Recasting India by Hindol Sengupta Read Free Book Online

disappeared.
    â€œThe migrating Dalit worker picked up more money than ever at jobs at the nearest town or city and changed their habits and society forever,” said Prasad. He says that to understand what changed, it is not the Dalit who should be asked, but the upper castes.
    â€œI remember this Bhumihar landlord in eastern Uttar Pradesh telling me that, ‘
Aaj kal uhi log lal murgi haath mein pakar ke motorbike mein pharphareke jaate hain
‘ [These days these people buy plump red chicken and pass by our houses holding the fluttering birds and zipping by on their motorbikes]! His resentment and disappointment was utterly complete, and the whole thing was very funny for me,” laughs Prasad. “Earlier social rank was by birth alone, but now status could be bought by enterprise—that is a priceless change.”
    And this change was not restricted to Uttar Pradesh. In Sangli, in the western state of Maharashtra, he asked an upper-caste Patil woman why she was working on the large farm of a successful Dalit food manufacturer.
    She told him that earlier the
tulsi
plant (considered sacred and to be found only in the front yards of the upper caste) defined who you were. Now it’s whether you have a TV or not. “I don’t think of this as a farm,” she said. “This is so big, and all the rules are like a factory. A factory has no caste.”
    This is the revolution, Prasad told me—don’t look for Tahrir Square or the guillotine. It is happening every single day.
    When I told my mother all this, as always she had something to add. “See, all this enterprise-shenterprise, na, this is why I taught you to make bread and butter and omelet when you were only ten years old,” she said. “You must be free. Not like your father. Totally not free. Who is going to cook and feed you? All that is gone. Mother is the last woman doing that. No wife these days. If you can’t even feed yourself every day, what freedom?”
    Even my mother seemed to understand that our regular, everyday rebellion—enterprise—is what sets us free.

CHAPTER 2

BUSINESS MODELS IN THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS PLACE
    Â 
    â€œIf we delay you,” says the English and Urdu sign on the gate, “for more than two hours, we will pay you Rs 2 per minute for every extra minute.”
    This is one of the first things that a driver carrying a truckload of apples—anywhere between 50 apples and a ton of apples—sees when he arrives at the gate of the cold storage and fruit processing factory of Harshna Naturals in Lassipura district. The factory is about an hour and a half’s drive north from Srinagar, the capital of Jammu and Kashmir.
    The man who put up the sign, 31-year-old agriculture entrepreneur Khurram Mir, says the sign works like a talisman, telling the farmers who come to sell and store fruits at his plant, his workers and even himself that things are getting better in a valley in which, depending on who you are reading, between 50,000 and 100,000 people have been killed in a two-decade insurgency that started in 1989.
    â€œWe are saying yes, things are so normal that we can pay for delays in a state used to shutting down for days with violence and anxiety.” Once described (by former US president Bill Clinton) as the world’s most dangerous place, this is the new sign of peace in Jammu and Kashmir, the Himalayan state over which India and Pakistan have fought three wars.
    Long used to peace brokers in the shape of politicians, diplomats, aid workers, even ex-militants, the valley is getting used to a new kind of agent of calm: the entrepreneur.
    And why not? More small and medium enterprises have been set up in Kashmir in the last two years than in the previous decade, says the Jammu and Kashmir Entrepreneurship Development Institute (JKEDI). 1 Its two flagship projects have produced more than 1,700 new entrepreneurs in the last two years, says Zamir