency in the places where these inbred seeds are produced, i.e. in research stations, NSC farm, and other Government farms used. At stage number two, i.e. seed multiplication of hybrid jovar and bajra at farm level, high efficieny is also required in order to produce good hybrid seed that will be sold to farmers for hybrid foodgrain production. Tan Dan in 1981 thought that both at stage one (government level) and stage two (seed farmer level) the efficiency often was not good enough, as the staff and seed farmers are not enough skilled for their jobs. The quality of seeds for crop production at stage three (general farmers) therefore tend to be suboptimal with regard to the heterosis effect etc. expected from hybrid seed, especially for HB1 and HB2 bajra. This deterioration was not balanced by the introduction of new strains such as HB4, according to the experience of Tan Dan, as HB4 did not perform as well as HB1 did in the 1960s.

Although the hybrid seed in actual farm production might not be as good as is expected by scientists confined to more ideal conditions the price of such hybrid seed was very high for ordinary farmers. At Jodhpur in 1980 the price for HB4 and HB2 was 10 and 7 Rs/kg, respectively at a merchant shop selling on commission from the Rajasthan Seed Corportation and the National Seed Corporation (NSC). They sell at fixed prices decided by RSSC and NSC, but at scarcity, such a merchant can force the farmer to pay more than what is written on the NSC price tag.

Good deshi varieties of bajra and jovar in NW India

Tan Dan 1981 therefore thought that the use of those good non-hybrid varieties of bajra and jovar that are grown in certain pockets of Rajasthan and elsewhere in northern India ought to be promoted among Chelana farmers. These varieties are cheaper, and crops of such seed are mostly more safe to manage. They are more disease and drought resistant and several respond well to fertilizers and water resulting in comparatively good yields under ordinary village conditions. Some of them have favourable features of value to farmers with special problems such as the Sulanli Bajri variety of bajra from the northeastern semi-desert districts of Rajasthan (Sikhar and Jhunjhuna Districts) which is unusually well protected against the often troublesome attacks of small birds.

Hybrids, farmers and utility

Well endowed farms with large amount of land and water may increase profit by using the hybrid seed of sorghum and bajra supplied and generated by Government seed multiplication schemes, but how hybrid seed effect yield and economy of ordinary farmers with little money is not so clear.

Good varieties of non-hybrid seed might benefit them more. Plant breeding on such varieties for higher yield due to good input response and pest resistance would benefit farmers with small resources, but perhaps not commercial seed companies. Hence, for the work of non-profitmaking institutions for plant breeding backed by tax payers money continue to be important for resource weak farmers. Commercial globalization and free trade has not solved the seed problem for those who do not buy new hybrid seed from commercial seed suppliers every year. Poor farmers with small landholdings often use outcrossed hybrid seed of later generations, which they get from their own crop or buy cheap from big farmers or neighbours. Such bajra fields look very diverse.

All India coverage of bajra and jovar hybrids

In the mid1970s the cultivation of hybrid bajra had become an important part of total Indian bajra production covering 3 to 4 million hectares, equivalent to about 25% of the All-India bajra sown area.

The area sown with jovar hybrid seed for foodgrain production was in total India comparatively small, about 1.25 million hectares, which was 7 to 8% of the All-India area sown for jovar foodgrain in the mid 1970s.

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### Chapter 19 The HYV wheat and progressive farmers

The new highyielding wheat varieties of the 1960s

In 1965 Tan Dan had gone to Delhi for buying spareparts of the Super Zetor of the Detha farm. He went to Messers Bhagvan Das and other companies at Kashmiri Gate. There he heard two men talking about wheat that somebody had invented "as in a fairy tale". Tan Dan had read about the new wheat in newspapers. Feeling curious he went to Pusa Institute to find out more.

A few years earlier the international wheat research institute CIMMYT, Mexico, had supplied seeds of wheat varieties to the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in New Delhi, popularly called Pusa Institute, as it was first at Pusa in Bihar and then moved to Delhi.

Norman Borlaug was the driving force behind the genetic research in Mexico to develop new highyielding wheat varieties suitable for hot climates. The wheat institute in Mexico collected local wheat varieties from a large number of tropical and subtropical countries all around the world, which they studied in trials. They selected the best ones from the point of view of yield, disease resistance etc, and then they distributed seed of selected improved wheat varieties to national research stations in many countries including India. Possibly, they improved the performance of the selected local varieties by treating seeds in such a way that mutations took place and then further screening. Numerous small trials were carried out to study the effect of each kind of seed treatment, but Tan Dan was not sure about these things.

Background of the Indian agricultural research development from the mid-1960s with US support

The droughts in India in the 1960s resulted in several severe foodgrain crop failures with the result that millions of tons of wheat had to be imported. As the United States had the largest foodgrain stock, the grain mainly came from the USA both as commercial imports and as food aid under the PL 480 program.

It was expensive to store that much foodgrain, and the US Government did not want the country to be burdened by these stocks any more. They had piled up as a result of market imbalances in the US agricultural sector, and served as an enormous buffer stock tapped at food crises around the world caused by droughts and floods and an ever growing population, especially in poor Third World countries. The large population pressure and Monsoon failures made food crisis acute in South Asian countries such as India. There were famine-like conditions affecting millions in rural Bihar and elsewhere around 1966, i.e. at the time when the dwarf wheat was tried at research stations in north India.

Agitation in USA against the large foodgrain stocks tying up too much valuable capital resulted in a political will to support a strategy for large-scale support of agricultural development in major Third World countries most in danger of recurrent food crisis, especially India. The idea was that these threatened countries should built up their own buffering stocks by massive agricultural development. Third World countries themselves rather than the US economy should finance the huge buffer stocks required.

As a part of this strategy against world hunger the United States Government launched largescale financial and technical assistance for developing the agricultural research capacity within in India, especially in the field of irrigated intensive cultivation of wheat varieties that were highly responsive to more water and fertilizers. The policy was to create pockets of highly developed wheat production areas. It was during this phase that several agricultural universities of a new kind were established in India, modelled on the socalled land grant universities of the USA. In north India such agricultural universities were formed at Ludhiana, Pantnagar and Hissar. While equipping and initiating research programs for these large institutions, American scientists and consultants in most fields came to India for guidance and help. During the latter half of the 1960s a large army of American scientists flooded the Indian agricultural research institutions, giving a strong American slant to the whole thinking on agricultural research and development in India.

The American helpers probably took for granted that the capitalistic market economy which had been conducive to the rise of the United States as a super power also was the right way to get India out of its poverty and food deficit. Just as the top layer of Indian administrators after independence in 1947 adopted and copied the style of the former British colonialists, the Indian agricultural scientists, who up to that time also had followed the English pattern, now became overwhelmed by the extreme efficiency and high level of knowledge the Americans brought to India in their respective disciplines and specialities. The American way of doing research and defining research objectives came to be adopted by the Indian agricultural research scientists of these brand new institutions in the 1960s, especially as most of the Indian heads and top scientist of these institutions were counterparts to US scientists with whom they were in close contact for many years, mostly after they themselves had stayed in the United States doing advanced and difficult research work in that country. After their return to India, they tried their best to carry on in the Indian situation. In Rajasthan and elsewhere in India they faced several problems, which they had not experienced in the United States, and none of their foreign teachers had taught them how to tackle. Disheartening social factors such as inflexible bureaucrats and rural feudal attitudes spilling over to research centres.

