Perhaps above-average, lofty characters like Janet Ganguli, the author of ‘Under an Indian Sky – Ten Years in a Bihar Village’ should form part of our guests of honour during future commemorations on 2 November. She is English and spent ten years in a Bihar village from 1975 to 1985, selflessly giving out care and love to the villagers she lived with. She is English and could give lessons to many who shed long tears on the struggles of immigrants from India. But she is English and may not be considered for such invitations. Talk of embracing the whole of history.
India’s Maps
India is perhaps among the few countries to have undergone countless transmutations of territories, boundaries, provinces, states and place names over the last two centuries or so. It is certainly not easy to follow the evolutions of her maps during the British occupation for instance. India’s maps during the 1700s were probably only understood by the British themselves, and the configurations got worse as Britannia continued to rule the waves. The absence of earlier maps in the works of Mauritians who have written on India, including the favourite immigration era, possibly indicates the painful exercise involved. The transformation of this subcontinent’s map before and after the 1947 partition, the most complex divorce in history, offers the best reflections of all the hitherto hidden reflex of the ‘Indian’, young and old. Students of history would do well to read on the mapping aspects of the partition. It is stunning and the cartographical work, if that science was applied at all, was completed over an unbelievable period of less than six months!
Maps are one of the best complements that enable the understanding and remembering of history. Unfortunately Janet Ganguli’s book contains no maps, but in this case this absence certainly does not reflect any shortcomings of the author.
Titmoh, Bihar
The village of Titmoh used to be in Bihar up to the year 2000 when Bihar was split into two states, Bihar (north) and Jharkhand (south). So Titmoh is now in Jharkand’s northern district of Deogarh on the Jharkand-Bihar border (certain maps of India indicate ‘Devghar’). Titmoh is not shown in the maps. The number of India’s villages run into hundreds of thousands, literally; a stark fact that does not help those out there in the Indian Diaspora when they decide to locate the village of their ancestors. It is her thousands of destitute villages that make up the bulk of India, villages never seen by visitors and tourists, apart from fleeting glances from comfortable train compartments and coaches.
Titmoh is just another village in India. Who cares about Titmoh, one of the thirty thousand or so villages in Jharkhand? How many from among those in the Indian Diaspora all over the globe, care for the villages of India? Over half a century ago, perhaps Mahatma Gandhi was her only son to have genuinely felt for those villagers and lived among them. He had reminded the world that ‘the soul of India lives in its villages’, in vain it seems.
The Mauritian patois has developed an expression for a desolate situation: ‘Coumment dire dans l’inde’.
“Over the course of time I came to understand that just as poverty did not simply signify the lack of material things, nor could its cause be found in the people’s ignorance. What the poor lacked was justice and the power to control their own lives.” This comes from the bottom of Janet Ganguli’s heart after her ten years in Titmoh. Her true story deserves to be known here in Mauritius, perhaps the more so by the thousands of Mauritians whose ancestors hailed from the villages of Bihar; the state fleetingly revered, if at all, during a few minutes on occasions like the 2nd of November. The programmes this year will include the familiar speeches of previous years. But they will probably also focus, and rightly so, on the jubilation of Aapravasi Ghat’s inscription on the World Heritage List, unintentionally pushing the actual remembrance of those villages further into the background. It is the oblivion of the roots and of the remote geographical spots of a people’s history that one should be wary of.
Janet Ganguli
She was born in England in 1949, of English parents, although her mother was born in India where her grandparents had spent twenty-five years in the days of the British Raj. So she grew up listening to the stories of India. By twenty-four she possessed a degree, had attended lectures on tropical diseases and had received training as a nurse and midwife. Janet Ganguli had equipped herself with the background required to withstand the long and arduous years in an isolated Indian village. She opens the first line of her first chapter with ‘For as long as I can remember I was drawn to the idea of going to India.’ A familiar call to so many in life but achieved by the few strong-willed. Unfortunately again her book is too modestly written and does not reveal passions and emotions, especially those of the author herself; a fact easily overlooked by the hasty reader.
Overland trip to India
In 1975, at twenty-four, she journeyed from London to India through the old overland route, the popular ‘hippy trail’ of those days; Victoria station, Istanbul, Iran, Afghanistan and the spectacular Khyber Pass. ‘As we walked across the border into India the sun glinted through an avenue of tall trees and a man in a brightly coloured turban said, “Welcome”.’ She had with her a map she had bought at the age of fourteen, ‘by which time some of the names on the map had changed.’!
