The double-digit growth touted for the Indian economy is being accompanied by a growing gap between the urban middle class and the rural poor, the latter exemplified by the conditions in Eastern Uttar Pradesh, or Purvanchal. Here, impoverishment increases as power looms displace handloom workers, and harvesters make agricultural labourers redundant. The patchwork of tiny land parcels that makes up the Purvanchal landscape in satellite imagery itself is evidence of rural want, and the condition of the landless is somewhat worse. Against this backdrop of poverty, Maoists organise and the upper castes react. The state takes the side of the latter. A communal twist is forced on the people by the opportunist politician, pitting Muslim poor against Hindu poor. But Purvanchal, the most neglected, most populated region of India, will survive because of the resilience of its citizens and their spirit of tolerance. They will keep the designs of the exploiters and communalists at bay.
Benaras, the oldest city in the world it is said, is where my travels through Eastern Uttar Pradesh have always begun. The coolies who carry my luggage from the train station, the rickshaw-pullers who take me down the crowded, tumultuous lanes to the Ganga View Guest House on Assi Ghat, the hawkers who sell incense and flowers outside the Kashi Vishwanath temple, the weavers who produce yard upon yard of beautiful silk at Pili Kothi … they come from Gorakhpur, Gazipur, Mau, Bhadoi, Deoria — poor Hindus and Muslims from all over Purvanchal, looking for life in a city where others come to die.
It is an incongruity that is mirrored everywhere in Benaras, reflecting the situation in all Purvanchal, where one finds stoicism amidst indescribable want. In some mohallahs here, the clang of temple bells and the call of the aazan are both often drowned by the sound of hundreds of looms, on which the famous banarsi silk and brocade saris are woven. The looms have been worked by generations of Muslim families, and sold by Hindu traders. Today, the saris still fetch thousands of rupees in the market, but men like Omar Sayed are paying the price of weaving them with their blood.
I met Omar in the city's Bajedian Mohallah. Having moved from Azamgarh District to Benaras nearly a decade ago in search of work, he was employed by a master weaver who had six other people working the looms for him. But things started going wrong for the 1.5 million workers in this industry towards the end of the 1990s, when cheap Chinese silk fabric became available in the country. In Benaras alone, the daily demand for the Chinese material tops 25,000 metres, at nine rupees a metre. The locally made silk fabric costs between 35 and 150 rupees per metre. Weavers who made the shift from handlooms to power looms in order to produce largely synthetic saris managed to stay afloat for a few years, which also did away with a lot of jobs. But then electricity cuts began stretching to almost ten hours at a time, and the loom-owners too were doomed. Surat, in Gujarat, has now begun to produce the same textiles, only cheaper.