Everybody loves a good drought, page 17
And that brings up this point: the issue does not end with heaping denunciation on usurers. Vicious as it often is, usury is linked to the collapse of formal rural credit. It fills a gap. In doing so, it devastates the lives of many. That is crucial. And the stories in this section do try and capture how it does that. But don’t lose sight of why and how it arises. And who it invariably hurts.
With formal rural credit crumbling after 1989-90, even loans for productive purposes are harder to come by. Hence, the peasant goes to the moneylender. The desire to break out of such debt is really strong in rural households, but the chances of doing so are very bleak for many.
The range of loans and their terms is bewildering. There are, of course, cash loans everywhere. Then there are also the ‘interest-free’ loans of Ramnad, the ‘grain loans’ of Bhoden, the ‘cloth loans’ of Khariar, besides other, less important forms. In return, usurers extract land, labour, produce, assets, or combinations of these. In parts of western Orissa, bondage and prostitution have arisen from the inability of peasants to repay loans to creditors.
The word ‘moneylender’ is no less complex. Full-timers are rare. Most often they are landlords and merchants, or both, plying this trade as one among other activities. These are the big ones. Then there are shopkeepers and petty government officials. And there are also lenders within the poor, though theirs are minor transactions. In Kalahandi, for instance, a group of dalits is into moneylending. But this is a layered operation where the small, local lender plays ‘collection agent’ for the town-based usurer. However, there are commercial lending deals between poor neighbours as well.
Numbers and categories are vital in explaining indebtedness, but reducing the problem to numbers would be self-limiting. Cash figures tell only part of the story. Moneylending is what moneylending does. Beyond a point, the peasant’s ability to cope is so thoroughly crushed that it matters very little whether the annual interest is 120 or 380 per cent.
In Bombay’s red light area of Kamathipura are women bonded into prostitution. Years ago, their grandparents took loans ranging from Rs. 12 to Rs. 50. Throughout western Orissa are villages where the breadwinners migrate huge distances not only to earn a few rupees, but also to pay off debts incurred in feeding the family. Across the country are people who have lost their land—and with it their livelihood and status—for the same reasons.
Moneylending creates servility and dependence. The sanctity of repayment, no matter how deceitfully the debt was contrived and how cruel the costs, has been drilled into Indian consciousness since the time of the Manu Smriti. Manu the Law Giver listed eighteen main categories of law for the king to decide on. ‘Of those,’ wrote Manu, ‘the first is non-payment of debts.’
Manu’s view: ‘By whatever means a creditor may be able to obtain possession of his property, even by those means may he force the debtor and make him pay.’ The elite, of course, were exempt. While the lower castes would pay a debt or discharge a fine in labour, ‘a Brahmana shall pay it in instalments’.
Centuries later, the elite are still exempt. As the inaction on their mountainous debt shows, they don’t even have to pay instalments. We could probably do with a couple of nineteenth century novelists to write about it.
The Tyranny of the Tharagar
RAMNAD (Tamil Nadu): The tharagar (commission agent) dips his hands into one of two sacks laid before him by a small farmer and extracts a kilogram of chillies. This he carelessly tosses to one side—as sami vathal (God’s share).
Ramaswamy, the chilli farmer eking out a living on three-quarters of an acre, watches as though hypnotised. For Ramaswamy can sell his chillies to no one but this tharagar. Why? By advancing him Rs. 2,000 just before the start of the season, the agent bought up Ramaswamy’s entire crop even before it was sown.
This is one important form that moneylending has taken in the ex-zamindari area of Ramanathapuram (or Ramnad). Yet, the tharagar of Ramnad, one of India’s poorest districts, is more than a moneylender. He is often a landholder, a wholesaler linked to the transport business and even, in some cases, an exporter. Ramaswamy’s tharagar is all of these. And his is a tightly knit fraternity. As the president of the Ramnad Chilli Merchants’ Association told me, ‘Only those who are our members can operate here.’
Just seventy members of the association control the entire chilli crop brought to the Ramanathapuram town market, and with it the lives of thousands of very poor farmers in one of the country’s great chilli-producing districts. Chilli is the biggest crop after paddy in Ramnad.
