The Garland

Bundelkhand is a thirsty land. When I arrived there early in 2008, my skin—already parched from the dry winter air of Kathmandu and Delhi—immediately felt itchy. The cool air hit my sinuses with a prickly thud. They ached, and my eyes smarted as moisture left them. The land was an expanse of beige sand and rocks; beautiful, I thought, save for a dryness so intense it made me feel a little anxious. Most of the trees were not very tall, except for the water-thrifty “flame of the forest,” with its dark green dust-covered leaves, several inches wide. In the spring the leaves drop off and the tree’s bright orange blossoms, shaped rather like bird beaks, pop out to give the tree its other English name, “parrot tree.” Bundelkhand is sometimes called the heart of India. It sits in the center of the broad upper half of the subcontinent and its many ruins from the nation’s Mughal and Hindu past evoke the shifting suzerainty of pre-British India. Most of the ancient kingdom of Bundelkhand is now in Madhya Pradesh, also known as “MP,” or “middle province.” It’s a large landlocked state south of Delhi; Bhopal, the site of the devastating 1984 explosion at the Union Carbide pesticide plant, is its capital. The remainder of Bundelkhand is in Uttar Pradesh, “UP,” or “northern province.” Many would like to see Bundelkhand secede from both and become a separate state. With a population of fifteen million, it would be a sub-stantial state on its own. And some people believe this poor and undeveloped region will have a better chance of progress if it is independent of both MP and UP and their politics. I stayed in Jhansi, a large district in the UP portion of Bundelkhand, at the campus of a nonprofit endeavor called Development Alternatives. The group works to help people in Bundelkhand manage water and develop small industries as an alternative to agriculture. There was a simple guesthouse on the campus with hot showers, which revived me and rehydrated my dry eyes and nose in the evening.