In India she joined the Service Civil International (SCI) and settled in the small village of Titmoh, with fellow volunteers, to continue one of the SCI’s projects there. Her ten years started just like that, as it very often is with predestined affairs.
Life in Titmoh
From a miserable makeshift hut in that village, ‘the centre’, Janet Ganguli and her fellow volunteers gave out what medical care they could to the villagers. The medicines were contained in a tin trunk. No electricity, no telephone, no cooking gas. She was at first ‘memsahib’, later ‘ma’ or ‘jan’. The sicknesses ranged from scabies, diarrhoea, TB to leprosy. When she was unsure of a diagnosis she arranged for her patients to be consulted by a doctor several miles away in Madhupur. The latter appears on the map of Jharkhand in the Deogarh district. Titmoh is twelve miles south of Madhupur, as the crow flies.
And so the gruelling life, and the months and the years, drifted by for Janet in the barest of village conditions along with the consant sight of diseases. She became part and parcel of the Santhal tribe, the Dalits, Ghutvals (caste Hindus) and Muslims. She writes, ‘The majority from all the groups were united in their poverty and each day was a struggle to survive.’ This, in the modern times, in the 1980s, whilst in the outside world society jabbered on with tall talks. There will be similar discourses throughout our island on 2nd November. The Santhal tribe is one of the oldest and largest in India (ten million). In the Indian Diaspora, their present generation number round eight hundred thousand, including Mauritius.
Manun and Mrs Ganguli
Her life changed further when she met Manan, a brilliant Bengali doctor from Calcutta also engaged in voluntary work and battling with the conflicts of life. Ganguli’s book is perhaps too modest and skips the high voltage emotions a young girl of her age would have experienced upon meeting her future life partner in a lost village in India! She had arrived in Titmoh, born Aitken. She got married in Calcutta and became Mrs Ganguli.
‘Our Bengali wedding in Calcutta was followed by one in Titmoh where my village friends, Hindu, Dalit, Muslim and Santhali all joined hands to dance together.’
This young, highly qualified couple did not slip back to civilisation. They continued to serve Titmoh.
The continuing years
She continued to taste the real meaning of poverty. When the SCI project closed down, Janet and Manan ‘moved back to the house beside the mango tree’ and forged on.
Janet had more bitter tastes of just about every aspect of the life she had chosen, that of alleviating the poor in an Indian village; typical ones too: ‘I experienced the callous indifference and corruption of government officials. And I saw my bright, playful little neighbour Dumna die in front of my eyes.’
Janet and Manan instilled another vital mentality hitherto not in the lifestyle of the villagers: that of staging mass protests against the government. Towards the end of their stay (1980s) a serious impending food shortage led them to the district Commissioner in Dumka, the Governor of Bihar in Patna and to the Chief Minister of Bihar, followed by a group of selected villagers. The couple had paid half the travel expenses. All in vain. They kept the newspapers informed and finally Janet, Manan and the villagers landed at the Bihar Assembly! After a few months some inadequate rations were distributed, and the manifestations by the villagers, inspired by the couple, continued. Their reward for ten years of hard voluntary work in a village was the appearance of posters singling them out as CIA agents all out to destabilise India! Amid the confusion and human reactions they also reaped the ingratitude of many, but did witness the arrival of cooking stoves and construction of wells in Titmoh and the surrounding villages. They witnessed the slow introduction of civilisation, sometimes helplessly, into the villages and travelled back to England in 1985.
1998
In 1998, Janet revisited Titmoh, twenty-four years after she had first arrived. She marvelled at certain transformations of the place and met many of her old friends. She gives way to some subtle thoughts in the last paragraph of her book:
‘I met some of the poorest of my village friends for whom life is a never-ending struggle and yet they have somehow survived… I marvel at their endurance and resilience. At the same time I feel overwhelmed by the immense loss of all the latent talent, skill and accomplishment of so many millions of people, these inhabitants of another world who are denied the possibility of reaching their full potential.’
If this too sounds familiar, the starker rejoinder is that the words come from a person who actually experienced it all for ten years; ten years in a Bihar village. Good food for thought as we once again commemorate on the 2nd of November.
