RAHUL BANERJEE

A Cheerful Sceptic!

After accomplishing some of my own Herculean and Sisyphean labours (of which more later) and having reached middle age I put them down on paper but there were no takers because the publishers felt that what I had written wouldn't sell. But unlike in times of yore these days intellectual expressions spurned by publishers can still find a readership on the Internet where most things and especially unsolicited information and advice can be offered for free. So here are the results of my labour. But before people can get to my writings proper a small warning as to what they are in for is in order.

I believe neither in God nor in Utopia. I neither think that there is any human destiny nor that there is any pre-determined purpose in nature. I believe instead that everything depends on sheer chance and so life is, always has been and always will be unpredictable. Thus for me if there is any sin it is that of trying to make life predictable by binding it into the tyrannical confines of religion, ideology and private property and using society and the environment as dustbins for the negative side effects of such sinning. It is this sin that is frequently visited on us in the form of covert and overt wars, mayhem and murder and environmental disasters like Hurricane Katrina. So like all true blue naturalists and following in the footsteps of the first and greatest of them all, the Buddha, I too believe in nothing (It is of course a different matter that later the Buddha's followers unable to bear the scary thought of this nothingness transformed him into a God and Buddhism into a religion). Being a naturalist I am consequently also a sceptic because I am inherently suspicious of grand theories whether religious or secular. However, since  I  do not expect anything  from life  I am nevertheless a  cheerful sceptic

A Bhil Family

At the threshold of my adult life in 1983 I became an apostate from technology because of these heretic beliefs. Instead of pursuing a career as a civil engineer and manager for which I had trained for five years before that at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, I chose to lead a life of political activism among the Bhil adivasis (tribals or indigenous people as some others prefer to call them) in Jhabua district of Madhya Pradesh in India.

Erosion Plugged

I have often been castigated for supposedly wasting my education as an engineer but my answer has been that I have used my training to much better effect in cooperating with the Bhils to conserve nature through watershed development as in the picture above. This is much more than can be said of the others who have gone on to pursue corporate careers which are devastating the environment and the social fabric by their worship of capital and profit to the exclusion of all else. Initially I still had some belief in Marxism despite some of its utopian and deterministic aspects. However ten beautiful years spent among the supremely anarchist Bhils made me shed these last shackles of my mental bondage. The Bhils have traditionally lived non-accumulative, minimalist lives close to nature and have fought fiercely to maintain its pristine glory and their subsistence lifestyles. They held their own right up to the end of the first millenium after Christ. Their monuments to their martyrs called "Gathas" testify to this rich martial history.

A Memorial to Bhil Martyrs

However, their bows and arrows were no match for the firearms that their adversaries began to use against them with the advent of the second millennium after Christ and since then they have been continually dispossessed of their habitats and pushed back into remoter and remoter corners till after independence no remote corners remained to be penetrated by the modernising Indian state. Thus the initial matter of concern for me when I arrived in Jhabua was the absolute mismatch of traditional Bhil culture and lifestyle with the modern scenario.

Pens as Arrows

Education, meaning the learning of the complicated aspects of the modern world and being able to synthesize these with their own rich culture was a must if the Bhils were to survive as equal human beings in a competitive democracy. This has been the goal of the modern political struggles of the Bhils. An educated Bhil painter and activist, Gosa, portrays this in the picture above, which has pens as arrows.

This smile masks Hot Iron!

However, later I came to realise, with the prodding of my wife Subhadra who is a firebrand feminist and to whom I got married in 1993, that there is a major flaw in this picture of Gosa's. Subhadra is a dalit (translates as repressed), who are the previously untouchable outcastes of traditional Hindu society, belonging to the Mahar caste from which Babasaheb Ambedkar, the great pioneer of dalit liberation hailed. She has fought her own battles against patriarchal and caste oppression including that resulting from her marriage to an upper caste chauvinist male like me! Thus let it be clear that I am not speaking for her here but only mentioning the ways in which she has made me aware of my chauvinism.

Subhadra pointed out that the picture by Gosa depicts only the Bhil male. The Bhil social order too, mirroring possibly the most retrograde aberration of Indian society is highly patriarchal (we wouldn't be a billion plus people today if women had had the freedom not to have to bear so many babies). So at Subhadra's insistence we left Jhabua in 1994 to start work in Khargone and Dewas districts to address the problems being faced by Bhil women. These newer battles which have been very much more soul stirring than the earlier ones still continue.

  Veiled Protest!

Thus despite over a decade of organisation work among them, these women still veil their faces in public in deference to elder men as can be seen in the picture above where they have raised clenched fists to shout slogans of liberation but still have their faces covered.

Our Labour of Love!

Later still in 2000 our son Ishaan was born. That forced me to compromise in practice with my naturalism as unlike the Buddha I didn't think ditching my wife and son to take off for the woods to be such a big deal! We came out from our idyllic rural life among the Bhils, where initially in Jhabua I did not even earn a single penny or own anything other than the clothes I wore, to live in the city of Indore. From 2001 onwards I engaged primarily in pen-pushing or rather key-punching to earn money, an activity that I had started desultorily in 1994. Thus over the years I have gradually mutated from being a pure voluntary political activist to being a part time mercenary development researcher also. I have written profusely in this time about my life and work as well as everything else that has crossed my mind or for which I have got paid money!

The World Wide Web is one place from where I have learned a lot in recent years and all for free. The ideas of many people posted on the web have helped me immensely. I am part of a group of people who have set up a website on the state of Chhattisgarh from where Subhadra hails. So through this home page of mine, which is nested in this larger website, I propose to give back something to the Web in the hope that others too may benefit from my experiences as I have from theirs -

Making Sense of Rural Development

One of the ironies of fate has been that I have come back to using the computer in a big way despite having vowed when leaving IIT Kharagpur never to use one again because of its obvious contribution to the rape of mother earth by facilitating the excessive consumption and waste of resources (these days the problem of e-waste has assumed serious proportions with India having become a major dumping ground for this highly toxic excreta of modern development from all over the developed world). I used to do programming in college to analyse data using statistical formulae. Nowadays things have progressed very much further and there are sophisticated applications that do all the statistical operations and all one has to do is intelligently put in the proper data (otherwise one is faced with the "gigo" or garbage in garbage out syndrome!). So that's what I do these days. Data comes to me from all over the country and sometimes from across the world which I then clean of garbage and put into the statistical application programme to get results and insights. This section contains my resume detailing all the work that I have done in the field of rural development, political and legal activism and statistical analysis. All the project reports, articles and papers that I have churned out in the course of the research assignments that I undertake are up for public viewing here (still being uploaded).