The other day, a decades-old soulful Indian song rendered by Neena and Rajendra Mehta, titled Ek Pyaara Sa Gaon (Our beloved village), exerted an unusually powerful pull on me. It bewails modern urban life with its “lonely crowds”, and waxes eloquent about pristine, idyllic villages near ponds and rivers and inhabited by warm-hearted farmers. Despite the song’s overdrawn imagery of rural bliss, it seems that its wistful impulses are common to many who were born and raised in agricultural villages and later moved to cities to pursue their dreams of “success”. And it stimulated memories of my own encounters with rural culture early in life.
At 81, I can still recall one fond pre-Partition visit as a six-year-old to our maternal grandparents’ khoo near Chakwal, now in Pakistan. A khoo means a well in Punjabi, but it was freely used as a shorthand for agricultural land situated at some distance from the city. If the family wanted to see the land for any reason, someone would just say, “Chalo ajj khoo te chaliye” (Let’s go to the well today).
During my brief stay in Chakwal, we once trekked to the patches of cantaloupes around that well, especially making a beeline for the lip-smacking variety called sarda. We ate slices of sarda on the spot and drank the water drawn up with a bucket tied to a long rope as we squatted under an old peepal tree; we cupped our hands to collect the water for quenching our thirst. In today’s lingo, it was an all-organic experience. And the delicious taste of both the fruit and the water has lingered in my mind like a Proustian memory.
Years after our family settled down in Roorkee in the wake of Partition, my high school Hindi teacher Mahendra Pratap Singh sometimes led some of us on bicycle trips to his ancestral village, located between our town and Haridwar, about 25 km to the north.
The natural vistas en route were a feast for our eyes as we pedalled along the Ganga Canal past miles of jamun trees and thorny bushes of wild berries. And he would recite appropriate poetry on the way to make us appreciate the joy of living close to sugar cane, wheat, mustard and sundry other fields nestling in the lap of the Shivalik hills.
The poems by Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Sumitranandan Pant or Mahadevi Varma have faded from my memory, but a poetic statement he himself once made has remained fresh to this today. As our bicycle gang drew closer to the hills, he, a romantic at heart, pointed to some peaks behind light clouds softly passing over them and said, “See how the beauty of those tops is enhanced because of their gossamer-like cover? It”s like a woman’s pretty face behind a thin, transparent ghoonghat!”
Later as we rested in his home, his grandmother made sure that not only were we fed a hearty lunch of dal, potato curry, dahi, salted radish, and rotis but also that we fortified ourselves with brass tumblers of hot milk topped by a thick crust of malai for our return journey. And bundles of sugar cane chunks were tied to the carriers on the backs of our bicycles as a gift for our families. No favours were, of course, expected from us boys in return, explicitly or implicitly.
I also attended our teacher’s wedding in a verdant village near Rajpur, Dehradun, 72 km northwest of Roorkee, where his sister and her husband owned a vast vegetable farm on a slight slope. As I surveyed it at dawn, on one side stood a veritable forest of maize, and on the other were rows and rows of fresh, dew-adorned cauliflower, bottle gourd, fenugreek, cucumber, brinjal and tomato crops waiting to be harvested — all swaying gently as they were caressed by a nourishing breeze in the early morning sun.
In the late 1950s, few farmers in India owned cars; that an old olive-green Morris Minor stood in the shade next to the family’s large brick home with a tiled roof, spoke of their obvious affluence. If some American cowboy halted his horse at the edge of that farm and cast a sweeping glance at it, he might well have lustily exclaimed, “There’s gold in them that fields!”
The wedding hoopla was of little interest to me apart from the sumptuous meals ahead, but my eyes were completely enchanted by the scenery, the mist-veiled Mussoorie hills — 6,500 feet high but just a few miles away — only intensifying my joy.
Similar delights piled up during my early college years, 1958-59, in Meerut whenever I visited the homes of my rural classmates. The lush fields; the smiles of the farmer families of sturdy Jat stock that supplied countless young men to India’s armed forces; the rich meals cooked with home-made desi ghee, especially the makki ki rotis generously laden with the home-churned white butter; the luscious mangoes plucked from the trees in their own courtyards; and the fresh jaggery that they put into our bags, all sometimes fill me with an intense longing for those days.
Clearly, as an American wit once remarked, nostalgia today is not what it used to be! A cliche, to be sure, but true.