T.S.Ramyeadtramyead@yahoo.com
Notes and References
- Ganguli, Janet, ‘Under an Indian Sky – Ten years in a Bihar village’. First published by Penguin Books India, 2005
- The photograph is of the book cover, taken by the author
- She has also published ‘A Time for Peace’, a book aimed at young people. Quaker Press, 2003
India’s Maps
India is perhaps among the few countries to have undergone countless transmutations of territories, boundaries, provinces, states and place names over the last two centuries or so. It is certainly not easy to follow the evolutions of her maps during the British occupation for instance. India’s maps during the 1700s were probably only understood by the British themselves, and the configurations got worse as Britannia continued to rule the waves. The absence of earlier maps in the works of Mauritians who have written on India, including the favourite immigration era, possibly indicates the painful exercise involved. The transformation of this subcontinent’s map before and after the 1947 partition, the most complex divorce in history, offers the best reflections of all the hitherto hidden reflex of the ‘Indian’, young and old. Students of history would do well to read on the mapping aspects of the partition. It is stunning and the cartographical work, if that science was applied at all, was completed over an unbelievable period of less than six months!
Maps are one of the best complements that enable the understanding and remembering of history. Unfortunately Janet Ganguli’s book contains no maps, but in this case this absence certainly does not reflect any shortcomings of the author.
Titmoh, Bihar
The village of Titmoh used to be in Bihar up to the year 2000 when Bihar was split into two states, Bihar (north) and Jharkhand (south). So Titmoh is now in Jharkand’s northern district of Deogarh on the Jharkand-Bihar border (certain maps of India indicate ‘Devghar’). Titmoh is not shown in the maps. The number of India’s villages run into hundreds of thousands, literally; a stark fact that does not help those out there in the Indian Diaspora when they decide to locate the village of their ancestors. It is her thousands of destitute villages that make up the bulk of India, villages never seen by visitors and tourists, apart from fleeting glances from comfortable train compartments and coaches.
Titmoh is just another village in India. Who cares about Titmoh, one of the thirty thousand or so villages in Jharkhand? How many from among those in the Indian Diaspora all over the globe, care for the villages of India? Over half a century ago, perhaps Mahatma Gandhi was her only son to have genuinely felt for those villagers and lived among them. He had reminded the world that ‘the soul of India lives in its villages’, in vain it seems.
The Mauritian patois has developed an expression for a desolate situation: ‘Coumment dire dans l’inde’.
“Over the course of time I came to understand that just as poverty did not simply signify the lack of material things, nor could its cause be found in the people’s ignorance. What the poor lacked was justice and the power to control their own lives.” This comes from the bottom of Janet Ganguli’s heart after her ten years in Titmoh. Her true story deserves to be known here in Mauritius, perhaps the more so by the thousands of Mauritians whose ancestors hailed from the villages of Bihar; the state fleetingly revered, if at all, during a few minutes on occasions like the 2nd of November. The programmes this year will include the familiar speeches of previous years. But they will probably also focus, and rightly so, on the jubilation of Aapravasi Ghat’s inscription on the World Heritage List, unintentionally pushing the actual remembrance of those villages further into the background. It is the oblivion of the roots and of the remote geographical spots of a people’s history that one should be wary of.
Janet Ganguli
She was born in England in 1949, of English parents, although her mother was born in India where her grandparents had spent twenty-five years in the days of the British Raj. So she grew up listening to the stories of India. By twenty-four she possessed a degree, had attended lectures on tropical diseases and had received training as a nurse and midwife. Janet Ganguli had equipped herself with the background required to withstand the long and arduous years in an isolated Indian village. She opens the first line of her first chapter with ‘For as long as I can remember I was drawn to the idea of going to India.’ A familiar call to so many in life but achieved by the few strong-willed. Unfortunately again her book is too modestly written and does not reveal passions and emotions, especially those of the author herself; a fact easily overlooked by the hasty reader.
Overland trip to India
In 1975, at twenty-four, she journeyed from London to India through the old overland route, the popular ‘hippy trail’ of those days; Victoria station, Istanbul, Iran, Afghanistan and the spectacular Khyber Pass. ‘As we walked across the border into India the sun glinted through an avenue of tall trees and a man in a brightly coloured turban said, “Welcome”.’ She had with her a map she had bought at the age of fourteen, ‘by which time some of the names on the map had changed.’!
In India she joined the Service Civil International (SCI) and settled in the small village of Titmoh, with fellow volunteers, to continue one of the SCI’s projects there. Her ten years started just like that, as it very often is with predestined affairs.
