Freedomville by Laura T. Murphy

Author:Laura T. Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

All Politics Are Local

In a small compound of faded pastel-painted cement houses that was eerily quiet, a bony, elderly man, wearing only a piece of cloth tied around his waist, called to me from the top of a roof that was in sore need of repair. He introduced himself to us as Mahendra Singh, gram pradhan of Sonbarsa village, one of the most well-known landlords of Shankargarh and the cousin of Virendra Pal Singh.

Mahendra lived in a sparsely decorated house. I entered what appeared to serve as both his bedroom and his living room. He pulled plastic lawn chairs up to a small tea table that was itself crowded against a platform bed made of plywood and cast-off lumber covered in faded blankets and a stained cotton sheet. Hanging on the discolored pink wall above this makeshift bed was a colorful calendar a few years out of date. In small niches along the wall, Mahendra had stored piles of papers, old bottles, and the detritus an old man collects over years. On a table in the corner sat an electric lantern and something that looked like a worn-out VCR, both of which were connected to a small car battery–sized generator. Mahendra quickly dispatched a servant to fetch some milk tea and butter cookies. He muttered something to my research colleague Aman Kumar about the servant’s caste status that I didn’t entirely catch, but Aman later told me the comment was meant to convey Mahendra’s magnanimity in allowing a dalit man to serve food.

Mahendra already knew that we’d been out to visit the people of Freedomville and that we were interested in the revolt, as so many others had been in the past. He told us he had long wondered when someone would come to ask about his important family and all that they had contributed to the region. Mahendra then outlined his own resumé for us. In high school and college, Mahendra had been a star athlete in kabaddi, a uniquely Indian sport that is a muscular, adult version of red rover. He attended college in Allahabad, where he studied political science, history, and Hindi, and served as the student body president. He realized he didn’t like village life, so he moved to Mumbai, where he worked as a government official, a bus-system administrator, a head of security for high-profile figures, and then spent a long time working for a bank. All the while, he owned land in Sonbarsa, so he visited often, but he had also invested in several businesses in Mumbai, which he’d left in the care of Virendra Pal’s youngest son, when he returned to Sonbarsa to run for pradhan in 2015.

Mahendra was a reluctant leader. Powerful Brahmin community leaders had traveled to Mumbai from Sonbarsa to entice him to campaign for village head. They told Mahendra that they were no longer pleased with the leadership of the current pradhan, and there were too few Brahmins in the village to create a voting bloc to support one of their own running.

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