Paddy cultivation is the hub of village life. I have written about the different aspects of village life, but virtually nothing about the people whose toil propels the village economy. I am always nostalgic about the time we had vast tracts of paddy fields. But who ploughed the fields? Who sowed? Who harvested? And who threshed and winnowed the paddy? The fields were ploughed by pairs of bullocks and buffaloes yoked to the ploughs. And everything was done by agricultural labourers. They lived in the Dalit colony. They were the people who knew how to sow the paddy seeds and how to transplant the rice saplings. They knew how to harvest and how to thresh.
They knew how to plough the fields and their toil created the food grains we feed on. Without their toil, we wouldn’t have been able to sustain ourselves. Usually the harvest called Kannikkoythu would be finished before Onam. The newly harvested rice would be used for Onasadhya. To me, the harvest was as important as the Onam celebration itself. We had around 10 agricultural labourers. They stood in knee-deep water harvesting the paddy. After the harvest, they would bring it on their heads to the threshing ground. Then the paddy would be threshed, winnowed and stored in our granary.
If the yield was 1,000 kg, they would get 100 kg. They would share this among themselves. Each one would get 10-20 kg. They had to celebrate their Onam with it. How hard they toiled and how meager their income was! They lived in little huts thatched with palm leaves. Our cow sheds were thatched with palm leaves. Sometimes the paddy wouldn’t be ripe enough to be harvested before the arrival of Onam. We would celebrate Onam with the rice of the previous harvest stored in the granary. The people whose labour produced these grains had neither granary nor grains to be stored.
How did they celebrate Onam? I have written nothing about them because I have never been to their abodes. I have only seen them from afar. They were an integral part of our lives; they were direly needed to produce the vegetables we wanted, to look after our cows that gave us milk, to toil in our fields and yet I never bothered to visit their huts, to see how they lived. Village life for me consisted of the homes of the middle class who were/are the landowners and the spacious tracts of fields that belonged to us. Their space was beyond that, in the periphery. They still belong to the periphery.