The drama of a farmer who refused to leave his field; burdened with debt, the Indian farmer is defenselessly at the mercy of the moneylender; the police turn a blind eye.

This is a very simple story, as only reality can be, as gruesome as only reality can be: the story of an old Indian farmer who was driven from his field and knew only one way to stay: to die.

When I woke up in the train guard's hut on the little platform in the jungle, where I had gotten off the day before to visit the Indian villages, the sun had not yet fully risen. I was completely stiff from lying on the wooden bench, and my mouth and throat were as dry as cork. On the floor next to the bench, curled up like a kitten, lay the little boy who had accompanied me into the wilderness the day before. He looked up, sat up straight, and smiled as he rubbed his eyes. We each ate an orange and a mango and washed ourselves at the tap on the platform. I was so thirsty I could have drunk five liters in quick succession, but you can't drink five drops of that kind of water without getting stomach cramps an hour later and a hollow rumbling stomach for days (…). When we found a small road that led into the jungle, it was still cool, but the wind coming from the east was already hot and dry. Fifteen minutes later, the sun was out and a new, scorching hot day began. The boy brought more nuts from the bushes and also fruits that looked like cherries, but I didn't trust them.

I had only slept for a few hours, I was tired and had been obsessed all night by the poor village we had visited, the images of which kept flashing through my mind: a group of houses built from tree trunks and clay, a hundred or so people, a few buffaloes and some sheep, there in the wilderness. There were five hundred thousand of them. Among all the enthusiastic people who had talked to me in Delhi about the future of India, I met one older man who did not share that enthusiasm. He said gloomily: we are working, but it is as if we are digging away at the Himalayas with a spade. I began to understand his gloom.

Do you speak English?

After walking for an hour (…) we reached a [large] village, where, just like the day before, we were instantly surrounded by toddlers. Older people also came out of their houses to take a curious look.

I was about to enter one of the houses when I heard loud shouting from the square behind me. I looked back and saw a man walking towards us, wearing a European shirt over his loincloth. As soon as he reached us, he began to speak heatedly, pointing to the doorway where I was standing and making angry gestures with his hand. The man spoke an Indian language, probably Behari, perhaps Bengali, I don't know, I don't know any Indian languages, but his gestures clearly meant that he was forbidding me to enter the cottage.

If it had been a Muslim village, I would have understood why: you are not allowed to enter a Muslim home unannounced; you must first give the women a chance to leave. But this was a Hindu village. I asked the man if he spoke English. Yes, yes, he said emphatically. But I already knew that kind of yes. I asked him in English if he was the prime minister of Belgium. Yes, he said, and then I knew he didn't know any English at all. (A word of advice: when you are in a foreign country where you don't know the language, you should never ask questions that can be answered with yes; they answer all questions with ‘yes’, and those affirmations are absolutely unreliable; you have to ask questions that can only be answered with ‘no’ or more words; if you get that, you know you're on the right track, if you don't, say goodbye politely and talk to someone else, otherwise you could spend hours with a friendly, constantly nodding man, not realizing that he doesn't understand a word you're saying and end up with completely wrong information).

The man started speaking in his language again and pointed to a small building across the square. On closer inspection, I saw that the word POLICE was written on it, in Indian characters on the left and in English on the right. Then I immediately knew what the man wanted. To him, I was a tourist who wanted to see “old India” and then return to Europe and say: India is primitive, they were wrong to chase the British away. This state of mind can be found in one form or another in almost all old countries that have only recently begun to modernize. Sometimes it turns into bitterness and exaggerated, ultimately harmful national pride, sometimes into openly acknowledged backwardness and an unabashed, courageous request for help. In India, it is somewhere in between: they would rather you look at the new irrigation works than the slums, but they do not forbid you to do so. However, people do talk and write about these things, and this policeman, in his eager love for the new India, had taken it upon himself to move from “not liking” to “forbidding.”