Thoughts on the world of Indian agricultural universities in the 1970s

In the beginning of the 1970s most of the Americans left the agricultural reasearch institutions in India which they had helped to build and function the American way, leaving behind Indian research workers continuing the research tasks on their own in the impressive and almost new research buildings, which still were under the spell of American science. Many Indian scientists with an upper class/ middle class/ urban and rural elite background did their best to incorporate the American capitalistic fend-for-yourself attitude in the Indian society, which already had its own brand of exploitative baniya capitalism. Individual competitiveness superimposed on ethnic community rivalry of the Hindu casteism could result in private initiatives showing high dexterity in manipulation of the many weak and irrational qualities in Indian public administration. By some called vested interests.

New avenues opened for alert careerists eager to take advantage of public funds within the world of science. These could be obtained by applying new knowledge of agricultural research and other new infrastructural resources which the Americans helped to establish in India before they en masse were kicked out of the country on the order of the Indian Government in connection with the Bangladesh war in 1971. That step gave the Government of India a welcome opportunity to demonstrate a stern anti-American and anti-capitalistic stand in world politics. This act was a little late, however, as far as the practical results were concerned with regard to the attitudes of that part of Indian elite which had been lucky enough to get some of its higher education in the United States. This new generation of Indian scientists already had been brought up and nourished on the attitudes and work routines of American science.

Most Indian scientists who actually returned to India continued to cherish memories of their happy years in the United States, which emotionally had become their second motherland. By maintaining their international scientific contacts they still meet their American colleagues now and then when they visit India and at international conferences and workshops. With increasing age and seniority these Indian scientists got invitations for delivering lectures in the United States about the present stage of Indian research development within their own field of specialization. Farmers and villages living in poverty were far away.

Indian plant breeding scientists and USA

In the 1960s the many emerging Indian agricultural research intitutions worked independently and often in competition with each others, carrying out research on almost the same high yielding dwarf wheat varieties, which the international wheat research institute in Mexico had sent to the Indian Government to be tested under varying local conditions. Therefore, in 1978 many dwarf wheat varieties in India had almost the same qualities, although given different names by different universities.

At the first glance the results presented look more comprehensive and diversified than they really are, as there is a lot of duplication work done, Tan Dan thought.

In the 1960s it was a scramble among Indian scientists for getting scholarship for going to the United States, and it was with this ambition that many scholars carried out their research.

Studying the effect of geographical variation of agronomic aspects has its own importance, though.

Indian wheat research and trials in the mid 1960s

From Mexico the Indian research centres in the early 1960s received the following two varieties for trials and further research under Indian conditions:

Sonara

Larma Roso

These were the two main varieties tried in India. Each of them had a large number of strains to be tried. Tan Dan thinks there were more than one hundred strains of each.

Both varieties had a copper colour, which was considered to be its main weakness as far as commercial production was concerned, as it was a tradition in India to eat more whitish wheat in north India, which was the main Indian region of wheat consumption.

The whiter the colour of the chapati the better it was appreciated by the consumer. Especially the upper classes, who were the ones for whom development of any kind in the first place was meant. Among them is the large cadre of Government officers and other senior administrators, as well as professionals and businessmen. They form the bulk of the Indian elite confidently leading the Indian nation forward on its path of change into a modern capitalistic market economy, which up to the 1970s was called the Indian brand of socialism by the more eloquent section of the political leadership, as socialism in those days was considered to have a positive value loading in a social welfare context, and therefore worth nourishing in a democratic political climate with a large number of the voters living in stark poverty.

Indian wheat varieties and colour prejudice

By an Indian elite dominated by members of savarn Hindu castes the sensitivity to the colour of their chapatis could to some extent be related to the general colour prejudice in favour of fair complexion of those who consider themselves heirs of the light skinned Aryan invaders of the Vedic time, when these tribes migrated into India from the northwest some three thousand years ago incorporating colour prejudice into Hindu rites and customs as a result of their confrontations with in India already settled inhabitants of darker complexion. This colour prejudice was cultivated over the centuries by the law-giving Brahmin priests in concord with the other ruling social groups of those days, groups which have become the core of the savarn hindus of the Indian society of today, for whom any suggestion that their liking for whitish chapatis has got anything to with social colour prejudice in general sound very farfetching and unrealistic, as far as Tan Dan has found out from discussions.

Swaminathan's research and award

Dr. M.S. Swaminathan did research in this field at Pusa Institute (i.e. IARI, the Indian Agricultural Research Institute) and managed to develop strains among both the Sonara and Larma Roso varieties with the desired light colour quality. They were used in commercial production and became popular.

Screening in India of the HYV exotics

The many strains of the Sonara and Larma Roso varieties from CIMMYT that the half a dozen or more universities and research stations worked on in the middle of the 1960s were by and large the same, and the ones all of them found to be best were Sonara 64 and Larma Roso 112.

After modification by local plant breeding research strains based on Sonara 64 got somewhat different characteristics. They were released from IARI at Delhi as S227, and from the Punjab Agricultural University at Ludhiana as Kalyan Sona.

Similarly dwarfwheat strains based on Larma Roso 112 was after modifications released by IARI, New Delhi, as S 308 and by PAU, Ludhiana as Sonalika.

Kalyan Sona, S227, Sonalika and S 308 became the four most well known varieties of dward wheat in the 1960s.

According to Tan Dan the reason for the popularity of the Ludhiana strains was not only good plant breeding work, but also that Punjab Agricultural University already in the 1960s had a more intensive extension program, giving widespread publicity to their work and inviting big landlord farmers in Punjab to demonstration days and other social functions on the pattern of American extension programs. In addition the names of Kalyan Sona has an appeal in itself, as it means 'welfare gold', and Sonalika also refers to seed which give golden opportunities to the farmers.

Sonalika is a very shattering variety compared to Kalyan Sona and therefore less liked by farmers, although even lighter in colour than Kalyan Sona, and therefore better from the angle of urban consumer preferences. Sonalika has the advantage of giving a better crop yield than Kalyan Sona, when sown quite late. Therefore late farmers felt compelled to use it, in spite of its disadvantages.

Wheat production rose at this time sharply in Punjab, as intensive agricultural development had been concentrated to this promising region, on American advice.

