My back is sore from dragging a pick accross the ground, and stooping to drop seeds of black gram into the furrow behind it, and carrying enormous baskets of dried leaves on my head. My arms and ankles are marked with a lattice of scratches from the thornbushes woven into the straw mulch. I'm feeling slow and sated after a dinner of fried rice & sprouted black gram, vegetable sambar, and coconut idli. In short, I haven't got the grace to tell this story well, but I'll tell it to you anyway as it comes to me, in spurts and starts.
I'm having a wonderful, life-affirming time here and I feel utterly at home. Here is Sangatya farm, a little piece of land, 6 acres, about an hour from the Karnataka coast. (If you want to see it on a map, look for Mangalore. 60 km north you'll find Udupi, and inland from there you'll find Karkala, the nearest town) I've been here for 12 days now. It's a farm that's trying really hard to be a non-hierarchical, sustainable farming community, but has run up against the fact that there aren't enough people who want that. At one point there were 8 people living in this little house and working the land; now it's dwindled down to one, with visitors. Shreekumar is the farmer, a gentle and articulate man with a background in anarchism and environmental/political activism and an upper-tier education in engineering. He teaches thermodynamics and other engineering courses at a university in Mangalore, which means he's gone from the farm 3 days a week. He speaks 4 languages. Then there's Vijayendra (Viju), a 68-year-old “professional revolutionary” who hasn't been formally employed since he was 20, a writer of eco-anarchist pamphlets and short stories, a consultant and our scribe. Between the two of them they speak 6 languages that I know of. Hindi, English, Tulu, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi.
And then there's me.
I've been here for 12 days, farming, educating myself and being educated, napping in the sun and swatting mosquitoes. I'm mostly very, very happy here. As a farm, right now we have coconut palms, banana plants, a motley crew of vegetables in a little patch of garden, a mango tree in bloom, a curry tree, itty-bitty hot peppers, and areca palms that we're ignoring, because they're leftover from the last farmers who lived here and they're a useless, inedible cash crop used to make gutka and betel, the chewing tobacco of this part of the world. In the rainy season we grow rice, and a lot of it, and we're munchng our way through the dried reserves of black gram, horse gram, millet, and more. There's too much for Shree to do here alone, and I feel necessary and appreciated for the work that I do. My work so far has been planting a whole field of maize and black gram (a kind of small bean), digging new beds and gathering leaves to mulch them, watering and digging irrigation; spreading coconuts and millet to dry in the sun. All of the work is done by hand and with simple metal & wood tools. It's not hard work, just simple work, and it takes time. The black gram and the maize have sprouted in most of the field and I derive great proud and nurturing pleasure from watching them grow from seeds to sprouts to what look like real live plants. It's beautiful.
As for the rest of my time here, I've been learning a million things. Most of life here centers around food, and we eat a lot of it. Our diets are built on rice and coconut, supplemented with dal, bananas, vegetables from here and from the store, and other odds and ends. I'm afraid I'll grow fat here on rice and coconut and rice and coconut, but I'll at least be in good company. We have tea and coffee breaks in the morning and afternoon. I've learned how to use a solar box cooker, how to cook on a wood fire, how to make sambar, dal, gati, idli, coconut chutney, and other local dishes. How to crack a coconut and catch all the juice, how to wash dishes using ash and coconut husk, the local method for sprouting mung beans. That the stem of a banana plant is edible and pretty tasty when cooked with the right masala, as are green, unripe bananas. I've also been learning in a less culinary direction, from books and talks with Viju and Shree. I'm up to my elbows in anarchism, here, and reading everything from organic farming techniques (“On Composting”, by Venkat, the father of permaculture in India) to classic and new anarchist literature (Mahatma Gandhi's Hind Swaraj; Vijayendra's Regaining Paradise) and a treatise rejecting vegetarianism (The Vegetarian Myth), which is a remarkable piece of non-fiction. I've been bathing and washing my clothes in the river, and letting the little fishies nibble at the dead skin on my feet.
There are so many sounds here, and most of them are birds and insects. Viju is a bit of a naturalist, and he's taught me the names of many of the birds we see each day—drongos and warblers and golden orioles, cattle egrets, cormorants, crow pheasants, sunbirds (which are tiny and brilliantly bejeweled in red and green and purple, like the prettiest hummingbirds, but they perch and flit instead of humming). Peacocks are actually pests here, eating the tender shoots of plants we mean to grow. There are huge spiders and tiny frogs, and rat snakes draping in the trees, and biting, stinging ants, and small lizards that run up and down the wall eating bugs that stray into the house. The mosquitoes have stopped biting me, and I've stopped using mosquito repellant.
This place is radicalizing me and educating me. I want to lead a good life and a peaceful life, and I want to educate others, and I want to grow my own food and defend as much land as I can. I want to reject conventional agriculture and its wanton destruction of entire ecosystems, its depletion of topsoil and gulping down rivers for irrigation and forests for fields. I want to make a difference, or at least find myself an island of sustainability, responsibility, love, and compassion and refuse to be a part of the World at Large. It's a lot to ask, I know. I'm prepared to work hard for it.
