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And The Tap Tells A Tale

Where were the women of the little colony, I was starting to wonder. A dozen or so of the men had spent the morning with me, talking, showing me papers, showing me around their homes. When we began, I spotted several of their wives, standing around on the periphery in colourful saris. But those bright reds, greens and yellows had since melted silently away.

I was to see them again soon enough. The men wanted to show me something a hundred or so metres away. No, they did not mean the missing women. But when we got to the spot, we found several of them there. They were taking turns to fill their pots with water from a "tap."

Now I use that term -- "tap" -- with some circumspection. Because this was not what you might ordinarily recognise as one. Instead, it was a pipe that stuck a few inches out of the ground. Water flowed steadily through it. With no obvious way to turn the flow off, it had formed a slushy, murky pond in the surrounding mud. To reach the tap, the women had waded through the muck with their pots. Now they were perched on stones placed in the pond, smiling shyly up at me as their pots filled.

The tap, of course, was the only source of water for the little colony of just over a hundred huts, of about five or six hundred people. The tap, of course, was what the men had brought me to see.

And I had particularly wanted to see this tap. While we talked, several of the men had produced a series of bills from the municipal corporation, going back nearly a quarter of a century. Each listed a charge for water. For at least 25 years, each of those one hundred huts had been billed for water -- for that one tap they all had to share. In its most recent billing, in November 1998, the corporation wanted Rs 252 per house for the tap. I did the calculation easily: over Rs 25,000 a year for one tap shared by several hundred people.

This had to be a remarkable tap indeed; I almost expected it to be gold-plated. I simply had to see it. I felt mildly let down when it turned out to be most ordinary.

Still, there was enough else to puzzle over. The oldest bill I saw that day was one that Nathabhai Veljibhai Vaghela showed me. It was dated August 30, 1975, and was for the year between April 1, 1975 and March 31, 1976. On it was the water charge for those twelve months: Rs 2.14. Two rupees and fourteen paise. Nathabhai also showed me a bill dated August 6, 1988, applying to the period between April 1, 1988 and March 31, 1989. This bill demanded Rs 18 for water: in 13 years, there had been a nearly nine-fold increase in that charge.

Seventy-year-old Khudabhai Jivabhai was one among several men who had the most recent bill. This was the one dated November 2, 1998, carrying a water charge of Rs 252 for the year 1998-99. In the 10 years since 1988, the municipality had multiplied its water fee another 14 times.

Or: the charge today for Baroda Municipal Corporation water to this one colony of hutments is nearly 120 times greater than it was just under 25 years ago. That outstrips inflation by a mile: Tata's reliable little SO (Statistical Outline of India) tells me that the wholesale price index has risen approximately five-fold over the same period. Real estate has not appreciated nearly as spectacularly either. In fact, I feel safe in saying there cannot be a single investment that has, over a quarter of a century, increased in value as much as the cost of Baroda water to several hundred of its poorest residents has.

And in all that time, one thing has not changed. Those residents have had to get their water from one somewhat distant tap that is surrounded by a pool of slime.

It was 80 years ago, the men told me, that the Maharaja of Baroda gave their ancestors this land to live on. They belonged to the Bajanias (the word comes from "bajana", to play an instrument), a wandering minstrel tribe that makes a living by playing music at weddings and other functions. The land -- then part of Majepur village, well outside the limits of Baroda -- was a reward to one Bajania troop for a performance at some long-forgotten royal wedding.

The Maharaja's word was then law. If it was to prove inadequate decades later, as you will soon see, at the time it was enough for those two dozen musicians and their families. They did not bother asking the Maharaja for written titles and other such legal niceties. Giving up their wandering, the Bajanias built themselves homes and have lived here ever since. Today, the hundred huts form a colony known as Mani Nagar Bajaniavas.

Of course, Mani Nagar is now very much part of Baroda. That's because Baroda has expanded greatly in those 80 years. In particular, what used to be fields in this area has turned into a maze of paved roads used by a steady stream of chaotic traffic. There are dozens of shops and STD booths, several quite fancy four and five-storeyed blocks of flats. Around the buildings you can see the usual detritus of urban India in the late 1990s: plastic bags, drink cartons, garbage dumps in which a few pigs root noisily.