The emphasis of landlord type 'progressive' farmer in Indian rural development

In the 1960s American advisers were busy not only in giving a new shape to Indian agricultural research administration, but also to direct how the new research findings and other facilities should be distributed to the farmers. Everybody happily agreeing that socalled 'Progressive Farmers' with good resources at their disposal should be given major attention in the initial stages, so that these farmers could serve as models to be copied on a smaller scale by their relatively poor and less informed neighbour farmers. When they saw for themselves the profits of the progressive farmers, they would certainly like to emulate, as profit maximization in the spirit of sound capitalistic competition was the basic human trait on which all economic theory was based, including that of welfare economics. As USA dominated the textbooks in the science of economics and business administration around the world including India, as in most other sciences, it was easy to get the idea about the progressive farmer to sound very plausable in all kind of extension programs, especially as most scientists were closest to this group of farmers.

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### Chapter 20 Tan Dan's attempt to develop wheat production at Chelana

Tan Dan gets HYV seed at research institutes in 1965

In triple gene high-yielding dwarf varieties the best qualities from three different strains were combined, i.e. one strain strain with high yield (heavy earheads with many and big seed), another strain with disease resistance, and a third strain with short strong stem to prevent lodging. The problem in lodging, Tan Dan told, is that only the upper side of the earhead will mature on plants that lie flat on the ground.

In 1965 Tan Dan went to Pusa and Ludhiana to get wheat seed of such triple gene varieties. He got seed from five varieties. These were Kalyan Sona and Sonalika from PAU, Ludhiana, S227 and S308 from IARI, New Delhi.

He only got a few seeds, less than hundred from each variety, as seed of new high yielding wheat varieties were very precious. They were difficult to get hold of for almost any price offered, as the demand was so great and the supply so limited.

In October 1965 Tan Dan met a farmer inside the Pusa Institute who had not got any seed, as he had less god contacts among the research workers than Tan Dan. He offered Tan Dan one Rupee per seed.

Tan Dan brought the seed to Chelana where he sowed them in a one acre field divided into five plots with big empty strips in between to avoid crosspollination. Tan Dan and the Chelana school teacher used a part of the six acres field the school had leased from the gram panchayat.

The teacher, R.C. Sharma, had agriculture as one of his subjects, and the plot was used for instructing the children in agriculture by practical experiments. The teacher and Tan Dan also took the opportunity to show the parent's of the students and also the villagers in general.

Tan Dan collected some local wheat varieties for trial

Tan Dan and his friend Sharma, the teacher, also planted local deshi varieties of wheat, which Tan Dan had got from a few places in Rajasthan.

From Nimbas area of Pali District Tan Dan got seed from the locally grown bhajia wheat variety, which Tan Dan had been told about by several farmers. They said that bhajia grown in the Nimbas area was an unusually good wheat variety.

From Sumerpur, a township near Mount Abu, Tan Dan got the _sharbatti_ wheat variety, which is locally grown in that area. Many villagers had told Tan Dan that sharbatti was a good variety.

From Pipar Tan Dan got another good bhajia wheat variety. It had long stems, and was taller than the wheat from Nimbas. Both these local wheat called bhajia had grain of red colour.

Some people of the villages where they grow bhajia varieties had told Tan Dan that the wheat is called bhajia, because wheat in the old time was looked upon as a medicine. It was considered superior to the ordinary bajra diet, and was therefore given to sick and old people. Wheat chapatis were softer to chew then the bread of bajra or jovar. In Marvari language bhajo means old man.

Tan Dan wheat trials 1965-67

In the rabi seasons from 1965/66 to 1967/1968 Tan Dan, assisted by Sharma, grew three local varieties in his trials, namely bhajia from Nimbas, bhajia from Pipar and sharbatti from Sumerpur. He grew the four high-yielding exotic varieties kalyan sona, sonalika, S227, and S308. In addition he grew RS 31-1, which was not an exotic variety from Mexican wheat, but a selected variety based on a collection of deshi strains from the Durgapura research station of the Rajasthan Government.

All the eight trials were given the same agronomic treatment, including the same amount of inputs. However, the local three varieties were planted in the beginning of November, while the exotic varieties of wheat were planted ten to fifteen days later, about 15-20 November, as the deshi varieties required a longer period for ripening.

They harvested S308 and Sonalika first. Towards the end of March. Ten days later, in the beginning of April, S227 and Kalyan Sona were harvested. The third week of April they harvested S 31-1. In the last week of April the three deshi wheat varieties were harvested, as these took the longest time to mature.

The eight varieties were given 30 kg nitrogen per acre (75 kg/ha) as a basal dos before sowing, and twenty kilogram (50 kg/ha) phosphate, also before sowing. No potash was given. Twenty days after sowing the exotic varieties were given eight kilograms (20 kg/ha) of nitrogen and thirty days after sowing the deshi varieties were given eight kilograms per acre of nitrogen, as the first watering ot the plants through irrigation after sowing (the very first watering was done already before sowing) had to be done earlier in the case of exotic varieties than the local varieties, as the exotic varieties had a more shallow root zone, and did not seek water from the depth of the soil to the same extent as the local ones. Hence the exotic varieties wilted more easily. The fertilizer dose of 8 kg N per acre (20 kg/ha) was given at the time of the first watering after sowing in both cases. The second watering after sowing was given without fertilizers after another twenty days.

Normally eight to ten waterings were recommended for the exotic varieties and six waterings for local varieties by district agricultural officers. At the trials Tan Dan and the school teacher carried out they gave seven waterings to all the eight wheat varieties. The trials were done on good loam soil newly broken up.

Most wheat at Chelana was cultivated in that kind of soil in the 1960s.

In the first year 1965/66 they only multiplied seed on the trial plots at the school. The recorded data was for the next two years of 1967 and 1968 rabi harvests.

In May 1968 Tan Dan went to the United States for half a year. The demonstration trials stopped, as the teacher had problems in continuing on his own. They were never taken up again, as Tan Dan after his return to India worked on farms outside Chelana most of the time, first at Ganganagar, and then for several years at Jodhpur. He did not live regularly in Chelana again until 1973. At that time the introductory phase of the new scientifically grown foodgrain crops was over at Chelana. Everybody had become used to the high yields. Chemical fertilizers had come in so high demand that the market shortage had resulted in various black market malpractices. Hence, there was no longer any need of demonstration plots for showing the advantages of the new type of seeds and other inputs such as chemical fertilizers.

Field watering methods in Chelana wheat cultivation

They irrigated the crop in the same way as all other Chelana farmers, i.e. by surface flow irrigation letting the water entering the field until it reaches the brim of the ridge of the irrigation square. These ridges have a height of about five inches. Then further flow is prevented by mending the breach of the ridge of the irrigation square. After having filled the gap in the ridge by hoeing the next square is watered by breaking the wall of the feeding canal adjoining the irrigation square.

