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Inside the train carriage, there were many people sitting on the upper and lower bunks, squatting in the aisles, and crowded in the corridor leading to the toilets. Perhaps that was why Ganesh Rajwar had settled himself in the open doorway, his feet dangling over the metal steps. The train swayed through Maharashtra, but Rajwar sat quietly. A colorful cotton gamcha, which resembled both a scarf and a towel, was wrapped around his neck, the wind playing with the ends of the cloth.
I wanted to ask Rajwar a few questions, like: How far has India come? What problems does it still face? What does freedom mean to you? What is your vision of India? But before answering any of these questions, Rajwar asked me to take a photograph of his left hand. Faintly visible on his palm were two sets of phone numbers, scrawled in ballpoint pen. He had boarded the train in Nagpur, on the Deccan Plateau in the heart of the subcontinent. He had arrived there the day before after a long journey on another train from his home in Jharkhand, in eastern India, and was now heading south to Vijayawada, in Andhra Pradesh state, about eight hundred miles away, in search of work on a building site. The numbers on his palm had been scrawled by a contractor back in his hometown. On reaching Vijayawada, Rajwar planned to call the numbers he had noted down and inform those who picked up the phone that he was waiting at platform no.
When I met Rajwar, it was about nine o'clock on a Wednesday morning in early August, and I had already been on the train for about forty hours. The Himsagar Express runs from the Himalayan foothills of Kashmir, where I had boarded, to Kanyakumari, at the southernmost tip of India, a distance of 2,355 miles. I intended to travel its entire length, a journey that would take three days.
Rajwar said he would be gone for at least a few months. He would earn four hundred rupees (less than five dollars) for eight hours of work, and another two hundred rupees for an extra four hours a day. The money would help support his wife, two young sons, and his mother. Workers from poor parts of India like Jharkhand and the neighboring states of Odisha and Bihar—my home state—flock to other parts of the country, especially the big cities, to work in the service sector and in various temporary jobs. Rajwar was barely making ends meet—and I felt I couldn’t ask him a big question like “How has India changed in the last twenty years?” Instead, I asked him, in our local dialect, to explain what would happen if someone like him couldn’t leave for work. He replied that if the migration of people from places like Bihar stopped, the country would come to a standstill.
The questions I planned to ask Rajwar were inspired by – in fact, lifted from – a black-and-white documentary from 1967. The film is called I Am 20, and it was made for the Films Division of India by SNS Sastry twenty years after the country’s independence. The documentary, which runs just under nineteen minutes, asks a group of twenty-somethings various questions. I first watched it about ten years ago and found it fascinating: the idea of talking to people all over the country seemed interesting and enticing.
“20 Years of My Life” begins on a moving train. At the end of the first minute, after a collage of passing houses, bridges and fields, we meet an eloquent young man sitting with a physical chemistry textbook in front of him. He says, “One thing I would very much like to do is to travel across this country from top to bottom, with some money, a notebook, a pen, a tape recorder and a camera.” He expresses a desire to know what he is a part of and what is a part of him. I think it was this phrase about traveling across the country “from top to bottom” that planted the crazy idea in my head to board the Himsagar Express. I was nostalgic for the time the film showed, when freedom seemed new and exciting, and I wanted to meet fellow Indians who would talk openly about their hopes and fears.
The new country and its youth speak with such innocence, largely because they don’t know what we know, living so many years later. The young people in the documentary have a captivating sense of idealism, even when much of what they say amounts to lamentations about the poverty and misery around them. Fifty-eight years later, with the idea of a new India being aggressively marketed both at home and abroad, I wanted to know whether the old answers, and perhaps even the old questions, were still relevant. Today, news reports from the country of my birth cover everything from scientists successfully landing a spacecraft on the moon and cricket victories to cow lynchings, where Muslim men are executed for allegedly eating beef, and the horror
Sourse: newyorker.com