And I don't need to enter these nice-looking flats to know that each one certainly must have a steady supply of Baroda Municipal Corporation water that arrives via gleaming Jaquar brand bathroom fittings. I don't need to, because that's how such flats are. They are built so that those who live in them can find comfort and water within their homes. So they need not be forced into the inconvenience of filling pots from one un-shuttable tap. I did not find out what the Baroda Municipality charges the people in these flats for water; whatever it is, I know they get it more easily than the far less privileged men and women who live at their doorstep.

Why, I asked the less privileged men, does the municipality charge you an ever-escalating fee for water, but supply the precious liquid to you in such a niggardly fashion?

We have asked the same question, they told me, and many times. We always get the same answer: you have encroached on this land illegally; you must leave; we are going to demolish all your huts eventually; why should we give you water anyway? Ever since these buildings started coming up -- here they waved at the blocks of flats -- we have been hearing this argument.

The men unfolded a survey map to prove to me that the land the Maharaja originally gave them included the plots where the blocks of flats now are. They tried to make it clear how the lines on the map corresponded to the ground. But with all the buildings and roads around us, I could not quite grasp the layout the map indicated.

Until I remembered the tap. It is a hundred metres from the huts, but it is surrounded by four of the buildings, each no more than a stone's throw away. Even given India's notoriously eccentric municipalities, it seems crazy for Baroda's city authorities to give these Bajanias a tap so far from their homes. Unless when the municipality did connect that tap, it was in the middle of their plot of land, among the huts they had built there. That, I realised, is the story the map told.

The huts at that end of their land, the Bajanias said, had all been torn down to clear space for buildings. When one such demolition job, in 1993, was imminent, the hutment dwellers went to court but failed to stop the municipal action. That judgement was later upheld by the Ahmedabad high court. In an order dated May 25 1993, that learned court observed: "[The appellants] submitted that they are in possession [of the land] pursuant to some [grant in] their favour by some ruler of Baroda State. In support [of this] submission no evidence was produced before the [earlier] trial. [Nor was] any evidence forthcoming before this court.... The appellants therefore do not have any [title on] the land and therefore they cannot be permitted to [occupy it]."

And that is just how summarily, 80 years on, a Maharaja's gift to a few wandering minstrels was snatched away.

Their homes bulldozed soon after, about half the Bajania families were forced to relocate their lives to the steep slopes of the foul stream that oozes nearby. It is foul because the drain from the buildings empties into this particular stream.

Spare a thought for the irony of it all. The Maharaja gives a few tribal families a plot of land. Years later, the Baroda Municipality gives the colony that has formed there a tap, their only source of water. Some more years later, the same municipality demolishes about half the houses in the colony, those nearest the tap, to make way for new multi-storeyed buildings. Today, the uprooted families live on top of the shit that flows from those buildings.

If you could ask the municipality, the government, for just one thing, what would it be? I asked the Bajanias this question. Somewhat naively, I expected answers like "a school", or "jobs", or "toilets." But whether it was Sumabhai Khodabhai, or Shyambhai Jethabhai, or Bhailalbhai Ramabhai, or any of the other Bajanias that morning, they all sang the same tune and it wasn't any of those.

Give us the land we have lived on for nearly a century, they asked. Put it in our names. We want nothing else.

Why, I was left to wonder, is that so hard?

Tailpiece:

In my column What's A Few Lies Between Friends? I quoted Shabana Azmi pointing out that in the film Fire, the names of the two women are "Radha" and "Neeta", not "Seeta". This was, of course, after Bal Thackeray announced that he would "permit" the film to be shown if the names were changed from "Radha" and "Seeta" to "Shabana" and "Saira".

Since the column appeared here, I've heard from a few people that in the version they saw in the USA, the name of the character was indeed "Seeta". In the version screened in India, it was "Neeta".

So I write this tailpiece to confess that I have no idea what is going on.

This article is part of the project Dilip D'Souza is pursuing to study India's Denotified and Nomadic Tribes as a National Foundation for India Fellow for 1998-99.

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