Word: nadu
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...toddy tappers of Tamil Nadu triumphed last week after 23 years of temperance. Toddy is a potent and pungent Indian drink fermented from palm sap, traditionally collected by tappers who scamper daily to treetops to retrieve earthenware pots filled with sap tapped from the trees. But toddy tapping became a near-forgotten craft after 1948, when Tamil Nadu responded to a plea by Mohandas Gandhi to save Indians-and their pay envelopes -from toddy...
Last week Tamil Nadu suspended prohibition, and toddy shops were licensed to brew the potion again. But after so long a time, they could round up few able tappers. Those who remained took advantage of the situation, demanding, and getting, daily wage increases of from 41? to $1.33. They also received such unheard-of fringe benefits as salary advances, insurance, medical care, brick houses to live in instead of mud and straw huts, and profit sharing...
...result, canvassers from every Indian party have been venturing into the country's 565,000 small hamlets and villages in hopes of tapping the Untouchable vote. In West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the Communists have made considerable headway with promises of liberal land handouts. