Daughter of the Earth

By Rainer Hoerig, Pune, India*

India’s farmers love her while international agrochemical and gene technology concerns fear her: the scientist Vandana Shiva is taking on the forces of globalization to bring more eco-friendly farming methods back to her country, and to give people their right to freedom and self-determination.

The train carriage rocks in a gentle rhythm as it moves along the uneven rails. Now and then the locomotive issues a warning whistle. Fields, villages, and farms fly past the windows. We see water buffalos pulling carts piled high with straw and women in colorful saris bent low over the earth cutting bushels of wheat, and we delight in a flock of white herons swirling around a farmer as he plows a field.

“Look carefully – this is the wealth of my country,” urges my companion, a graying, well-built woman in her early fifties, who speaks with the clarity and conviction of a university professor. “Unlike Europe, agriculture plays a leading role here in India: it provides work and bread for 70% of the population, and it shapes many aspects of public life.”

Vandana Shiva calls herself an eco-feminist. She is a star on the Indian scene, even if not an undisputed one. She has received numerous Indian and international awards, among others the 1993 Alternative Nobel Prize and the ‘Order of the Golden Arches’ from the Dutch royal family. Vandana Shiva demonstrates against globalization, fights for small farmers in the developing world, and works to spread her vision of a true partnership with nature. Once upon a time she studied quantum physics in India and Canada. Today she is the leader of three citizens’ initiatives, advises politicians and women’s groups, and serves on national and international commissions. After weeks of preparation and many telephone and email requests, I was finally able to arrange an appointment for an interview – in the train from New Delhi to Dehra Dun, a provincial city in the foothills of the Himalayas.

“Don’t be fooled by the idyllic scenes,” warns Vandana Shiva, who at times slips into the role of tour guide. “Our farmers are in a serious crisis. The Green Revolution – that is, the introduction of high-intensity farming, together with chemical fertilizers and pesticides – freed India from the need to import foodstuffs, but the price was very high: the suppression of traditional farming methods that were suited to local conditions and that worked with nature instead of against it.”

I mention the fact that recently more and more small farmers have been expressing their desperation by drinking highly poisonous pesticides to commit suicide. “A direct result of industrial agricultural methods and globalization,” Vandana Shiva agrees. “Look out the window: for miles there is nothing but fields of sugarcane. These giant monocultures are only possible by using chemicals on a massive scale. While the price of these chemicals is constantly rising, globalization, with its cheap imports, is causing the producers’ prices to collapse. The result: small farms are sucked into a whirlpool of debt. To many farmers, suicide appears to be the only way out.”

With passion and fury the former scientist accuses the giant European and American agribusiness multinationals of waging a war against the farmers in the countries of the southern hemisphere. “They are employing their own ‘weapons of mass destruction’, such as herbicides like those used as defoliants in Vietnam under the name ‘Agent Orange’. With life-threatening chemicals and unfair trade practices agribusiness are squeezing bigger and bigger profits out of the south’s agriculture. Now, with the help of gene technology, they are trying to enslave farmers once and for all through the sale of expensive, genetically altered hybrid grain, which produce sterile seeds so that farmers are forced to buy new seed grain every year.”

One hundred years ago the British colonial administration forced Indian farmers to plant indigo for the English textile industry instead of food crops. The result was famine. “Today international patent holders force the farmers to work for their bottom line. But just as Mahatma Gandhi broke the British salt laws and taught people how to produce sea salt with their own hands, so are we going to flout the patent laws and manage our own seed grain. It is our duty to protect this gift from nature and our ancestors, and besides we need it to live.”

The lives of 600 million people are threatened

Approximately 600 million people work in Indian agriculture. They produce one third of the gross national product. Agriculture even has a big influence on industry. If a good harvest puts more money in the farmers’ pockets, there are more buyers for industrial products. If the weatherman predicts good rains during the monsoon season, share values rise in the stock market.

India has some of the best farmlands in the world. For millennia Indian farmers have been developing and improving their own technology for irrigation, fertilization and plant protection, a technology which is based on the natural and social conditions of the local area. The majority of Indian farms are run as subsistence farms and most of them according to traditional methods. The farmer who has enough land plants in addition to what he needs to feed his family some grain or vegetables as cash crops. The state, however, smoothes the way for entry into “modern,” which is to say, commercial farming with subsidies for electricity to run irrigation pumps, as well as for chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

Life in the countryside is now undergoing rapid change. Advertising, via satellite TV, now reaches even the remotest villages awakening new needs. Integration into modern markets is now transforming the economic framework. Anil Choudary, who works for the development organization PEACE, reports from the villages of Bihar and Uttar Pradeshs: “Normally wages are paid here in commodities. To begin with the workers get a meal while they are working. After the harvest the landowner gives them a portion of the fruits of the field as well as money from the sale of the crops. The period of their wages is extended as a result, and the workers don’t have to worry about room and board while they are working. During the past five years, however, this custom has been destroyed by the laws of the market. Pretty soon, Indian farm workers will only be paid in cash.”

Thanks largely to the Green Revolution, the former India, a worldwide symbol of famine is now self-sufficient in food production. In some regions many farmers have become prosperous. Today India is the world’s largest producer of sugar, milk and tea. The government silos are overflowing with around 50 million tons of grain. For the first time in its history, India can export wheat and rice. On the other hand, however, millions of Indians don’t have enough to eat on a regular basis. Hunger is obviously not a consequence of insufficient food supplies, but rather a function of insufficient buying power.

Since the ‘70s the dark side of the Green Revolution has become more apparent. The miraculous yields of the first few years can only be replicated with increasing effort and expense. Today farmers have to apply more and more chemicals to stabilize their yields. In the meantime almost all Indian foodstuffs have been contaminated with dangerously high levels of pesticide residue. Permanent irrigation, along with massive use of chemicals, ruins the soil. In the province of Punjab, India’s bread basket, roughly four million acres of what used to be the best farmlands have turned into swamps and are as a result unfarmable. More than 14 million people, including many indigenous peoples, have been displaced by the construction of dams and irrigation systems over the past 50 years. Most of those driven from the land have ended up in big city slums.

In 1995 India joined the World Trade Organization, one of the premier free market promoters. According to WTO regulations, India had to open its borders for agricultural imports in April of 2001. Agricultural journalist Devinder Sharmal gives a particularly dramatic example of what then happened. “In the same year, a ship loaded with Danish milk powder arrived in an Indian harbor. In case you don’t know, India is the world’s largest milk producer. The production costs are very low here. In spite of that fact, the Danish milk powder at $1400 pro ton was 16 percent cheaper than Indian milk. How was that possible? Quite simple. The European Union pays an export subsidy of $1000 per ton. This cheap stuff was then sold in Punjab, the result being that the bottom fell out of milk and dairy cattle prices there. Thousands of farmers were forced to get out of the dairy business!”

The economic conditions for millions of farmers have been deteriorating for years. They try to defend themselves by protesting for example against the importation of cheap palm oil from Malaysia and Indonesia, which ruins the prices for Indian coconuts. Experts like Devinder Sharma are now warning that the exodus from the land which dumps millions of people into the cities each year could reach catastrophic proportions: “If cheap, subsidized imports flood our markets, that exodus could quintuple. It’s difficult to imagine the social and economic crises which await India down the road.”

A woman against the global ‘players’

With globalization come new technologies, things like genetically engineered, patented seeds. The American firm Monsanto conducted its first experiments in India with genetically engineered cotton last year—with tremendous yields, at least according to a spokesman from Monsanto. Farmer cooperatives and environmentalists, however, claimed that many farmers were complaining about bad harvests. Mention the word “seed patent” and Vandana Shiva’s eyes begin to flash. “I become incensed when people claim that they have invented new life. What an outrage! This is an attack on the diversity of our species. If we did what the agribusiness firms want, our agriculture would be reduced to five or six different crops. In the final analysis this is a crime against justice. The purpose of this political agenda is the enslavement of the farmer! This is how the patent law works: We have a patent, okay? You can’t sow your own seed unless you pay us a fee because the seed belongs to us and us alone. If you don’t go along with that, we will ruin you.”

I was reminded of the case of Percy Schmeiser, the Canadian farmer who got sued by Monsanto because his rapeseed crop had been contaminated by wind-driven genetically manipulated pollen. But the judge saw things differently and Schmeiser was found guilty because patent protected seeds had been found growing in his fields. As a result he had to pay a license fee and fine which amounted to $130,000.

Looking out the window, we can see low hills in the distance, the first signs of the Himalayas. We are now traveling through a dense jungle with mango trees, through which monkeys jump overhead. A railwayman serves tea. Each of us gets a white Styrofoam cup, two teabags, a thermos with hot water as well as packets of milk and sugar. It’s a common occurrence which we don’t really ever think about. But Vandana Shiva takes the tea service as an occasion to talk about the much praised free market. “Since you’ve lived in India for some time, you surely remember how tea used to be served on the train. The waiter used to pour the already brewed and sweetened tea from a large pot into a fired-clay cup. Having enjoyed your tea you could without second thoughts throw the earthen cup out the window. But now look at what we’ve got. Our tea break creates mountains of trash. What insanity! Thousands of village potters have lost their jobs because some clever entrepreneur convinced the railroad bosses that Styrofoam cups are better than clay cups. The same mechanism has been at work in agriculture ever since the Green Revolution. Commercial seed is driving our own native seeds off the market. We can’t allow that to happen!”

In the early ‘90s, Indian public opinion rose against a newly granted patent on the Niem tree. This robust tree is native to India and has been used from time immemorial as a local source of medicine and pesticide. Then all of a sudden the American firm W. Grace received a patent for a Niem extract-based pesticide. Citizen groups and prominent citizens pushed the Indian government to contest the patent in court. Vandana Shiva was on the front lines of this battle. In the end, she, along with the support of Greens in the European parliament, contested the Niem patent before the European patent office and won.

The battle against a rice patent

“After we won the Niem case, we got the news that a Texas firm by the name of Rice-Tech had just applied for a patent for Basmati Rice, the rice for which my home of Dehra Dun is famous. This American firm claimed that it had invented plants that had a certain height, a clearly defined grain size, and a certain aroma. The Americans even wanted to patent how the rice was prepared. My God, one of the first things my mother taught me was how to cook Basmati rice. Research has shown that the aroma isn’t reducible to genetic characteristics. It derives from the interplay of certain environmental conditions in the Himalaya valleys. Basmati rice that is grown in the plains has a completely different aroma. And then along comes this American firm and declares that this rice and this aroma is their invention! We had no other choice but to take up the fight again. I notified the Indian government and filed suit with the Supreme Court and began an international protest campaign by e-mail. I traveled to Texas and found many supporters there. We marched to the headquarters of Rice-Tech and made a big stink. Finally, the US patent office had to revoke the Rice Tech patent.”

I dig a little deeper wanting to know why she gets herself all hot and bothered over American patents that aren’t valid in India. Not yet, answered Vandana Siva, but it’s only a matter of time. India is a member of the World Trade Organization, and it is through their committees that the US government is attempting to force its patent laws on the rest of the world. The instrument to bring that about is the “trade-related intellectual property rights” agreement, passed in 1995, known under the English acronym of TRIPS, which forces the states who have signed it to accept certain standards for the protection of intellectual property. “We are putting pressure on our government to negotiate changes to TRIPS so that American patent law does not go into force in India,” Vandana Shiva explains.

The confrontation over patents for Niem and Basmati, in the course of which Vandana Shiva and her allies have inflicted significant defeats on some of the world’s most powerful corporations, are prominent cases of biopiracy. They are keeping courts, politicians and scientists busy throughout the world. “Let me explain to you why this isn’t fair,” Vandana Shiva continues. “The world developed as a result of the exchange of biological resources. Exchange usually means both giving and taking. When we receive a gift, we feel responsible for it and treat it like something valuable, something that can be handed on to others. Biopirates, however, take the gifts without asking and transform them into their own monopoly. They are trying to transform the custom of gift giving into a money machine for their own exclusive benefit. What’s even worse, the continuation of that custom is considered a criminal activity. The farmer who keeps seed on his farm is stealing intellectual property! This kind of money making is extremely reprehensible.”

Suddenly the door opens with a jerk and a petite lady in her prime appears to embrace Vandana Shiva with open arms. After the two have greeted each other warmly, the lady introduces herself as the filmmaker Mira Diwan. She has just come from filming in Rishikesh. She, in fact, wants to shoot a scene of Vendana Shiva on the train, and as a result our meeting comes to an abrupt end.

A cowshed turns into a research center

After a journey of four hours we reach the station of Dehra Dun. It reminds me of Switzerland. The little waiting room has been built with exposed beams, the air is clear, and the people you meet there are a little bit more reserved than in the capital. Vandana’s brother Kuldip Shiva greets our little group and steers us through the crowds to his Jeep. Soon we are driving leisurely along narrow roads full of potholes. We pass golden fields of grain, a crowded market, evading chickens, dogs, water buffaloes and oxen. In the mist enshrouded distance we catch a glimpse of cliffs and glaciers from the highest mountain range in the world.

Vandana Shiva senses our awe. Beaming with pride and happiness, she tells us, “This is my home. I grew up in this valley. In these mountains I got to know the women of the Chipko Movement, the movement that changed my life. But let’s start from the beginning. After going to school here in Debra Dun, I studied physics and did my dissertation on quantum theory in Canada. The University of Ontario offered me a job, but I wanted to return to India, and so I accepted an invitation to be part of an interdisciplinary research project in Bangalore. It was during one of my visits back home that I came into contact with the Chipko movement. Simple village women organized to save the forests near their villages by simply embracing the trees. These forests were doomed to be felled in the course of clearing more land for agriculture. I supported the women whenever it was possible. Gradually, however, I came to the conclusion that this was no summer vacation job and that I had to make a decision. Eventually I chose to be with these women and my native place instead of Bangalore. I began my own research institute in 1982 in my mother’s cowshed. My research is not carried on in isolation from the lives of my people, but rather firmly rooted in this popular movement and it takes place in an ecological context.”

Shiva’s “Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology” has done trailblazing work. It documented the ecological damage the Green Revolution has brought about and established how eucalyptus plantations promoted by the World Bank deplete ground water resources, it analyzed the GATT free trade agreement. The work of the research foundation provides the basis for Shiva’s numerous books and her articles in alternative magazines.

“Nineteen eighty-four was in many ways a fateful year for me,” Vandana reminisces. “In June of that year the Indian Army stormed the Golden Temple of Amritsar, the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, the most important ethnic group in Punjab. This was the culmination of political extremism which had found fertile soil in the land of the Green Revolution and which ultimately cost the lives of about 30,000 people.

This period was a perplexing one for India because no one could understand why the most prosperous state in India had descended into terrorism. How can a technology like the Green Revolution, for which its inventors had received the Nobel Prize, lead to war? These questions were too serious to ignore.”

The Green Revolution, according to Vandana Shiva, had shaken traditional social relations to their foundation and at the same time increased social polarization. Economic conflicts were made out to be religious ones by politicians. The Sikh religious community became radicalized and began demanding its own state. Young Sikhs engaged in armed insurrection against the federal government. In June of 1984 the Indian army stormed the Golden Temple in Amritsar, where the leaders of the fundamentalists had barricaded themselves. The Temple was half destroyed in the ensuing battle and several thousand people died.

In the same year the south of India was suffering from drought. But the rainfall was completely normal. Upon closer analysis, Vandana Shiva discovered that the real problem was the seed. Drought resistant crops like millet had been replaced by drought sensitive crops like rice and sugarcane.

The Bhopal gas catastrophe

And then on December 3, there was the gas catastrophe of Bhopal. Three thousand people died that night. As a result of the toxic gas 30,000 people have died until today, roughly the same number as the victims of the insurgency in Punjab. For Vandana Shiva it was a bitter experience:” That means that 60,000 people died as a result of a technology that was supposed to bring development and social peace to our planet.”

She began to look into the matter more closely. “Why are farmers being killed by chemicals? It wasn’t difficult to figure out that these are weapons of mass destruction, which were developed to kill and were let loose on the agricultural sector after the war. Bhopal was no accident; it was part of a war! Sometimes, as in the case of Bhopal, the victims are visible, because the disaster was so concentrated. But this tragedy takes place on a daily basis everywhere where farmers are harmed by handling poison in their fields. Each one of us is affected on a daily basis by what we eat, because there is no such thing as food without poison in India today.”

That year Vandana Shiva decided to concentrate her efforts on agricultural development and work for the creation of a chemical free, bio-organic agriculture. Her slogan was “No more Bhopals; plant Niem trees.” A few years later the GATT free trade agreement was ratified. Vandana Shiva then turned to mobilize the international community with protests against world-wide agribusiness and seed patents. Back home in Debra Dun she created an organization ‘Navdanya’ (nine seeds) to preserve traditional seed grain from extinction.

“Navdanya was my response to the world-wide free trade agreement, to the World Trade Organization and to the monopoly on seeds. Navdanya stands for constructive resistance. Constructive because Navdanya promotes alternative measures like the preservation of seeds and the promotion of organic farming. Resistance because each farmer who becomes a member of Navdanya has to take the following oath: I view this seed, which I have received from Mother Earth and which our forefathers have inherited, as a gift which I must preserve for coming generations. I proclaim myself as part of the tradition of sharing, through which these seeds have been passed on to me for my safekeeping. I swear never to accept laws which criminalize the preservation and exchange of seeds!

A fiery speech in Berlin and boisterous applause

September 1988 in West-Berlin. The Auditorium Maximum of the Free University is packed with people wearing jeans and leather jackets, Indian ponchos, African dashikis and Asian sarongs. The annual meeting of the World Bank in the still divided city provides the occasion for this assembly of protest movements from all over the world. A sari-clad young lady emerges from the crowd and walks to the microphone, where she announces: “I am nature. I give life. Without me the earth would be dead. But I am repeatedly molested in the name of Progress and Prosperity.” Gigantic dams strangle rivers, the speaker continues. Fields, animals and people are being poisoned with chemicals. Her speech unleashes enthusiastic applause—proof enough that this congenial Indian has touched the hearts of her audience. Her name: Vandana Shiva.

“Berlin was the World Bank’s Seattle. Berlin shoved the World Bank into the spotlight of world publicity. It was the first time that people and movements from the entire world, who had never met before, came together. People who had been engaging in resistance to the World Bank in all parts of the world discovered their common ground. From this emerged a creative, global community. What touched me the most was a spontaneous demonstration of around 80,000 people, many of whom were ordinary Germans. That was the nucleus of the Anti-Globalization Movement, even though the term Globalization hadn’t been invented yet.”

After about an hour’s ride, we turn off of the road and reach by way of an unpaved farm track the Navdanya Farm, one of the most significant centers of organic agriculture in India. The staff hurries back and forth greeting their boss with the traditional Namaste and a slight bow. Vandana Shiva gives some instructions and invites us to a late lunch at the cafeteria. There we find traditional Indian dishes ready for us—big plates with high sides, little bowls, cups for drinking—which we fill with brown rice, lentil curry, several types of vegetables and side dishes like “chapatti” bread, yogurt and mango pickles. We enjoy a wholesome vegetarian meal, based on the principles of the ancient Indian medicinal lore of Ayurveda.

Vandana Shiva invites us to a tour of her farm, where hundreds of different plant species are grown—grains, peas and beans, vegetables, medicinal herbs, ground cover and legumes. Earthworms nibble away at windfall fruit, animal manure and other biomass transforming them into natural fertilizer. Cattle urine and the bitter oil of the Niem tree keep pests under control. Shiva repudiates specifically the “industrial” organic farmers in the west who buy biological fertilizer and pesticides from big companies. Her farm functions according to natural cycles and produces everything it uses itself. In contrast to conventional wisdom, organic farming is very profitable: “According to our reckoning, a local farmer who switches over to organic farming can triple his income. His production costs sink drastically because he doesn’t have to buy chemicals. The productivity of his farm increases if you take into account not just yield per acre but all of the other products including fertilizer and biomass which he produces. The yield per acre may be higher on monoculture farms but the total yield on organic farms is higher.” Shiva holds state subsidies for chemicals and electricity, which distort the market, responsible for the fact that organic farming often appears to be less productive than conventional agriculture.

We finally come to a house built in the vernacular style with dried mud walls, in front of which are displayed sacks full of red chili peppers, yellow lentils and golden yellow wheat bathed in sunlight. “This is where we keep our seed bank,” our hostess explains. “It now contains 700 different types of seed including 250 different strains of rice. In addition to that, we are cooperating with 20 similar organizations throughout India. If you look closely you can see that an artist from the south has decorated the mud walls with traditional motifs from the indigenous Warli people.” We look around: between plantlike ornamentation and stylized figures there are closets and trunks full of bags and baskets, all of them with neat white labels on them. In one corner jute sacks filled to bursting are stacked against the wall. This is Vandana Shiva’s treasury!

Taking liberation into one’s own hands

Navdanya promotes organic farming in three ways. In addition to the seed bank, which gathers and lends native strains, the institute trains farmers in organic farming. Finally, the institute also helps several hundred members in marketing their products. Navdanya sells organic food at its own store at the popular crafts market “Delhi Haat” in New Delhi. The Navdanya office in the capital has organized a distribution service for fresh organic vegetables from the Himalayas. Producers and consumers are united as members of Navdanya, a co-operative in the best sense of the term.

“We take our cue from Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian struggle for independence against colonial rule,” Vandana Shiva continues. “Gandhi didn’t just carry banners and complain about the British Empire. He introduced concrete measures to liberate people, for instance by revitalizing the tradition of domestic spinning so that people realized that they no longer needed to wear foreign clothing. They developed pride in their own products, things like the hand-woven Khadi, and boycotted foreign fabrics. And, lo and behold, the mighty colonial empire began to collapse beneath the independent will of the Indian people. Today organic farming and self determination are our spinning wheels! We use them to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of multinational agribusiness.”

We return to the main building through yellow rapeseed fields. Even from far away my eyes are drawn to a round building with no walls under whose roof a group of around two dozen farmers sit and listen to a lecture. In response to my question, Vandana Shiva explains that they have started a college here which offers courses on organic farming on a regular basis. Today, a group of farmers, including visitors from Africa and the United States, is being introduced into earthworm-assisted techniques of composting.

A more satisfying life

Vandana Shiva calls her third project “Bijaa Vidyapeeth” (seed college). Following the example of Schumacher College in England, under the direction of her friend Satish Kumar, she wants to help bring about social renewal. “Society needs a new orientation, so that it can rediscover the basis of a meaningful life. Today everything is ordered to making money, not ordered to how human beings can live a peaceful, holistic and more satisfying life. That’s what we all hunger for.” The courses at the college cover practical activities in both agriculture and forestry. Internationally known scientists and activists give guest lectures there. “In this way, the college attempts to lead people closer to the realities of life and to transmit a new world citizen consciousness, based on ecology, justice, and peace.”

Evening is setting in. The sun moves down slowly behind the mountains. “If you place bets in the stock market every day and are able to leverage a hundred dollar bill into a million dollars, then you seriously begin to believe that growth is a function of the global casino. If you work on a farm, however, then you know that growth only comes as the result of hard work, from the power of the seed, and from fertile soil and irrigation. You recognize at the same time, that there are limits to growth and so don’t fall prey to the illusion that there is such a thing as limitless growth. According to the traditional division of labor in Indian society, women took responsibility for life, while the men were shunted into positions inimical to life, to plantations, to the mines and the stock market. That led to the fact that women have taken over the leadership roles in most ecological movements. It’s not that they are biologically determined to do this; they do it because their social and political marginalization has given them an advantage. Women think differently. They treat the forests and the tree and the seed and the river differently than the greedy entrepreneur, who can only perceive dams and canals. These women have to walk ten miles to get drinking water. They are the ones who bear the brunt of the burden when the environment is destroyed. As a result women are on the front lines in many ecological struggles, whether it’s the Chipko movement or the struggle over water rights or the battle against commercial lobster farming on the coast. Who is still demonstrating for the rights of victims 19 years after Bhopal? Women!”

Vandana Shiva walks me back to the car. I put the last question about her personal life. “There is not much to talk about,” the single mother says without hesitation. “I’m trying to divide my time between three different projects like Navdanya, the national campaign work, and the international activities. As a result there is no time left for me personally. I’m not really sad about that because everything that I do in the public sphere is also private! When I turn 60 and reach the point where farmers can look after their own seeds, then I’ll devote myself once again to quantum physics.”

The article has been specially translated by Current Concerns for this issue with the approval of the author Rainer Hoerig, who we would like to thank for his help.

Recommended books:

– Shiva, Vandana: Biopiracy, Green Books

– Shiva, Vandana: Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, Zed Books

– Shiva, Vandana: Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity & Biotechnology, Zed Books

– Shiva, Vandana: Ecofeminism, Zed Books

The author:

The German journalist Rainer Hoerig, 47, has an Indian wife and lives in Pune, near Bombay. He has lived in India for 15 years. He has travelled widely in India and has produced contributions for German radio (e.g. ARD), newspapers (e.g. Frankfurter Rundschau) and magazines (GEO). www.rainerhoerig.com