Untouchable Friends
Chapter 5 The sweeper families at Chelana
The development of the bhaipa since the 1940s
Baya, the sweeper girl, had a greatgreatgrandfather called Sheraji. He was the ancestor of all Bhangis who lived at Chelana in 1980.
Sheraji lived in the early 20th century, at the time of Jugti Dan, Tan Dan's grandfather. Sheraji had died before Tan Dan was born. In those days the Bhangis lived at the southern edge of the village settlement area. Then there were more Bhangi families at Chelana than that of Sheraji, but none of the families who lived in the village in 1980 hail from them. It is likely that Sheraji had relatives who moved to other villages of the area to work as sweepers there, because Tan Dan have been told by Chelana Bhangis that they belong to the same kinship group as the Bhangis of three other villages of the area.
Hence, the whole Bhangi mohalla is one bhaipa (clan). In 1980 nobody of the grown-up men of the Bhangi group at Chelana were more distant relatives than second cousins. Tan Dan had met all of them, but not Sheraji.
The shift to the new mohalla
In the 1950s there were two Bhangi families in the village. Both of them were big joint families with several grown-up sons. The heads of these families were Labuji and Bhikaji. Labuji was the Bhangi feudal servant of the the Chelana Thikana, who worked at the stable. As a feudal servant he was ordered to carry out various nasty duties, such as mishandling villagers who had broken feudal customs.
It was Labuji who gave Harji Bhambi a shoe-beating and plucked his hair on the order of the village Thakur around 1950. The cruel treatment was a punishment for disobeying an established feudal rule. According to that rule all low caste people of the village should keep a cleanshaven strip on their heads, as a sign of submission and meekness.
Both the Bhangi families lived a wretched life in filth and poverty. Their congested mohalla was situated in between the Bhambi mohalla and Jugti Dan's big farm house.
They lived in the Marvar world of feudal rule, caste inequality and untouchability. It was taken for granted that Bhangis should live a life in stark poverty and great misery. In the 1950s times changed, fortunately, and a new age slowly dawned also in the remote village of Chelana. Situated in desertlike surroundings in between the two towns of Jodhpur and Ajmer, more than 160 kms apart.
The tight grip of the feudal elite in Rajputana loosened over the working class they had exploited so badly for such a long time. From 1952 onwards the humble agricultural tenants became more and more confident landowners.
From the central Government of newly independent India a stream of welfare schemes were handed over to the bureaucratic machinery on state and district levels. Schemes were made for building stone house colonies for various untouchable groups which from the 1950s were called Scheduled castes in the official language.
In the late 1950s the Rajasthan Government had a house building scheme for people of the Bhangi caste. It was the Harijan Colony Settlement Scheme.
Any gram panchayat, that means democratically elected village council, could apply for funds for building stone houses for families of the Bhangi castes in the village. It was interest free loans, which should be paid back by the new house owners in due course. At the initiative of Ravi Dan, the Chelana sarpanch and Tan Dan's elder brother, money was obtained, a building contractor called. A line of eight solid one room stone houses was erected in the wasteland at the northern outskirt of the village. Beyond the Rebari mohalla and that of the Ganvaria Banjara, two nomadic groups who in the 1950s started to settle at Chelana on their own intitiative, as the village had come alive and kept expanding due to the start of mechanized irrigation farming.
The two Bhangi families shared the eight attached houses half-half. The western half of the line of houses was allotted to Labuji's family, and Bikhaji's joint family got the eastern houses. The kinship group kept growing and in 1981 there were thirteen families of husband, wife and children. A few houses had been added, and the families still had sufficient space. But the families continued to expand.
At Chelana all Bhangis lived in the new mohalla for several decades, before any family tried to settle anywhere else in the village. The small land of the old Bhangi mohalla in the south they sold to some neighbouring Bhambi families. In the early 1990s the place still looked abandoned, full of filth and fences of dry thorny twigs for domestic animals. All the Bhangis felt it was a great step forward to shift to airy stone houses from their dirty thatch-roofed huts.
The villagers regarded Government facilities provided under such welfare schemes as grants rather than loans. Nobody thought the government would ever try to recover the loans. They thought so until Indira Gandhi declared of Emergency Rule in 1975. All of a sudden discipline and strictness was emphasized in the development programs and in the society at large, and even the Bhangis could feel it, as they were reminded a few times to pay back their loans. A few of the families had paid back a part of the loan up to 1981.
