Son Lal

---

Tan Dan's chelana 1948-2014

Chelana was Tan Dan’s native village in Rajasthan, northwestern India and money is the theme of the third volume of the book Tan Dan's Chelana. A book which describes how the farmer Tan Dan experienced changes in his social environment during the period 1948 to 2014. Volume Three focus on the financial changes in the Chelana area after the introduction of mechanical irrigation in deep wells. The start of cooperative societies and rural banks resulted in overspending and debts for the inexperienced waterlord farmers. The book shows how they tried to cope with these for them unexpected problems. The support of cooperative societies for social upliftment was as important to Tan Dan as it was to his friend Binj Nath, the landlord farmer shown on the front cover. In this volume there are anecdotes about Binj Nath’s dramatic life experience and the ups and downs of Tan Dan’s relatives, when they tried to finance the expanding activities of their big waterlord farm. Their relation to new rural banks and old moneylenders would have been better, if they had been less optimistic in their loan repayment plans. Tan Dan argued that the professional moneylenders got a too large share of the wealth produced on the Chelana waterlord farms. Some village Baniyas also earned money by taking care of savings of shepherds migrating to other regions a part of the year. Although poor villagers had been badly exploited by moneylenders for generations, the attitude of poor villagers to the business class was more positive than might be expected. That was Tan Dan’s feelings after getting scoldings from many villagers for supporting the tax department in a raid for finding hidden wealth at some merchant homes.