"In rural Maharashtra, I would suggest Phaltan…," replied the incisive commentator and good friend Dilip D'Souza, in April this year, when I asked him about a possible place to work during my summer vacation from college. I had only heard of the place once before. Anxious and excited, I decided to pack my bags and go teach English at a Marathi medium school for a month in Phaltan. It turned out to be a fine lesson in field sociology.
Phaltan is a small town some 300 kilometres from Mumbai and 100 kilometres from Pune. A tableland in Satara district of Maharashtra in India, it wears a facade that is typical of many backwater towns. A theatre that plays B-grade Bollywood productions, Internet surfing parlours (popularly called cybercafes), a supermarket – all punctuate the grammar of this town that has more temples than any other place in western Maharashtra. The distant charm of Bombay and the lesser romance of Pune have ensured an ironic, but unavoidable, confluence of the definitely traditional with the apparently modern.
Phaltan was the seat of the Naik-Nimbalkar royalty, the family of the wife of the Maratha warrior Shivaji. While the 'idea' of the Indian republic has clearly reached the corridors of the town administration, it is yet to make a mark in the minds of its residents. Descendents of the 'royal family' still control, if not govern, all aspects of life here. The sitting member of the state Legislative Assembly belongs to the royalty.
The 'family' owns and runs everything from educational institutions to luxury hotels, not to mention innumerable hectares of real estate. Of nearly 60,000 residents of the town, a handful of business families live it luxurious. For the rest, it is the typical story: unemployment, lack of opportunities, little upward mobility, minimal economic infrastructure, and the social mires of caste and, yes, religion.