A Curious Village

Do you sometimes feel like riding a buffalo, milking a cow or pelting stones at mangoes?

A young buffalo leaps into the backwaters of Ulhas river. Squealing children and adults watch. A moment later, a child leaps on to its back and sits astride, clutching at the bare skin on the buffalo’s neck. On a cue by its handler, the buffalo walks into deeper waters. Five minutes later, it shakes the child off its back. Soon, an adult clambers on. A few hundred metres away, a group of adults have shed their inhibitions and are pelting stones at fruits dangling from tall trees. Every hit gets a round of applause. They all share the booty. Somewhere else, grown-ups are swinging high in the air from crudely-made swings. Welcome to Saguna Baug, a place that will pretend to be a village so that you can experience a rustic life before returning to the city. You can even milk a cow or a buffalo at half past five in the morning or at around seven in the evening. It is not as easy as it seems, though.

“City people are not used to silence even in their homes. I want to give them just that,” says the architect of this farm, Chandrashekhar Bhadsavle. Bhadsavle developed his 55-acre irrigated farm into a rustic holiday locale “to wean urbanites from the rigours of city living and introduce them to the pleasures of simple living in a rural setting”. The farm lies in a green valley at the foothills of the Sahayadri mountain ranges near Neral, about 150 km away from Mumbai.

Farida Shabir Mun has visited Saguna Baug four times. A resident of Marol, in suburban Mumbai, she drives down for a day trip with her children and friends. They rent a cottage for the day. “This place is popular with the Bohris as the Tilapia fish is available here. This fish fits all the stipulations laid down in our holy scriptures. We eat only live fish with scales on their bodies but not whiskers. Once the fish is caught, we have to touch it and say a short prayer before it is killed. A lot of Bohris, including those who come down to Mumbai from abroad, drive down here to eat this fish,” says Farida.
The only claim to modernity here is the Western-style toilet and hot water geysers. With no TV, music systems and newspapers, one has to fall back on conversation. With nothing else to do, you will go on walks along a roughly-hewn mud path, take in the heady scents of the night and the tinkling of wind chimes tied to trees.

Saguna Baug follows a no-alcohol policy. Cold beverages, too, are not available as it takes too much power to keep a refrigerator going. But you’ll realise, you don’t miss the things that you thought you would.

Bhadsavle quit a lucrative job in the US and returned to India to set up his dream project. He has also set up a cooperative venture with 20 other farmers to start an agri-tourism movement in Maharashtra. The idea is to give the village to city dwellers.

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