India

Introduction

In Class IX our Hindi teacher read “Thakur ka Kuan” aloud to us in the last period of a hot July afternoon. When she reached the end, nobody moved to pack their bag. It is only a few pages long, and it finishes with a sick man drinking water that stinks. I did not expect to meet it again in an English literature project about a novel set in West Africa. But the first time I read Kadiatou’s words to her friend Fatou in Songs of Dust and Water, “A well has no gate. Anyone with a rope may draw from it. A machine like that is kept behind a fence, and somebody holds the key” (p. 92), I wrote Gangi’s name in the margin.

This project compares the two texts. Both are about who is allowed to draw water, and both show that the answer has less to do with how much water there is than with who decides. My argument is that Premchand and Hydara look at the same danger from opposite sides. Premchand shows a well with no gate that is still closed to Gangi, because the lock is held by custom and by fear. Hydara shows a village that has drunk bitter water for years and is then offered clean water from a machine with a real padlock, and the second half of the novel is the village learning to keep that key in its own hand. Reading the two together made me see that Kadiatou’s sentence about the open well is true only where nobody is shut out by birth. The novel has no caste, so it never has to test her sentence, but an Indian reader cannot help testing it. I will also bring in Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s Mahad Satyagraha of 1927, when the right to draw water was claimed openly and together, which is much closer to what Nafawol does than to anything Gangi can do.

1. Two wells

Premchand published “Thakur ka Kuan” in 1932, five years after Mahad. Jokhu, Gangi’s husband, is ill and asks for water, but the water from their own well smells foul, because an animal has fallen into it and died. The only other wells in the village belong to the Thakur and to the Sahu, the moneylender, and people of Gangi’s caste are not allowed to draw from them. Jokhu tells her not to try, because he is sure she will be caught and beaten. Gangi goes anyway, at night. She hides while two women of the higher castes draw water and grumble about their own hard lives, and while she waits she asks herself, angrily, why these households should be called high at all. When nobody is left at the well she lets her pot down on its rope and has nearly drawn it up when the Thakur’s door opens. She lets go. The pot falls back into the well, and she runs home without stopping. Jokhu has the dirty water at his lips and is drinking it.

Hydara’s novel covers twenty-five years. Its Part Two is set in Nafawol, a village on a floodplain the river has left, in the fictional Republic of Tekuru. The village well has turned salty. Kadiatou is its Yaara-Jaxo, the Water-Keeper, a title that comes down through the women of her family, “an inheritance no one boasted of and no one refused” (p. 85). An engineer born in the village, Dr Arramata, brings a machine that draws water out of the air, and money from a foreign fund that will pay only if the village owns what is built. The rest of the book follows the village as it builds a road, a mill, a common fund and a union of villages, refuses a huge offer from a company called TransGlobal, and waits fifteen years for its well to turn sweet again.

One text is a single night and the other a generation. What they share is a woman standing at the edge of a well who cannot simply give a sick person clean water.

2. “A well has no gate”

Kadiatou says her sentence about the well on the first day of the meeting, walking home with Fatou, after the strangers have described their machine. A well is open to “anyone with a rope”, while the machine will sit behind a fence and “somebody holds the key” (p. 92). Fatou, who has hired other men’s lorries for thirty years, answers her with an image from trade: “When one man owns the only lorry on the road”, he is “kind all through the planting. At harvest he names his price” (p. 92). Both women fear the same thing: a useful thing held by one hand.

Read beside Premchand, the first half of Kadiatou’s sentence becomes very uncomfortable. The Thakur’s well has no gate either. Gangi has a rope and a pot, and she even gets the pot almost to the top. What stops her is a rule that nobody in the story needs to write down, because the whole village carries it. The sound of his door opening is enough to make her hands let go. Kadiatou’s “anyone with a rope may draw” describes a village where custom does not sort people before they reach the well. In Premchand’s village the sorting has happened long before anyone picks up a rope.

Part One of Hydara’s novel, set in Madina in the neighbouring country, already knows that permission matters as much as access. When the foreign engineer refuses the bracket the blacksmith Malik has repaired, Malik tells his apprentice: “A thing you are not allowed to mend is not yours” (p. 16). Minister Khresay, having signed for the plant, defends himself with a proverb: “When your own well is dry, you do not refuse the bucket because you dislike the man holding the rope” (p. 9). In both sayings the danger lies with whoever holds the rope. Gangi’s case is harder. She holds the rope herself, and it is still no use to her.

