Pied Pipers without Pay

By Roma Dey, former Praxis Trainee

Roma, started her Praxis stint with an immersion experience. An experience that must have felt a bit like jumping into the deep end before learning to don one’s swimming cap. Here she speaks of the trials and tribulations of the Musahar community with whom she stayed at Kubol, a village in Kiratpur, Bihar.

Kubol is a village of roughly 400 households in Kiratpur block of Darbhanga district in Bihar. It comes under the Kubol-Danga Panchayat. Located on the western bank of the Kosi river, it is flood prone. Embankments built along the
river under the Government Flood Control Programme keep it waterlogged for months.

The village is divided in three Tolas (hamlets) based on castelines: Kubol, which mostly houses the upper caste; Mushahari, consisting of Mushahar households and Punarwas, which is a hamlet of fishermen.

We left Patna on Tuesday afternoon (19 June) and stayed over at Darbhanga for the night.

Here we met Narayanjee of Mithila Gram Vikas Parishad, our local partner for the immersion at Kubol. MGVP runs a health centre, “Asha Kendra”, in the nearby village of Tarwada . The next day, early in the morning, we resumed our

journey. We reached Bheja by jeep due to the bad conditions of the road and then traveled 18 kilometers by boat to reach Asha Kendra.

There, after meeting with members of the health centre, we walked to Kubol. As a team, we had decided to stay with the
most socially and economically disadvantaged households. We grouped ourselves in three teams of two each. Ali and I stayed with the family of Mahavir Sada in Mushahari. The family consisted of the couple, three sons and two
daughters. The eldest of their son is married and his wife suffers from kala azar (Kiratpur has a high incidence rate of kala azar and malaria).

Unfortunately, on the same day we reached ,Ali fell sick and moved to Asha Kendra to receive proper care.

During the brief period of my stay, I witnessed the hardships of Mushahar women. Apart from their household chores, they work in the fields belonging to wealthier families, which most often are upper caste. This is their primary mean of subsistence. For them the day would begin when the stars are still shining in the sky and end not before midnight. Once awake, they wake up the children and start cleaning their courtyards and huts and apply a paste of mud to fill in the wear and tear. They also clean up the goat sheds (at times they look after the goats of others and get a share of its selling price). Leaving the young children in the care of the older, they go to work on distant fields. During the entire morning, they gather the crop of maize or sweet potatoes, get it weighed, collect their share and hurry back home to cook and feed the children and the goats. Such is the plight that the children would eat them raw.

The women would be the last to eat of whatever is left. In the afternoon, women and children deseed the maize cobs and put the seeds and cobs to dry under the sun. They use the cobs as fodder for the animal.

On Thursday afternoon, I accompanied the lady of the house, Daiwati Devi, to the weekly market in the neighbouring village of Tarwad to buy necessary food items. The market caters to the very basic needs of the villagers.

Back from market, it was already time to cook dinner. After, she collected the goats and tied them in the shed as they find their way back home; she washed the utensils and prepared the children for bed. As another day passes by and she finally gets a chance to rest, for the first time in the day, her mind is off her chores.

She confides her fears of the approaching floods and laments the fact that the pucca house (under the Indira Awaas Yojna) still has no roof and they never had enough money to complete it. She inquires about my family, especially my parents, and looking at her own children, sleeping under the sky, tells me, “You have come to live with us, experience our lives. See our poverty, the problems we face, see our conditions of life and tell people about it if it can be of any good to our children.” Though I was tired, I could not sleep for a long time. The one hundred fifty odd households belonging to Mushahars do not own agricultural land. Nine of them have been allotted land under Bhoodan but none have been able to get possession of it. Traditionally, they have been engaged in scaring away and killing wild animals to protect the crops and cultivating the land of the upper caste landowners. In fact, the name Mushahar comes from the two words “mush” meaning rat which forms a part of their “ahar” or diet. As told by a villager, Nathuni Sada, the rat selects the finest stalks of crops and stores them in its burrow. The mushahar would locate the burrow, kill the rat and gather it along with the grains. It was a proof of the mushahar’s intelligence to get more than his share of the produce.

Being at the lowest rung of the exploitative caste system, the Mushahar community is socially and economically disadvantaged. In spite of constitutional and legal provisions, their conditions have not changed much. Their children are discriminated in the school. And this is no positive discrimination! They do not send girls to school and only a handful of boys attend school enduring the discrimination in the lure of the mid-day meal provided at the school.

In the absence of livelihood options at the village, men migrate to the cities and women shoulder the entire responsibility of their families. The men migrate to cities like Benaras, Delhi, Mumbai to work in chemical factories or to Punjab to work as agricultural labourers. Working conditions are difficult and at times dangerous but this doesn’t deter men. They return to be with their families in the months of July and August when the Kosi floods. They send money to support their families, however, in the absence of personal bank accounts they send it through the accounts of fellow villagers who charge 2% of the sum as fee. In times of need they take loans from the local money lenders at an exorbitant rate of 10% per month and get entrapped in the vicious cycle of debt. Getting institutional loan is difficult for this largely illiterate community and most often they fall prey to exacting middlemen. Being illiterate and unaware, they are not able to avail full benefits of various government schemes and provisions like the Integrated Child Development Scheme, National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, Reproductive Community Health Programme and the schemes like Antyodaya and Annapurna under the Public Distribution System. Despite economic constraints, the family warmly welcomed a stranger in their house and won over her. “Did you get tea in the Mushahari?”,asked a former school teacher of the village, who belongs to the upper caste. Much to his chagrin I replied, “Of course! The people are so warm hearted, everything else seemed insignificant.”

Musaharsars often referred to as ‘Dalits among Dalits’. They occupy the bottom-rung of society in the middle Gangetic plains. Descendents of a Chotanagpur tribe, the Musahars are scattered all over the paddy-growing areas, providing unskilled labour.

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