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Rajesh Thind
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| THE FAMILY FARM |
Twelve acres in the Punjab
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| Narrative non-fiction | Proposal, December 2008 | Author photo: ©DR
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Sometimes when we seek out our past, we discover the future has got there first...
Twelve Acres - that’s the amount of farmland in the Punjab I stand to inherit when my 70 year old father dies. It’s not much, but it roots my immigrant family in our homeland, culture and tradition: an appealing, if abstract, idea to a Londoner used to moving house every few years. The land has been in the family for over 10 generations. My father can recite those generations by name, as if they were old friends rather than long-dead ancestors. But dad’s a pragmatist, and as he’s diabetic, he has high blood pressure and a pacemaker; he thinks that the time has come to sell up. He claims that I’m incapable of looking after the land. He calls me a “British Monkey” who knows all about pubs, girls and football, but nothing about India. He says that the land will be stolen, or squatted – and I could get even myself killed with a dose of snake-poison slipped into a cup of hot milk. In the rough-and-tumble of the Punjab, land represents power, wealth and prestige, and people will do anything to get hold of it. A British Monkey doesn’t stand a chance. I have to admit he has a point. On my visits to the village I’ve shied away from milking the oxen for morning tea and I have been horrified by the stinking toilets. But having grown up so distant from my family’s past, I feel as though selling the land would sever my only tie to the homeland – and no matter how tenuous that tie, it’s not one I’m ready to abandon. So I did a deal with dad. We agreed that if I went to our Punjabi village and proved to him, and the tenant farmers, that I could learn to be a good landlord, we’d keep it. What I found when I got there proved to be far more challenging than anything he or I could have anticipated. Milking the oxen would be the least of my worries. In The Family Farm Rajesh will explore what the “Rise of Asia” means for the people who live on his family’s land, for his dad, and for himself.
Upon arrival in the Punjab Rajesh was shocked by the profound and sometimes violent impact that the rapid pace of modernisation is having on people’s lives. Mobile phones, the internet and satellite dishes are connecting remote villages to the capitalist world – and exposing the inhabitants to temptations that are tearing their communities apart. Teenage boys, upset that their parents can’t buy them the trendy trainers they see on TV, are drinking lethal fertiliser; women are being killed by husbands greedy for new dowries and desperate young people are turning to heroin or risking their lives on illegal passages out of the country.
Rajesh went to India hoping to reconnect with his family’s past but quickly realised that villagers who had never left their place of birth were feeling far more dislocated than him. In disarming and poignant prose The Family Farm examines the true nature of belonging and takes a unique and intimate look at the effects of globalization on a small rural community.
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