With the stamp of Rijkevorsel

Such matters are by no means difficult to resolve. If it is an unofficial person, one must show a document stamped by the Indian government. The Indian population is, on average, very loyal and patriotic. There is great love for the “leaders” who liberated the country barely ten years ago and who will now make it prosperous. As a result, people show great respect for everything that comes from those leaders, including their stamp. I had two papers with such a stamp, one from the Indian embassy in Brussels and one from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Delhi. However, I did not show them, because the man himself was an official and therefore regularly handled letters with stamps. To such people, if I need to get something done, I show my Belgian identity card: that beautiful double card always makes an impression. It has a photo, two signatures, one from me and one from the municipal secretary of my native town of Rijkevorsel, as well as the municipal relief stamp and a little Dutch text. While I show this card, I make big gestures towards my camera and my notebook, point my arm all around India, then towards the house, start again, and then place my two palms on the man's chest with closed eyes, which means: you are standing on a line you must not cross, and I step into the house. It always works.

They don't know the card, but don't want to appear stupid by showing it; they can't read what's on it, but don't want to show that either, and the stamp is one they've never seen before. In such cases, it has happened to me that the man in question glanced at the card, then, to appear very clever, immediately made exuberant gestures to signify: of course, if you have such a card, then everything changes, and then went along himself to show the forbidden things. Sometimes they look at you a little doubtfully and don't make exuberant gestures, but you go in anyway.

(…)

Tipping forever and ever

When I entered the cottage, had greeted the man, and gestured that I wanted to look around, the policeman remained standing at the door. He came with me to the second cottage and the third, but only reluctantly, and then he went back to his office. I knew very well what all this meant: the usual way to get anything done in India is not to show any papers at all, but to give the person involved money, and then you can do anything. This man had also counted on money and was disappointed because he hadn't received any. I am sure that if I had asked him for some information or some help, he would have been very helpful. In India, you find this kind of thing not only among lower-level officials, but also among very high-ranking ones. Once, in a large city, I needed the help of the chief of the main station, the big boss, with no one above him. When I had received his help, he walked with me to my train and kept bowing and scraping until I slipped him a few rupees. He accepted them shamelessly, said goodbye, and disappeared. Accepting money for services rendered is not a disgrace in India; it is a custom.

The old man on the ground

In the fifth of the cottages I visited, I witnessed a tragedy. The farmer was at home, as were his wife, two grown daughters, a son of about sixteen, and four more children. What immediately struck me when I entered was that everything had been packed away: the plow and the rice pounder had been tied together with the rakes and were leaning against the wall outside, next to them were the dishes, wrapped in cloths. The man greeted me politely, but was visibly distracted. His wife was sitting with their older daughters in a corner of the outer hallway, huddled on the floor. Then I noticed an old man lying on the floor against the wall in the inner room, which, like the other houses, had no windows and was therefore very dark. He looked at me with a hard, hostile face and after a few moments, during which he had taken me in from head to toe, he turned his eyes away and continued to stare straight ahead. The farmer, emaciated, his ribs visible on his naked upper body, wearing a gray, frayed loincloth around his waist, spoke to the old man lying on the floor, pleading, agitated, soon furious.

I sensed that something was amiss. I stepped back into the hallway, where the women were sitting calmly, crouched down with that patience and outward indifference that one finds everywhere in India and that has become foreign to us hurried Europeans. The farmer had come along and tried to explain to me what was going on, but he spoke in his own language and I didn't understand a word. Then the policeman reappeared and the farmer stopped talking, looking frightened. The policeman said a few words to the farmer in a snapping tone, whereupon the farmer shook his head painfully and pointed to the inner room with a helpless gesture. Again, the policeman snapped and made a decisive gesture with his arm, which seemed to me to mean: get out of here.

I began to understand that this family was moving and that the old man could not or would not go with them. The policeman took my arm and signaled for me to follow him. We walked across the square to the police station, where we were met by a man dressed in European-style khaki. This man, who could actually speak English, was clearly the boss of the other man, who was apparently some kind of guard, because he bowed deeply to him, let him go first, and was then sent outside.

