The summer months are always kind of muggy in Patna. In the early 1990s, they appeared sultrier than normal. The days would be hot and the nights would be dry. There was only so much one could do. And that ‘so much’ was never much, with those prolonged hours of nothingness blankly staring at us. Don’t know if the irregular load-shedding and the dark absence of electricity were the reason behind the dreariness. Or if one could point towards the abrupt kal shaam chhe baje phir mulakaat hogi endings of Doordarshan as the cause. Or whether the limited stock of antaakshari songs (despite the unending stock of holidaying cousins to play them with) was the prime suspect. OR perhaps it was just the mid-teen angst.

But the insipid monotony was real. And there was only so much one could do.

Those were also the days when Aamir Khan was doing snake movies, Rishi Kapoor was wearing his last set of sweaters around trees, Jackie Shroff was giving solo box office hits, and Vinod Khanna was cracking dudhu jokes looking at women in Farishtay.

Yes. There really was only so much one could do.

Or actually, there was. Buzz words like liberalisation and globalisation were just beginning to hover around, and private TV channels were soon to be an everyday fix as a positive fallout of the policy changes. Cable TV was slowly becoming the fashionable thing to do in small town India, a perfect middle class counter point to the safari-suit-and-pomeranian superiority practiced by the elite. My professor parents, of course, thanks to their world view and wisdom nurtured by Brahmanical leanings, had a strong point of view on cable TV or any other form of unsupervised entertainment. EXACTLY the reason why I readily agreed when Ramkailas ji, my trusted aide, and the family Man Friday, recommended that we steal the cable connection since the wires went through our garden.

Till then, our experience in thieving was restricted to pocketing raw mangoes of the awesomely juicy Maldah variety from the neighbours’ yard.  So I was not too sure. Having said that, the lure of breaking the boredom and seeing content outside of the staid DD programming was too much of a temptation. The programming options were way too many, beyond the Krishi Darshans and Chitrahaars of the world. There was finesse and flair one wasn’t used to seeing on television. Plus, there was MTV. That thing that was meant to morally corrupt the youth of the nation.

I was ready to be corrupted.

All it took was a pair of garden cutters and some ingenuity, and we were a cable TV household between 10pm and 5am, every day. Opening gates to a world unseen. The firang accent, the cool graphics, the smart promos, the interesting shows… they were all from a distant land. There was Star Plus with its Crystal Maze, Donahue, Oprah and, oh, those kissing cousins in The Bold and The Beautiful. Or the cigarette smoking Tara in the eponymous series on Zee TV, and even the obnoxious Mohan Kapoor on the channel’s Saanp Seedhi, and also Rajat Sharma, giving birth to a different breed of journalism in Aap Ki Adalat. This was all different. New. And real.

And then there was, of course, MTV. All different. New. And surreal.

With its funky graphics, bizarre spots and fast pace. Smelling like teen spirit. With Michael Jackson and Madonna. With Guns N’ Roses, a paradoxical co-existence that could well define MTV. With Right Said Fred declaring his sexiness and Phil Collins his inability to dance. With Pearl Jam, Megadeth, Metallica and innumerous such bands that us small-towners had no knowledge or clue about. I saw images I never thought existed. I saw people I never could be. I saw love. I saw debauchery. I saw a display of colours, commotion and camaraderie. It was culturally alien, unfathomable at times. But it was all eerily eye opening. I could never be them, I knew. And yet, I wanted to know more about them. Every day.

I saw possibilities. And I am not just talking television. I am talking life.

For that Hindi medium boy from Bihar struggling with Itihaas, Bhugol and Nagrik Shastra in school, it was almost like him creating his own itihaas every night. By unshackling himself from all that was around him. By thinking beyond the books and the course material. By taking those fantastic flights to nowhere. I never did stop thinking in Hindi. I did not develop an accent. I never could appreciate Pearl Jam, Megadeth or Metallica. I did not try becoming a different person with brand new reference points. Only, my perspectives changed. I started seeing things differently. I did not know where did I want to go, but I knew what it would be like.

We were caught soon enough by Papa. He said all that we had to do was ask. He was, obviously, very upset. Major mud on our face. But I wasn’t complaining. It was worth the trip. It was not as if it suddenly changed my persona or that I could see doors opening for me. But this entire visual experience, day on day, made me realise that there were so many doors that existed.

