Suntali works three shifts at other people’s homes, where she washes clothes, cleans the dishes and does other household chores. She is paid a pittance, but she has no choice but to work, as the family cannot survive on the earnings of her husband and son. [break]
Like other Tharu families in Dang and its neighbouring districts Banke, Bardiya, Kailali and Kanchanpur, Suntali’s family is very poor, the result of being in servitude for many years.The Tharus were not always poor. They owned the fertile plains of the Tarai. But after malaria was eradicated, hill people came to settle in the Tarai and slowly started usurping the land owned by the Tharus.
Gaurav Dhwaj Khadka
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Poor and illiterate, and without land and alternative means of income, the Tharus ended up tilling the lands of the landlords in a sharecropping arrangement. This arrangement was so heavily in favour of the landlords that the Tharus were in bondage (as kamaiyas) in no time. In bondage and unable to provide for their increasingly large families, the kamaiya heads of the family were compelled to send their daughters to the houses of local chiefs as kamalaris (indentured labourers).
This is how, like thousands of other Tharu girls, Suntali ended up becoming a kamalari.
Suntali was born into the family of a kamaiya. It had nine members: five sisters, two sons, father and mother. Her father used to receive just a few muri rice for tilling the jamindar’s lands. That wasn’t enough to feed the family. So her father sent four of her elder sisters to work for mukhiyas. But he wanted to educate his youngest daughter. She says, ‘Father used to tell me, “I couldn’t send my other daughters to school, but I want you to get an education.”’ And he did enrol her in school.
Suntali went to school for four, five days. One day a teacher asked her a question, and when she couldn’t answer it, he beat her up. She was so frightened that she stopped going to school. That was however not the only reason. She says, ‘My parents didn’t buy me a uniform and I was too ashamed to go to school wearing a guniyo cholo.’
When Suntali stopped going to school her father told her, ‘Now that you didn’t study, you go work.’ That was how she found herself working as a kamalari at a mukhiya’s, at age 11.
Gaurav Dhwaj Khadka
The mukhiya’s family was large, and Suntali had to work hard. She had to wake up at five and go to the mukhiya’s house, fetch water from far away as there were no taps at that time. She had to plaster the house with red mud, feed the cattle in the morning, help in the kitchen, and then go home to have a morsel of food before heading back to cut grass, wash clothes and look after the children. She would usually return home late, after doing the dishes. And she had to put up with the tantrums of the mukhiya family, whenever something went amiss.
The work was hard and degrading. But she worked there for 18 years, until she got married to a Chaudhary. They had been meeting for three years, on and off, before they decided to get married. Their parents didn’t have the money to marry them off properly, so they married secretly in a temple.
An indentured labourer as well, her husband didn’t earn much. A lack of family planning awareness led them to have five children, one after another, and it became difficult for them to make ends meet. Suntali wasn’t able to give her children an education and sent her eldest daughter off to be a kamalari, knowing full well the hardships she would have to endure. Her three other daughters, however, didn’t want to work as kamalaris and started to do odd jobs. Her son dropped out of school in Class Eight because they couldn’t afford to pay the fee of 300 rupees. Now he works in a grill factory.
The husband still works as a kamaiya, though the practice was made illegal and punishable by law in 2000. People like him will stay kamaiyas, whether there is a law against its practice or not, as long as they don’t have other livelihoods to pursue. Ditto with kamalaris, even though its practice, too, was banned on 26 September 2006. Much else needs to change. Until then, life for the likes of Suntali and her children will remain the same…and there will still be girls living under bondage.
This article is excerpted from Hamra Hajurama: Our Grandmothers, a photo.circle project. A book launch and exhibition will take place at the Nepal Art Council, Baber Mahal, on 18th December.