In Chelana and similar Rajasthani villages this qualified work is mostly done by the labourers on their own without any guidance at all by the landlord, the socalled 'progressive farmer', who as a rule only visited their fields now and then for short time, not even each day. In most cases they did not come more than one or two times per week, and sometimes not more than three or four times in the whole crop season. Devilal Kalal, one of the waterlords-cum-landlords of Chelana did not go to his field at all until harvesting. He left the whole work of cultivation to his sharecroppers and labourers, who at least in Chelana were the real farmers as far work and technical knowldge is concerned, although illiterate and hardly ever approached, neither by extension officers of the government nor by others visiting Chelana in various agricultural development matters.

Between each of these seven waterings there are normally 18 to 25 days, but if the weather in the rabi season is very dry and windy, cracks may develop in the soil early and waterings may have to be done already after fifteen days.

At the time when the fourth irrigation after sowing is done, another ten kilograms of nitrogen per acre (25 kg N/ha) was given and after that no more fertilizers.

The watering has to be done very punctually at the later part of the plant period. The first two to three irrigations of the wheat plant as well as any crop is important, as the number of tillers, i.e. stalks is being formed in that early stage and insufficient waterings mean few stalks, i.e. the number of tillers. (Branches of the root system coming as stalks.)

The later waterings mostly from the fifth onwards have to be made on time, as the earheads are being formed at that stage, the inflorescence stage. With less water for the plant at this stage fewer grains form in the earhead, resulting in less number of grains per earhead. After fertilization and grain formation the milk stage occurs. At this stage there is also need of good soil moisture. If watering is done neglectantly, the size of the grain will remain small and the grains will be light in weight, as the embryo will shrink and not develop to solid grain.

Watering nos. 1-3 tillering stage

watering no. 4

watering no. 5 earhead formation at the inflorescence stage

watering no. 6

watering no. 7 milk stage in seed formation

Care had to be taken at 1. tillering, 2. earhead formation, 3. the milk stage

Wheat crop diseases at Chelana

In 1966 to 1968 no pesticides were needed at all, as there were no diseases on the crop. After that fungus diseases such as rust and smut developed on all varieties both local and exotic in most fields of the Chelana farmers. The rust and smut diseases were in 1978 still on the increase on most wheat varieties in Chelana and other villages in Rajasthan, wherever wheat and barley are grown. It was part of the reason for the declining yield on many Chelana farms in the next decade.

Another reason was the decline in genetical purity and uniformity of the wheat varieties in use. The ones introduced in the 1960s were still used in most cases in 1978, as the farmers and research stations were not quick enough to switch over to new varieties for keeping up the yield.

Smut

The research centres all the time released new varieties tested for better quality with regard to smut resistance. However, it is possible to control that disease also today with the same prophylactic technique which has been existing all the time, although not used or known by most farmers in Chelana and elsewhere even today, Tan Dan told in 1978.

The protective treatment against smut is to soak the seed in water for three hours and then take it up and dry it and rub the grain or treat it with mercury compound traded under various names and then sow the seed in the normal way. The reason is that the smut spors sticking to the surface of the seed grain germinates already after two to two and a half hour, while the grain itself needs longer time to germinate and therefore is unaffected. The germinated spors are then damaged by sundrying, and rubbing with the mercury compound. But for rust no such preventive treatment is available to Tan Dan's knowledge.

Rust

Tan Dan in 1981: Rust is a big problem. Wheat yield of affected fields in Rajasthan has gone down to one fifth of the normal or even nil, according to Tan Dan. In Jalagarh no wheat at all was produced in years of rust epidemics in the 1950s and 1960s. It is better in Jalagarh nowadays, but even rust resistant varieties such as triple-gene HYV dwarf wheat are likely to get infected in years of epidemics. Their advantage is that they stand erect, while local varieties lodge soon and thus get more affected by rust. Wheat grains with rust have small grains light in weight, and has a bad smell when flour is mixed with water while making chapatis, which gets an abnormal and therefore disliked taste while eating. Even the cattle avoids eating the straw of rust infected wheat, and people in western Rajasthan thinks that heifer-in-calf may get abortion from eating rust infected wheat straw.

According to Tan Dan urine helps to injure smut spores, but soaking wetness also helps to improve germination.

Tan Dan 1981: Modern farmers who have started HYV wheat production within the last 10-15 years they do not know, but old farmers of the Mali, Jat, and Sirvi castes, who have grown deshi wheat for generations, know about this old method of soaking and rubbing. They rub it in cow urine, which they consider purifying.

The saying is "Gau mata e richa karje."

i.e. Oh, mother cow, save us. ( _richa_ means protection).

Late planting better

The customary sowing time for growing wheat was the last week of October to first week of November.

In rabi 1966/67 the local varieties in the trial were sown in the beginning of November 1966, i.e. still rather late according to traditional standards. The next year the local varieties were sown in the middle of November 1967, i.e. about ten days later. The exotic varieties were in 1966 sown 15 and 16 November, and in 1967 they were sown on 29 and 30 November.

Tan Dan thinks the reason for lower yield the first year of recording than the second one was too early planting. Both local and exotic varieties were generally planted too early by farmers. In his opinion they would get higher yield, if they sow the deshi varieties in the middle of instead of around the first November, as now is the case, mostly. The farmers would get higher yield of the exotic varieties in Chelana and western Rajasthan and perhaps all over northern India, if the exotic varieties were planted in the last days of November instead of in the middle of November. But sowing of exotic wheat varieties in the middle of November has been recommended by the local agricultural extension officers coming to Chelana from Jalagarh, Merta, Jodhpur and the seed inspectors from NSC visiting Chelana insists that planting should take place in the middle of November telling that the sowing should not be delayed after 20 November. In their opinion that is the latest date wheat can be sown without getting a decline in yield. They insisted on these dates for the wheat seed multiplication program, in which a few Chelana farmers participated on contract with the National Seed Corporation.

He has seen that also with regard to wheat seed multiplication, contracts were only given to those who gave bribes to the inspectors. Later on they had to give another bribe to get the seed crop cleared and certified by him at the time of inspection of the standing crop.

Attempts to explain the higher yield of later sown wheat plants in rabi

The reason for getting a somewhat higher yield at ten to fifteen days later sowing than the date recommended for exotic varieties and twenty days with regard to deshi varieties compared to the traditional sowing time for deshi varieties is perhaps, as Tan Dan thinks, that the crop planted later in November has its grain formation taking place later in spring, from the first week of March to second week of April for late sowing, and from 20th February to middle to March for early sowing of wheat in Chelana area. Therefore grain formation is done at a time when the sunshine is stronger and the rate of transforming soil nutrition to plant nutrition is faster, because the photosynthsis process is faster. Another reason could be that the grain formation stage takes longer time when sown early as the temperature is lower. The earheads are then exposed to birds, insects and other pests for a longer time. They may be attracted to the earheads which stands in the fields and shine for a longer period than the late sown wheat crop.

Tan Dan's attempt to convince research workers

Tan Dan told several research workers in plant improvement at various research stations that the field problems are bigger for early sown wheat.

Pests are more and often also one or two waterings more are required in early compared with late sowing. It is an additional cost.