It was not just economic liberalisation at work. Or just liberalisation. It was liberation!

It changed my outlook. It made me more confident. It made me more audacious. It allowed me to dream differently. That gawky teenager, son of academicians, started looking beyond Engineering and Medicine as a career. As did many of us from similar backgrounds. Everything in the world, hitherto unseen, was now around us. And everything was achievable. We did not have to travel to foreign lands to broaden our horizons. The world had come to us. Very soon, the world literally was around us in the supermarkets. In form of Camay soaps and Hershey’s chocolates. As brand new malls and multiplexes. In the queues at McDonald’s. Buzzing in pagers and mobile phones. Surprisingly, none of it made me feel poor and deprived at any point of time. It kept egging me to have a deeper resolve to become better off. Read rich.

In retrospect, that was the bawdiest, and yet the most important, contribution of liberalisation to the small town India, and not just me. We stopped feeling guilty about earning and spending monies, something that Papa would have so not approved. We were okay to let go of our middleclassery.  Of course, that came with its own set of struggles. Mumbai, the city I had chosen to move to, gave me its perfumed indifference, showing me my place in the 8:11 local. I gave it my unadulterated confidence. Very soon, we reached a compromise, and the city was home.

Fate brought me to MTV in 2000. And MTV gave me the confidence to change MTV. It had made me embrace its globalness, I made it embrace my Indianness, being a part of the team that made it desicool. I worked with them for ten long years. Fancy designation, et al. Little did MTV know about the role it had played in my life. Even when it was on mute. :)

Meanwhile, we got Ramkailas ji a job as a peon in Delhi. His family continued to be in a remote village in Bihar. We sponsored the education of his son who is now sixteen. The boy uses a smart phone and knows how to Whatsapp. I suspect he also knows how to order mangoes online. Only, he aspires to follow the career path of his father. Become a peon.

Twenty-five years later, I wait for another round of liberalisation.

– first published in Indian Express Sunday edition Eye as a part of their special issue on 25 years of economic reforms –

*Vaibhav Vishal is a screenwriter and creative consultant based in Mumbai. He can be reached at https://ofnosurnamefame.com

The film’s backstory is about the young couple Sumit (Abhinav Jha) and Priyanka’s (Tanya Khan Jha) love affair in a small town, which forces them to escape to Delhi. However, the real-time story on screen begins as they return to Darbhanga after the Covid lockdown. Post the film’s screening, Saurabh, the director, said that the seed of the film lay in his own experience of returning to the city during the pandemic. “The town had a sense of disillusionment, especially among the youths. It was a struggle for survival,” he added.

Saurabh used this experience as a take-off point. With his crew of actors and supporters (mainly from the city), he crafted a layered and nuanced portrayal of a loving young couple as they lived those times.

Priyanka can return home during the pandemic, but her bhadrlok father wants her to leave Sumit. She defies her family to choose Sumit. Sumit gets support from his school-time friends, Nihal (Dheeraj Kumar) and Mayank (Sheelnidhi), who help them find refuge in a dilapidated old building that functions as a hostel for local college students and the district headquarters of the Communist Party of India. 

A significant portion of the film is shot in this building and against the backdrop of ruinous forts and monuments built by the former Darbhanga Raj family- a telling reminder of the picturesque but decadent zamindari and communist politics in the region. The setting captures the predicament of the young couple who seek love and freedom but find themselves entrapped in existing social conditions.

The film is at its best in portraying the minutiae of the relationship between Sumit, Priyanka and their friends. While Sumit and his friends represent a class of young people full of youthful energy, whiling away their time smoking and cracking little jokes in nooks and corners of small-town India, Parth Saurabh has done a gratifying job by not disrobing them of their dignity. Behind the facade of their rebellious nature, they also come as caring and thinking characters who can reflect on their predicament. Priyanka finds herself drawn to Sumit, perhaps because of this unconventional quality.

However, their relationship begins to flake as Sumit constantly fails to take responsibility for himself and Priyanka despite their love and care. His fanciful plans for opening a coaching class do not materialise; instead, he goes deep into debt because of the constant borrowing from his friends. Priyanka gets tired of his pattern. “I want to be back in Delhi...go to a university,” she tells a visiting friend. Delhi briefly returns to the narrative as an object of desire. It also reveals the futuristic aspiration of Priyanka. On the other hand, Sumit is fragile and swayed by the immediate thrills of alcohol and ganja amidst his failure to find a job. He lives with the burden of the present.

