Rude Awakenings - Forest Sangha Publications

^0 T H E D R U M 06less.” And the charmers? “They have one acre, but this they are not owning,they must work for it.” They were the ones in the small mud hutstoward the edge of the village.Landholdings can be so small in the Ganges plain because the land isso productive. Our host told us he grew three crops a year: rice plantedwith the rains, then wheat, which was being planted now, and thenlegumes, mostly lentils and chickpeas. He had several cows and waterbuffalos (most families had only one), and these were grazed on thestubble of the cut crops and fed with chopped fresh straw. No one keptchickens, as to good Hindus eggs were seen as impure, not as bad as meatbut getting that way.Of course the other reason they could live on such small amounts ofland was that everyone lived so frugally. We were in the house of thebiggest landowner in a big village. He probably had a radio and television,but he did not have a car, and there was little ostentation, just thefancy woodwork doors and the metal plates we ate from instead ofbanana leaves. The workers had nothing but their mud hut, their onecow, and a few bangles for the wife. And the Untouchable castes wouldnot even have that.When I got back I looked up some statistics. There are 843 people persquare kilometre in the Vaishali district of Bihar, not the highest in theGanges plain, but then Vaishali is purely rural and the others have cities.A square kilometre is about 140 football pitches, so there would be onaverage six people living off the production from each pitch. Just imaginea countryside divided into plots the size of football pitches, on andon in all directions, and six people standing on each one. No wonder wecould never get away from people and no wonder, with that bleak life,they found us such an interesting event.It is this population density that is the reason Bihar is so different todayfrom what it once was. The vast tracts of forest left at the time of theBuddha were steadily cleared over the subsequent centuries as the populationgrew and, for many centuries, flourished. By the time the British1 6 3