The Bhangis felt grateful to Ravi Dan, although the money and the execution of the work had come from the bureaucratic machinery of the Rajasthan government. The role of Ravi Dan and his supporters in the gram panchayat had indeed been decisive for getting the money from the Government in the 1950s. Ravi Dan was a young active progressive farmer participating in local politics on the Congress side. In several other villages of the Chelana area no schemes of this kind was implemented at all, especially in villages in which the old feudal lords continued to rule.
It happened that the former village lord became the chairman of the village council. The Thakur became the Sarpanch. It was possible in villages where the Rajputs constituted a large part of the village population. In such villages low ranked castes such as Bhambis continued to be very meek and obedient and also voted for the Thakur in Gram Panchayat elections, although it was very much against their real interests.
The low castes including the Bhangis continued to be supressed by the elit in the next few decades in spite of formal village democracy. Especially in villages with ex-jagirdars of the Rajput caste capable of adjusting to the new age. Some Thakurs managed commercialized large farms, and continued to be in a strong social position by deepening their urban contacts. Tan Dan guessed that also in such villages money was allotted for the construction of Bhangi houses under the welfare scheme, but misappropriated somehow, without the Bhangis in such villages even being aware of the existence of such a scheme. At any rate, according to Tan Dan, Chelana was one of the few villages in the area where a new well planned Bhangi mohalla could be seen during these years of the late 1950s. Built by Government funds. Although the scheme was meant for all villages in Rajasthan with a substantial Bhangi population.
Most men of the Bhangi caste did not work regularly as sweepers
Most women of the Bhangi families at Chelana worked as sweepers at private houses, but their menfolk did not, except on those rare occasions, when no women of their household could go. For example, when they were were sick.
It was more common that men worked as sweepers at public places. Then they were employed by some organization which paid them wages. For example, Bhangis were employees of the municipality for cleaning streets in towns and kasbas. Both men and women did such work. Sometimes husband and wife worked together.
Still, women used to stand the drudgery of sweeper's work better than men. By tradition it was their task to take care of their own family and household, and that might have fostered them to greater responsibility and maturity than men showed.
Madan Ram's son Tamba Ram and his wife illustrate that. They both got jobs as street scavengers at Pipar, the kasba to the southwest of Chelana. Tamba Ram left after some time, but his wife continued the work which brought cash to the family. Tamba Ram sometimes lived at Pipar together with his wife, and sometimes alone at Chelana. Off and on he worked as an agricultural labourer, but on the whole he was unemployed. Most of the time he sat at home. He was often drunk.
Chelana Bhangis as sweepers at the Muslim Id festivals
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At the two Id festivals of the Chelana Muslims each year, Mithi Id and Bakra Id, the Bhangis by custom swept the namaj ground, the praying ground, where all Muslims of Chelana made a collective prayer. The place for doing namaj, i.e. prayer, was called idga. At Chelana the idga was situated between the village bazar and the village tank. The idga was a simple wall monument in the open and the praying ground in front of it was just a small barren field.
Although in most cases it was the Bhangi women who worked as sweepers, on this function the job was only performed by Bhangi men, because this Muslim function was only attended by men.
The namaj prayer was carried out about ten o'clock in the morning on the day of Id. After the namaj meeting was over and the assembled Muslims were about to disperse, the Bhangi men kept standing here and there in the midst of the happy, talkative crowd, waiting for their reward. They just stood their without saying anything. Now and then some of the departing Muslims stopped at a Bhangi and gave him a few coins. Most of them only gave five to ten paisa. Occasionally some pious or generous Muslim could give as much as a Rupee.
When all the Muslims had gone, the Bhangi men got together and pooled their money. They shared the money in equal amount, after a lot of counting and calculating. They were five grown-up men, some young boys and a few children sitting in the shade of a stone wall of a Rathore house yard on their way back to the Bhangi mohalla. Tan Dan's friend Devi Ram, who worked as a bundle lifter at the magistrate court at Merta, and his brother Jabru. There was also Vimla's father Harman Ram and Pelad , the most senior person of them all, being in his late forties. Handling money was normally done under the leadership of the eldest person of a kinship group.Therefore Pelad led the work of dividing the money.
New jobs for Bhambis
The old organizations in feudal western Rajasthan were meant to control people and to extract something from them. Such as Thikanas and caste panchayats. In the 1950s a new kind of village organizations started, which had the objective to provide some kind of service to the villagers. To help them somehow instead of suppressing them. Such as schools and hospitals. Post offices and agricultural marketing cooperatives.