There are many scenes in the film leading to altercations between them. You expect a hovering sense of conflict and violence as a viewer. And, yet, every time, the love they share takes over the differences they articulate to each other. 

Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar does an impressive job by delicately representing issues of masculine fragility and feminist agency. It is a befitting response to mainstream Bollywood films like Kabir Singh (which thrive on a unidirectional sketch of male aggression). The film may also remind you of Marathi cinema, such as Sairat by Nagraj Manjule, where love aims to transgress the boundaries of caste/class bifurcations.

Shot during the monsoon in Darbhanga, the film’s visual language utilises the downpour and the swelling water in the ponds to create a psychological mood for both its characters and the city. Like the city submerged in the deluge with no outlet for the water to recede anywhere, Sumit and Priyanka’s relationship comes to a similar standstill by the end. 

One early morning, seeing that Sumit cannot escape the maze he has created for himself, Priyanka decides to leave, perhaps to her father’s place. Realising that she has left, Sumit runs after her while she is dragging her suitcase on the road. They both are at a crossroads. 

They face each other. Their glance near the end is a reminder of what Judith Butler once said about love: “It is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.”

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Bhikari Thakur’s plays dealt with social issues and themes of gender, poverty, and most importantly the out-migration of men in colonial India. His play Bidesiya (first staged in 1912) is widely held as the originator of the eponymous genre of bidesiya folk tradition in which the protagonist leaves their families and villages to earn money in the city.

Influenced by Tulsidas’s Ramcharit Manas, he made use of doha and chopai (a variant of couplets and quartets) to the beats of manjeera (hand cymbals), dholak and harmonium. Since the purdah system stopped women from performing on stage, he incorporated the age-old tradition of “launda naach” where female characters were essayed by men dressed in women’s clothing. While upper-caste communities looked down upon his artistry, his plays exuded the power of people’s theatre. Such was the impact of his plays that on many instances’ masses were emotionally moved to end traditional injustices after witnessing his dramatical works.

One such incident is recorded in Sutradhar, renowned Hindi author Sanjeev’s novel on the life of Bhikhari Thakur. In 1964, Thakur’s play Beti Bechwa, which was inspired by real stories of young girls from poor families being sold into marriage to old men, was staged in the Kumardhubi area of Dhanbad district. During one of the shows, more than 500 labourers of the Layakdeeh Colliery marched to a nearby Shiva temple and took an oath that they would never sell their daughters.

Today, his work is considered one of the most vivid glimpses into the lives of the Bhojpuri community of his time. His legacy was kept alive by performers like Padma Shri winner Ramchandra Majhi who was also a member of his troupe. Incidentally, one of his songs ‘Ae Sajni’ was featured in Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi and sung by Swanand Kirkire. Even his popularisation of launda naach is being rediscovered as a South Asian manifestation of queerness. The documentary Naach Bhikhari Naach, from directors Jainendra Dost and Shilpi Gulati, traces the lives of those who inherited his cultural legacy and their dwindling artform in a rapidly modernising India. 

Sunil Kumar, an upper caste landlord, came to buy a cigarette from the little mud shop that clung to the edge of the narrow dirt road under the shade of ancient mango trees. But the shopkeeper Sidhanath Sah could not find the packet from which the single cigarettes were sold. He looked behind the tins of flour, underneath the big bag of sugar and even dug through the loose-leaf tobacco, but his son had been minding the shop that morning and now the packet was missing. Sidhanath Sah knew how fond Sunil Kumar was of an after-lunch smoke and that he would be irritated by the deprivation. As he obsequiously begged the man’s forgiveness, he was already mentally alleviating this humiliation by punishing his stupid son. Sunil Kumar left in a huff. He was too peeved to enjoy the verdant beauty of the crops thriving in the fertile soil of the Ganges plain all around him. To the right were the waterlogged green rice paddies, to the left the drier green wheat fields. Brilliant yellow patches of flowering wild mustard signalled that the wet monsoon would soon prevail.        