Tan Dan believes hardly anybody at the research institutes took his thoughts seriously, perhaps because most of them had an urban background. Few had any personal experience of cultivation under village conditions. Those with a farm family background in almost all cases came from farms with hired labourers that did the daily routine work. The landlord relatives of some scholars might work more with farm management problems on a higher level than minute crop field observations.

Ravi Dan hear about miracle wheat

In 1966 Ravi Dan heard about the new wheat on his journeys to Jaipur and Jodhpur, especially when going in buses. It is an important media of information, especially the kind of village buses, overcrowded and noisy, which were plying in Rajasthan along the dusty and bumby countryside roads in the 1960s. Buses that passed Chelana going to Merta, Jalagarh, and Jodhpur. The passengers talked about this and that in loud voices all over the bus, and at this time there were rumours and discussions about the new wheat varieties, a kind of miraculous wheat, which could yield many times the normal. They called it ajhab geun, which means miracle wheat.

The importance of buses as a media of information in rural areas, as well as of rumours and gossips, may not be fully realised by those who travel by jeep instead of countryside buses. In the 1960s a person who sat silent in the bus all the way from Jalagarh to Chelana was looked upon as a dumb person and his co-passengers sometimes started guessing about him in their loud talks.

Ravi Dan asked Tan Dan about the new wheat and Tan Dan told him they ought to grow it. He went to Ganganagar town where he bought ten bags of RS 31-1 in the end of September 1966, which they cultivated on 25 acres of the Detha farm.

They got twenty quintals per acre (5,000 kg/ha). In the next few years from the 1966/67 rabi season onwards the area under wheat on the Detha Bandhu Agricultural Farm increased from 25 to 400 acres. Wheat had become the major commercial crop in the rabi season, as the market demand was very high due to national wide food shortage. In Chelana village as a whole wheat production increased in the rabi season from almost nil in 1965 except for 'bagada' to about 40% of the total rabi sown area since the beginning of the 1970s and that was still the case in 1978 rabi season. The rest of the rabi land at Chelana was sown with jeera on about 40%, and on the remaing 20% mustard oilseeds and mustard spices. Jeera was the most profitable rabi crop in 1978, but wheat was grown in fields where jeera could not be grown due to various soilborn diseases such as bacterial wilt and blight.

About RS 31-1 wheat

RS 31-1 is an improved deshi variety selected by the Rajasthan Government through field trials after various local strains had been tested at the Government Research Farm, Dungarpur near Jaipur.

In the Chelana school plot trials RS 31-1 got seven waterings, 75 kg/ha N as basal dose and 50 kg/ha P as basal dose. Then 20 kg/ha N at first watering.

(Given to all varieties of the trial.)

Yield for RS 31-1 at Tan Dan's and school teacher's trial plot was about 48 quintals per hectare.

RS 31-1 yields on a typical farm in Chelana a wheat yield of 30 to 38 q/ha (deciton/ha) if it was given 50 kg/ha nitrogen, half of it ploughed down before sowing and half of it as top dressing. One quarter (12 kg/ha) at the third irrigation and another quarter at fifth irrigation. As is the normal practice at Chelana.

Many farmers in Chelana instead applied chemical fertilizers to the standing crop but gave no basal dose at planting. Nitrogen at the first and third irrigations, preferably spreading the fertilizer when the water is running into the patches to avoid the risk of having spread fertilizers without in fact getting any water due to various snags.

RS 31-1 is more drought resistant than Kalyan Sona and gives a higher yield under bad conditions, but less than Kalyan Sona under perfect conditions. RS 31-1 is also more rust resistant than exotic HYV wheat.

Conclusion: RS 31-1 compared to exotic Mexican wheat varieties is equally good, considering that irrigated cultivation at Chelana faces various hardships such as untimely electricity failures.

In the dwarf wheat introduction phase of the late 1960s Chelana waterlord farmers tried to grow Kalyan Sona as a first preference. As it was difficult to get hold they also used RS 31-1.

RS 31-1 was still free from rust and smut at Chelana, Tan Dan told in 1978. It covered half the area sown by wheat. The exotic dwarf varieties were more afflicted.

Tan Dan's estimate of rabi crop areas in Chelana in 1978

Cash crops continued to be preferred crops by Chelana village lords, with jeera covering about two fifths of the total winter crop sown area and mustard one fifth. Wheat was sown on the remaining 40 % and of that the high yielding variety RS 31-1 covered half and bagadha one fifth. The remaining 30 % of the wheat sown are was covered by the highyielding dwarf varieties Kalyana Sona, mainly, but also Sonalika was grown.

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###  Chaper 21 Traditional wheat cultivation in western Rajasthan

The traditional kathia wheat

No pure wheat crop at all had been grown in Chelana up to the 1960s, although deshi wheat was grown mixed with barley, and the mixture was called bagada.

It was therefore not a question of comparing the new varieties of wheat with wheat which the farmers already were growing. However, once or twice a decade dry farming of wheat in the traditional way was done in western Rajasthan and Chelana village in the winter. It was in years of high soil moisture, when the monsoon rains had been exceptionally good, and there were still pools of standing water around the fields at the time of sowing the rabi crop.

The variety of wheat traditionally used was called kathia, which yielded about five quintals per acre (12 deciton/ha), when it was at all grown in such favourable years. That Tan Dan had seen himself, as kathia wheat was grown in Tan Dan's childhood by his father Tej Dan. Also in the 1970s in many western Rajasthan districts it was grown in the same way, although it was seldom grown at all in the driest districts such as Jaisalmer. No inputs of any kind is given to kathia under this traditional form of cultivation, except that the seeds are soaked and stirred in a pot of cow urine for a while, and then dried again. After that it is immediately sown in rows with the traditional wooden plough and seed funnel mounted on the plough. The funnel was originally made of bamboo, which like the lathi stick was bought from far away regions of India. Nowadays iron funnels and pipes are more common.

Kathia unirrigated rabi wheat yields about 5 to 8 quintals/acre (12 to 20 q/ha) with no input, but with good tilling (jotna), as well as seed treatment with cow urine.

Bagda on less good soil at Chelana

Bagda was sown on soil not good enough for the highyielding wheat varieties.

Bagada was also grown in Chelana by the Dethas and other 'progressive farmers' on their poor patches of land. There the new exotic high yielding wheat varieties with triple genes (Tan Dan's description) did not respond well, and the bagada was more profitable to grow on such soils.

Bagda yielded ten to fifteen quintals per acre (about 30 deciton/ha) as irrigated crops, when given ten kg per acre (25 kg/ha) of nitrogen as top dressing only. That was divided into two doses of five kg/acre each at second and fourth irrigation. This way of growing bagada and local wheat was popular among the village farmers in general, especially among the smaller and more uneducated, as the inputs are less and straw for fodder more. The quality of the long and leafy straw is considered good for the cattle.

