A Village Headman.
“But how about my buffalo?” cries the thin ryot of the valley. As Mr. Vaughan Nash said in his book on the Famine, the buffalo is quite as necessary to the Indian peasant as a boat to a fisherman. Buffaloes are necessary for work on the fields, manure for the soil, and milk for the family, to say nothing of fuel and flooring. No one who, like myself, has lived much in Kaffir huts with cow-dung floors, or has cooked on the veldt for weeks together with cow-dung as fuel, will make light of such uses. But still, when wood is to be had, only a fool uses cow-dung for cooking or even for flooring. In the Indian forests, wood is to be had, but the Forest Laws forbid the people to use it, and they are driven to floor and cook with the cow-dung that ought rightly to go as manure for the fields.
But the grazing is the chief difficulty, now that the old communal lands are being swallowed up by the Forest Department. The villagers may earn a few pence by cutting grass for the contractor who carts it away to the city, but the hungry buffaloes look up and are not fed. Even where a grazing allotment is made, it is too small, and I was in a village fifteen miles from Poona where the twelve families could afford to keep only one buffalo between them, and they had to pay rent to the Forest Department for the right of grazing that one buffalo and a few goats upon little patches of the vast hillsides, all of which they regarded as the common lands of the village for centuries past. The rent, no doubt, was very small, probably only a few shillings a year for the buffalo and goats, but the village income was very small too.
From the bureaucracy’s well-intentioned schemes, other peculiar results arise which perhaps did not occur to those who framed the laws. One case, for instance, was mentioned to me by several villagers as a kind of typical or proverbial absurdity. A waggon broke its wheel and the owner began to mend it. The village police, hearing the hammer, arrested him under Section E, paragraph 109 (or some such clause) of the Forest Laws, upon the charge of practising carpentry within a mile of the forest limit. In his innocence, he asked what he ought to have done to get his waggon home over the few hundred yards to his door. He was informed that he ought to have walked into Poona, twenty or thirty miles away, discovered the office of the Forest Department, waited till the proper official, who would very likely be in the country, returned to town, stated his case, and asked for a legal certificate authorizing him to cut timber for the repairs of his wheel on the spot. Then, with good luck, within a week or ten days from the accident, he might have found himself in a position to drive his waggon home in accordance with bureaucratic regulations. I believe, however, that this rule has now been modified, and that the man would only have to hunt a forest ranger for permission. But take another grievance, which recalls childhood’s memories of the Norman Conquest. The ryot’s little wealth of crop and stock is continually exposed to wild beasts—deer, wolves, panthers, and boars—just as our farmers’ crops are exposed to hares and rabbits. But under the Arms Act, the ryot has little chance of killing them himself. His duty is to walk into the nearest town and report the presence of a wild beast to the police. The police look round for an Englishman who wants something to kill. Frequently they advertise for one in the local papers, and usually they have not to wait very long. Off goes the Englishman—rifle, tiffin-basket, boy, bedding, and all. But in the meantime it is not improbable that the wild beast has walked away, or founded a whole new family even worse than himself. At the best, it is just possible that the Englishman may miss him.
While I was in India a movement was started for the protection of the helpless ryot from deer. In many parts of the country, especially in Rajputana and the Central Provinces, you may frequently see herds of deer and antelopes browsing upon the standing crops, to the great loss of the cultivator. It was alleged that the increase of deer was due to the gradual reduction of tigers (which are nature’s own corrective), and the proposal was to discourage the slaughter of tigers by withdrawing the Government reward of £3 6s. 8d. a head, or even to forbid the sport of shooting tigers unless they were proved by experience to be man-eaters. Personally, I think the latter regulation would be good, for the deer would be reduced, the crops protected, and the tigers increased. But I am not sure how far a ryot, in the interests of agriculture, would approve of a regulation that allowed one tiger one man.
The main grievances of the ryot against the Forest Department may be seen briefly stated in a memorial presented to the Governor of Madras by the cultivators of eight villages in the Salem district, April, 1908. The Forest Department proposed to reserve the Anurath Hills in the neighbourhood of the villages, and the memorial protested that already there was not much waste land for grazing, and hardly enough land even for cultivation. To reserve the hills would also deprive the villagers of wood and fuel, and inflict a kind of double assessment:—
“You settle our lands,” said the memorial, “every thirty years and raise the assessment. To pay this assessment we ought to cultivate our land with the aid of good manure. To have manure we must maintain sufficient stock of cattle. When we enter the forest to procure fodder, you demand permit fees; thus you demand double payment (one in the shape of land assessment and the other in the shape of forest fees) for the lands we cultivate.”
The memorial went on to say that, owing to the rigour of forest administration, the villagers, to protect themselves, had to bribe the subordinate officials of the Forest Department, and it concluded with the words:—
“We lead a peaceful life. It is the policy of the Government to keep every ryot in a contented and happy state. But in order to secure additional forest revenue, if you permit the Forest officials to enclose an additional reserve against our wishes, you will create much heart-burning and discontent against the Government.”