Sidhanath Sah’s absent-minded son returned to the shop and two swift slaps later the cigarettes were recovered. Shortly, another man who was of the Bania caste – like the shopkeeper – came to the shop for a cigarette. As fate would have it, the customer passed by the thwarted smoker, Sunil Kumar. On learning he had bought the cigarette from Sidhanath Sah, Sunil Kumar went into a rage – the shopkeeper sold cigarettes to his own lowly caste, but lied to his betters, trying to make a fool of him, a zamindar (landlord) and a Bumihar. Sunil Kumar gathered a gang of Bumihars and they took revenge on the shopkeeper. So severe was the beating that Sidhanath Sah came close to death. The lower castes were angered and called for a meeting with the Bumihars. But before the meeting could take place, the landlords’ ghoondas – goons – went to the hut of one of the lower caste leaders who was a known Communist, dragged him out and beat him. Yadav Birbal needed fifty stitches on his head alone.

“Dirty damn fucking behaviour; the zamindars are monsters,” the retelling of the story was interrupted by the outrage of fellow Naxalite, Rabindra Kumar, seated in the gloom of the room, behind Chandrabhusan. He dropped his fiery eyes to the mud floor and mutters contritely, “That is a personal opinion.”

Chandrabhusan pursed his full lips and continued the tale as if the young man had never spoken. After the assault, the lower castes set up roadblocks. In one typically overloaded bus they spotted Barhoo Chowdri, the uncle of Sunil Kumar. They pulled him out, dragging him over the luggage, boxes and goats that cluttered the aisle. But once they had him in their clutches, they were unsure of what to do with their hostage. That night, Barhoo Chowdri, sensing the indecision of his captors, tried to escape. He was chased down and killed. The Bumihars couldn’t believe it. The peasants had always borne economic exploitation, humiliation, beatings, death and even rape at the hands of their feudal masters. It was accepted that a low caste bride be deflowered by a zamindar on her wedding night, but now those same submissive Untouchables had taken up arms against their lords. The upper castes were determined life in Belaur should continue the way it had for centuries. They recruited a private army of some four hundred men-at-arms, called them the Ranvir Senaand set about quashing the rebellion. The lower castes called in the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) guerrillas. The Cigarette War had begun.

Chandrabhusan was the front man for the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). Not to be confused with either the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist – Party Unity), the Communist party of India (Marxist) or simply the Communist Party of India, with whom they were bitter rivals. There were dozens of communist parties, factions and splinter groups who all followed the path of the late Chairman Mao, in spite of the liberal reference to Messrs Marx and Lenin. Despite some groups having elected to become political parties, most of them operated underground and waged a guerrilla war against the state and the private armies of the rural landlords. Rather loosely, they were collectively called Naxalites.

A plaintive cricket-like chirp intrudes; it was the dull black Bakelite telephone in a corner of the shack-office. The room was full of CPI (ML) members yet they all blithely ignored the insistent bleating of the phone. Perhaps this was because a soiled cloth covered it, apparently serving to render it mute as well as invisible. A little later, Onkar Tuwari, the local party chief, came in. In direct contrast to his city comrade, Chandrabhusan, the local man was a tall, emaciated figure who moved hesitantly, in fits and starts. Everyone shifted seats to let Onkar Tuwari take the honoured place behind the desk. When the phone first rang in his presence, the talk in the room hushed. He stared at it, as if waiting for the caller to be prove his sincerity. Finally he reached over and gingerly picked the handset up, seemingly unsure of what would ensue. He grunted and then smiled before gently returning the handset to its cradle. The tension in the room evaporated and talk resumed.

Gandhiji, as Indians fondly refer to their most famous and beloved citizen Mahatma Gandhi, succeeded in overthrowing British colonial rule, but failed in his struggle to relieve the majority of his countrymen from the even greater oppression of the caste system. He renamed the Untouchables, calling them Harijan – Beloved of God. The Mahatma changed their epithet, but their misery continued. India’s apartheid began with the northern Aryan invaders conquering the indigenous, and darker, Dravidian peoples. They developed a divine hierarchy, which strictly pigeonholed different groups. The Brahmins, the Aryan nobility, were at the top of the pecking order and occupied themselves with matters of God and learning. Their strong-armed cousins, the Rajputs and Bumihars, were the warrior caste. Lower down there are more than 300 castes, including that of shopkeepers; potters who make water jars; potters who make clay bedpans; night soil removers; etc. The caste ladder eventually descends into the hell on earth that is the lot of the Untouchable castes.