3. The one who serves the cup

The worst moment in “Thakur ka Kuan” comes at the end, when Gangi finds Jokhu drinking the water she was trying to replace. The story stops there, and the reader is left with the smell.

Kadiatou’s position looks like the opposite of Gangi’s, since she is the well’s keeper. Yet in the first chapter of Part Two her situation ends in the same place as Gangi’s. She draws “a few litres of cloudy brown water” (p. 86) each morning, and her thought is plain: “This water is slow poison, and I am the one who serves it” (p. 87). The women of her compound cook with it “and gave it to their children, because there was no other water” (p. 86). Even the strangers are offered it, “because a guest is offered water and there was no other water to give” (p. 87). Hospitality, which in my grandmother’s house means the first glass goes to the visitor, here becomes a cruelty nobody can avoid.

I think this is the most important link between the two texts: holding the rope is not enough by itself. Gangi has no right to the clean well. Kadiatou has every right to her well, and its water is still bad. The well at Nafawol “had been going bitter for six years before anyone from outside acted”, and “Kadiatou had noticed in the first season” (p. 81). Noticing, and saying so in committee, changed nothing. In both stories the person closest to the water is the one who cannot fix it.

Years later, arguing with Fatou about the TransGlobal offer, Kadiatou brings this back. “Do not tell me I don’t know what it is to feed a child something that harms it because the other choice is nothing,” she says, and then: “I have been the one who hands over the cup, and I will not have our grandchildren’s cup in another man’s hand” (p. 193). This is where the two texts divide. Gangi’s whole effort is to get one cup of clean water from another man’s well for one night. Kadiatou has had clean water for years by this point, and her fear is that it will once again depend on somebody else’s goodwill. Premchand wrote to make his readers ashamed that Gangi had to creep about in the dark. Hydara is asking what happens after the shame, once a village has a choice and must decide whether to hand the key away again.

I keep returning to one small detail. When Kadiatou first gives clean water to her granddaughter Mariam, the child “drank, and made a face, because she had forgotten that water could taste of nothing, and drank again” (p. 99). Jokhu, in Premchand’s story, drinks foul water because he cannot bear his thirst any longer. Mariam pulls a face at clean water because she has got used to the foul. In both cases the body has adjusted to what it was given, and that frightened me more than anything else in either text.

4. The padlock and the hand on it

In Premchand there is no padlock, because none is needed. In Hydara there is a real one. When the agreement with the Fund is read aloud under the baobab, Kadiatou speaks for the first time only at the end: “You will put a fence round the machine,” she says to Adam. “Who keeps the padlock?” (p. 101). Adam’s answer is “The committee” (p. 101). The key that is then put on the mat is a small piece of black plastic. Ousman turns it over and says, “It’s lighter than a groundnut” (p. 101), and the alkalo hands it to Fatou, who “put it in her purse, with her coins” (p. 101). I liked that it goes in with the coins, as if it were money.

The phrase in this section’s heading comes from the scene with Evelyn Reed of TransGlobal. When Reed offers to help the Union “reach scale”, the reply comes without a question mark: “With whose hand on the key,” Kadiatou said (p. 187). My teacher pointed out that the narrator writes “said”, not “asked”, and that this changes how the line sounds. Kadiatou is not really asking; she is naming the condition, and Reed “stopped smiling”. Fatou then translates the whole offer into a trader’s word: “It would be a sale” (p. 187).

The Thakur’s power never has to be put into words like this, which is why it is so hard to fight. A padlock that is written into a contract can be argued about, and a key can be handed from one person to another. In Part One, the farmer Samba warns the engineer who accepts a single official’s signature for a whole village: “A signature tells you who held the pen” and “It does not tell you who agreed” (p. 18). Nafawol’s answer is to make every paper public. At the end of Proxima’s ten years Adam returns the second set of credentials, and Fatou says: “Ten years you kept a second key to our house” and “It was always ours. This is only the receipt” (p. 213). Gangi could never have asked for a receipt. Nobody in her village would admit there was anything to give back.

5. Mahad: drawing water in public

The historical event that sits between these two texts is the Mahad Satyagraha. In August 1923 the Bombay Legislative Council passed a resolution, moved by S.K. Bole, that the “depressed classes” should be allowed to use public water sources maintained by the government and local bodies. In 1924 the municipality of Mahad, in what was then Kolaba district, declared its Chavdar tank open to them. In practice caste Hindus would not allow it. On 20 March 1927, during a conference at Mahad, Dr Ambedkar led a large group of people to the tank, where he and they drank its water. Afterwards they were attacked, and orthodox Hindus carried out a ritual to “purify” the tank. At a second conference in December 1927 a copy of the Manusmriti was publicly burned. In 1937 the Bombay High Court decided that the untouchable communities had the right to use the tank.

