As times change in rural Bihar, so does the social texture of the village.
At first glance, you would feel you are still north of the border, in Nepal's Madhes, with the sight of mutton, fish, chicken and pork being fried by the village roadside, with the green expanse of paddy fields in the background. But this is the village where I was born and have spent most of my life, in Bihar's West Champaran district. The flow of liquor washing down fried meat might be a common sight along the Indo-Nepal border, but in Champaran and similar villages it signifies a major socio-economic change. The clientele at such meat-and-drinks joints in villages in this part of the country is neither bourgeois nor kulak – the working-class proletariat has the expendable income to drown their earnings now.
This was unimaginable even a decade or two ago, with low wages and little work. Coming back home after finishing college in Delhi in 1985, I took up farming. A strapping young landless labourer on my farm left for Punjab after the rabi (spring) harvest to keep the hearth burning at home during the lean months of monsoon joblessness. I inquired about this chap when I returned for the kharif (autumn) harvest to my farm, 40 km from Bettiah, the headquarters of West Champaran district. He was still away in Punjab, and his wife had piled up a huge debt. As I came back from the fields one afternoon, I found a stranger wearing a shirt with trousers, goggles firmly in place above the bridge of his nose, a transistor radio slung across his shoulder, all accentuated by a grin across his face. I looked hard, but my eventual recognition was only prompted by a woman's jibe on my threshing-floor: 'Siyara oohey baa, rang badeley baa!' (It is the same fox, just changed his colours).
Beneath the newly acquired swagger of this Punjab-returned farmhand was concealed an emaciated body. Within a day his acquisitions were pawned off, since his savings could not clear his family's debts. The next day he was back on my fields, harvesting paddy with his wife. A few days later, the bread-earner was bedridden. As I came to learn from other migrant workers, the opium-laced diet typical of Punjab's farms was taking its toll. My mind went back to Britain's colonisation of China, where opium from Patna and Malwa (in modern-day Madhya Pradesh) served the imperial design. Here I was seeing a hardy farmhand withering after a work stint in the hub of India's 'green revolution'. I remember engaging the workmen returning from Punjab in a debate. By then, wages had shot up in Champaran, too – at times higher than the fixed minimum wages. But I could not reason with the psyche of the opiate.