The Gram Panchayat, i.e. the village council, could arrange these facilities through Government officers who provided funds and facilities. That is how simple villagers gradually realized that the power to get things done had shifted from the village thakur at the thikana to the Sarpanch and his Gram Panchayat.
Some of the Bhangis such as Labuji had been employed as a kind of serfs at the Thikana, the feudal centre up to the early 1950s, but from the late 1950s the new peasant leaders of the village, Ravi Dan and his friends, arranged employment for a few selected Bhangis at some of the new institutions, which were about to start in the village. Ravi Dan told the Bhangi bhaipa (kinship group) that the Gram Panchayat could arrange two permanent jobs for them, one at the secondary school and another at the village hospital. The two Bhangi families of Labuji and of Bhikaji could select one young man each for jobs as chaprasis, i.e. watchmen-cum-attendants. It was a servant kind of job with low status and a small salary. Still it was very attractive for villagers such as Bhangis, as it meant a regular income without hard labour.
The elders of the Bhangi caste decided that Labuji's son Sugna Ram should work at the Chelana hospital, and Bhikaji's grandson Matadin at the village school.
The Chelana hospital started to operate in 1960. It was a small one. It mainly functioned as an open dispensary, but there were beds, too, both in the male and the female ward. On average some fifteen to twenty persons stayed there as hospitalized for a few days.
After having worked at the Chelana village hospital up to the 1970s, Sugna Ram got a job at a dispensary of another village for some years. In the 1980s he became a chaprasi at a hospital at Jodhpur.
Matadin, the Bhangi who got a job at the Chelana school, continued to work there until his retirement. The school kept expanding all the time since its modest start in the late 1940s. Around 1955 it got its own school building, then a middle school was added and in 1959 the Chelana Secondary School was started. Matadin and the other three Chaprasis of the secondary school were recruited at that time. Matadin was the only one who belonged to a schedule caste. As a Bhangi he was untouchable to the whole staff of the school, and to the students as well.
Until 1980 Matadin lived with wife and children at his father Udaji's house at the Bhangi mohalla at the northern edge of the village. He had many brothers and the house was getting crowded. In 1980 he built a house on a plot at the new housing area near the school in the south. The plot was just a part of a bushy wasteland up to which the village settlement area had not yet reached. He had been promised that plot several years earlier by Ravi Dan, the sarpanch. At the 1978 Gram Panchayat election, Satya Narayan became elected new sarpanch, i.e. chairman of the village council. He belonged to the other side in village politics. As he was opposed to the actions taken by Ravi Dan generally, he was not keen on helping Matadin to solve his housing problems. The Gram Panchayat decided that Matadin had built his house without permission, and ordered him to pull down his house, as it was unauthorized. The two parties of the Gram Panchayat kept discussing about it, and no action was taken, but the threat remained for many years. Matadin's family still lives there.
The house was situated in a new housing colony of mixed castes to the south of the Merta-Jalagarh road, which in the 1980s had become very busy full of heavy vehicles from near and far, especially trucks for the limestone industry of the area. That industry kept growing all the time. In the 1990s there were even cement factories in the area pouring out a thick smoke. A major source of new wealth and environmental pollution.
Devi Ram, the bundle lifter at Merta
Matadin had a brother called Devi Ram. He was one of the very few Bhangi children, who went to the village school around 1960. An important reason for letting him study was probably, that his elder brother Matadin was employed at the school. Devi Ram had a pleasant personality, and after he had finished school, he got a job as a kind of chaprasi at the tehsildar office at Merta. His job was a little more advanced than an ordinary chaprasi work, as he had to be literate.
He moved around papers, files and other material of the patvaris in the Kanungo's office, which was a part of the tehsil office for the Merta area. He had to put files on the right shelves and lift bundles of paper, which could be heavy. Hence, the title of his job: bundle lifter.
He had a house in the Bhangi mohalla at Merta, a fairly big housing colony in the middle of the town. Tan Dan visited him there now and then, as they remained good fiends, helping each others in various ways.
At school Devi Ram was a class mate of Tan Dan's young brother Ratuji and also of Genvar Ram, a Bhambi boy who had been good at school, but got his life spoilt by a fraudulent court case that went on for years.
