Poverty Porn: Making Heroes Out Of People Just Struggling To Survive

“We must imagine [Sisyphus] happy”

- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

I hear that the Canal Man in Bihar is still digging the channel. In 2020, he had been celebrated as the hero who had dug a thr­ee­­­-­km-long aqueduct to bring water to his village. It took him more than three decades. I had met him then, when his story hit the headlines. Laungi Bhuiya, in his seventies, wanted to stop migration from his village in Gaya’s Sherghati area. There are a million stories like his, when the poor have tried to fix things because the State is absent or unwilling. Laungi’s village still doesn’t have a pucca road despite the promises, the pleas and the media attention. It still doesn’t have a dispensary. They feli­citated him. They cheered him. But nobody saw why he did it.  

According to recently-released data, more than 52 per cent of Bihar’s population is poor. Over the years that I have travelled through Bihar, my home state, I have come across many stories of acute poverty and distress. Like the girls who had to bury their parents, both killed by the coronavirus in Araria in May this year because villagers didn’t allow them to cremate the bodies for fear of the virus spreading through the smoke from the pyres. Soni Kumari, just 19, had to bury her father all alone because no one would help them. Within days, she had to bury her mother too. And once again, all alone. She and her two siblings now face the prospect of slipping into poverty.

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I must imagine all of them to be happy like Albert Camus did in his 1942 philosophical essay called The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus made a comparison between the human condition and fate of Sisyphus, who was condemned to push a rock up a hill, again and again until eternity. Camus insisted Sisyphus could be happy. In Bihar too, poverty plays in a loop. In his iconic play Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett wrote about two tramps waiting for Godot, while knowing that Godot would never come. That’s how the poor in Bihar wait for everything. They know nothing would come.

The absurdity of everything in Bihar, especially poverty, is no less than a tragicomedy. We have names for its poster boys and girls—Mountain Man, Canal Man, Cycle Girl. They make headlines. Political leaders rush to poor villages with gifts and cheques. Pose for photo-ops. And when the spotlight shifts somewhere else, the same “heroes” slip back into the black hole of poverty once again. Few ever talk about why a man would dig a canal for 30 years. Or why a girl would cycle all the way from Delhi to Darbhanga in Bihar, carrying her injured father.  They did it because they had no choice. They did it because the State failed its poor.

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Snapshots An election poster in Patna; and (right) foodgrains at Laungi’s house.

Before Laungi, it was Dashrath Manjhi’s feat which stunned the world for his sheer audacity—a poor man single-handedly carving a road out of a rocky hill over 22 years. He was celebrated as hero too. But the truth is, Manjhi’s family at Gehlour hills in Gaya are still struggling to make ends meet. The media moved on from his story, as they always do. A stamp was released in his name. A film was made on his life. His road was made motorable.  

Laungi’s Kothilwa is part of a brutal landscape of rocks and red soil with hills looming in the horizon. According to the 2011 census, Kothilwa had a population of 733 people. The nearest town of Sherghati is around 23 km away. There is no pucca house along the dirt road that leads to this godforsaken village. Mud huts with thatched roofs are ubiquitous as are little children with blonde hair, a sign of extreme malnutrition. Posters of the new Animal Shed Yojana, which is part of MNREGA in Bihar, are pasted on the broken walls of houses in this stretch. The people rear goats in this part of the countryside.

Laungi told me he felt lonely out there in the wilderness, digging all by himself. He was dismissed as a madman by his family and the villagers. Laungi owned two bighas of land but could only grow maize on his farm. He couldn’t talk to anyone about the canal, an act of defiance against the callous State. Laungi’s story belongs in the realm of a man-does-the-impossible. So does the tale of Jyoti Paswan, who cycled with her injured father riding pillion for 1,200 km in May, 2020, during the lockdown. Jyoti’s village Sirhulli is a place from where most men and women migrate to other places for work. What the stories missed was why she had to cycle all the way—she had no choice as all means of transport had been shut and migrants had no option but to cycle, walk or ride in trucks to return home after they had lost their jobs.

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Camus saw Sisyphus as an absurdist hero. And in many ways Laungi is an absurdist hero too. And the rebellion of his act, which is political, lies in his consciousness and his scorn. The story of redemption, and of vindication, of a man who kept digging despite all odds. Through all these decades, the village still has no water for irrigation. But the part about water is inc­idental to the plot. The crux of it lies in the story of migr­ation from this region. In its abject poverty.  

In 2008, the Bihar government did a Marie Antoinette, who once asked starving French peasants to have cake “if they don’t have bread”. Bihar government officials started asking people to eat rats in order to battle soaring food prices, and save grain stocks. Jitan Ram Manjhi, the then state caste and tribal welfare minister, said rat meat was a healthy alternative to solve the food crisis.  

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The point of recounting all these stories is to make a simple point: that poverty is endemic in Bihar. You see young girls dancing in cages in orchestra bands, getting shot at and even raped. They are poor and vulnerable. They dance to survive and some even die. The point of this Outlook issue is to look at what makes Bihar so poor. More importantly, what does poverty in the poorest state feels like.  

This is a recounting of stories we encountered. Laungi is at it again. Like Sisyphus. We are all waiting for Godot and we must imagine Sisyphus to be happy. Nothing would make sense otherwise. There is a song that I often listen to. Ik bagal mein chand hoga by Piyush Mishra. In that, he talks about the moon and roti. For the poor, the roti is as distant as the moon. That’s how absurd poverty is in my state. 

(This appeared in the print edition as "Poverty and its Heroes")

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