Modern India is proud to call itself the world’s largest democracy. With more than one billion people it is certainly the most populous country in the world where a Western style democracy is practiced. But democracy’s foothold is rather tenuous, especially in Bihar. The lower castes and Untouchables make up the majority of the population. So, in a village like Belaur, where a minority upper caste makes life a misery for the majority lower castes, you could expect a champion of the underdogs to be elected. It would certainly be so, but for that neat little trick of booth capture. In area where the landlords knew that they would lose in a fair vote, they recruited gangs of goondhas who specialised in staging military-style operations to occupy polling stations, ensuring all the votes were for their employer’s candidate. Not subtle, not nice, but booth capturing was totally effective, and a great line of business. Early on the morning of the poll, well-armed goons moved in. They usually took about three hours to occupy and control an area, depending on the opposition they encountered. Then another three hours to stamp the ballot papers and have the presiding election officer countersign the papers at gunpoint. The cost of hiring the goons to capture a booth depended on the seat’s prestige and the expected difficulty – the polling stations might in an area where their candidate’s opposition was popular and powerful. With the evil of inflation biting into every hard-workingman’s pocket, the cheapest you could capture a constituency for in 1996 was about $6 000, while the top seats went for as much as $20 000. This was big bucks – a farm worker in Bihar earned about half a dollar for a back-breaking ten–hour day. But a seat in the provincial legislature was the gilded path to wealth and power. You and your allies decided which company got that lucrative road resurfacing contract; who was granted permission to start a bus company; and who, quite suddenly, should find his trading license revoked for no apparent reason.

In Belaur village, Zamindar Purushottam Dubey was leading me on a guided tour. We had been to see the gaudy Hindu temples dedicated to favourite gods. Several small simple clay deities were casually propped against a fig tree – they had been found while the field alongside was being tilled with an animal-drawn plough. No one seemed to pay those ancient unpainted statues much heed. He led us through the maze-like streets of the village centre where one or two-story brick houses invariably belonged to big landlords and the low mud huts were the abode of Untouchables whose families had been bonded to the landlords or moneylenders for generations. Debt might befall a family through a grandfather who had to borrow money to pay for an expensive dowry because he had one too many daughters. No worse luck can happen to a poor man than to be blighted with many daughters. Or perhaps the promise shown by a clever son might have prompted a proud father to take out a loan to fund an education, a desperate gamble to break the poverty trap. But there were many bright young men who did not make the cut. To rise above the circumstances of your birth in India, one has to be extreme. Extremely brilliant. Extremely talented. Extremely lucky. Perhaps even extremely vicious.

Dirt tracks raised above the monsoon flood level snaked out through the fields to the big landowners’ farms that surrounded the village. Purushottam Dubey stopped and turned with dramatic abruptness, “The fires of revolution brushed past this village in September of 1994. That there,” he indicated a crumbling settlement of grey mud huts across a field, “is where the Naxalites began their war. It is deserted now. They did not succeed.”

He stared closely at me, waiting to see a reaction, even a tightening of my eyes that might have betrayed sympathy for his enemies. Satisfied, he continued the tour, his hands clasped behind his back. It was the affectation of a landlord; the landless did not have the luxury of strolling with idle hands. We were to meet one of the heroes of the zamindars’struggle. Outside a hut set among fields, I was introduced to a farmer who had faced the onslaught of the Naxalites and triumphed. He was a massive man with powerful shoulders that bulged out from a white single. His eyes were close set to either side of a nose bent to one side like a pugilist’s and their blank stare was suspicious and belligerent.  “This is a very brave man. Very brave,” stated Purushottam, “the bravest man in Belaur.”

On hearing the translation of this favourable description, the bravest of men invited us to join him on the low wood pallet on which he and his cohorts were resting. The customary offer of tea was made and accepted. It was a silent and uncomfortable tea; how does one make small talk with a hero? I took leave of my zamindar hosts and crossed the no–go zone that separated the Untouchables’ from their former feudal landlords. The Bazar Tola was a miserable collection of mud huts – no brick buildings there. Suffering had worsened since the landless rose up against their former feudal masters in the Cigarette War, as they could no longer work in the landlords’ fields. They stared suspiciously at the strangers, young women covered their faces and pulled back into darkened doorways. I skirted the edge of the village as a coterie of curious men and children followed a few dozen metres behind. I had discovered that to get spontaneous photographs, I had to sneak up on scenes to get that two or three-second window of authenticity before everyone gathered to pose for the camera. So, I stole up on a home that looked out across the fields to the landlords’ village about a kilometre away. A woman looked up and her eyes widened in panic. She started to yell and grabbed her toddler by the arm and sprinted off. The kid was dangling like a puppet, his whirling feet only occasionally brushing the pathway. There was a chain reaction of screaming and yelling. Men rushed to my side “Bumihars! Guns!” galvanised, they pointed across the wheat field at women quietly working the fields. 

