The morning in Punjab’s village is both similar to and different from the portrait Waris Shah painted in his tale of Heer in the eighteenth century. “With the bird-song travelers take to the paths and churners shake the churns / those who enjoyed the nocturnal pleasures of the beds with their partners run to the stream to wash their bodies clean …” is what Ranjha, one of the protagonists, sees when he rises early in the morning to resume his journey to nowhere in search of somewhere.

These days when you get up early in a village, you do hear birds singing and twittering but travelers, whosoever they may be, are no longer in hurry as they have some sort of auto vehicles and metaled roads make the travel time saving. Electric churns no longer require the churners to wake up early and spend long time using them. So what you hear is the whirring of mechanical churn that replaced the sway of the acoustic sound of the traditional churn. As to the lovers of nocturnal pleasures, they need not go out to a stream to wash their satiated bodies. Every house has a hand pump installed. Water used for any purpose goes out into the streets through open muddy sewers overflowing with putrid fluids and feces sludge. Streets are literally where angels would fear to tread because they are hardly more than so much of feted sewage, stinking mud and shitty dust. Whatever of sewage sludge flows sluggishly out of village streets is used as a fertilizer on nearby land.

The moment you step out of the village what strikes you is the opposite of what you left behind; the beautiful and vast expanses of clear blue sky and open farmlands. The stark contrast can’t be greater between ugliness of the village interior and encompassing beauty of natural and man-made landscapes. Village is drab, dusty and stinky while what surrounds it is colour, clean air and natural fragrance of verdure. Crops, bushes, fruit trees, wild grass, herbs and groves are a stunning spectacle. Sadly the unpalatable difference between soothing workplace and tawdry residential space in our countryside has reasons rooted in the socioeconomic and politico-cultural history.

Dynamics of uneven development find their concrete expression when village is juxtaposed against an urban space. Once a village develops into a town or city what remains out of its ambit continues to vegetate and thus treated as backwater. Countryside is conceived as little more than a forgotten territory that has to justify its very existence by managing to supply food and variety of raw materials to urban centres. The most obvious manifestation of this fact is found in lack of modern amenities that create unhygienic conditions in the villages. Antediluvian attitude of village folks has also conditioned them to accept the unhygienic living conditions as something normal and opposite of a palimpsest on which nothing new can be inscribed that could serve as a manifesto for the better future. Execrable apathy of state and officialdom exacerbates the situation.

We generally come across three types of villages in the Punjab: ancient village in the hilly area, precolonial village in the plains and village in the colony area that came up in the wake of canal network in the colonial era. Villages in hilly area are relatively cleaner due to their terrain and topography as they are built on slopes making the disposal of garbage and sludge easier. Precolonial villages are also less messy. They have open sewers and muck but they keep their cattle in their farms, not inside the village. Absence of animal excreta give them cleaner look. Colonial era villages made their appearance in the early twentieth century when the Raj administration completed a gargantuan task of building a huge and intricate canal network in the Punjab to bring under cultivation the large swathes of wild lands between the rivers called ‘Bars’ and erstwhile princely state of Bahawalpur.

People from what is now East Punjab for being well-versed in advanced agricultural techniques were given incentive to leave their ancestral homes and get settled in meticulously planned villages called ‘Chakk [circle /wheel]’ in the West Punjab. They were allotted parcels of lands on easy terms. In addition to the economic urge for increased agrarian production and resulting surplus, political factor also played its part in this internal migration; the pre-emptive move nipped the possible unrest in an overpopulated region in the bud. Another segment that came to colony are hailed from northern and north western districts such as Gujrat, Phaliya and Shahpur /Sargodha. Both the segments of newcomers were called ‘Abadkaar’ [settlers] by the locals.

Among multiple problems the settlers faced in their new ‘Chakks’, the crucial one was that of cattle theft. From the arrival of Aryans thousands of years ago in the Punjab till the mid of 20th century, rustling had been a prized profession that epitomized bravado and a way of life that gave birth to tales of derring-do. Remember the stories of cows lifted by the locals narrated in a mythopoeic manner in the Vedas? Settlers from the north of the Punjab being part of and familiar with the local culture and traditions kept their livestock at their farms and dealt with the issue of rustling with their muscle power and traditional instruments of ‘Pareh /Suth’ [ councils of notables, elders and wise men] along with the help of newly established colonial police. But settlers from the East Punjab kept their cattle in their homes. A host of factors forced them to do so. The fact of their being less familiar with the local cultural mores and informal social institutions made them vulnerable. Shortage of working hands also played a role; they couldn’t spare men to guard their livestock if they parked it in the sheds on their farmlands. Consequently locals and settlers from the North and North West have cleaner settlements but all three types of villages fall far short of having expected hygienic living conditions. Contaminated water is the greatest health hazard. If we wish to make the living conditions of our country folks as acceptable as their working environment is, two remedial measures need to be undertaken urgently. Firstly, intervention by educated local young men and women in collaboration with conscious urban groups in the stagnant cultural waters is needed to transform the rustic attitude that accepts the low quality of life as destiny. Secondly, initiative, comprehensive and sustainable, by the state institutions is required to improve the sanitation in the village by installing underground sewers and providing affordable treatment of wastewater that continues to poisons the aquifer. We must rid ourselves of ‘rural idiocy’ and urban apathy if we want to have the least; a modicum of uniform development. We must take care of those who take care of our land before it’s too late. Do we need to remind all that God created the earth only once. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, November 19th, 2018