An Outstretched Palm, a Dismissive Wave

In a village of beggars, what people want most is the one thing nobody else can give them: self-respect.

The soil is rich, yet the 650 villagers are dirt poor because none of them owns any of the lush green farmland that surrounds them. They depend almost entirely on the coins and bowls of wheat flour they receive as alms.

It has been this way for at least a century because, the villagers say, they have been born to honor the Hindu god Krishna with song and outstretched hands.

According to local legend, Lord Krishna’s father posed as a beggar to escape a wicked uncle who wanted the newborn god dead, and the beggars of Ranidongri say they are simply following in sacred footsteps.

Farmers in the nearby villages of northern India’s Madhya Pradesh state look down on Ranidongri’s lowly vasdeva caste as lazy drunks who use religious devotion as an excuse for not getting a job--and who have an annoying habit of voting for the wrong party.

The beggars of Ranidongri are loyal to the once-mighty Congress (I) Party that now sits in opposition. Two decades ago, then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited the village and promised to give the beggars land, they said.

They were still waiting when she was assassinated in 1984, so the vasdevas put their hope in her son, Rajiv, who succeeded her. In 1991, he was assassinated while campaigning for reelection. Ten years later, the villagers are still waiting for their land.

“We are living as if we were still under the British--like slaves,” villager Sadaram Mukutwansi, 32, said through an interpreter.

Mukutwansi’s family sleeps on a bare earth floor, which he said is a lot less painful than the jeers of people who tell him to stop begging and do some honest work.

“It feels like the sky is falling on my head,” Mukutwansi said. “But it’s worse than that. It’s like a mountain crashing down on my head.

“We have no other profession,” he continued. “I blame my own karma. If god didn’t give me poverty, then we wouldn’t have to go to them [to beg] in the first place.”

It is punishment for being just as mean to other beggars in a previous life, Mukutwansi believes. But if god finds him worthy of being a person in his next life, Mukutwansi thinks, those who taunt him now will come to know how it feels.

“These days, nobody wants to give,” he said. “They tell us to go find some other trade. If the divine god wants us to take the form of human beings, then we should be in the place of those who turn us away.”

The beggars say they have been hurt by more than just scornful words. They accuse their neighbors, staunch supporters of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, of trying to beat them into submission with bamboo sticks.

“If people around here find a reason,” Mukutwansi said, “they’ll kill us.”

At harvest time, he and several other villagers said, the farmers come in groups of 15 to 20 men armed with bamboo sticks to demand that the vasdevas work in fields of sugar cane, peanuts, corn and soybeans for less than 25 cents a day--a pittance even by Indian standards.

The attackers come from the nearby village of Mohali, according to the beggars. The people of Mohali are also from a low caste, known as the gowli. But good politics has given them power, just as smart farming made them comfortable.

“They are big people,” said Dayaram Vasudev, 25. “They are very rich people. They have two or three tractors.”

Bharat Yadav, a Mohali farmer, is also vice president of the panchayat council that governs local affairs for about 160 villages, and he didn’t hide his contempt for the beggars among his constituents.

Begging has “become a habit for them,” Yadav said. “It’s because of their laziness. You’ll see some among them who are very well built, and others look like politicians. After they beg, they put on such nice clothes you wouldn’t know they were beggars.”

Yadav, 40, squeezed his bare feet onto the edge of his chair so he could rest an arm on a raised knee. He wore a light pink scarf draped over his shoulders. He denied that the men of his village had ever harmed the beggars.

“These are all lies,” he said with a dismissive wave. “They are from the opposition party, so they are simply fabricating lies.”

The council vice president explained that the beggars have a taste for the local brew, moonshine made from the flowers of the mahua tree, which produces a liquid said to be potent enough to keep a motorcycle running in an emergency.

“They have a tradition of drinking,” Yadav said. “They leave their houses and go out to beg for five to six months. They earn 10,000 to 12,000 rupees [about $210 to $250], come back and mostly spend it on drinking.”

Mukutwansi says he and other men from his village were prepared to set principle aside and take jobs moving dirt for a small dam, at just over $1 a day, but they were chased away from the monthlong government project.

In the beggars’ village, Mukutwansi squatted on a plastic mat sewn from pieces of old sacks and rested his back against the dried mud wall of a neighbor’s hut as he tried to help a visitor understand his “profession.”

His white T-shirt was torn, front and back, and his fingernails were coated in pink polish, slightly chipped. A saffron thumb smear in the middle of his forehead, a tilak, marked a recent visit to a Hindu temple.

Mukutwansi said he takes his only son, Lokeshi, 10, with him to beg in a group of about a dozen people, who travel by train--if they can beg a free spot on the floor--to reach the several cities where they sing for handouts.

Most days, his alms amount to about 45 cents and a little flour, Mukutwansi said. In his two-room hut, with a roof of straw held down by rocks, he had about 35 pounds of flour and a few pots, but little else for a family of six.

When word spread that a foreign journalist had come to visit the beggars’ village, local officials rushed in from the town of Amla along a rutted dirt road. After listening in, they did some spin control.

“For years, officials never came here,” Mukutwansi whispered, as one of the officials craned to eavesdrop. “Where they have come running from now, I don’t know.”

Gyaneshwar Bhagat, an assistant development officer with the state government, unrolled a map to show the government had donated 56 plots of land, 900 square feet each, to some of the beggars. He didn’t know what was happening to 51 other families’ requests for land grants.

The government also built a school for the village three years ago. The beggars say the teacher, who comes from Mohali, often beat his pupils and hasn’t shown up since July 5, even though the school year is not yet over.

Even if the vasdeva children complete fifth grade at the free school, they end up begging because their parents can’t afford to send them on to the next level, the villagers complained. From the sixth grade on, it costs about $15 a term to pay for a student’s fees, books and uniforms, they said.

“We pity our children,” Mukutwansi said. “Whenever we go and beg at houses, we beg for self-respect too. Just as we called you sahab [sir] today, I wish we were educated so that someone would call us sahab too someday.”