In comparison, Kalyana Sona and Sonalika yielded under normal Chelana farm conditions and practices on better soils some 15-20 quintals per acre (about 40 to 50 dt/ha). 40 kg N/acre (100 kg N/ha) and 20 kg of phosphate per acre (50 kg P/ha) were applied by most farmers.

Coarse grain and the sophisticated wheat

Tan Dan's relatives did not like his intention of cultivating bajra and jowar in the early 1960s, as they thought these cereals were inferior and unprofitable. Poor people's food. Villagers in general had since generations regarded eating such coarse grain a sign of backwardness and poverty. The Dethas, too.

During Jugti Dan's time the family mostly ate jovar and bajra, but also wheat during the summer months for about four months after the spring harvest of wheat in north India. They bought it from outside.

They also managed to cultivate some wheat themselves with the limited amount of water that could be pulled up from the Detha well by the leather bucket system. The well had been dug by Jugti Dan's family in early 19th century. When the economy of the Dethas declined after the Hariadhana disaster, the Dethas could not afford to buy wheat any longer. Therefore, from around 1930 to the middle of the 1950s the Detha family hardly ate any wheat chapati. With the new affluence in the 1950s as a result of mechanized irrigation farming, they started to grow bagada.

The traditional bagada wheat barely mixture

Bagada is a mix of red local wheat called bajiya and barley. This mixed rabi crop is irrigated and in those days cow dung manure was used, unless it was a field newly opened up for cultivation, but never chemical fertilizers. The yield was 15-20 quintals per acre (40 to 50 quintals per hectare), Tan Dan told.

Bagada was still cultivated in 1978 in those many villages around Chelana and in western Rajasthan in general, who still lived in the old ways relying on old agricultural practices of mainly dryland agriculture. For them the kharif crop was the main one, practically the only one, but irrigated bagada was cultivated in the winter here and there.

Bagada as a substitute for pure wheat in western Rajasthan

In about 1955 the Dethas started to cultivate cash crops instead of bagada. They grow jeera and mustard in the rabi season, as the merchants in Merta and Jalagarh, who also were their moneylenders, were interested in increasing their business in these commodities, which had a ready all India market, and could be sold at any time, while foodgrain was difficult to sell. It could only be sold locally to a flickering market. To reach large foodgrain markets was difficult without trade channels and transportation systems.

In the period 1955-1960 bagada was sold at 15-18 Rupees per quintal by the farmers of Chelana area including Merta and Jalagarh. 1960-1965 the price had increased to 18-23 Rupees per quintal. 1965-1970 the sale of bagada dwindled as farmers grew more of other grain, mainly pure wheat, but the poor had a habit of buying bagada, as it was still less expensive than wheat. As their demand continued, bagada wholesale price increased to 30-50 Rupees per quintal. 1970-1975 the bagada price the farmers got from the merchants increased to 70-100 Rupees due to general foodgrain shortage. The farmers mostly sold Bagada at 15-25 Rupees less than wheat per quintal to the merchants. Probably also in 1975-1978, but Tan Dan was not sure.

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### Chapter 22 The change to a money economy at Chelana

Before the age of money

The bagada mixture of deshi wheat and deshi barley is sown, harvested, threshed, ground and eaten as a mixture. The price of bagada was only 15 to 18 Rupees per quintal during the period when the Detha farm grow bagada from 1949 to 1955. At that time they ate bagada bread themselves in addition to bajra. They also gave bagada as wages in kind to labourers, and tried to sell the surplus, which was difficult, as there was no local market. Chelana and surrounding villages lived in a practically moneyless economy, where services were exchanged on a barter basis.

The barter economy also included manufacturing of equipments, building houses, or anything else of an investment nature. Foodgrain could hardly be sold to the baniyas of Chelana, as they did not do any wholesale foodgrain business after the banjara ox caravans had been replaced by the railway in the 19th century. The Chelana baniyas did only petty retail trade to the villagers in shops, besides having moneylending business in South India, an activity they had had for generations.

Not until 1955 when farmers such as Ravi Dan and Mehar Dan switched over to jeera and mustard did the wholesale trade in Chelana start growing.

With new cash in the hands of more farmers, the money economy started to grow. The Dethas started to make and to spend money, but other communities of the Chelana village such as the Jats still lived in a subsistance and barter economy.

Traditional grainlending system of Baniyas

Since generations a very old system of grain lending was practiced by Baniyas and big farmers even up to 1978. They lent foodgrain seed for sowing on the terms that the borrowers should give back five times as much, and foodgrain for consumption on the terms that they should return 2.5 to 3 times as much. This system is called bhadi, and is practiced at Chelana and all over western Rajasthan by Baniyas and landlords, when dealing with labourers and sharecroppers. It is a pre-monetary form of moneylending, which the baniyas considered practical when dealing with illiterate persons.

The growth of money economy at Chelana from 1955

From 1955 to 1965 Chelana and western Rajasthan as a whole was in a transit phase from a barter moneyless economy to a money economy, where most services and commodities and investments were bought for money. In 1965 Chelana had passed through this phase and got firmly involved in the money economy. The top group of increasingly affluent villagers were equipped with cash for buying completely new kinds of commodities both for their work and for their homes.

Money economy was introduced to Chelana about 1965 also in the sense that from this time financers had discovered the development potential of the village. Big baniyas living in villages and small towns within a radius of fifty miles from Chelana, as well as in Jodhpur, started to divert their money to Chelana on a large scale from the mid-1960s. They were the ones who gained most from the rapid Chelana development. Around 1978 many in this group of more than fifty private moneylenders earned in interest alone 200,000-300,000 Rupees per year on loans lent out to farmers in Chelana village. In total crores of Rupees had been earned by this group since 1965 up to 1978. They had earned that much money just by being moneylenders charging 44% interest. They had not involved themselves actively in agricultural development work, nor did they have any knowledge of such work, according to Tan Dan.

Traditionally in the area around Chelana the moneylenders had been around, wherever in the region there had been economic activities that could generate large financial turnovers.

On the one hand they had a productive role as suppiers of necessary credit, on the other hand the vulnerable position of many of their customers was often recklessly exploited in a socially destructive manner. An extremely non-egaliatarian feudal social structure in combination with periodic economic calamities due to a very erratic monsoon in this arid to semi-arid region reinforced the exploitative opportunities that the baniyas in most cases fully utilized to the misery of the afflicted customer.

In Chelana itself several Baniyas had grown into big moneylenders and wholesale merchants since the middle of the 1960s, and belonged to the category of fifty Baniyas mentioned above. To them belonged Deep Chand, Bhanvar Lal, Madhu Lal, the three biggest businessmen in Chelana in 1978. Each of them earned at least 300,000-400,000 Rupees per year, Tan Dan thought, although it was difficult to make out, as none of the Baniyas wanted to give any information on such matters. It was believed in the village that Deep Chand and Bhanvar Lal each had a capital of about 2,000,000 Rupees, and that Madhu Lal has between 1,000,000-1,500,000 Rupees, part of which they use for moneylending, mostly against 44% per year, and part of which for their wholesale business. Their the money was invested as working capital in their wholesale business, especially stocks of cash crops. Cereals were kept for a short time, so the capital tied there had a strong seasonal fluctuation.

