In this village disputes are still settled by the village elders under a tree. A multitasking teacher teaches the village kids all that they need to know. Haunted houses, lost wells, desolate paths, jasmine flowers and the smell of wet clay- Sampigehalli is a village frozen in time, ironically located near the post-capitalist city of Bangalore. H.A.Anil Kumar hits a less trodden path to reach this village and comes back with the following impressions.
The old man sits there reading newspaper from beginning to end, from morning till evening. He claimed to have travelled ninety years in this village and that, perhaps, is one of the reason as to why he takes so long to read a Kannada newspaper. By the time he finished reading today’s newspaper, tomorrow’s would be in print! Yet, his village – Sampigehalli –just at the outskirts of North Bangalore never featured in any of those news columns. Never! He had been witness to this village throughout all the major world events of twentieth century, that incidentally did affect the city nearby but not his own village!
He sits on the Ashwatha Katte, the high-rise stone clad pedestal in the village center. A banyan tree and a neem tree are compulsorily grown within these 20 feet by 50 feet pedestal. This man is the oldest man in the village who has seen its transformation or the lack of it, in the light of the speed with which a sleepy township called Bengaluru has been metamorphosed. The tree shades of this katte acts as an umbrella for those who travel through this village, shelters those who take a siesta and acts as the court in the evenings whenever a village dispute is settled. Police have almost nothing to do with this village other than attend the village feasts and festivals.
There is a well next to Ashwatha Katte which is now defunct. Located at the heart of the village which has 250 houses, it used to provide water only to a privileged caste, when it was alive. Filling the well with mud also meant burying the caste differences, at least for now. It is located at the central point of Sampigehalli, en route to the next village. Interestingly the well does not belong to a family from within which nobody is interested to fight over owning it, since nothing grows on a well, one cannot build a deep rooted house upon it nor is its physical width worthy to be considered a site!
A road perpendicular to the main, but non-asphalted, leads to the temple twenty feet away and stops. There are fields on either side and it goes nowhere further. The only bus that arrives twice to this village, everyday, stops near the ex-well. Though most villagers make use of it now –the bus, not the well — people thought it to be an extravaganza when it first arrived only a decade ago. One of the young village dwellers, it seems, tried driving the bus when its owners were having chai at the local-dhaba. The bus was started, moved a bit and mowed down a couple of sheep and turned half-turtle. The boy went absconding till he was assured that there would be no case against him, for serving public transport without being paid!
The desolate mud house on the opposite side of the temple is left to further deterioration. Since a tantric and a mystic practitioner stayed in it once upon a time, nobody dares to make the mistake of claiming it. It is used only once a year when the theatre play that goes on throughout the night (bayalu nataka), is enacted. Extra actors who are not familiar with the village are given accommodation there. A deer and pigeons brought to create special effects, housed in the desolate house, it seems, had mysteriously vanished off during the night, that too even before performing their roles – as themselves –in the play. Their sacrificial remnants were recovered from the lake the very next day! The old man remembers everything, “my problem is I can’t forget, almost anything” he utters. He hints that the mystic-tantric quit his house because of the ill effects of his own magic.
The village celebrates prehistoric transport with such vigor that recently when a boy tried to commit suicide by swallowing sleeping-pills (no medical shops at Sampigehalli), there was unfortunately only one scooter in the village and the driver as well as the vehicle were ‘at home’ at that time. The sinking boy was tied behind the driver and rushed to the nearby Yelahanka township hospital, with lot of bullock carts and bicycles driving behind him in frenzy!
Sampigehalli is a village just ten kilometers away from Bangalore railway station. Yet it seems so remote that it seems to be hundreds of kilometers and a couple of centuries away from the nearby urban space. It also seems like a recently habituated nomadic settlement. Everybody knows the rest of the villagers by their names, even now while in Bangalore city you hardly meet familiar faces on the streets, even after driving the same route for a couple of decades!
With only one road passing through Sampigehalli, it is a sleepy location with a single-teacher primary school. Everything inside the school is visible to everybody outside, all the time. More than the lack of infrastructure, it is the warmth that has held them together – the first grade students in the first row and seventh grade in the seventh row! During the first and the last hour of everyday schooling, the teacher becomes a sweeper, attendant, organizer as well as the head master. He is ‘the’ tutor for all the classes during the rest of the schooling time. The school, with all the colorful charts painted in enamel paints all over its outer walls looks like a tattooed-museum of its own self!
