Plant Your Love and Let it Grow

Forty years ago I read an article by the American author and environmentalist, Wendell Berry, in the Humanist magazine about the tremendous therapeutic value of farming and living in rural surroundings. I was in the third year of college at the time studying to be a civil engineer. That was the time I was reading Gandhi and the Upanishads also. A few months down the line I decided that I would also live in a village and farm. So eventually after my graduation I landed up in a village and from there in another village and finally in Alirajpur among the Bhil Adivasis. However, since I had also been reading Marx, Proudhon, Bakunin and the like in college, even though I ended up living in a village, I could not do much farming. Most of the time I was into grassroots mass mobilisation for the rights of the Bhils. So, like in the famous Grateful Dead song "Casey Jones", all the time there was trouble ahead and trouble behind. Consequently, farming was the last thing that crossed my mind as I was high on, not cocaine, but revolutionary spirit, often laced with the local Mahua!!

As things would turn out, a decade later I married a farmer's daughter, Subhadra. She too had drunk of the revolutionary spirit and that too of a feminist flavour and so we continued our dangerous political train driving, a la Casey Jones, spending our time in and out of prison and crashing head on into the oppressive train being driven by the Government!! But that became increasingly risky and after a particularly painful clash against the Government in 2001 in which we lost four of our sangathan members in police firing, we gave up on militant mass mobilisation and retired to the city of Indore to pursue sedate service delivery work and research.

Then in 2012 Subhadra decided she wanted to do farming. Staying in the city of Indore was becoming more and more claustrophobic for both of us. So we began searching for land. Thus started a wild goose chase. We wanted land close to a forest in hilly terrain and in an Adivasi area where there was one of our Sangathans and it had to be close to Indore with phone and internet connectivity. Too many parameters to satisfy and so we could not get land easily. Finally in 2015 we did get our land in Pandutalab village in Dewas district that satisfied all our conditions. It has been five years since and now we have a farm and farmhouse self sufficient in water, energy and food situated on the edge of a dense forest.

However, while Subhadra dived into farming with gusto along with the Adivasi couple we had engaged to help us, I still used to live and work on the farm off and on in a desultory manner and so could not test Berry's claim that farming has a therapeutic value. But from the month of June this year the Adivasi couple has left and so since then I have put in long stints of living and working on the farm as it is not possible for Subhadra to do all the work on her own. Farming is hard work both physically and intellectually. There are so many variables that have to be taken care of that one is on one's toes all the time. Normally, this results in considerable tension for the farmer these days. However, we are not normal farmers. Berry, in that article that I had read forty years ago, had given a sage piece of advice that one should not be dependent for one's livelihood on the farm. We have followed that advice and so we earn our money from other activities, which is possible because there is internet available on our farm, and do farming for the food and the physical and mental rigour.

Consequently, in these two and a half months my mental and physical health has improved considerably. One chronic ailment of mine has for the time being been completely solved. For some fifteen years now I have had a skin condition called psoriasis which results in scaling and itching of the skin. In all these years I have tried, allopathy, ayurveda, naturopathy and what have you but the problem has persisted. One dermatologist even told me once that I would have to reconcile myself to living with psoriasis till the day I die as if it was my second wife. When I told Subhadra this, she said that it was my third wife because the Adivasis were my first love and she was effectively my second wife!!! But now this long standing problem has vanished completely. No scaling of the skin and no itching whatsoever even though I have not been applying any medicine at all for the past two and a half months. Of course it may relapse but at least for the time being psoriasis has vanished.

Subhadra of course takes farming very seriously as a mission. She began farming again because she found that the women with whom she worked for their reproductive health were all anaemic because they were not eating properly. Delving into the problem she realised that it is the unsustainability of farming in this country that is at the root of malnutrition and disease. So she is on a crusade to bring farming and women back to health. For me, however, over the past two months farming has become a labour of love. Something that I had first dreamt about forty years ago in college has now been actualised. As the lyrics of a famous song by Eric Clapton go -
"Standing at the crossroads, trying to read the signs
To tell me which way I should go to find the answer,
And all the time I know,
Plant your love and let it grow"