Wednesday Quick Reads
The Sewing Machine Project
[I’m taking a little break this week, so thought I’d repost this short section from the “Villages and Tribes” chapter of my India book, Very Bad Buddhist, which you can find posted in full on this Substack. The set-up is that I’m taking a meditation course in socially engaged Buddhism at the Root Institute in Bodh Gaya, Bihar, India, led by an Anglo-Indian teacher named Kabir Saxena. The place of the Buddha’s enlightenment, Bodh Gaya is the number one pilgrimage site for serious believers. It is also in one of the poorest parts of India. The Root Institute reaches out to the impoverished villages in the immediate area. On the morning this section recounts, my rag-tag meditation group of westerners is taking a field trip to visit one of the Institute’s projects, helping village women become economically self-sufficient by training them on the sewing machines the Institute has provided.]
The morning of our first visit to a village, our group had many questions about the local scene. The Indian man who would translate came to the morning meditation and discussion session. Through him, we learned that the Maoist revolutionaries in his area go door to door. "Who is your exploiter?" they ask and they write down the answer. If that person's name appears a certain number of times, they then go and talk to him. "Stop doing this or that," they say. If the person won't change his behavior, they come back and kill him. It's apparently that simple.
And in this land of class and caste warfare, the other side is just as brutal. The big land owners still often force people to work their estates. A couple of strong arm types show up in the village and say, "Time to go to work." If you say you have other things to do that day or other plans for your life, you are apt to get your arm broken or worse. For a member of a lower caste to become involved in political activity is often to risk life. Poor families have no recourse to the police, who are more often than not bought and paid for by the wealthy.
A Harijan village might attack or be attacked by a village of a different caste. Some castes have private armies. Legitimate political officials exploit these differences, as do Maoist factions that have allied themselves with dacoit, or outlaw, groups. Jesse James meets Chairman Mao.
"What is the caste of the village we will visit?" someone asked.
The village we would visit, the village from which I had heard the explosive singing my first night at the Institute, was mixed. There were milking caste people there. Goat and sheep keeping caste people. And, off by themselves at one side of the village, Harijans, “untouchables.”
Kabir and our interpreter led us across the fence and irrigation ditch bordering the Institute's property and to a footpath along the dikes between paddy fields. We wandered out in a long, straggly line, Kabir and the interpreter out ahead and Thomas and I next, with the others behind. A walk in the country. Thomas and I, impatient with the pace and seeing the village in a clump of trees ahead, went out in front.
This insured us a good seat when Kabir led us through the muddy village of dogs and low, brick houses to the sewing room, where the twenty-some women of the project waited for us. They had spread a couple of clean, floral cotton bed spreads (Pier 1 Imports, anyone?) over our half of the floor and set three colors of marigolds in water in a shallow stainless steel bowl on the floor.
I took off my shoes and entered first. All the women moved to one side of the room and stood up. They put their hands together and namasted and we all stood very formally as the other Westerners came into the room. Again we all namasted, then sat down. To start off, because Kabir said many of the young ones like the idea of meditation, we sat in silence for a while, watching our breathing.
We began asking them questions about their lives through our interpreter. One of the brick walls was unfinished and little kids, other women and men crowded around there to watch and listen the way people in India always seem to crowd in to watch and listen.
We learned that the village of 2000 people is made up of about 200 households. Women from all three castes—Harijans, members of the milking and the sheep-keeping castes—were in the room. About 75 to 100 people in the village can read and write.
"Do you have a school here?" asked one of the Westerners.
"Gee ha! Oh, yes," came a proud chorus. Then out of the brief silence that followed this answer, from one young woman with a quick smile at the very back of the room, "But the master doesn't come."
"Does he still get paid?"
"Gee ha," came the chorus. Everybody laughed, the Westerners in confusion and disbelief, the women and the crowds of men and children nearly bursting into the room in nervous embarrassment.
There were small open spaces between some of the bricks, ventilation holes, and at some places the wall did not reach all the way to the rafters. More ventilation. Eyes peered through each of these openings, tiny fingers through some. Encouraged by the laughter in the room, little boys pushed dirt and debris through some of these holes so that it fell in our hair. When we jumped and shook the dirt off our heads, there came giggling and the sound of scampering feet from the other side of the wall—then more dirt. Loud Al hated this, and each time they targeted him he'd jump up and yell, "Oh! Damn! What next?!" Even the women we were trying to interview thought this funny and swayed and leaned on one another laughing each time it happened. Al, unamused, finally stood with his back against the holes in the wall. "I'll probably get a knife in the back now," he said.
Alice, the social worker with all the laundry, then began pumping the village women with questions. They liked her.
"Are you married?" they wanted to know.
She pointed to her husband, Bruce, who stood apart from even those nearby in the doorway. "He is my husband," she said, and for a long moment afterwards there was silence as the women openly assessed him.
Then one woman asked what the age difference was between them. It seemed great.
"Oh, he's really just a little boy inside," joked Alice uncomfortably and everyone broke out laughing.
Bruce, however, did not smile.
"We heard," said one of the village women, "that you don't stay married. Is that true?"
About ten of us tried to answer all at once. A complicated answer. And incomprehensible.
Audrey chirped out of a British B-movie, "Do your husbands beat you?"
"Gee ha," came the answering chorus.
"What do you do about it?" Audrey demanded.
They shrugged, embarrassed. Some giggled and talked among themselves. Then the brave one with the quick smile asked, "Do your husbands beat you?"
"Yes, yes," came the chorus from the Western women. Lots of nervous laughter. "Gee ha!"
"What do you do about it?" the brave one demanded.
Audrey shook her fist, ready to storm the Winter Palace. "We beat them back!" she yelled, and the room exploded in cheers and more laughter. She shook her fists at them. "That's what you need to do! Beat them back! And then leave them! Don't stay married if they beat you!"
She had won them over. The men standing in the doorway, the exposed wife beaters, shifted nervously. They and we Western men, suspected wife beaters, were out of the conversation now. We could sit and listen to the women, but nothing we said would be picked up on, nothing we asked would be answered. Only the male interpreter could take part. Finally, even he was discarded as the village women led their Western counterparts outside to look at the sewing machine they were learning to use in order to earn and save a little money. For the moment at least, they had transcended the language barrier.