The moment Ramaswamy entered his tharagar’s domain, the agent charged him a commission of Rs. 20 (or Rs. 5 for every Rs. 100 of the total value) on his two humble sacks. Each contains 20 kg of chillies. Only if the tharagar does not want the lot will Ramaswamy get a chance to sell it elsewhere.
The tharagar has already consulted the wholesalers (who belong to the same fraternity). And he now sets the price along with his fellow tharagars. They do this by means of a secret language of the hand, fingers clasped and ‘talking’ under a towel. The actual producer stands watching in unhappy awe. The thousands of kilos of chillies brought by the farmers can lie for days in the tharagar’s yard while negotiations are on. During this period, they get dried out under the electric lights and fans here. Draining the water out of them in this way finally makes the chillies weigh much less, to the detriment of the farmers.
In this instance, the tharagar sets a price of Rs. 10 per kg for Ramaswamy’s offering. Then comes the sami vathal, depriving the poor farmer of another Rs. 10 worth of chillies. Next, the tharagar cuts payment by a further Rs. 20, saying each of the two gunny bags holding the chillies weighs a kilogram. (Actually each weighs less than 200 gm.)
Then Ramaswamy finds that both the bags he had so carefully weighed in at 20 kg each in Keelathooval village now weigh just 18 kg apiece on the scales. Another Rs. 40 to the tharagar. Ramaswamy knows he is being cheated but is not clear how. Nor does the tharagar explain why he charges his commission on 40 kg but pays only for thirty-two.
By the end of the season, Ramaswamy will have made five trips to the tharagar’s lair (with the agent claiming ‘God’s share’ on each occasion), depositing ten sacks in all. For his labours, he will earn, at the price set for him, a total of Rs. 1,600. But the tharagar, if he is into exports, could earn up to Rs. 20,000 or more on the same transaction. He has also got around 40 kg of chillies completely free from Ramaswamy. And he is dealing with hundreds of Ramaswamys.
While the actual producer just stands by looking on, two members of the tharagar (commission agent) fraternity set the price for the chillies. With one of them standing on top of a pile of chillies, they discuss a price by means of a secret language of the hand, fingers clasped and ‘talking’ under a towel.
Even if he were selling only to markets in Madras, he would get Rs. 25 per kg at the least, where he gave the farmer Rs. 10 per kg. If he has a good network, he could be selling within Kerala at up to Rs 40 per kg even in the currently depressed market.
Multiply Ramaswamy’s agent by seventy and the farmer by several thousand and you have Ramnad. You also have what a senior official here calls, ‘a uniquely exploitative relationship’. And a market worth millions in the grip ‘of a handful whose entire business is based on trapping the peasant in debt’.
Besides, if the tharagar owns land close to that of these farmers, you might find him selling them water. The hatred the poor farmers of Ramnad reserve for the tharagar has to be understood against this backdrop.
Take Ramaswamy, again. He spent Rs. 3,000 growing the chillies he sold to the tharagar for Rs. 1,600. Around Rs. 300 of his expenses were incurred on hiring the tharagar’s electric pumpset for a few hours to pump up water. That places him further in the debt of the latter. He also has a debt hangover from similar deals the previous year. This means Ramaswamy’s crop for the next two or three seasons, the seeds of which he has not sown, is already pledged to the tharagar.
There are thousands in the same situation as Ramaswamy, mostly small or marginal farmers owning an acre or less. In such cases, the agent’s control over the farmer is quite complete. The tharagars, though, are quick to point out that there was ‘no interest charged’ on the original ‘advance’. As for the current depression in the market, ‘Just watch,’ says Vidyasagar, a researcher at the Madras Institute of Development Studies. ‘This so-called crash has come simply because they’re now buying up stock from the peasants. Once they’re through, the prices will go up again in two or three months.’
The chilli farmers of Ramnad see the current depression in prices as rigging by the tharagars. Past experience seems to bear out this scepticism. At one point in April, the then collector of the district intervened and pushed the merchants into offering a price of over Rs. 200 a bag (of 20 kg). ‘They did so,’ says Bose, a young scheduled caste farmer from Etivayal village, ‘in that one market for one week. Then it fell to Rs. 80 per bag.’
