Rude Awakenings - Forest Sangha Publications

^0 S E C O N D M O O N 06the children were used for. The best-looking children were sold tobecome prostitutes.Not much farther along, we came to the archaeological remains atKolhua. Our guide found the chaukidar in charge of the site, a local,wearing the usual worn khaki uniform denoting the lowest class ofIndian bureaucracy (which would reflect his caste), and we were shownround by the two of them, our guide asking questions in Hindi and thenrelaying the replies to us in English. There was a column that we weretold postdated the other Ashokan columns we had seen. It also postdatedthe flowering of the Indian arts; it was a very poor imitation,shorter, squatter, with the lion on top looking more like a cloth replicastuffed with straw. There were also the excavated remains of severalsmall Buddhist monasteries: oblong buildings each with a central courtyardwith some dozen small monastic cells. These were the first we hadseen of the viharas that give Bihar its name; hundreds of others havebeen found, nearly all following this same simple design. These musthave dated from the peak of Buddhism in northern India, when Biharwould have had the density of Buddhist monks they have today in Thailandand Burma.On the way back we were brought for our meal to the house of a locallandowner, or thakur. Although his home was bigger and grander thanthe rest in the village, it was not much by our standards. It was a squareblock of concrete no bigger than a small English house. And it was unfinished:some doorways had fancy wooden doors while others had nothing,and the concrete rendering on one of the walls was incomplete.Through our young friend I found out from the slightly portly andmiddle-aged thakur that he was the village’s largest landholder. Thisallowed him to have several lower-caste charmer families working forhim, both in the fields and helping around the house (they served themeal). His total holding, however, was only twenty acres, the size of atypical field in England. I asked how much other thakurs had. “Somehave nearly as much as this man,” the lad replied, “but most are having1 6 2