What strikes me is that at Mahad the right already existed on paper, twice over, and it meant nothing until people went to the tank in daylight, in numbers, and drank. Gangi is alone and goes at night, and her story shows that one woman by herself cannot break the custom, however brave she is. Nafawol’s way is closer to Mahad’s than to Gangi’s. Adam tells the elders, “I have seen what happens when a system is owned only on paper” (p. 91), and the village takes him at his word. When the agreement is opened, Fatou takes it out of Dr Arramata’s hands and reads it herself, because “Every one of them skipped a line” (p. 100). The vote on TransGlobal is cast with stones dropped into a clay pot and counted on a table in front of everybody: fourteen black stones to ten white.

I must be careful here. Mahad was a struggle against an injustice that had lasted for centuries and had religious authority behind it, and the people who went to the tank put themselves at real physical risk. Nafawol’s quarrel with TransGlobal is about contracts and money, and nobody’s body is in danger at the vote. I am comparing the method, which is publicity and numbers and keeping a record, and I am not saying the two are equal.

6. Where the comparison breaks

The plainest difference is that there is no caste in Songs of Dust and Water. Nobody in Nafawol is forbidden water because of the family they were born into. An Indian student who went looking for Gangi’s situation in the book would not find it, and I do not want to pretend otherwise.

But the novel does know about wells closed by the strong against the weak. In Sirawol, the neighbouring village, an old woman takes the young technician Hassan to the “ideal” site his survey has picked and tells him that her grandfather dug a well there sixty years ago, and that a bigger family claimed it was on their grazing land and “filled it in with stones one night” (p. 157). Her grandfather’s cattle died. “Nobody tells a machine,” she says. “That is why they sent a boy with ears” (p. 157). This is the closest the book comes to the Thakur’s well: the stronger family decides who may draw water. The difference is that the old woman’s grievance is heard, and the machine is moved to ground no family claims.

The novel also knows that a household is not one person. When TransGlobal offers fifty thousand dollars to every family, Isatou, who runs the women’s savings group, asks a single question at the cooking fires: “Into whose hand?” (p. 190). When Fatou insists the money is still large, Isatou answers, “I asked whose hand” (p. 190). Premchand’s women at the well complain about their husbands too. Gangi is shut out by caste, but the two higher-caste women have their own walls at home. Both writers see that “the household” can hide a woman behind a man’s name.

One line made me uneasy as an Indian reader. The women of Kadiatou’s line “married within Nafawol, so that the well would never be kept by a stranger” (p. 85). In India, marrying inside a closed group to keep something in the family’s hands is one of the ways caste has lasted. I do not think Hydara means anything like that; the custom is about guarding a responsibility, and nobody is kept from the water because of it. Still, the word “stranger” stayed with me, and I noticed that the book’s ending loosens the rule without anyone announcing it. By Year 15, Kadiatou is too old to draw the bucket. “She could not draw it alone any more. She did not have to” (p. 232). Her great-granddaughter Halima, who is twelve, puts her hands on the rope below Kadiatou’s and they pull “hand over hand, the fibres biting both their palms” (p. 232). There is no ceremony. “The well was kept now by a girl who did not yet know it was hers” (p. 232). The office passes by touch, to a child who thinks the fuss is about nothing.

Conclusion

The novel ends with a very short coda about Wagadu, the old empire the grandmothers remember, and its last sentence is “One pair of hands can always be made to let go” (p. 233). When I read it, I thought immediately of Gangi at the Thakur’s well, with the pot almost at the top, letting go of the rope the moment she hears the door. Her hands are made to let go by a power that only has to open a door.

Premchand’s story shows how that happens to one woman on one night, and it refuses to console us. Hydara’s novel spends fifteen years on the other half of the problem: how a village keeps its hands on the rope once it has the rope, by writing its rules down, putting its accounts on a wall, voting in the open and sometimes paying a heavy price for it. A family leaves, a girl loses a year of study, and an old man in Kumbawol dies still waiting for a hospital. Neither text pretends that clean water is simply a matter of digging. In Premchand, the water is there and Gangi may not take it. In Hydara, the water has to be brought back, and then guarded. The final image of the novel, two pairs of hands on one rope, young below old, is the answer I would have liked to give Gangi. In 1932 she had nobody to pull with her.