R. Sridharan, the suave and sophisticated president of the Ramnad Chilli Merchants Association, disagrees. ‘Prices are falling due to overproduction. It is happening all over the country,’ he says. But why, in that case, do the tharagars persist in giving advances to peasants to grow even more chillies when the market has been so poor? ‘The advances,’ says Sridharan airily, ‘are a continuous process.’
Of exports, he says: ‘In a good season, we can get up to $4.40 per kg.’ That’s about Rs. 150 per kg and is a great deal more than what Ramaswamy, for one, collected on his entire sack of 20 kg. Sridharan is also a wholesaler and exporter. He is most articulate as I interview him in his electronics shop, one of the extremely few that stocks items like washing machines and refrigerators in this town.
What about the government’s regulated market scheme here? The merchants scoff at it and the farmers know little about it. Sridharan says that to be effective, it ought ‘to give storage facilities to the farmers and credit facilities to us’. He does not say why the government should not give credit facilities directly to the farmer. But another tharagar does: ‘What are we there for?’ he asks.
The ‘credit facilities’ offered by the tharagars, says a senior official here, were known in the old days ‘as naked usury’. The farmers see it that way in the present day as well.
Natarajan, a scheduled caste farmer from Etivayal, was unable to repay the ‘interest-free advance’ that he had taken from his tharagar. So he had to pledge his next crop as well to the latter. Meanwhile, he needed to survive the season, having sold his crop to the tharagar at a fraction of its real value. So he pawned his family’s only gold ornaments—worth approximately Rs. 4,000—with the commission agent. Against this, the tharagar gave him a loan of Rs. 1,200. The interest rate on this was Rs. 10 per month on every Rs. 100 of that sum. That is, 120 per cent interest annually. Natarajan knows he can never repay the loan, but could be paying the interest all his life.
‘They know that this is precisely what it will come to,’ says V. Kasinathadurai, a local activist. ‘That is why the tharagars can afford to be most generous with their “interest-free” advances.’
Can this incredible system be broken or even tamed? ‘Yes,’ says R. Gnanavasalam, district secretary of the Tamil Nadu Kisan Sabha. ‘The state should create a proper market as in Guntur and intervene to assure the producer a minimum price of Rs. 25 per kg. Besides, the government should have a weighing system that checks and certifies all bags as they enter town. Further, we need a chilli oil factory here to exploit possibilities that are now left to centres outside the district. And, of course, credit facilities for farmers.’
Gnanavasalam is clear that not much progress can be made unless the cycle of debt is broken. He is actively organising chilli farmers to fight for their rights and hopes to get some of their demands conceded. Meanwhile, Ramaswamy and Natarajan will have to take their sacks to the tharagar.
Slaves with ‘Salaries’ and ‘Perks’
RAMNAD (Tamil Nadu): Meesal village lies about forty kilometres from nowhere. Which is probably one reason why its landowners are able to practise a form of bonded labour that is both clever and vicious, but attracts little attention. At the receiving end are the Chakkiliayans, the lowest strata among the harijans, at the bottom of Ramnad’s casteist heap.
Even the Pallans and the Parayans, the other harijan groups here, practise untouchability towards them. The Chakkiliayans cannot even get the barbers among the harijan groups to cut their hair. They themselves are traditional leather workers and cobblers and also drum-beaters.
It doesn’t end there for the Chakkiliayans of this village in Mudukulluthur taluka. Almost every single one of the eighty-odd families here has a couple of members trapped in bondage.
It works this way: the landowners pay the bonded labourer a ‘salary’ and allow him or her a few fringe benefits as well. This means a payment of Rs. 1,000 for a whole year and permission to take the leftovers of the last meal of the day home. The owners stoutly insist that it is no more than an employer-employee relationship.
The catch is that the ‘employee’ cannot work anywhere else and is a virtual slave of the landowner. Jayamani and Armugham needed cash for their daughter Jayarani’s wedding. ‘The only thing we had to mortgage,’ says Jayamani, ‘was our labour power.’ So they pledged their son’s labour against the advance taken from the moneylender.