Popularly known for jasmine flowers everywhere, it has been called Sampigehalli (village of jasmines). Even the bright sunlight in the fields, added with the afternoon silence, apart from the occasional mowing of the cattle and recurring voices of the chicken; their foot marks on the rain clad ground, the typical smell of the wet soil, the children chasing the shadow of the slow flying two seater yellow aero plane from the half-century-old Jakkur aero drum nearby –all in all– comes to an abrupt halt whenever a plane crashes into the Sampigehalli lake. The planes seem to be hygiene-conscious; they are drawn to the waters constantly. Nobody dies in the crash, but villagers rush to drag out the wounded and own the weird plastic parachutes. They have known plastic more as parachutes than as contraceptives. The young cowherds – the result of the practice of bonded labor is still intact – mocking at both the notion of the abolishment of child labor; and attempting to learn swimming by holding on to the tail of a buffalo in the water, would be the only humans slightly disturbed by such surreal occurrences of almost all machine-birds crashing into the lakes.
The honge trees, whose shade are used as bed sheets in the afternoons by farmers, working in the fields to take a nap, are in plenty. They create a white flower-bed in no time. The above said old man of Sampigehalli is seen in the afternoon under the huge tree at the entrance of the village. Being the oldest in the village, he seems to be recollecting the memoirs of not only all the people of his generations who are dead and gone but also seems to be comparing the changing breeze, smell of the greenery as well as the industrial smoke which slowly is turning green into gray. He keeps staring at the quarried mountain to the eastern edge of this small village. The convex bulge of the mountain has become a concave pit in three decades. Even now, no matter how low the quarry and the politics around exploiting it has deteriorated into, the high rises of the city of Bengaluru is still visible from the quarry, like a fairy tale.
Quarrying of different kind has become the favorite time-pass preoccupation of the youth from around this village. Since the actual quarrying has almost stopped, the pit is filled with water and has become a second lake. One of the peaks is retained as it is, since there is a small temple above it and the whole setup looks like an abandoned film shooting set!
Sampigehalli is a village where if one walks for more than two hundred yards, he/she enters into a field, a barren land or a lush coconut grove. The community hall, which is actually an attachment to the temple, plays all India station throughout the day, in the age of digital, facebook and web world. This not only is music to the ears, but also is an indicator to the neighboring township Jakkur that the only luxury in this village is electrifying. Power cuts in this village, which is very frequent, is advertised through the pronounced silence in the otherwise noisy daily chores.
One need to be cautious while walking through the ragi fields, with occasional coconut, tomato, Malabar plants. Mischievous kids would have tied two ragi plants together so that one literally stumbles, apart from stumbling to the scenic beauty of the 400 acres of lake that is surrounded by at least three towns (Jakkur, Yelahanka) which is visible from everywhere in this village. The lake is the London Eye of Sampigehalli.
Sampigehalli is a village which has a natural visibility that most localities around Bengaluru cannot even withhold. You can gatecrash into well nurtured horse farms, nurseries etc. amidst the natural fields, which forms an oxymoron. A stranger is immediately identified herein while in the city nearby everyone you meet every day would be a stranger. The old man never sees Sampigehalli as it is. It is a palimpsest of at least nine-decades-metamorphosis of this village that he per-see-ives. What he sees is inevitably commixed with what he believes he has seen, forgotten, remembers and is hidden about it. During the night time, the famous Colonial- British-established-botanical Nandi hills are lit and visible from this village.
The house he stays is one of the last of its kind: made out of bricks, made up of the clay from the same lake, it seems to have certain site-specificity about itself. Most houses have tiled roofs and all tiles were bought from the now extinct tiles factory of Yelahanka, the neighboring township. In other words, the tiles have been reused and re-laid, like the memories of that old man does as a routine. Each house in the village seems like an extract from the museum-of-man in Bhopal:
They let you peep into the chiaroscuro-like-lit houses with most floors well ground by smearing of cow dung that keeps away all varieties of flies and their lord mosquitoes at bay, forever. Red-oxide flooring is a luxury for the Sampigehallites. The entrance is a cowshed and a semi-open bath room. If it’s raining, the burnt seeds of jackfruit travel directly from the bathroom firewood stove to your hands, even when you are a stranger to the whole setup. The humans and animals coexist, the ripened grains, jowar and other grains are dumped in, and the Rembrandt-like-chiaroscuro is the only light that defines the interiors.
One aspect about Sampigehalli is that it is not and more importantly, it cannot be a tourist destination. It is that palimpsest of memoirs that the old man offers and narrates about his very village that enlivens the place. What if this man is gone? I am yet to cross check as to whether anybody knows him, apart from me! He might actually be a personification of the memories that the village hides within itself. Otherwise, how else can one explain Sampigehalli’s remoteness, despite being just within the edge of the globalized Bengaluru!!
