Under the Sunface

Growing up amongst the Ngoni of Malawi

"If we give you our children to teach your words will steal their hearts; they will grow up cowards and refuse to fight for us when we are old; and knowing more than we do they will despise us."

International Thomson Publishing Company, USA

Second edition - 1968. Originally published in 1960

Margaret used to regularly lecture in New York so it is no surprise her work was published over there... HWB

^{Photograph from "The Indian Peasant Uprooted" by Margaret Read (1931)
Chapter VIII - Earning and Spending (opposite Page 196)
Click to enlarge}

From "The Indian Peasant Uprooted" by Margaret Read (1931)
Chapter VI - Tea Planting and Picking Page 130

Migration or Disappearance?

Kirodhan, a lad of fifteen, had vanished from the village of Rampur. A harassed deputation from the village waited on the District Officer and told him their fears thus:

" Sahib, my sister's son, Kirodhan, has gone. Three days ago that accursed Sham Kamar was in our village speaking to the young men about the tea gardens in Assam where he works.

None would listen to him for they know the tales of the gardens, how everything is good before they go, and then when they are gone they are lost forever. it is a fearful place; it eats the people.

And now behold Kirodhan, who was the joy of my sister, was snatched away., and we fear too that he may have been eaten up in that country and we shall never see him again. For if he tries to come home they will shut him up and watch him and prevent him. That is the custom there. "

Family Earnings

When Ramswami left Waltair district he was earning 2 anna a day and in busy seasons his wife could earn the same. Their two boys minded the goats and occasionally picked up a few odd jobs. The sardar who recruited them for Assam spoke of what seemed to them like fabulous wages and held out the further inducement of land to cultivate and possibility of saving money to buy cattle.

When Ramswami had arrived on the tea garden and settled down the chowkidar came round and told him that he and his wife and the two boys of 11 and 9 were all on the books of the garden and would all be expected to work. After a month or two of getting accustomed to the new life, Ramswami began to take stock of his surroundings. It seemed as though on his garden most things worked by special favour.

There was very little rice land available and it seemed to be given to workers who pleased the manager. It was good rice land and the men could make more money if they worked on the land than if they worked on the garden, but that did not please the manager. He saw too that some men were able to get advances from the manager to buy cattle for which they had free grazing. One day in the bazaar he met a man from his own "country" who told him he was going to buy some Government land and make a farm of his own. He had saved money from the earnings of his family, and would thus fufil his great ambition to own land for himself, so that he would no longer be a coolie but a farmer, and he threw out his chest with pride as he said it.

Roots in an Alien Soil

Oti Goa after twelve days on the journey, "all the time in trains and getting out of trains," stood on the road where the lorry left him looking at the rows of brick houses with corrugated iron roofs, the garden lanes where he was to live. He thought of the little mud hut he had left where the thatched roof came nearly to the ground, and he wondered if he could ever sleep under that glittering roof. He pulled the new blanket which had been given him round his shoulders, but even then his teeth were chattering in the raw January afternoon. He thought of the tales he had heard of fever in Assam, and he began to desire hot food and a fire to sit by.

Most of all he wanted his family and his country and the familiar sights and sounds and smells. Evening after evening, for week after week, he went out from the evening meal to the same spot on the road and looked over the slopes of the tea garden to the great river, wishing that he could find his way home. No one else came to the garden from his village and he wondered whether they thought of him and whether they received the 10 rupees that he sent, and whether the new baby was a boy.

Oti Goa in the eleven months he was in the garden before the Commission met him he had to make many readjustments to his new life. He never did anything but hate the rows of houses with the shining roofs. He could not sleep in the cold nights even with the two blankets which were given him. He stumbled out to work half-dazed with cold when the chowdikar roused him in the winter mornings. He had fever in the rains, and for a long time was not strong enough to do the deep hoeing. Though he gradually became accustomed to the climate and the houses, the work and the food, he went on missing his village and the men he had known there, and he felt a lost individual without a community.

He knew as he told the Commission that he was better off in the garden than in his own country - he had more to eat, and kind treatment, and care if he was sick. Nevertheless he wondered sometimes if those things made up for the loss of his village connections and his feeling that he once had a place that was his own in a community but now had it no longer. No one cared what he did in the garden, provided that he did not drink so much that he could not work. He had no guide for conduct and no one to consult, and always present was that uneasy feeling of being separated from everything and everybody he knew.

TIME Newsmagazine - Foreign News: St. Gandhi Yessed
Monday, July 13, 1931

Sweetly reasonably John Henry Whitley who as "Mr. Speaker" used to soothe irate members of the House of Commons into sitting down, turned up again last week like the brightest of pennies.

