The Way to Love

EARLY IN 2014, Archana Devi, aged 20, was married to Amitabh Bachchan, aged 32, in her village in Kaimur district, in the south-west corner of Bihar. As the groom’s party took her to her new home, in the village of Barwan Kalan, she was in for a shock. “I was asked to sit in a palanquin,” she told me in Barwan Kalan in February, describing how she was cradled in a sari tied to two bamboo poles and carried up a rough, narrow track. “The three-hour journey from the foothills to my husband’s house felt like traveling through time, from the modern age to the stone age.”

Barwan Kalan, with a population approaching a couple of thousand, sits close to another small village, Barwan Khurd, high on a rocky hilltop in the Kaimur hills, inside the Kaimur Wildlife Sanctuary. For years, the village’s only connection to the outside world was the same track Devi had been carried along. It took at least three hours of difficult trekking over five kilometres to get out of the hills, and then a further 12 kilometres into Bhabua town—the district headquarters, and a gateway to the surrounding plains. This meant countless problems. Largely disconnected and forgotten, Barwan Kalan was, and is, denied basic amenities such as electricity. Villagers told me instances of women dying during childbirth because they could not reach medical care in time. For Barwan Kalan’s bachelors, one particular difficulty stood out—a lack of brides. The number of eligible women in the hills was limited, and isolation and poverty made attracting partners from elsewhere difficult. Before marrying Devi, Bachchan had twice been engaged to girls from the plains, only to be rebuffed. For Devi’s family to accept the match, he had lied that he owned property in the plains, and would be moving there soon.

Now, things are changing. Since 2008, local men, frustrated by years of failed attempts to get the government to build a road to their village, have been cutting one through the rocky hills themselves. The new five-kilometre stretch links Barwan Kalan to an existing track in the nearby plains, which runs another 17 kilometres to Bhabua. “Last year, we inaugurated the road for pedestrian, bicycle and two-wheeler movement,” Girha Yadav, an aged bachelor, told me. Yadav doesn’t remember his age, but several people in the village assured me he was over 80 years old. As the oldest road-building volunteer, Yadav is something of a talisman for the cause. “Marriage proposals have started trickling in,” he said. “There were five weddings in our village since the inauguration of the road. The results have charged up our guys. Now, I am quite hopeful that we will be able to make a proper motorable road.”

On a normal day, a crew of about 20 works to improve the present track. I was aboard the first four-wheeler to ever navigate the entire, terrifying track up to Barwan Kalan. “The work is on for the past seven years, but there is still a lot to do,” Madan Guruji, the village headmaster, told me. With the road as it is now, “a slight mix up and you go crashing 1,500 feet down.” Guruji, who toiled for years to upgrade the village’s primary school into the high school he now heads, complained of persistent negligence. “It has been seven decades since India attained freedom,” he said, “but we have not seen a sign of governance here. At times, it feels that Barwan Kalan doesn’t exist on India’s map.”

Yadav told me the village was inspired by Dashrath Manjhi, a Bihari man who, after failing to get his ailing wife to a doctor in time to save her life, worked almost single-handedly between 1960 and 1982 to build a road to his village near Gaya. “Manjhi built a passage after he lost his wife,” Yadav quipped, “we are doing the same to get wives.”

But where Manjhi won accolades, Barwan Kalan’s bachelors have been slapped with an FIR for tampering with the protected hills surrounding the village. When I telephoned the district’s forest officer, Kundan Kumar, in March, he stressed that “any construction … in the reserved area is illegal and those found flouting the rules will be punished.” In response, the villagers argue that they have lived in the area since long before it became a conservation zone, in 1982, and have a right to basic infrastructure. Other officials remain apathetic, despite Barwan Kalan’s Herculean efforts. “Which Barwan Kalan?” Prabhakar Kumar Jha, the district magistrate of Kaimur, replied when asked about the village’s plight. “There is no place in my jurisdiction by that name.”

Yadav said he is very happy for his “younger brethren,” who he hopes will “find their matches soon now that the road has become functional.” As for himself, he joked, “I am soon going to get married to the eternal beloved”—death.