From the next morning, their son reported for work to the landowner-moneylender at 8 a.m. and worked till around 9 p.m. He had to tend sheep and cattle, and do every conceivable job of the owner in the fields besides domestic work in his house. At 10 p.m., he returned home with the leftovers of the last meal in the owner’s house. This he has been doing for the past few months, on an annual ‘salary’ of Rs. 1,000.
At the end of twelve months, he will go into bondage again for the next year, since the interest on the loan of Rs 2,000 is too high to repay. It is ‘pathu rupa vatti’—Rs. 10 per month on every Rs. 100 hundred of that sum. Or 120 per cent a year. Already, his father himself has become bonded to the same owner as a result of his inability to keep up the interest payments.
Puchchi, in his sixties, is one of the oldest of the Chakkiliayans. That is his name as recorded on his ration card and it literally means insect. Another name you can find is Adimayee, meaning slave. Their overlords have handed down such names to people of these strata across generations. The names have remained, even been internalised.
Their ration cards show joint family incomes of Rs. 200 to Rs. 250 a month for households with up to eight members.
Even this, insists Puchchi, was an arbitrary figure arrived at by an officer doing the rounds. ‘Most of the year, we earn no cash at all, but he just wrote Rs. 250 a month.’ There is a pathetic irony in the official queries on the card alongside the income figures. Sample: ‘Are double (gas) cylinders available?’ Two cylinders and a gas stove cost more than what the entire family would earn in the best months of the year.
Some are slightly luckier than the others. Arumugham gets fed three times a day at the owner’s house, apart from his salary. Others aren’t. Bonded female children have to do the same work and more with no ‘salary’ at all, just the food.
Chitravalli, twelve, daughter of Shanmugham, is bonded without pay. But she can eat at the owner’s house and take home the leftovers of the last meal. Velu, fifteen, son of Muthu, is in bondage but earns a ‘salary’ of Rs. 1,400 a year. That immediately goes in paying back interest instalments on the original loan. Velu has been working this way, over twelve hours a day, for five years now. During that period, his master is glad to inform us, his ‘salary’ has gone up from Rs. 1,000 a year to its present grand proportions.
When the master advances a loan of Rs. 500, as he did for Srinivasan, twenty-two, six months ago, he immediately deducts Rs. 50 as the first instalment of interest. Srinivasan has so far repaid Rs. 300—in only interest. He has little chance of repaying the loan. He has run up more debts with others just to be able to repay a couple of instalments on this one.
We fail to locate a family that does not have some member in bondage. Puchchi’s two daughters, Maniapushpam, twenty, and Samiadrall, nineteen, are both bonded without pay. The Chakkiliayans are also weak and backward in other respects.
The harijans of Ramnad are, in any case, worse off than their counterparts elsewhere on some counts. Nationally, the literacy rate of the scheduled castes was, in the 1981 census, 25.3 per cent. It is nearly 7 per cent lower in Ramnad. Literacy among harijan women is close to 11 per cent nationally, but under 7 per cent in Ramnad. And within the harijan groups here, the Chakkiliayans are right at the bottom. Of 210 illiterates enumerated in Meesal village, more than 160 are from this community. Just four of them have seen the inside of a high school. They too, are no longer functionally literate.
Tracking the food habits of the Chakkiliayans can be demoralising. Many families are quite dependent on giveaways and leftovers. Sometimes, the leftovers from their masters’ houses can form the main meal. And the great gap between income and expenses ensures indebtedness even for people with such a low food intake.
Caste oppression here has been so bad that even in the recent past the mere sight of a clean-shaven, decently dressed Chakkiliayan was cause enough to spark a riot. The upper castes forced harijans to dress according to their status—meaning poorly. That goes back in history. In the 1850s, the British governor of Madras tried to change this ‘dress code’. He ruled that harijan women converts to Christianity could cover their breasts and shoulders. Till then, the rules set by the higher castes did not permit them to do so. In the 1950s and ’60s, this led to a number of the Chakkiliayans converting to Christianity. But that has not helped them much.