Tea and dysentery

The police chief – in fact, the only real policeman for the four villages in the area, as I would soon learn – kindly asked me what I was doing in the village; he nodded gravely after reading the letters of recommendation from Brussels and Delhi and said that he would be happy to give me all the help he could (…) While we were chatting, the other one brought tea. I hastily said, “Thank you, I don't drink tea,” because I knew that the policeman, sloppy like so many Indians, had certainly not boiled the water before pouring it over the tea and that I would suffer the consequences afterwards, but the policeman interpreted my protest as politeness, rejected it with charming courtesy and poured the tea for me himself. I had no choice but to drink the tea, deciding as soon as I was outside to take two extra anti-dysentery tablets in addition to the six I took every day, and then just hope that the discomfort that sometimes took a few days to appear would occur in a place – forgive me – where there were either houses with toilets or no houses at all.

“He is unable to pay!”

Then I asked what was going on in the house where the police officer had come to get me. “Never mind that,” said the policeman with a bitter gesture, “it’s not important.” Anyone who has spent some time in India would, like me, have thought: so it is important. The man's irritation had the same cause as the excitement with which the officer had previously forbidden me to enter the first cottage. The case of the moving family was something from the old India, the India that people were busy cleaning up. That India, many people reassured themselves, was no longer there, it was no longer allowed to exist, but in reality it was still there, it imposed itself from all sides and people were annoyed by it.

When I insisted on hearing more about it, the man said angrily, “Oh, the man can't pay!”

“What can't he pay?”

“His debts, his taxes, his daughters' weddings, he can't pay anything!”

“Does he have a lot of debts?”

“Of course he has a lot of debts!” the man exclaimed irritably. “Is there a single farmer in India who doesn't have a lot of debts?”

The irritated tone of those last words was different from the way he had said at the beginning that the matter was not important. The anger had taken a different direction. At the beginning, it was directed at the farmer who was moving away, now it was about all farmers, about India, India that was not as he wished it to be. Still irritable, but softer, he said:

“Our farmers are very poor. You in Europe cannot imagine that. But do you know that almost all of our farmers have only a small piece of land that would be no bigger than your garden? That they have to live on it with their entire family?”

“They can't do that, can they?”

The man said bitterly, “They have to, and they have had to for five thousand years.”

“And those who can't manage?”

“They die.”

(…)

“Most Indian families are large,” I said. “There are a great many children.”

“Yes, but we eat very little,” said the man gloomily. "We can sustain this because we are used to it, having been so for five thousand years. The human body adapts. If you let a hundred Indian farmers sit down to a feast tomorrow and eat as much as they want, the next day all hundred will be sick and twenty will die. The climate is such that crops can be harvested twice a year, sometimes three times, so there is enough food, I mean for people who are used to being hungry and eating only once a day, but occasionally there must also be money for clothes, a new plow, an ox or a buffalo, a wedding. That money is not there."

“Where do they get it?”

“They borrow it. Then they can't pay it back. On the contrary, as soon as they need it again, they borrow again.”

“Who do they borrow from?”

“In every village, or for every group of villages, there is a moneylender.”

His face hardened as he said, “You would call him a usurer. He lives off lending money.”

“But he never gets it back.”

“Oh yes, he does,” the man grimaced.

“How?”

“He seizes the harvests, the family jewels... Indians love jewels. If they have had a particularly good harvest and have been able to sell grain or rice, they don’t come home with money, but with a ruby.”

“If the moneylender seizes the harvest, what do the farmers and their families live on?”

The man shrugged and said:

“There is always the jungle, some wild plants, fruits, a scoop of rice when he goes somewhere to hire himself out as a day laborer.”

Turned to dust

Then the policeman came rushing in, without knocking, which the officer angrily rebuked him for. But the policeman began to speak hurriedly and point outside with grand gestures. Then he motioned for us to come with him. We stepped out onto the square, squinting against the white glare of the sun, and saw that the house of the family who had moved out was ablaze.

“The bastards!” growled the policeman.

“What happened?”

“Can't you see?” cried the man angrily. “They were driven from their land and set fire to the house in revenge.”

He gave angry orders to the policeman, but the policeman waved his hands and said a few words, which suddenly made the policeman stop being angry.