Life in Titmoh
From a miserable makeshift hut in that village, ‘the centre’, Janet Ganguli and her fellow volunteers gave out what medical care they could to the villagers. The medicines were contained in a tin trunk. No electricity, no telephone, no cooking gas. She was at first ‘memsahib’, later ‘ma’ or ‘jan’. The sicknesses ranged from scabies, diarrhoea, TB to leprosy. When she was unsure of a diagnosis she arranged for her patients to be consulted by a doctor several miles away in Madhupur. The latter appears on the map of Jharkhand in the Deogarh district. Titmoh is twelve miles south of Madhupur, as the crow flies.
And so the gruelling life, and the months and the years, drifted by for Janet in the barest of village conditions along with the consant sight of diseases. She became part and parcel of the Santhal tribe, the Dalits, Ghutvals (caste Hindus) and Muslims. She writes, ‘The majority from all the groups were united in their poverty and each day was a struggle to survive.’ This, in the modern times, in the 1980s, whilst in the outside world society jabbered on with tall talks. There will be similar discourses throughout our island on 2nd November. The Santhal tribe is one of the oldest and largest in India (ten million). In the Indian Diaspora, their present generation number round eight hundred thousand, including Mauritius.
Manun and Mrs Ganguli
Her life changed further when she met Manan, a brilliant Bengali doctor from Calcutta also engaged in voluntary work and battling with the conflicts of life. Ganguli’s book is perhaps too modest and skips the high voltage emotions a young girl of her age would have experienced upon meeting her future life partner in a lost village in India! She had arrived in Titmoh, born Aitken. She got married in Calcutta and became Mrs Ganguli.
‘Our Bengali wedding in Calcutta was followed by one in Titmoh where my village friends, Hindu, Dalit, Muslim and Santhali all joined hands to dance together.’
This young, highly qualified couple did not slip back to civilisation. They continued to serve Titmoh.
The continuing years
She continued to taste the real meaning of poverty. When the SCI project closed down, Janet and Manan ‘moved back to the house beside the mango tree’ and forged on.
Janet had more bitter tastes of just about every aspect of the life she had chosen, that of alleviating the poor in an Indian village; typical ones too: ‘I experienced the callous indifference and corruption of government officials. And I saw my bright, playful little neighbour Dumna die in front of my eyes.’
Janet and Manan instilled another vital mentality hitherto not in the lifestyle of the villagers: that of staging mass protests against the government. Towards the end of their stay (1980s) a serious impending food shortage led them to the district Commissioner in Dumka, the Governor of Bihar in Patna and to the Chief Minister of Bihar, followed by a group of selected villagers. The couple had paid half the travel expenses. All in vain. They kept the newspapers informed and finally Janet, Manan and the villagers landed at the Bihar Assembly! After a few months some inadequate rations were distributed, and the manifestations by the villagers, inspired by the couple, continued. Their reward for ten years of hard voluntary work in a village was the appearance of posters singling them out as CIA agents all out to destabilise India! Amid the confusion and human reactions they also reaped the ingratitude of many, but did witness the arrival of cooking stoves and construction of wells in Titmoh and the surrounding villages. They witnessed the slow introduction of civilisation, sometimes helplessly, into the villages and travelled back to England in 1985.
1998
In 1998, Janet revisited Titmoh, twenty-four years after she had first arrived. She marvelled at certain transformations of the place and met many of her old friends. She gives way to some subtle thoughts in the last paragraph of her book:
‘I met some of the poorest of my village friends for whom life is a never-ending struggle and yet they have somehow survived… I marvel at their endurance and resilience. At the same time I feel overwhelmed by the immense loss of all the latent talent, skill and accomplishment of so many millions of people, these inhabitants of another world who are denied the possibility of reaching their full potential.’
If this too sounds familiar, the starker rejoinder is that the words come from a person who actually experienced it all for ten years; ten years in a Bihar village. Good food for thought as we once again commemorate on the 2nd of November.
T.S.Ramyeadtramyead@yahoo.com
Notes and References
- Ganguli, Janet, ‘Under an Indian Sky – Ten years in a Bihar village’. First published by Penguin Books India, 2005
- The photograph is of the book cover, taken by the author
- She has also published ‘A Time for Peace’, a book aimed at young people. Quaker Press, 2003
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