This is one community with whom the government has actually tried to intervene. Recognising they were amongst the poorest of the poor, the government in 1981 acquired a piece of land in the village to build them houses. The landowners of Meesal immediately opposed this. The issue hung fire till 1986 when they were finally persuaded to hand over the site.
With formal rural credit crumbling after 1989-90, even loans for productive purposes are harder to come by. Hence, the peasant goes to the moneylender. The desire to break out of such debt is really strong in rural households, but the chances of doing so are very bleak for many.
The range of loans and their terms is bewildering. There are, of course, cash loans everywhere. Then there are also the ‘interest-free’ loans of Ramnad, the ‘grain loans’ of Bhoden, the ‘cloth loans’ of Khariar, besides other, less important forms. In return, usurers extract land, labour, produce, assets, or combinations of these. In parts of western Orissa, bondage and prostitution have arisen from the inability of peasants to repay loans to creditors.
The word ‘moneylender’ is no less complex. Full-timers are rare. Most often they are landlords and merchants, or both, plying this trade as one among other activities. These are the big ones. Then there are shopkeepers and petty government officials. And there are also lenders within the poor, though theirs are minor transactions. In Kalahandi, for instance, a group of dalits is into moneylending. But this is a layered operation where the small, local lender plays ‘collection agent’ for the town-based usurer. However, there are commercial lending deals between poor neighbours as well.
Numbers and categories are vital in explaining indebtedness, but reducing the problem to numbers would be self-limiting. Cash figures tell only part of the story. Moneylending is what moneylending does. Beyond a point, the peasant’s ability to cope is so thoroughly crushed that it matters very little whether the annual interest is 120 or 380 per cent.
In Bombay’s red light area of Kamathipura are women bonded into prostitution. Years ago, their grandparents took loans ranging from Rs. 12 to Rs. 50. Throughout western Orissa are villages where the breadwinners migrate huge distances not only to earn a few rupees, but also to pay off debts incurred in feeding the family. Across the country are people who have lost their land—and with it their livelihood and status—for the same reasons.
Moneylending creates servility and dependence. The sanctity of repayment, no matter how deceitfully the debt was contrived and how cruel the costs, has been drilled into Indian consciousness since the time of the Manu Smriti. Manu the Law Giver listed eighteen main categories of law for the king to decide on. ‘Of those,’ wrote Manu, ‘the first is non-payment of debts.’
Manu’s view: ‘By whatever means a creditor may be able to obtain possession of his property, even by those means may he force the debtor and make him pay.’ The elite, of course, were exempt. While the lower castes would pay a debt or discharge a fine in labour, ‘a Brahmana shall pay it in instalments’.
Centuries later, the elite are still exempt. As the inaction on their mountainous debt shows, they don’t even have to pay instalments. We could probably do with a couple of nineteenth century novelists to write about it.
The Tyranny of the Tharagar
RAMNAD (Tamil Nadu): The tharagar (commission agent) dips his hands into one of two sacks laid before him by a small farmer and extracts a kilogram of chillies. This he carelessly tosses to one side—as sami vathal (God’s share).
Ramaswamy, the chilli farmer eking out a living on three-quarters of an acre, watches as though hypnotised. For Ramaswamy can sell his chillies to no one but this tharagar. Why? By advancing him Rs. 2,000 just before the start of the season, the agent bought up Ramaswamy’s entire crop even before it was sown.
This is one important form that moneylending has taken in the ex-zamindari area of Ramanathapuram (or Ramnad). Yet, the tharagar of Ramnad, one of India’s poorest districts, is more than a moneylender. He is often a landholder, a wholesaler linked to the transport business and even, in some cases, an exporter. Ramaswamy’s tharagar is all of these. And his is a tightly knit fraternity. As the president of the Ramnad Chilli Merchants’ Association told me, ‘Only those who are our members can operate here.’
Just seventy members of the association control the entire chilli crop brought to the Ramanathapuram town market, and with it the lives of thousands of very poor farmers in one of the country’s great chilli-producing districts. Chilli is the biggest crop after paddy in Ramnad.
The moment Ramaswamy entered his tharagar’s domain, the agent charged him a commission of Rs. 20 (or Rs. 5 for every Rs. 100 of the total value) on his two humble sacks. Each contains 20 kg of chillies. Only if the tharagar does not want the lot will Ramaswamy get a chance to sell it elsewhere.
