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FORAY | Sunday, March 21, 2010 | Email | Print |  Chandrabhan Prasad Recently, I visited “God’s Own Country”, Kerala. This State is more of a painting than a landmass with vegetation all over.I was visiting Kerala Central University on the invitation of Dr Raghavan Vellikkeel, a faculty at the Department of Comparative Literature. The subject of discussion being “Englishing Dalits”, I was tempted to accept the invite. Inaugurated by the visionary Vice Chancellor Prof Jancy James, there were fantastic presentations from celebrated scholars like Dr Sanal Mohan, (MG University, Kottayam), Prof M Dasan (Kannur University), Dr V B Tharakeswar, (EFLU, Hyderabad), D Shyam Babu (RGF, Delhi), and Ms Meena Kandasamy (Anna University, Chennai), whom I describe as the “Goddess of Dalit poetry”. Organised much better than seminars in premier institutions in Delhi, the subject was introduced by Dr Prasad Pannian, a young faculty at the University. Dr K Joseph, another faculty, played a key role in organising the event. High in attendance, students demonstrated a great amount of intellectual rigors. So much so, that D Shyam Babu, Dr Tharakeswar, and I were required to have another session with students the next day. The seminar was a grand success as it deconstructed the notion of Dalits’ ‘Mother Tongue’. Subsequent speakers detailed how Dalits spoke dialects and that mainstream languages — Hindi, Malayalam, Telegu, Kannad, and Tamil — were never Dalits’ mother tongues. With no bondage of mother tongues, Dalits can, therefore, be easily dispassionate with native languages and passionate with English. English is neither caste abuse loaded nor with any caste-loaded prejudices. A consensus had arrived. As usual, I had requested Dr Raghvan, who apart from being a thinking scholar is also a great host, to take us to a few Dalit inhabited villages around Kasaragod district where the university, in its formative stage, is located. My request required that I would prefer visiting Dalit families involved in agricultural sector as farm workers. We were taken to Kannur district where some farming, as the organisers had assumed, still existed. Escorted by the ever-energetic CK Vishwanath, D Shyam Babu and I visited a Dalit hamlet of 12 families. We were disappointed as none were in farm work. “Where is farm work left in Kerala?” asked an elderly Dalit. “Neither are we interested anymore in farm work,” he added. I was not surprised when told that in Kerala, too, bullocks have been replaced by tractors in the State’s rice bowl areas such as Palakkad. I was told as to how massive labour shortage has forced farmers to shift their cropping pattern. Back in Delhi, I did a bit of research and found how fast India’s cropping pattern is changing. In the year 1980, 801,700 hectares of land in Kerala was under paddy cultivation, which fell down to 276,000 hectares by 2006. Production of rice fell from 13 lakh tonnes in 1980 to 6.3 lakh tonnes in 2006 despite many high yielding varieties now being sown. Due to changing cropping pattern, areas under food crops fell from 37.5 per cent in 1981 to 12.5 per cent in 2006. Uttar Pradesh is losing its top slot to Maharashtra in producing sugar. The cane acreage in the State is falling at an alarming rate — from 2.85 million hectares in 2007-08 to 2.14 million hectares in 2008-09. Hit by socialism, Kerala has turned into a Western Union economy as people are betraying the “God’s Own Country.” Moving away from farm to non-farm work is gaining currency, and workers are fleeing Bihar and Uttar Pradesh countryside as well causing a massive labour shortage forcing farmers to shift their cropping pattern. Extreme desire to escape from farm work, and the economic expansion driven opportunities in urban centers, in less than a decade, there will be fewer hands left to work in farms in most parts of northern India. A great crisis is awaiting India where the country may witness a massive fall in production of rice, sugar, pulses, oilseeds and vegetables. Most crops requiring hands for harvesting will be replaced by wheat. As evident in this year’s budget, and intellectual response to it, India’s planners, policy makers and opinion creators seem completely unaware of. What seems clear is that, in its intellectual life, India has weakened even more. The country’s intellectual reflexes are much slower than the pace of transformation. India’s intellectual poverty is far more worrisome than the poverty of its citizens. Heavy investment in new farm machines can save us from a big food crisis which appears quite real. |
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