Daharkanda

Green fields, grazing animals, lush greenery, and simple people with utmost hopes in their hearts unaware of what is happening in the world outside. What else comes to our minds when we think about a village? Daharkanda almost fits this bill, from our childhood tales, but reality is always stranger and harsher than fiction.

My recent stay in this village has given me rich insight into the concerns it faces, especially recent, and possibilities to mitigate them over time, through proper intervention and awareness programmes. Bringing change takes a lot of time and perseverance, and we need to be more accepting towards their way of life, which though harsher, is in sync with nature. We must never break that. I had previously visited the village for workshop purposes, but staying in their houses, and accompanying them in their daily chores, has allowed me a clearer understanding of the village practices. One cannot understand the dynamics of a place, or the people inhabiting it, until one experiences their lives in their ways. Visiting a place for half a day doesn’t let them open up to you as much as it is needed for us city dwellers to understand their lives & livelihood, either. A writeup is not possible to elucidate our findings and realizations that we have come across in our visit, but as researchers it is our duty to give a sneak peek into their lives through us so that we understand that a life without exploiting the environment is possible and cost-efficient.

You will mostly find everything you need at your doorstep without having to make a call to the online grocery stores. And most of it is free! From firewood for cooking to mud for building houses and stoves, and even water snails to feed ducks with.

As I write this, the whole world is voicing their concerns against the new farm bills that are being passed by our government. But it was quite shocking to know that the people of Daharkanda have very little or no idea about it even though their main livelihood is agriculture based. Half the people are not aware of what’s going on in the country. This really makes me question the true essence of democracy as half of the decisions are taken without the knowledge of half of the people. A very tiny village which has a minimal number of voters and is situated remotely almost near the Bangladesh border, makes this even worse.

It brings us to one of the most interesting thing about the place, River Sonai, which is also the primary source of water for the whole village. The river acts as a line of separation between the two countries, India and Bangladesh, which share its water. Villagers living nearby come to its banks to bathe, wash and fish. The banks are filled with myriad wild plants and the living roots of the trees form natural bridges and steps in plenty. On one of the four days of our stay in the village, when we were lying down on such a natural pathway, I pondered upon the thought that how boundaries are so fragile and meaningless. How we human beings have created these imaginary boundaries to divide two beautiful sister countries for our own selfish reasons. It was so painful to watch the ducks being chased by their owners as they were swimming away to the other side of the river which is Bangladesh. I mean how would the ducks know about the boundaries that we have created? It brings me to question these laws even more — so much suffering! From the cows having to wear identity cards on their ears, to people being killed by soldiers up and downstream, as we learnt through stories we heard, all for what?

But I digress. Coming back to the river, it is vast and can be seen as far as the human eyes go. The reason why farming is easy in that area is because of the well situated river, whose water is used in the fields with the help of pumps and canals; because of this river, the land, too, is quite fertile and clayey, which the villagers use for constructing tools and utensils. During summer, the water dries up making the river bed walkable. We’ve heard stories of people going to Bangladesh by walking on the river beds when the rules were less strict.

They also use the water for household purposes like drinking, bathing and washing. Even though the underground water is saline, the river water is quite fresh and sweet. The groundwater stays moderately warm even at night during winter as we saw vapour rising from it. The water smells slightly of sulphide. We also heard folktales of a woman (a “witch”), rising from a decaying pond beside the river to gobble up passers-by. It just goes to show both how personally superstitious beliefs touch the lives of villagers and how rooted to nature the sources of such tales are.

Other than trees, one could see, at every other footstep, ducks, chickens, goats and cows. From this it was evident that animal husbandry is another source of income for them. They buy foals, raise them healthy, and sell them at higher prices. If the goats give birth then they sell the foals. The more the foals, more the income. That is why during our stay the “story of the week for the village” was a goat giving birth to five babies. Some of them complained that the cost of rearing the animals is often more than the profit incurred. This is especially true for cows. Also, when the goats often invade someone else’s field and eat their produce, it leads to quarrels. This requires the women tending to them to be extra watchful of them as they graze. The chickens & ducks provide them with eggs and meat. The chickens are fed fodder crops and veggies from the fields whereas the ducks are fed leftover rice and freshwater snails (গুগলি) that the women fetch from the rivers. We even saw someone feeding the ducks with their own hands. Cows are considered to be much useful as they are used for different purposes like grazing, ploughing the fields, milk and, cow dung, for building and maintaining mud houses, and as fuel for cooking. They have a unique way of doing this. They shape up the cow dung on sticks like kebabs and let them dry. These dung kebabs are fed to their mud stoves. It’s nice watching their stoves in action, the smoke rising safely through its chimneys. They have made small houses for the animals beneath their pucca houses and small animal shades for those who have mud houses. The children have an excellent bond with all the animals. The amount of time and labour devoted towards them is unexplainable. After the sun sets, the women call them in with musical calls of “aye”, and magically they come back, as if they know that they are being called. Domestication of dogs is not practised there as we saw very few dogs here and there. It’s mostly to protect the chicks and ducklings from being preyed upon.

Most of the houses in the village have two rooms with a kitchen and bathroom outside. The source of water are the tube-wells and there is a tap for drinking water for the whole village, that has recently been installed by the municipality. The houses in the village, sadly, are rapidly being transformed from mud houses to pucca houses as an initiative taken by the government under Pradhan Mantri Vikas Yojana. Though this seems like a boon to them, in reality these houses are badly insulated and require high maintenance, let alone being easily repairable after any disaster, especially because the construction materials are not local. Post Amphan the village has lost a major portion of its green cover and hence these houses are now dangerously exposed to the winds. Just like the city dwellers, people in the village are also cutting off the trees in order to protect their houses unaware of the fact that now the houses will be in more danger.