Introduction

Every summer in Jaipur our colony waits for the tanker. My grandfather, whose village is in Jhunjhunu district, still talks about the kund in his family’s courtyard, a covered pit plastered with lime that caught the rain off a sloping floor, and about the village johad where the cattle drank. He says nobody in his time ever “bought” water. When our Sociology teacher asked us to choose a common resource and the institutions that manage it, I chose water in Rajasthan, and specifically the work of Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS) and Rajendra Singh in Alwar district, where johads helped bring the Arvari river back to life.

For the comparison case I chose a novel, Songs of Dust and Water by M.J. Hydara (2026), which I read during the winter break. Its second part is set in a fictional West African village called Nafawol, on a floodplain the river has abandoned. The village gets a modern machine that harvests water from the air, but the water that finally returns comes from something very like Rajasthan’s traditional methods: low stone lines across old river channels, pits on the higher ground, and many years of waiting. The village also runs its affairs through institutions that reminded me of our own: a village committee, a women’s work group called a kafo, and a rotating savings pot called an osusu, which is very similar to the self-help groups I had read about in Kerala’s Kudumbashree programme.

A novel is not field data, and I say more about this under Methodology. But a novel can show how an institution feels from the inside, which a statistic cannot do.

Objectives

1. To understand how johads and the Arvari river parliament work as a community institution for managing water.
2. To understand Anupam Mishra’s argument, in Aaj Bhi Khare Hain Talab (1993), that traditional tanks were built and kept by society itself.
3. To compare women’s savings groups (Kudumbashree in Kerala; the osusu and kafo in the novel).
4. To compare these with the water-harvesting methods and institutions described in Songs of Dust and Water.
5. To identify what the comparison shows about why some community institutions last.

Methodology

This project is based on secondary sources. I read Anupam Mishra’s Aaj Bhi Khare Hain Talab in Hindi, parts of Dying Wisdom by Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain (Centre for Science and Environment, 1997), the chapter on social movements in our NCERT textbook, and web pages from CSE and Kudumbashree. I checked dates and figures against more than one source wherever I could, and I have kept to figures that the sources agreed on.

For the novel I did a close reading of Part Two and noted every passage about water, land or institutions, with page numbers.

I also had an informal conversation with my grandfather about the johad in his village. This is not a proper interview survey, and I use it only for background.

Limitations: I did not visit Alwar. Nafawol and its country exist only in the novel, so the book cannot prove anything about real West Africa. I use it as a “thought experiment” that can be compared with a real case.

Analysis

Findings

1. In both cases, the lasting improvement in water came from slowing rain so that it recharges the ground (johads in Alwar; stone lines and half-moon pits in the novel). Extracting deeper water only bought time.
2. In both, recovery took about a decade. In the novel the channel ran in Year 10 and the well was sweet by Year 15.
3. Technology helped as a bridge. The novel’s harvester stopped at seventy per cent and ended as a backup for the hot months.
4. Each case needed a community institution to make rules for the whole area: the Arvari Sansad of about 72 villages; in the novel, a committee, a public ledger and a union of villages.
5. Good rules apply to the powerful too (the three-signature rule, rationed taps for everyone, the Arvari ban on borewells).
6. Women’s savings groups work because money is visible and local. When they are linked to a larger fund or bank, members can lose control, as the quarrel over the osusu pot shows.
7. Traditional knowledge (Mishra’s main point) is needed alongside modern measurement. In the novel, the elders’ knowledge and the engineer’s figures agree.

Conclusion

At the start of this project I thought that the hero of the novel would be the machine, because it is introduced first and it is the most exciting thing in it. By the end I thought it was the stones. Kadiatou’s well recovers because people spent dry season after dry season carrying stone into dead channels, and because the village kept rules about money and water that nobody could quietly bend. The same is true, as far as I can tell, of the Arvari. TBS and Rajendra Singh, who received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2001 and the Stockholm Water Prize in 2015, are rightly famous, but the river was brought back by many villages agreeing to dig johads and then to obey their own parliament.

When I told my grandfather about the novel’s ending, where an old woman and a twelve-year-old girl pull one bucket up together, he said that this was how the johad in his village was kept too, until it wasn’t. I think that is the sociological point. A community institution lasts only while each generation puts its hands on the rope.