Letters from Kolar

It was Mother India with her heat and droughts, monsoons, rivers and coasts, mountains and plains, temples and sad eyed cows roaming the streets and lanes. It was India with its patchwork of small fields and rice paddies and colorful markets. It was India where superstition and the spiritual were always present.  It was India, a land of six hundred thousand villages and over- crowded sprawling cities. It was India where a quarter of the world’s population lived without proper sanitation or enough water and where everything except hospitality was in short supply. This was India that you either loved or hated. This was India and for the first time in my life I felt as though I was home.

The clouds that floated in over the sparsely vegetated hills and granite outcroppings of Kolar District on South India’s Deccan Plateau were usually nothing more than white wisps devoid of the promise of rain.  I was smitten by the harsh beauty of the arid landscape and its inhabitants, not unaware of the hardships of life there. The region suffered from chronic drought and was one of the poorest and most underdeveloped areas in Southern India. I came there as a member of a group of Peace Corps volunteers with special skills recruited to help the farmers of the district better utilize the area's groundwater resources by deepening and improving surface wells that would give the local farmers an opportunity to raise cash crops during the long dry period. We came to Kolar expectant and idealistic young men, and as it turned out, we would not only teach our skills, but learn something about ourselves and life. We worked alongside Indian counterparts in order to pass on our methods and ideas. There is a proverb ”give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." Our Peace Corp philosophy was that it is better to teach someone to do something rather than do it for them.

We entered another world. It seemed as though we spent a lot of our energy adapting to the culture, adroitly weaving in and out of unusual situations and navigating the maze of everyday occurrences that were a part of village life. We were met by the effects of poverty and lack of medical care.  There were people who bore scars from smallpox and we saw deformities that in other countries would have been hidden from view deep in hospital wards.  Leprosy and polio and tuberculosis and many of the diseases that were eradicated in the western world still existed. Epidemic illnesses like typhus and cholera were under control as a result of mass inoculations but there were other acute health problems in the villages.  One of the major causes of illness was from water that was contaminated due to the custom of open defecation or by the flies that bred in uncovered sewage ditches. The risk was greater during the monsoon season. Disease was also transmitted from person to person through the normal practice of washing the rectum with the left hand after defecation and not disinfecting the hands afterwards. Hepatitis, intestinal parasites and common diarrheal illnesses were serious problems and were spread by this basic lack of sanitation and hygiene. There was also an ever present risk of staphylococci and tetanus that could infect the most innocuous looking scratch or sore and without antibiotics could be lethal.

At the shallow reservoirs that accumulated water during the monsoon for use in the dry season, you could find women doing laundry or filling their jugs and pots to carry home on their hips or heads, men squatting, making their toilet and then washing their backsides, drivers wash their lorries and herders watering their animals. One day I asked Dev, one of the men in the workshop, what was ailing him? His dark skin had paled and he bent over and groaned, holding his abdomen to ease the cramps. Between grimaces he said, “Oooh the mangoes in my father’s garden are ripe now and I ate too many.” I corrected him and said, “what you’ve got is an infection, you probably drank contaminated water or ate something that was tainted, I’m sure that’s why your stomach is aching.” “Oh no,” he said sheepishly, "it is certainly the mangoes and I’m being punished for my over indulgence." I asked another friend who was having abdominal pains what was ailing him and he said that he had been having heat. “Heat, What is that I asked.” “Heat you know when there is no women for a long time,” he replied in his singsong dialect. And again I gave him the same lecture on hygiene and coli bacteria. I asked him if he washed his hands after going to the toilet. The question and the answer were quickly forgotten. The bar of soap that I left along with a bucket of water by the outhouse remained unused. Trying to convince people that gastro intestinal illnesses came from fecally transmitted sources was pointless. They couldn't see the bacteria, therefore they didn't exist.

The well behind our house was a convenience for the women and girls from the nearby bungalows.  Running water was a luxury and didn’t exist in the village and filling the family’s water jugs for bathing, laundry and cooking was their responsibility. The women usually came twice a day, in the evenings and mornings.  They brought their own rope, or used ours if was hanging on the pulley, dropped their brass or clay pots the four or five meters down to the water and then with strong arms and hands hoisted them gracefully onto their heads and hips. The well was in constant use and the water was always fresh and cool and we had hard surfaced the surrounding area to prevent impurities from leaching into the aquifer during the downpours of the short rainy season. It never occurred to me that we owned the water; or didn´t think of it as strange that our neighbor’s didn´t ask permission to take it. To me it had no value. I came from a society where there was water in abundance and therefore took it for granted.  We washed our cars with it, flushed our toilets, watered our lawns and let it run out of the faucet if it wasn’t cold enough. In contrast the residents of Kolar were forced to count the precious drops, and I was beginning to realize that for most of the world’s people access to adequate, clean water was a luxury and that many people had to traverse long distances every day to get. Use of our well might save these women hours of standing in line and the burden of lugging their pots home from the village tap where at best there was pressure just a few hours every day.

A neighbor woman came to draw water one morning with her brass pot on one hip and Raja the youngest of her eight children on the other. He had uncut hair in double braids that male children often had signifying that they hadn’t undergone their first ritual purification. 