The tharagar has already consulted the wholesalers (who belong to the same fraternity). And he now sets the price along with his fellow tharagars. They do this by means of a secret language of the hand, fingers clasped and ‘talking’ under a towel. The actual producer stands watching in unhappy awe. The thousands of kilos of chillies brought by the farmers can lie for days in the tharagar’s yard while negotiations are on. During this period, they get dried out under the electric lights and fans here. Draining the water out of them in this way finally makes the chillies weigh much less, to the detriment of the farmers.
In this instance, the tharagar sets a price of Rs. 10 per kg for Ramaswamy’s offering. Then comes the sami vathal, depriving the poor farmer of another Rs. 10 worth of chillies. Next, the tharagar cuts payment by a further Rs. 20, saying each of the two gunny bags holding the chillies weighs a kilogram. (Actually each weighs less than 200 gm.)
Then Ramaswamy finds that both the bags he had so carefully weighed in at 20 kg each in Keelathooval village now weigh just 18 kg apiece on the scales. Another Rs. 40 to the tharagar. Ramaswamy knows he is being cheated but is not clear how. Nor does the tharagar explain why he charges his commission on 40 kg but pays only for thirty-two.
By the end of the season, Ramaswamy will have made five trips to the tharagar’s lair (with the agent claiming ‘God’s share’ on each occasion), depositing ten sacks in all. For his labours, he will earn, at the price set for him, a total of Rs. 1,600. But the tharagar, if he is into exports, could earn up to Rs. 20,000 or more on the same transaction. He has also got around 40 kg of chillies completely free from Ramaswamy. And he is dealing with hundreds of Ramaswamys.
While the actual producer just stands by looking on, two members of the tharagar (commission agent) fraternity set the price for the chillies. With one of them standing on top of a pile of chillies, they discuss a price by means of a secret language of the hand, fingers clasped and ‘talking’ under a towel.
Even if he were selling only to markets in Madras, he would get Rs. 25 per kg at the least, where he gave the farmer Rs. 10 per kg. If he has a good network, he could be selling within Kerala at up to Rs 40 per kg even in the currently depressed market.
Multiply Ramaswamy’s agent by seventy and the farmer by several thousand and you have Ramnad. You also have what a senior official here calls, ‘a uniquely exploitative relationship’. And a market worth millions in the grip ‘of a handful whose entire business is based on trapping the peasant in debt’.
Besides, if the tharagar owns land close to that of these farmers, you might find him selling them water. The hatred the poor farmers of Ramnad reserve for the tharagar has to be understood against this backdrop.
Take Ramaswamy, again. He spent Rs. 3,000 growing the chillies he sold to the tharagar for Rs. 1,600. Around Rs. 300 of his expenses were incurred on hiring the tharagar’s electric pumpset for a few hours to pump up water. That places him further in the debt of the latter. He also has a debt hangover from similar deals the previous year. This means Ramaswamy’s crop for the next two or three seasons, the seeds of which he has not sown, is already pledged to the tharagar.
There are thousands in the same situation as Ramaswamy, mostly small or marginal farmers owning an acre or less. In such cases, the agent’s control over the farmer is quite complete. The tharagars, though, are quick to point out that there was ‘no interest charged’ on the original ‘advance’. As for the current depression in the market, ‘Just watch,’ says Vidyasagar, a researcher at the Madras Institute of Development Studies. ‘This so-called crash has come simply because they’re now buying up stock from the peasants. Once they’re through, the prices will go up again in two or three months.’
The chilli farmers of Ramnad see the current depression in prices as rigging by the tharagars. Past experience seems to bear out this scepticism. At one point in April, the then collector of the district intervened and pushed the merchants into offering a price of over Rs. 200 a bag (of 20 kg). ‘They did so,’ says Bose, a young scheduled caste farmer from Etivayal village, ‘in that one market for one week. Then it fell to Rs. 80 per bag.’
