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Historically, the crosscurrents are just as diverse. Invaders have swept across India's deserts and hacked through its stifling jungles since time immemorial, riding everything from elephants to armored personnel carriers, swinging everything from stone hammers to 120-mm. mortars. But under the two centuries of the British raj, a structure of government and administration was slowly imposed on this subcontinent of chaos. What threatens it today is bureaucracy—an Indian nightmare more overwhelming than anything dreamed of by Kafka. District officials, who are nominally responsible for the "community development" of India's 567,000 villages, must file 280 reports to New Delhi a month. Development Minister S. K. Dey ruefully admits that none of the reports are read but brightly points out that all are dutifully filed away for future reference. New Delhi is being strangled in paper.
A Day Behind the Bullocks. Economically, India is still an agricultural nation, despite Nehru's brave plans for industrialization. Typical of India's peasantry is "Ramoo" Sivaram, a 33-year-old farmer who lives near Hyderabad in the province of Andhra Pradesh. His wife Lakshmi is named for the Hindu goddess of prosperity, but in her 27 years she has prospered only by pregnancy: married at 13, she is today the mother of six. Each morning at 5:30, Ramoo rises and trots off to the village well to bathe himself with buckets of lukewarm, silty water, then returns to his clay-walled hut and squats on the cow-dung floor for breakfast: a thick chapatty (wheat pancake) and a brass tumbler of scalding black tea. Ramoo owns only two bullocks, and with them he plods across his barren acres, dragging a steel-slivered plow designed in prehistory by some Indian prototype who faced the same harsh, crumbling earth. In a year, he raises scarcely enough to feed his bullocks. For lunch Ramoo eats another chapatty covered with watery gruel, and perhaps a slice of mango chutney hoarded by his wife to give the food some flavor. Then back to the plow.
At night, Ramoo shuffles down to the village's sole radio receiver, listens to the state-owned All-India Radio, which helps him to forget his debt to the village moneylender. Now and then he attends one of the thousand torchlit religious fairs that dominate the Indian calendar. There he delights in the wit of storytellers reciting one or another of the ageless, adventurous Hindu myths.