The Bleeding

"The blood of the villages is the cement by which the edifice of the cities is built." - Gandhi

Sure, Anglicized Gandhi also suffered the classic Western affliction of pastoral romanticism. The vagaries of the Industrial Revolution re-made village life in our collective consciousness: the farmer and his labour of land became a repository for shared dreams of the simple, the peaceful, the pure. Hot hours spent folded over a furrow (but outdoors! in the fresh air!) must have seemed a fine alternative to the burning white cauldrons of a metal factory for those drawn to emerging industrial centers.

As in so many things, India lives the old conflicts and contradictions between urban and rural well past where they shatter. Indian cities hold the global glitz of modern consumer capitalism, are are thus spectacular beacons drawing the scratching-hungry and poor forward, to promise and reward and lavish. The cities contain the late-night gamble of India as a modern state, for the villages and pre-industrial country fiefdoms could never have dreamed a nation as absurdly unlikely as India.

Yet Indian cities also, finally and unmistakably, uncloak the lie that Western lifestyles and development are without cost. A part of any Indian city, even any large town, is a visible manifestation of suffering. You first know you are approaching a city because the land suffers. For hundreds of kilometeres the sun will vomit a watery-yellow light through burning haze. Black scars ragged across barren fields, worried by centuries of plough; colour a luxury the land cannot afford. Concrete becomes the unvaried paint of the landscape: concrete and rusted wire fences enclose nothing but sunbleached dust and shit; concrete canals dry with rubble and stinking death, or, worse, trickling with toxic slag and ill children; concrete block tenements, exposed rebar and flaking paint squalor. Shacks accumulate around any fixed point: a wall, an ancient axed Banyan: corrugated steel, bamboo, nail-studded wood, rotting burlap sack scavenged or stolen and everything thrown together, hastily, before another can claim this space. Piles of filth as large as vehicles, all virulent and teaming. The smashed and forgotten economic projects that may have destroyed a family: an abandoned tanker-truck here, a bloated and dead cow there, an investment lost, we have nothing, we are finished.

So, as the lie of the city crawls in and settles: the Bleeding.