“They didn't do it,” he muttered. “They left half an hour ago, without the old...” The last word was only half spoken. He ran towards the house. “Come with me,” he shouted as he ran.

We ran toward the cottage. The house was a torch. Crackling flames rose in a tremendous bundle from the powder-dry roof. Smoke billowed from the doorway. The policeman ran around the cottage a few times, trying to approach it. However, the heat was so intense that he recoiled. Then a wall collapsed and the cottage collapsed in a fountain of sparks. It continued to burn for fifteen minutes: a shapeless pyre. Then the farmer and his son came running out of the jungle, panting and sweating. They stopped at the edge of the square, their eyes wide with fear.

The officer looked at them and said in a strangely soft voice, “That man will never know another moment of happiness in his life.”

“The old man is still in there, isn't he?”

“Yes.”

“He's the one who set fire to the house.”

"Yes, they tried to persuade the old man to come with them, but he refused. The old man has worked in the fields all his life, look, over there, that red dusty piece of land, his father worked there too, and his father before him, you'd be surprised how far back it goes. For the Indian farmer, the field is the only thing in his life that is good for him, the only thing that remains faithful to him. There may be drought, so that the field yields nothing, but then there is hope, the almost certainty that it will bear fruit again next time; and when there is sadness, the memory of some exceptionally good harvest makes his eyes shine again. A field is a friend, a father and a mother, a strong son, a beautiful daughter.”

The flames died down into a smoldering pile of ashes. In it lay, dead, the body of the old man, whose only joy in life had been the vision of a blossoming green field.

The old hand that had lit the fire, and the feet that had then retreated to the dark corner, were weak and unsteady, but the force that had driven them and the calm determination with which the old man had remained still as the flames engulfed his body was something of the force of nature that has swept across India since time immemorial, greater and stronger than man and his kind. During the night, the wind would stir up his dust and merge it with the dust of the field, with the dust of India.

Perhaps two rupees...

The women and children had now also returned from the jungle and stood huddled together a few steps behind the farmer and his son, watching: a meager group of people, a wooden plow, some earthenware.

“Don't they have a buffalo?”

“Not anymore.”

“The usurer?”

“Yes.”

(…)

The farmer and his family crouched down in the shade of the bushes at the edge of the jungle. I told the police officer that I had heard in Delhi that, according to ancient Hindu traditions in these areas, a farmer could not be driven from his field. The man blushed. He said quietly, “That's right.”

It was obvious: the moneylender was the big man, big men come from Delhi, the policeman could not afford to be a policeman for the moneylender too.

After a while, the man muttered as he looked at the family on the edge of the jungle: “Tonight they will collect the remains of his bones and take them with them.”

“Does the man have ten rupees?”

The policeman shook his head.

“Two?”

“Maybe.”

Twenty Belgian francs...

“Where will they go?”

“I don't know.”

“Do they know?”

Somber, like an admission of guilt, he replied, “I don't think so.”

He gave a shy, awkward military salute and muttered that he had to go to his post now. The boy, who had been playing with the other children in the square the whole time and had watched the fire from a distance, huddled together with the villagers in fear, now came running up and together we made our way to the house of the man who had driven the poor wretches from their homes and fields.

1. This is a translation of an article titled “Verpletterende armoede in de Indische jungle” (Crushing poverty in the Indian jungle), which was published in the Belgian Catholic newspaper De Week voor Belgisch Congo, on February 5, 1956. 
2. The article is part of a weekly installment which ran from November 1955, to June 1956, wherein the well-known Flemish writer Aster Berkhof (1920-2020; pseudonym for Lodewijk Paulina Van Den Bergh) recounted his trip around Asia, which he undertook in the summer of 1955. A significant part of this series is dedicated to India, on which 14 articles were published in 15 weeks. This is most of article 3/14.
3. The series of articles was later compiled in the form of a book titled Haveloos India (“Ragged India”), published in Antwerp in 1960, wherein this article is titled “Van een Indische boer die zijn akker niet wilde verlaten” (pp. 31-41).
4. All emphases are original to the text.