R. Sridharan, the suave and sophisticated president of the Ramnad Chilli Merchants Association, disagrees. ‘Prices are falling due to overproduction. It is happening all over the country,’ he says. But why, in that case, do the tharagars persist in giving advances to peasants to grow even more chillies when the market has been so poor? ‘The advances,’ says Sridharan airily, ‘are a continuous process.’
Of exports, he says: ‘In a good season, we can get up to $4.40 per kg.’ That’s about Rs. 150 per kg and is a great deal more than what Ramaswamy, for one, collected on his entire sack of 20 kg. Sridharan is also a wholesaler and exporter. He is most articulate as I interview him in his electronics shop, one of the extremely few that stocks items like washing machines and refrigerators in this town.
What about the government’s regulated market scheme here? The merchants scoff at it and the farmers know little about it. Sridharan says that to be effective, it ought ‘to give storage facilities to the farmers and credit facilities to us’. He does not say why the government should not give credit facilities directly to the farmer. But another tharagar does: ‘What are we there for?’ he asks.
The ‘credit facilities’ offered by the tharagars, says a senior official here, were known in the old days ‘as naked usury’. The farmers see it that way in the present day as well.
Natarajan, a scheduled caste farmer from Etivayal, was unable to repay the ‘interest-free advance’ that he had taken from his tharagar. So he had to pledge his next crop as well to the latter. Meanwhile, he needed to survive the season, having sold his crop to the tharagar at a fraction of its real value. So he pawned his family’s only gold ornaments—worth approximately Rs. 4,000—with the commission agent. Against this, the tharagar gave him a loan of Rs. 1,200. The interest rate on this was Rs. 10 per month on every Rs. 100 of that sum. That is, 120 per cent interest annually. Natarajan knows he can never repay the loan, but could be paying the interest all his life.
‘They know that this is precisely what it will come to,’ says V. Kasinathadurai, a local activist. ‘That is why the tharagars can afford to be most generous with their “interest-free” advances.’
Can this incredible system be broken or even tamed? ‘Yes,’ says R. Gnanavasalam, district secretary of the Tamil Nadu Kisan Sabha. ‘The state should create a proper market as in Guntur and intervene to assure the producer a minimum price of Rs. 25 per kg. Besides, the government should have a weighing system that checks and certifies all bags as they enter town. Further, we need a chilli oil factory here to exploit possibilities that are now left to centres outside the district. And, of course, credit facilities for farmers.’
Gnanavasalam is clear that not much progress can be made unless the cycle of debt is broken. He is actively organising chilli farmers to fight for their rights and hopes to get some of their demands conceded. Meanwhile, Ramaswamy and Natarajan will have to take their sacks to the tharagar.
Slaves with ‘Salaries’ and ‘Perks’
RAMNAD (Tamil Nadu): Meesal village lies about forty kilometres from nowhere. Which is probably one reason why its landowners are able to practise a form of bonded labour that is both clever and vicious, but attracts little attention. At the receiving end are the Chakkiliayans, the lowest strata among the harijans, at the bottom of Ramnad’s casteist heap.
Even the Pallans and the Parayans, the other harijan groups here, practise untouchability towards them. The Chakkiliayans cannot even get the barbers among the harijan groups to cut their hair. They themselves are traditional leather workers and cobblers and also drum-beaters.
It doesn’t end there for the Chakkiliayans of this village in Mudukulluthur taluka. Almost every single one of the eighty-odd families here has a couple of members trapped in bondage.
It works this way: the landowners pay the bonded labourer a ‘salary’ and allow him or her a few fringe benefits as well. This means a payment of Rs. 1,000 for a whole year and permission to take the leftovers of the last meal of the day home. The owners stoutly insist that it is no more than an employer-employee relationship.
The catch is that the ‘employee’ cannot work anywhere else and is a virtual slave of the landowner. Jayamani and Armugham needed cash for their daughter Jayarani’s wedding. ‘The only thing we had to mortgage,’ says Jayamani, ‘was our labour power.’ So they pledged their son’s labour against the advance taken from the moneylender.
