Madurai, India
Lakshmi Sundar
Whose Wells
Lakshmi traced the history of eleven village wells and who has the right to draw from them.
A well tells you who was allowed to drink, and who had to walk.
Lakshmi Sundar
The summer
Lakshmi Sundar grew up hearing that nobody could say who owned the wells around Madurai, only who was allowed to use them. She wanted to find out whether the paper trail agreed with what the elders said, and she chose eleven wells in villages within a day’s travel of the city.
She visited each well on foot, spoke to the oldest person who would talk to her, and copied the revenue records for it from the district office. The clerks were polite and slow. Some files took three visits to be found, and one had been water-stained so badly she read it by holding it up to a window.
By week eight she could show that three of the wells had changed hands twice since 1950 without anyone in the village being told. In one case the transfer was recorded under a name that no one in the village recognised. Her mentor, a retired land surveyor, told her to stop hunting for the villain and to write down what the records said and nothing else.
That advice shaped the report. She wrote the findings up in plain language, in short sections, with a table for each well showing who held it in 1950, 1975 and 2000. She also left blank cells where the records were missing, rather than guessing.
She read the findings aloud at a meeting in the first of the villages, to about sixty people sitting on a temple porch. Whose Wells is on the fellows page, with a copy of each table, and the village keeps a printed set in its meeting room.
