Zameen-asman ka farak

Zameen-asman ka farak – the difference between earth and sky. The Hindi idiom seems to describe perfectly the world of difference that divides Delhi from the villages that cover the vast Indian countryside. It’s not that I didn’t know this before last weekend, when I traveled with my economics class to villages a few hours outside of the capital. But sometimes the intensity of talking to the people of a place, breathing their air and swatting away their flies, is an electric shock of some sort, a visceral kind of awakening. In Tibetan there are different words for “to know by word of mouth” and “to know from experience.” Weekends like this one enlighten the need for this distinction.

It is a common feature of the developing world – massive, modern and wired cities juxtaposed against impoverished villages. Something about this juxtaposition felt especially startling though this time. Traveling from the inner districts of Delhi to the countryside of Uttar Pradesh is a fascinating journey. The colonies of central and south Delhi (the city’s different residential districts are called “colonies”) like Niti Bagh, Hauz Khaus, or Greater Kailash feel comfortably modern, the kinds of places where the educated and globally-connected have been living for decades. The harmonies between tradition and modernity feel well-established. As one travels from interior Delhi into its suburban areas, and the vastness of the city becomes all the more apparent, these battles between new and old seem more recent and raw. Billboards ostentatiously display the new most exclusive high rise in Ghaziabad, a *suburb* of almost four million people. The rhythms of a “modern” city feel more kitsch – new malls are springing up like weeds, and yet it isn’t strange to find a family on the tenth story of an apartment building raising a cow out back.

But not very far past Delhi’s mega-suburbs, the battles of modernity and tradition – of a country struggling to devise itself as a global power – dissipate, even disappear. Villages like Somaspur, or Taina Goaspur, in western Uttar Pradesh, a two hour drive from Delhi, are stagnant in the struggles for food, for a school that can hold all of its pupils, for the opportunity to think and breathe outside the constraints of caste. At first, these places seem peaceful and idyllic in all the ways that city-dwellers tend to imagine the agrarian life, but it only takes a few conversations to see the fuller truth underneath. A conversation where a very wealthy “farmer” (really landlord) complains about how his day laborers demand to be paid in wheat rather than cash, and how 100 rupees a day (about $2) no longer suits them. He is wealthy enough to send his sons to the United States but not wealthy enough to pay his workers a livable wage. Or a conversation where a Scheduled Caste woman (the government term for Dalit, or “untouchable”) explains how the government scheme for people below the poverty line (BPL) gets corrupted by a greedy village head. Or a conversation with a Dalit self-help group that elucidates why their self-help group is the village’s only one: the leader of the last Dalit group was tied onto the railway tracks before an oncoming train, for his political power had become too great.

The middle classes in Delhi are concerned with the traffic caused by construction for the coming Commonwealth Games, which seek to put Delhi on the map for a future Olympic bid. Villages like Somaspur don’t show up on any map. Urban Indians are known to obsess over which schools their children attend, often complaining about the reservation system (affirmative action), which sets quotas in higher education for students of disadvantaged backgrounds. The disadvantaged in villages like Somaspur can’t even dream of profiting from the reservation system, when simply making it to secondary school is as impractical as walking 10 km a day. The feminists of Delhi University accuse the most liberal institutions of society of patriarchy. While the veiled women in Somaspur aren’t allowed to speak without ten men monitoring them.

The government in Delhi is increasing expenditure on space exploration. While villagers in Somaspur are concerned about a dropping water table, a result of too many private wells and not enough government-funded canals. Zameen-asman ka farak.