From the next morning, their son reported for work to the landowner-moneylender at 8 a.m. and worked till around 9 p.m. He had to tend sheep and cattle, and do every conceivable job of the owner in the fields besides domestic work in his house. At 10 p.m., he returned home with the leftovers of the last meal in the owner’s house. This he has been doing for the past few months, on an annual ‘salary’ of Rs. 1,000.
At the end of twelve months, he will go into bondage again for the next year, since the interest on the loan of Rs 2,000 is too high to repay. It is ‘pathu rupa vatti’—Rs. 10 per month on every Rs. 100 hundred of that sum. Or 120 per cent a year. Already, his father himself has become bonded to the same owner as a result of his inability to keep up the interest payments.
Puchchi, in his sixties, is one of the oldest of the Chakkiliayans. That is his name as recorded on his ration card and it literally means insect. Another name you can find is Adimayee, meaning slave. Their overlords have handed down such names to people of these strata across generations. The names have remained, even been internalised.
Their ration cards show joint family incomes of Rs. 200 to Rs. 250 a month for households with up to eight members.
Even this, insists Puchchi, was an arbitrary figure arrived at by an officer doing the rounds. ‘Most of the year, we earn no cash at all, but he just wrote Rs. 250 a month.’ There is a pathetic irony in the official queries on the card alongside the income figures. Sample: ‘Are double (gas) cylinders available?’ Two cylinders and a gas stove cost more than what the entire family would earn in the best months of the year.
Some are slightly luckier than the others. Arumugham gets fed three times a day at the owner’s house, apart from his salary. Others aren’t. Bonded female children have to do the same work and more with no ‘salary’ at all, just the food.
Chitravalli, twelve, daughter of Shanmugham, is bonded without pay. But she can eat at the owner’s house and take home the leftovers of the last meal. Velu, fifteen, son of Muthu, is in bondage but earns a ‘salary’ of Rs. 1,400 a year. That immediately goes in paying back interest instalments on the original loan. Velu has been working this way, over twelve hours a day, for five years now. During that period, his master is glad to inform us, his ‘salary’ has gone up from Rs. 1,000 a year to its present grand proportions.
When the master advances a loan of Rs. 500, as he did for Srinivasan, twenty-two, six months ago, he immediately deducts Rs. 50 as the first instalment of interest. Srinivasan has so far repaid Rs. 300—in only interest. He has little chance of repaying the loan. He has run up more debts with others just to be able to repay a couple of instalments on this one.
We fail to locate a family that does not have some member in bondage. Puchchi’s two daughters, Maniapushpam, twenty, and Samiadrall, nineteen, are both bonded without pay. The Chakkiliayans are also weak and backward in other respects.
The harijans of Ramnad are, in any case, worse off than their counterparts elsewhere on some counts. Nationally, the literacy rate of the scheduled castes was, in the 1981 census, 25.3 per cent. It is nearly 7 per cent lower in Ramnad. Literacy among harijan women is close to 11 per cent nationally, but under 7 per cent in Ramnad. And within the harijan groups here, the Chakkiliayans are right at the bottom. Of 210 illiterates enumerated in Meesal village, more than 160 are from this community. Just four of them have seen the inside of a high school. They too, are no longer functionally literate.
Tracking the food habits of the Chakkiliayans can be demoralising. Many families are quite dependent on giveaways and leftovers. Sometimes, the leftovers from their masters’ houses can form the main meal. And the great gap between income and expenses ensures indebtedness even for people with such a low food intake.
Caste oppression here has been so bad that even in the recent past the mere sight of a clean-shaven, decently dressed Chakkiliayan was cause enough to spark a riot. The upper castes forced harijans to dress according to their status—meaning poorly. That goes back in history. In the 1850s, the British governor of Madras tried to change this ‘dress code’. He ruled that harijan women converts to Christianity could cover their breasts and shoulders. Till then, the rules set by the higher castes did not permit them to do so. In the 1950s and ’60s, this led to a number of the Chakkiliayans converting to Christianity. But that has not helped them much.
This is one community with whom the government has actually tried to intervene. Recognising they were amongst the poorest of the poor, the government in 1981 acquired a piece of land in the village to build them houses. The landowners of Meesal immediately opposed this. The issue hung fire till 1986 when they were finally persuaded to hand over the site.