“No, no, it was me!” I pointed at myself. They stared blankly at me, no doubt thinking I was extremely slow witted. We had insurmountable language barriers as my taxi driver, Ramisingh – who spoke some English – was not in sight. The Untouchables fearfully readied themselves to defend their hamlet. Fortunately, Ramisingh returned and a crisis was averted. Back in the village centre, zamindar territory, I bumped into a slight man with a serious face and a piddling moustache. He was going door to door, canvassing for votes. “I am an Independent Candidate,” said Bijander Yadav Singh emphatically, “I am campaigning for equality; against communist violence and against the violence of the landlords.” He spoke in clipped tones; he lectured to landlords and he preached to the landless. One thing I had picked up during my time in Bihar was that is that no-one, but no-one, ran as an independent candidate if they realistically hoped to win. A hopeful must be pretty desperate to try match the resources of an entire caste or party in the strange, convoluted and corrupt game that is Indian politics.

Back in the CPI (ML) office that night, I was being treated to one of Chandrabhusan’s discourses on The Struggle, hoping to glean more insight into the political labyrinth. After independence, Gandhi and Nehru’s party, the Indian National Congress, espoused mild Socialism. But all too soon, Socialism became a vehicle for government control, nepotism and corruption. The banner of Socialism fell to the vanguard, the committed Maoists and Communists; the radicals. In those early days, the middle-ranked castes were at the forefront of the fight to create a society where every individual, no matter what their caste, had equal rights, opportunity and access to the nation’s resources. It was a period of heady optimism. The mighty British Raj had crumbled before the humble strength of Gandhi. It was the time to usher in India’s golden era, free of the shackles of caste. And, sure enough, many of the middle-ranked castes broke through the social barriers that denied them a fair shot at success. They became transporters, businessmen and industrialists. Once they saw the advantages of keeping the masses poor and subjugated, they promptly forgot about the proletariat becoming part of the elite. There are only so many slices to the cake.

“In Belaur, take the example of Bijander Yadav Singh, a little-known but ambitious gangster.” Chandrabhusan’s voice came softly from the darkness that lay between us. The sun had set and the paraffin lamps were not yet lit. Mosquitoes whined softly around my ears. I could not hear the ones around my ankles, but felt their sharp attack. When the Cigarette War began, Yadav Singh (of middle caste) saw his chance. If he could be seen as the saviour of the downtrodden lower castes from the tyranny of the vastly less numerous upper castes, he would surely win the election. He sent four of his gunmen to assist the lower castes against the landlords. It was his goons who gunned down the upper caste hostage Barhoo Chowdri when he tried to escape after being kidnapped off the bus at the start of the hostilities over a misplaced cigarette. As the conflict escalated and the landlords recruited the powerful Ranvir Sena army, Yadav Singh thought it smart to switch sides. His goons began to commit acts of brutality against their former friends, the lower castes and Untouchables. He hoped that his new-found zeal would earn him the support of the Bumihars to be their electoral candidate. The Bumihars accepted the firepower of their new ally, but nonetheless put forward a candidate from their own caste. Yadav Singh, in desperation to get on the gravy train, set himself up as an independent candidate, ostensibly to fight injustice and radicalism. It suddenly dawned on me that this was the man we had seen canvassing in Belaur earlier that day; this was a giant leap in my comprehension of the intricacies of village politics. Chandrabhusan calmly waited out my burst of excitement on discovering this coincidence. “We are going to eliminate him,” he said quietly, without infliction, “he thinks he can toy with the people, make fools of us. We will show him otherwise. Not now. We have too many other things to deal with. Later.”

Note: Grerg Marinovich is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer and filmmaker. He currently teaches Visual Journalism at Boston University’s journalism school. He spent 25 years covering conflicts around the globe. I am thankful to him for allowing me to publish his article with photos that he wrote after his visit to Bihar in 1995.

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