By Emily Hughes, Staff Editor
Night was just beginning to edge in as I took a seat on a living room couch next to a gentleman named Kumar Rana, a friendly-looking man in his 50’s for whose story I was, at the time, thoroughly unprepared. Kumar, a longtime friend of my father’s through their intersecting paths in Santiniketan, India, was staying with our family for a few days before returning to Boston, where he is working on his Master’s degree. When my father suggested I interview him, I agreed without a clear idea of what the end product would be, or even the reason for such an interview. Upon learning more about Kumar Rana, however, I came to realize that having a blunt conversation with him about India’s past and present was an extremely interesting opportunity that I could not pass up.
Kumar has worked for an agency called the Pratichi Trust for some years now. Its mission is to improve the lives of people living in tiny villages around India, specifically in three ways: increasing gender equality, improving health conditions and providing education.
Kumar, who began the interview with a request for me to fix his English when I typed up the article (despite the fact that he speaks it very well), was smiling for a large portion of the conversation despite the gravity of the subject matter, perhaps in remembrance of his village, in politeness, or simply because he enjoys smiling.
Interviewer: Do you mind starting off by telling me a little bit about your childhood and how you grew up?
Rana: I’d love to. Let me tell you, I had the double disadvantage of studying in two different alien languages. My studies were in Bengali, which was not my mother tongue.
Interviewer: Gotcha.
Rana: I had to learn. I write in Bangla, and now, I write for the popular newspapers, journals, and I have some books in Bangla, but initially I had to study it. And then, there was English. And then, there was sanskrit.
Interviewer: Sanskrit? Really?
Rana: Yes, sanskrit. Really. I learned sanskrit later, after many many years; originally I didn’t learn much. But I grew up with these difficulties. And I was born in a village with a population of, at the time, 400 people.
Interviewer: Okay, so really small.
Rana: Very, very small. 90% of the population was tribal, meaning they belonged to one of the ancient tribes of India called Santal. And now, the population of that village is about 7 million.
Interviewer: Wow!
Rana: I almost grew up in a Santal family, because Santal families were our neighbors. I lost my father at the age of one and a half. That’s why my mother had to be very busy, you know, organizing the domestic chores and at the same time working, organizing cultivation, because we had some lands. She had to manage everything. So I got some freedom to grow up, freely. I remember I used to stay out the whole day, and then come home in the evening.
Interviewer: How were you educated?
Rana: There was a primary school in our village, but there was no upper primary or secondary. So after year four, I had to leave the village, and I went to a relative’s house. From there, I continued my schooling for one year, and that too, involved a daily walk of about six miles [to school].
Interviewer: Wow, you had to walk six miles every day? How long did that take?
Rana: We used to start around 9 o’clock in the morning, and school started at 10:30. And later, in the past decade, when we were fighting for school meals in our country, I remembered those stories, those days when we were so hungry at school; by the time we reached school we became hungry again — and there was nothing! And we had to come back. We plundered whatever we could find.
Interviewer: What was life like at home?
Rana: At that time, it was remarkable in two ways. One part was that at that time, there was a radical political movement called the Naxalite movement that my brothers were involved in, and our house was a center of political activities. Many people who were involved in [the political movement] — very brilliant students from Calcutta — left their studies and came to stay in the village and be with the people. I had the chance to talk to them and learn from them. But on the other hand, I experienced some difficulties due to police atrocities. I remember one day, I was studying and the police came — there was no electricity, we had kerosene lamps — and he tore apart one of my books, lit the paper, and lit his cigarette with that paper. It was.. well… there were a lot of atrocities. So I had to pay some difficulties, it’s true.
But childhood? That’s a different memory. It may not be very relevant, but the memory is very sweet. Our village was surrounded by forest. You had to cross four kilometers of forest to get to the village, and there used to grow a lot of wild vegetables, mushrooms, a lot of things, and we used to go hunting. I grew up in nature. I really know the forest. I know all the names of all the trees because I grew up there.
Interviewer: That’s lovely! And do you spend time in the forest nowadays?
Rana: Sometimes, yes! When I go to Santiniketan, I have a place where I stay, and the forest is very near. I go because it’s very close to my heart; I don’t do much, but I go at night just to hear the noises of bugs.
Interviewer: That’s so wonderful! Do you mind telling me a little bit about your later years in high school?
Rana: When I was in the final year of my high school, I became a political activist. I was one for 10 years.
Interviewer: Were you successful?
Rana: Yes — we did some substantial walks. And why I became a political activist is very interesting. I have seen before my eyes the atrocities, the exploitations, the landlords and money and perpetuations against our people. I remember one day, when I was very small, five or six years old, there was an old tribal woman who was begging and praying to the moneylender to close her account and end the loan passed down by her family for generations. She was holding the feet of the moneylender, praying to him, but he didn’t listen. So I had those memories. When the right opportunity came, I became a political activist. At one point, we actually grabbed many hectares of land from the moneylenders and landlords and [returned them to the people]. It was 1977, and a lot of political changes were happening during that time. At that time, the wage rate was very low — unimaginably low. Even if everybody worked, families still could not get three square meals a day. But we, [through political activism], enhanced that rate by three times. Once it started, it got its momentum, and it’s now eight times the original amount.
And that is basically my upbringing.
Interviewer: Thank you! Could you tell me a little bit about your current job, and how your past influenced or continues to influence your work?
Rana: Well, I left politics not because of any ideological or political differences, but because I felt it was very difficult to continue as a political worker for the rest of one’s life. But I still have that passion for the people; basically whatever I have learnt, I have learnt from being with the people, working with the people. And in what I do now, there are three main areas: education, basic health and gender equality. I’ve seen how illiteracy is one of the central causes of deprivation of the people. But once you counter illiteracy, half of your job is done because people can then take the next steps for themselves. The notion is not simply doing something for the people. It is doing something for the people so they can do something for themselves.
Interviewer: Where have you worked specifically, and what definitive solutions have you come up with?
Rana: We emphasize research because it is very important to know what is happening. Through our experiences, we have built a relationship between research and public action. So it’s a continuous action kind of thing. We also have a clinic in a district where we work with children, trying to figure out what “their world” is like. Because children have their own world, you know? We were trying to prepare a document on children’s world views. There was one particular interaction I liked very much; we asked this girl, “What do you want to be in life?” and she said, “I want to be a boy.” When we asked why, she said, “Then I can be everywhere.”
Interviewer: That’s brilliant — it’s brilliant!
Rana: It is! And another thing is, we believe we can change by doing — not just by summarizing. Summarizing is very important, but at the same time we have to do something. So we are doing. We have teachers communicate with each other. We are working with children, researching, building up debate and discussion.
Interviewer: Do you have any particular goal you want to achieve within your lifetime?
Rana: Yes. We have this goal that every child will have the opportunity to pursue his or her own education. We want each and every person in the population to have safe water, sanitation and vaccination. And no gender disparity. It’s a grave problem: some choose to abort the child even before she is even born [because she is female]. So this is something that is very important, particularly in India.
The battle is huge. We are winning some, and we are losing some. But we are learning how to win. And it will go on. It will go on.