The Food Corporation of India and other Government agencies did not buy as much grain from Chelana and other villages in western Rajasthan with good production, as they did from villagers in Punjab and Haryana.

There the farmers sold directly to the Government at the floor price which for wheat was 105 Rs per quintal in 1976.

At Chelana farmers were in debt to the Baniyas and had to sell to them at lower price.

However, in the late 1970s many Chelana farmers did start to sell their wheat to the Government agents in Jalagarh in order to get the floor price. It was inconvenient, however, as the distance from Chelana to Jalagarh is 24 miles. (About 40 km.)

Market fluctuations in foodgrain trade in western Rajasthan since the1950s

Demand and turnover were low in the Rajasthani retail foodgrain market up to the mid-1950s, as a large part of the population lived in a subsistence economy which included traditional bartering of commodities and services. There were feudal dependents and the jajmani system of family to family ties over generations.

From about 1955 to 1963 there was a moderate increase of the foodgrain business, whereas 1964 to 1975 was a period of sharply increasing demand due to severe food scarcity. It was mainly due to several years of droughts due to erratic monsoons. The food scarcity slackened a little around 1970 due to the impact of higher agricultural production in the country as a whole. High-yielding cereals, mainly wheat, had been introduced and irrigation projects were completed. The scarcity got worse again from 1972 to 1975. It was in these years of the early 1970s that Tan Dan saw new tricky business methods meant to circumvent Government rules and regulations. The aim of the official policy was to safeguard a sufficiently large foodgrain supply at prices low enough for the many poor consumers, a matter which did not seem to bother the private business community much.

In these years the baniyas became very successful in creating high prices both for farm produce and farm inputs by creating shortages in the market by hoarding. However, after 1975 the critical food situation eased due to

• some good monsoons,

• increased ability of farmers to produce high crop yields with new inputs increasingly available in the market, partly as a result of general industrial growth,

• the increased ability of the Food Corporation of India to maintain a satisfactory supply level in the Indian foodgrain markets.

As a result the extreme profitability of the foodgrain business declined in the mid-1970s. According to Tan Dan, Chelana baniyas in 1978 had become less interested in the grain trade, switching over to cash crops instead.

Foodgrain trade in the 1970s in western Rajasthan

Farmers may sell directly to the consumers. Tan Dan has observed that in recent years during the drought and grain scarcity in 1974 there was a new way of door to door delivery of grain in towns and big villages of non-wheat producing areas by which landlords with cart loads and tractor trailer loads of wheat sell regularly. Sometimes a baniya sell a landlord's grain like this, thereby circumventing the Government market regulations in the wheat trade, which according to Tan Dan prescribed that in Rajasthan retail dealers in foodgrain must have a license. Nobody without a license is allowed to keep more than six bags of wheat at a time. The Government appointed grainsellers declared as fair price shops are the retail outlets for grains and other essential commodities supplied by Government wholesale depots, and they sell at prices fixed by the Government of India.

From 1975 foodgrain production and stocks increased in three consecutive good monsoon rains. The situation on the foodgrain market changed from scarcity in 1974 to surplus in 1978 as far as the market is concerned, which does not mean that everybody had enough to eat, as many persons had so little cash that they could not buy, even if the shops were full of grain. That was the position of labour families living on low wages, and those suffering from full or partial unemployment. Hence undernourishment due to low purchasing power and piling up of foodgrain stocks went on simultaneously in the Chelana region.

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

In 1980 Tan Dan feared that the business community again would able to make excessive profit in the foodgrain market at the expense of the consumers in coming years of monsoon failure. In case they could rise the consumer price by hoarding.

He hoped the Government would be able to counteract by building up sufficiently large foodgrains stocks for release in such years.

In the next few decades foodgrain continued to increase and could be bought in the market at prices most people could afford. The future looked bright for the elite, who were in an upward spiral of development. Irrigated cereals grew where dams and canals had been constructed. Partly at the expense of tribals and others living on marginal resources. Some tribals also started to grow canal irrigated wheat and rice on their small holdings in areas such as Bansvara in southern Rajasthan. Foodgrain production increased and so did the size of the population. Natural resources such as underground water and limestone kept declining. The race between additional foodgrain production and additional population went on in a region about to deplete its own natural resources due to an enormous population pressure.

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### Supplement

The Chelana Detha clan pedigree (Tan Dan's kinship group)

Kan Dan Detha living at Devli got feudal grazing rights at Chelana in the first half of the 19th century. Three of his sons settled at Chelana. They were Budh Dan, Dalpat Dan and Ishar Dan. Budh Dan had two sons. Jugti Dan and Kim Dan. Yugti Dan's five sons were Sabal Dan, Fateh Karan, Radmal Dan, Tej Dan and Mahesh Dan.

Tej Dan got seven sons,

Sukh Dan, Ravi Dan, Savai Singh, Nath Karan, Kishore Singh, Tan Dan, and Raghunath Singh.

Tej Dan had seven nephews,

Sumer Dan, Naru Dan, Sire Dan (sons of Sabal Dan),

Bhir Dan and Ganga Dan (sons of Radmal Dan), and

Mehar Dan and Hamir Dan. These fourteen cousins (names in bold letters) started Detha Brothers Agricultural Farm in the 1950s.

Jugti Dan's brother Kim Dan had no son of his own. Therefore he adopted Mahesh Dan.

Kan Dan's second son Dalpat Dan got Mun Dan, the father Chiman Dan.

Kan Dan's third son Ishar Dan was the grandfather of Shiv Dan, a poor cattle herder who never became a farmer. All the other Detha families switched over to agriculture.

Tej Dan's brother Fateh Karan never got a son. He had two daughters Hapu and Ramu. They are the only women shown in this pedigree. (Hapu was Tan Dan's cousin who married into a Mehru Charan family at Chelana.)

Village councils for democratic village development in western Rajasthan

In this section Tan Dan's previous narrations about the change from feudal to democratic village administration at Chelana will be supplemented with more formal information for Jodhpur District, as described in the official Gazetteer.

The early start

The princely states of Rajputana including Jodhpur state, also called Marwar, was a comparatively stagnant and conservative part of the Indian subcontinent. Therefore, the urge for change towards less feudal and more democratic conditions in that region was strong among the political activists within the Indian freedom movement during the 1940s.

On an all India level the agitation for village self rule was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress Party under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru.

Already in 1938 the Panchayat movement had started in the former Jodhpur State. The agitation for social reforms by the popular movement for Indian independence brought about radical change in spite of a strongly conservative and feudal social atmosphere in the state.