This usually lively little boy had difficulty walking. “Amma what is wrong with Raja’s foot,” I asked. “He cut it on a sharp stone” she answered.  His foot was swathed in strips of brightly colored silk that were torn from a discarded sari and even through the binding I could see that it was swollen. I asked if I could take a look.  “Amma, what have you smeared into the wound?” She explained that she had bathed it in urine from their cow and then packed his foot in it’s' dung. I found out later from my acquaintance Dr. Joshi, that it was a traditional Ayurvedic remedy that had been used for centuries. Afterwards she went to the temple and a Brahmin priest made puja, and offered pieces of coconut and flowers to Shiva, burned sandalwood incense and lit an oil lamp and chanted a mantra used for good health and healing. Raja still had the saffron cum-cum markings on his forehead from the ceremony, but his mother was concerned because despite her prayers and the Brahmin’s blessings, his cut wasn´t healing. 

It was an equilibristic feat balancing a desire to introduce new ideas without condemning and alienating the people you were trying to help by inferring that the customs and traditions that were passed down through the generations were unscientific and often did more harm than good. Without sharing any of my concerns about sepsis or infection or thoughts on how anyone could believe that cow dung would heal a wound, I said encouragingly, “Amma, your puja was without a doubt very effective.  You brought Raja with you when you came to the well and I saw that his foot needed attention.” "Bundni" come in."

She carried him into the kitchen. The cement walls and floor kept the room cool and gave a respite from the silvery heat outside. In the light that seeped through the louvered jalousie of the room’s only window, Mani, my housekeeper, boiled a kettle of water on the kerosene burner. His straight back and steady gaze gave him an air of fatherly authority that contrasted his mild, deferential manner. He put her at ease, speaking calmly and kindly to her as if she were one of his daughters, at the same time gently chastising her for her cow dung paste and belief in superstition instead of proper medical attention.

The Peace Corps had issued all the volunteers in my group a well-stocked first aid kit for both prophylactic care and emergencies. It was a shiny grey enameled metal box 18”x18” and must have seemed impressive to someone that had never seen a doctor or a hospital. There were surgical scissors, ointments for burns and insect bites, tincture of opium for diarrhea, gauze compresses, tape, swabs, antibiotic salves, and antibacterial soap. Without any other training than common sense and the everyday knowledge that people have in a developed country, we knew their uses. I took down the box from its shelf. Raja sat frightened and still on the floor. He held his mother’s hand while I rinsed and cleansed the cut. He never uttered a peep while I scraped away the cow dung and wiped it clean. I bathed his foot and applied a tetracycline ointment and then wrapped it in sterile gauze. I repeated the procedure during the next few days until the danger of infection was over, ready to load him into my Jeep and take him to the mission hospital to see Dr. Joshi  at the first sign of fever, or if the swelling didn’t subside.

 Anybody that understood basic hygiene realized that disinfectant and antibiotic salve were more effective on an open wound than a warm wet packet of cow dung and urine. But if you were uneducated and regarded the cow as sacred and even that its excrement had healing properties, then it wasn’t so strange to use it for medicinal purposes as was done in most of rural India at that time. I saw village women who tramped in fresh cow patties or the balls of dung dropped by wandering temple elephants to soothe and heal their cracked and dried feet. Properly dressed Brahmin men in spotless white kurthas could scurry over to a cow that had lifted her tail to urinate, wetting their fingers in the warm stream and then running them through their hair to give it strength and luster. Cow dung patties could be seen stuck to the outside walls of every bungalow to dry for use as fuel. Cow dung was heaped into a vat, stirred with a paddle, and then spread on the floors of cottages as plaster. When I related the incident of the infected foot and my neighbor's home remedy and my friend’s story about the mangoes to Joshi, he shook his head and sighed. He said "these poor villagers didn’t know any better. Their ignorance and superstitions came from lack of education and poverty and a dearth of modern alternatives. If someone they loved was ill and they made a puja and it gave them hope and felt that it helped then that was fine, but we must get them to believe more in the gods of sanitation, antibiotics and disinfectants, and then if they want, they can also throw in  a little prayer for good measure."

We didn’t realize at the time that we were challenging the age old way that Indian farmers and villagers looked at their future. They saw the future as unchangeable, viewing it as a repetitive cycle dictated by the past. Subsistence farming and simple plows drawn by buffaloes or bullocks on fields that were harrowed and sown by hand would be replaced, albeit slowly, by motorized tillers and tractors. Traditional crops such as rice and millet that people maintained were tastier and that after threshing produced enough straw for the draft animals and cows, would be replaced with modern high yielding hybrids with heavy ears and short sturdy stalks that could support their increased weight, but consequently wouldn’t produce enough straw for fodder.  It was an inevitable spiral of change. When the bullocks and buffaloes disappeared so would the dung that they produced and was spread on the fields. The ever so important nitrogen that came from the cattle manure would have to be replaced by chemical fertilizers. Small plots of land that had been passed from father to son would be used as collateral for loans for the more expensive seed and fertilizers, loans that couldn’t be paid back if the harvest failed. Small family plots would be joined into larger farms that were more suitable for mechanization. Modern agriculture would eventually make emigrants of people who had lived on the land for centuries, forcing them to the anonymity and squalor of the already over populated cities.

 Kolar Karnataka, before the summer monsoon 1971