Though all the houses have access to electricity, they use very little — 2 low voltage bulbs for the house, 2 fans, maybe one bulb for the bathroom and one for the kitchen. Some houses have television sets, too.

The roads are quite bumpy in the interiors but the highway is smoother, and made of asphalt.

As far as agriculture is concerned, the main vegetables grown are cabbages, cauliflowers, onions, garlic, chillies, brinjals, carrots, beetroot, pointed gourds, beans, and potatoes. There are large yellow fields where mustard is cultivated and this whole process of extracting the seeds from the flowers is done mainly by the women which is a beautiful watch. What is left after the extraction is used as fuel for cooking, or as fodder for the cows. It looks very beautiful, just like the handmade artificial flowers and can be used to decorate houses. We collected some of them for our homes, which has intrigued many visitors.

The villagers don’t own much agricultural land themselves and instead, have to take them on lease. The profit from the produce, however, gets used up to pay this amount, leaving little for anything else. Even though most of the fields had paddy or mustard, it was relieving to see fields bearing seasonal vegetables like pointed gourd being produced on patches in between. This is the first time we got to know how much effort it takes to cultivate pointed gourd, especially artificially pollinating the crops using one patch of male flowers and pollinating the female flowers using the stamens of those. This work is primarily done by women, adding to their burden of responsibilities.

Unlike other villages, the farmers acknowledged the fact that they used harmful chemicals to cultivate their crops, which is quite unexpected and against the norm. They even used pesticides to kill earthworms, which ruin the beans. Because of so high pesticide usage, the farmers often fall sick while returning from the fields and even contract chronic digestive disorders.

They showed interest in learning natural farming, without the use of pesticides, and wished to switchover, if the yields were to match. Thus, if we host workshops there, we’ll certainly get people attending them, due to this high interest for it, they being aware of their impacts on them and others, with their knowledge of natural farming being limited to commercial organic mono-cropping practised before the green revolution.

The farmers have to sell their crops far below market price, which is equivalent to selling nothing. Such events are further enhanced through practices of strong arm middlemen, dictating who can sell their wares and where. We heard stories of farmers who took their goods to Sealdah being harassed and sent back.

The village has an interesting demography of consisting almost entirely of single mothers. Child marriage is very prominent in the village with girls being married off at around 12-14 years’ age. On bearing children, most of these girls have to face divorce from their husbands and have no choice but to return home. Thus, in several families, there is a de facto matrilineality present, consisting of single mothers: grandmothers, aunts, mothers and daughters. The relationship between such single or rather, singled mothers and their children is very beautiful and unique, forming deeper bonds, as they lack a father. Many of the women take their children to their workplaces, the fields, where they play while observing their mothers work.

Lacking the privilege of education due to this societal pressure of early marriage, many in the village aspire for women’s education. They wish their children to get well-educated and find decent jobs in the urban spaces, leaving the rural environment behind. This dream however took a massive hit from the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdown, which took the school away from the children, especially in a village lacking smartphones or computers, and further, lacking electricity for extended periods of time after Amphan struck. This has also led to an increase in the number of dropouts and, even in child marriages among women, who for the poverty-stricken families is often an extra mouth to feed. The rampancy of child-marriage is also a result of the prevailing ageist beauty standards, which make it difficult for older women to find partners, as well as the dowry system, which is why, families marry off their daughter as soon as they find a groom asking for a low dowry, as one would sell falling shares in a stock exchange.

Nevertheless, few women want to brave the market and become entrepreneurs, staying in the village and selling products they can make from the rural space. Their skills mostly include stitching, cooking, making food products, such as pickles, chutneys, etc. We were given a delicious taste of their skills through some bread rolls, jaggery and shoru chakli, beef stew, and a delicious daal with eggs and vegetables thrown in.

This begs one to state how well we were treated by the villagers, who went out their way massively, to look after us, some delicately juggling their jobs, and “domestic duties” for this purpose. At the same time however, in this web of mutuality, what struck us were the strong economic disparities between the members of the extended families, and even neighbours. In the village, only owners of cows could avail the luxury of a dung kebab, the rest being forced to use sticks and crop leftovers they find. This was even true among families, where siblings or cousins living next to each other would not share it, and cook separately — one under the open sky, the other inside a roofed hut or even a brick & concrete building.

A village of infinite possibilities but lacking guidance and confidence to make use of the extremely hardworking dedicated people as well as enriching resources. The lack of knowledge of the outside world or the lack of community building capacity are the hindrances. They need to be made more aware of the activities happening around the world for that would give them the scope to think outside the box. It has to them who comes up with a idea as they know their land and people more than us. What we can do is hold workshops and screening sessions where they get exposed to various films and documentaries of women and community works so that they know about the possibilities. Also, we have to work and constantly engage in conversations with the children in the village so that the different social issues can be stopped, so that they raise questions when something is wrong. We can also arrange for an awareness campaign for the farmers to let them know the alternative ways of agriculture/natural farming as they seemed interested in knowing and learning whether it is possible to practice farming without pesticides. Or to create a farmer’s market over there with few families who own lands so that they earn more than they are earning presently and the rest can follow. They can also think of using the waste products like jute and the crop residue of mustard plants after harvest for making decorating stuffs and selling them in the city as almost all the households have that in abundance. And it’s absolutely free. What I felt was as there were too many animals, there might be some possibilities of using those animals for some purpose. Need to think about that though.

Penned by Sanghamitra Mukherjee.