In the early 1940's Jodhpur State government considered the establishment of village panchayats, and the Marwar Village Panchayat Act was promulgated in 1946. The panchayats were empowered to levy taxes on professions, sale of commodities, vehicles, animals, marriages, adoptions, feasts etc. Panchayats were entrusted with certain administrative duties such as looking after village sanitation, water supply, maintenance of thoroughfare, improvement of agriculture and livestock, looking after works of public utility and the management and control of public religious and charitable endowments. Several panchayats rendered valuable services to the rural public by providing street pavements, repair of roads, street lighting, removal of rubbish heaps and arrangements for regular cleaning of the village drainage system, construction of public latrines, control of stray animals, opening of schools, improvement of cattle stock, construction and repair of wells and tanks, plantation and preservation of trees, and removal of encroachments and widening of village paths. (Agarwal, 1979, p.384) Judging from that source, Jodhpur state seemed to be a very progressive region already in the feudal age! Where the feudal government promoted village panchayats with plenty of welfare activities. Practically the same schemes that ambitious village councils of Jodhpur district deal with nowadays. In spite of that the need for improvement seems as big as ever in civic life.

In 1946 there were 208 gram panchayats (village councils) in that princely state. 99 of them were in khalsa villages and 109 in jagir villages.

The village councils of the 1950s were meant for development

Most villages in Marvar did not get a gram panchayat until 1953, though. Among them were Chelana. That year the village council administration was regulated by the Rajasthan Panchayat Act 1953. "In October 1953, the Rajasthan Panchayat Act came into force and village panchayats and tahsil panchayats were established. According to the provisions of the Act, every village or a group of villages having a population between 4,000 and 8,000 formed a panchayat. Each panchayat circle was divided into wards and a panch was elected from each ward. A system of adult franchise through secret ballot was introduced in the panchayat elections. The panchayats performed functions relating to sanitation and public health, street lighting, registration of births and deaths, regulation of local fairs and rural water supply etc. After the advent of the Community Development Programme in 1952-53, these panchayats were utilised as agencies for implementing development programmes at the village level. The panchayats were also vested with some judicial powers and could try petty civil cases and exercise third class magisterial powers." (Sehgal, 1976)

Elections were held every third year on the basis of adult franchise and by secret ballot. The number of Panchas varies from eight to fifteen according to the population of the panchayat. The area was divided into as many wards as the number of Panchas fixed for the Panchayat. Any person recorded as a voter in the electoral rolls of the Rajasthan Legislative Assembly, residing in the Panchayat area can contest election from any ward, but can vote only in the ward, in which he lives.

Village panchayat functionaries

Sarpanch. The Sarpanch was the Chairman and Chief Executive authority of the Panchayat, and the head of the team of the Panchas. He was elected by the entire electorate of the Panchayat. He convened meetings of the Panchayat and presided over them, and was also responsible for the safe custody of cash. He was competent to receive money and make payment as authorised by the Panchayat and he prepared the budget for the approval of the panchayat and the Panchayat Samiti. He, along with the other Panchas, arranged and supervised the execution of work in the Panchayat area.

Secretary. Every panchayat appointed a Secretary to attend to the administrative work and to perform the duties assigned to him by the Sarpanch.

Resources and budgets

The Panchayats had certain taxation powers and levied the vehicle tax, octroi and taxes on buildings and on commercial crops. Other sources of income were: fees and fines imposed on the owners of impounded cattle, fines for disregarding administrative orders of the Panchayats, grazing charges, irrigation fees for water given from the panchayat tanks, proceeds from sale of Abadi lands etc. The Panchayats also received grants from the Government.

The Panchayats were free to plan their expenditure within their resources. Budgets framed by the Panchayats, however, have to be approved by the Panchayat Samitis concerned.

A meeting of Gram Sabha (Village Council) which consists of the entire electorate of the Panchayat area should be called at least twice a year to involve the villagers directly in the panchayat plans and keep them posted with the progress made. (Agarwal, 1979, p.384-5)

Very ambitious plans, and many rules and regulations, but their execution was not in the hands of the government bureaucrats that formulated these ideal schemes in their offices. What to do, if the functionaries mishandled funds allocated from government budgets or were partial in distributing grants and subsidies? If they favoured their caste friends and relatives at the expense of others? Or put the money in their own pockets. Did anybody think that the high-handed bureaucrats of the previous feudal regime suddenly would disappear to be replaced by development minded officers, that would protect the welfare of the common man out in the villages?

Functions of the Panchayats

The functions of the Panchayats were of three kinds: development, municipal and administrative. These village councils should prepare plans for increased agricultural production by individual families in the panchayat area and organise the community for the promotion of its wealth, education, economic security and social and cultural well-being. Agriculture was a secondary function of the Panchayats till 1953. It assumed greater significance after the introduction of the concept of Panchayat Raj in rural self-government.

**Meaning of Marwari and Hindi words**

Gotra. A group within a caste. They have kinship feelings and only marry other gotras, not their own.

Kamdar. He was the secretary and manager of the Thikana. The kamdar was also called Thikanadar.

Lathi. Long bambu sticks of hard wood. Always with a length from the ground to the lower part of the ear of the owner when used for fighting.

Raj ro marg. The cleanshaven strip on the top of the head is called "raj ro marg" i.e. the royal path. Compulsory for Bhambi men in the feudal age.

Savarn Hindu. A person belonging to high ranked caste groups, especially the brahmin, baniya and kshatriya type of castes.

Shudra Hindu. A person belonging to a caste ranked below the castes of the savarn Hindus.

Thakur. The feudal village lord.

Thikana. The fortress and residence of the village lord.

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Reference

Agarwal, 1979, Rajasthan District Gazetteers

Ambasta, S.P. 1986. The useful plants of India. Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, New Delhi. 918 pp.

Bhandari, M.M. 1978. Flora of the Indian Desert. Jodhpur. 471 pp.

Bhatta, S.D. 1962. And they gave up dacoity. 302 pp. Sarva Seva Sangh. Varanasi.

CAZRI, 1976. Fifteen years of Arid Zone research (1959-1974). Central Arid Zone Research Institute, Jodhpur.53 pp.

Gill, K.S. 1979. Research on dwarf wheats. Indian Council of Agricultural Research. New Delhi. 180 pp.

Jaiswal, P.L. (chief ed.) 1978. Wheat research in India 1966-1976. Indian Council of Agricultural Research, New Delhi. 244 pp.

Singh, M.H., 1990, The castes of Marwar. Census Report of 1891. Jodhpur.

Srivastava, A.S. and Mathur, Y.K. 1979. Recent advances - biodynamics and control of white grub. A guide for the control of white grub. Department of Entomology, C.Z. Azad University of Agriculture & Technology, Kanpur 208 002, India. 14 pp.

Cover image

Tractor ploughing and ox ploughing side by side in a western Rajasthan village around 1970. More and more oxen were replaced by tractors.

Photo: Tan Dan Detha.

***

That was all for the time being, but Tan Dan has more to tell.

If you have any comments on this book, please mail to me. Any suggestion for improvement is most welcome.

My e-mail adress is sonlal41@hotmail.com

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