In the two years since his retirement as Speaker (TIME, July 2, 1928), Mr. Whitley has spent US$400,000 to find out what is the matter with Indian laborers, spent it as chairman of a Royal Commission which presented its 570-page report last week.

Astounding to those Britons who think St. Gandhi a crack-brained fakir is the fact that the Royal Commission's conclusions are substantially those which the Mahatma has trumpeted for years.

Mr. Gandhi has always said that the grinding poverty of India's half-starved masses is the root-evil of the whole Indian question. Last week the Royal Commission reported that "stark poverty" is the "major reason" for the Indian laborer's "comparative inefficiency."

"An endeavor must be made," urged the Royal Commission, "to enhance the efficiency, to heighten earnings and to improve conditions of life. . . . Poverty leads to bad conditions and inefficiency, inefficiency and bad conditions to poverty." Thus the Royal Commission discovered a 20th Century vicious circle similar to the mystic Hindu Wheel of Karma: a series of events everlastingly repeating each other from which the only escape is violently to break the wheel.

Mr. Gandhi has charged British employers with heartless, indifferent exploitation of their Indian employees. The Royal Commission stigmatized last week the "vicious system" whereby British employers do not hire & fire their Indian help themselves, but leave this to Indian foremen who extort the last anna of tribute from wretches who pay to get a job, pay to keep it.

An entire chapter is devoted by the Royal Commission to abuses and extortions practiced upon simple Indian peasants who come to town seeking factory jobs.

The Royal Commission reported cigarette factories in which Indian children aged from six to ten are employed 14 hours a day, seven days a week, at a wage of 4¢ a day, adding, "similar conditions were found to prevail in the mining and wool industries." Adult Indian workers, the Royal Commission ascertained, receive some 37¢ a day unless highly skilled, when they may earn 50 cents.

Mr. Gandhi is tireless in his crusade against intoxicants. The Royal Commission, notwithstanding that a trifle of their $400,000 expense account went for drink, reported in favor of "prohibition or restriction" in India—not Britain.

Composed primarily of married men, the Royal Commission viewed with alarm '"deplorable and wretched conditions" in Indian factory towns "where there are twice as many females as males."

Foreword to The Indian Peasant Uprooted by Margaret Read (1931)

A bluebook is necessarily dull and dry: for the men, women and children, on whose lives it is based, must be counted in percentages and classified in groups. So it is apt to miss its appeal to public opinion and to rest, little heeded, in official pigeon holes.

Miss Read deserves thanks for a remarkable achievement. She has taken the Report of the Royal Commission on Labour in India, with its formidable eighteen volumes of evidence and retranslated them into terms of individual lives. The result of her work is a book which should appeal to the general reader and should be read widely both in India and Great Britain.

Legislatures and Governments are slow to take action unless moved by groups of men and women who care intensely about the welfare of their less fortunate fellow-citizens. One result that may be hoped for from this book is the formation of such groups determined to overcome every obstacle that may make for delay in the application of the Commission's proposals.

J.H. Whitley

^{Click to enlarge}

From The Land and Life of India by Margaret Read (1934)
Chapter VI Rulers and Ruled Page 96

Margaret lived in India for 5 years, from 1919 to 1924. In that time she witnessed what she then described 10 years later, as seen through an anthropologist's eye... HWB

The first American female war photographer, Margaret Bourke-White, is famous for taking photos of Gandhi at his spinning wheel in 1946. In Richard Attenborough’s life of Gandhi, the intrepid and brash photographer (seen here) is portrayed with uncanny likeness by Candice Bergen.

The Land and Life of India by Margaret Read (1934)

The motifs (conventionalised forms of the lotus) used in the border design of the dust jacket are taken from the decoration of the tomb and mosque of Rani Sapri at Ahmedabad, built in 1541.

The Land and Life of India by Margaret Read (1934)

The cultivated fields ended in a grove of trees sloping to the River Beas. The track wound through some rough scrubland up to a slight eminence where the roofs of the village could be seen. The sun was getting low, its level rays with long shadows piercing the haze of dust. Half a dozen little children were bringing home the village cattle with an occasional call of "Aré sister. Come Sister."

The boys wore diminutive loin-cloths, enormous folded turbans, and carried long switches over their shoulders ; some were munching sticks of sugar-cane. The little girls, in full skirts to their ankles, carried bundles of firewood or fodder on their heads. The cattle, bony hipped and thin flanked, trailed wearily along behind the children.

^{Silhouette description from Chapter III Village Life on page 33}

This copy has just arrived from Sidcup, via Abe Books, as we rebuild a collection of Margaret's published work... HWB