Bhangi tractor drivers
Devi Ram had two brothers who were tractor drivers, Jabru and Kalyan. They belonged to the young men at Chelana who got the opportunity to learn tractor driving from the 1950s onwards, when mechanized irrigation farming was introduced in the village. They became skilled labourers in high demand in the agricultural peak season and therefore better paid than ordinary labourers.
In 1980 there were about thirty men at Chelana who worked regularly as employed tractor drivers. Others drove now and then, especially at peak seasons. They were both hired labourers and young men belonging to farm families.
Four of the tractor drivers belonged to the Bhangi caste. Among these were Jabru and Kalyan mentioned above. Both of them used to be hired by Detha farmers.
The third Bhangi tractor driver was Dula Ram. He had a share in a tractor which to the major part was owned by his maternal uncle, a cattle bone contractor at Rian. Dula Ram was the son of Sugna Ram, the chaprasi at the village hospital, and his grandfather was Labuji, the feudal serf at the Thikana stable. Dula Ram and his father lived in the second house from the west in the line of attached stone
houses which constituted the whole the Bhangi mohalla.
The fourth Bhangi tractor driver was Chetan Ram. He was the father of Baya, the young sweeper girl we followed through the village on her tour to her jajman families. Chetan Ram died in late 1994. His younger brother died twelve days after him. They had both been alcoholics for many years, when they died at the age of 45 and 42 years. In the 1990s Chetan Ram had his own tractor, which he and his sons mainly used for transporting stones from limestone quarries to lime kilns. His sons continued to operate the tractor after Chetan Ram's death.
The expansion of the limestone industry at Chelana has meant plenty of job opportunities to poor depressed groups in the Chelana area, as the case of Chetan Ram's family showed. Therefore they were less in the clutches of the village elite than earlier. But the old feudal relations continued out of habit and tradition for many decades. Chetan Ram, for example, used to keep company with Rajputs, although he hade a very subordinate position in their company.
Chetan Ram learnt tractor driving as a teenager, when he worked as an agricultural labourer at the farm of Praduman Singh, a skilled farmer of the Rajput caste and a good friend of Ravi Dan, the village sarpanch. Praduman Singh himself taught Chetan Ram the technique of tractor ploughing, and how to maintain the tractor. It happened in the 1960s, when also Tan Dan learnt tractor driving.
Chetan means 'he who is awake, he who is conscious' in both Hindi and Marvari, and Chetan Ram was quite a bright boy in his youth. He became a talented tractor driver, according to Tan Dan, who thinks that Chetan Ram might have been one of the ten most skilled drivers of the village. As for operating the tractor in the field, in making straight rows in ploughing and planting etc.
The reason why Chetan Ram became like a family driver at Praduman Singh's farm in the 1960s might have been that Chetan Ram's family had an old jajmani relationship to Praduman Singh's family with regard to sweeping etc. Tan Dan was not sure. Chetan Ram got the opportunity to become a tractor driver rather than his brothers, as he was the eldest brother. The others were still too small.
In the 1970s, Chetan started to drive tractors for Mehar Dan, the first sarpanch at Chelana in the 1950s, and one of Tan Dan's cousins.
In 1981 Chetan Ram had not worked regularly as a tractor driver for five years. He only worked in the peaks of the rabi and kharif seasons. Then the farmers wanted their fields ploughed and sown as fast as possible and skilled tractor drivers were in high demand. Their wage was therefore 15 to 20 Rupees per day, whereas in the lean season tractor drivers only got eight to ten Rupees per day.
Chetan Ram got into more and more leisurely habits. He only worked for some three or four months per year in total. The rest of the year he was idle, sitting at home or meeting young people of the Rathore mohalla. He got into the habit of drinking liqour together with them. They drank, whenever they managed to get hold of alcohol. They bought from the government licensed liquor shop or, more often, from those who distilled liqour at home, and sold at a very low price. Around 1980 they only charged two to three Rupees per litre for their illegal liqour.
Chetan Ram's Rajput friends accepted his company, but did not forget he was an untouchable. They served him in a special mug, which he had to take care of himself. They used him as a servant and messenger, and called for him, whenever something was to be done. Chetan Ram got exploited, but he thought he gained from his Rajput company, too. In the eyes of other Bhangis he was a distinguished person with powerful friends. Although he was neither old nor mature in character, his caste fellows considered him to be their leader, and he often acted as the spokesman for the whole Bhangi mohalla.
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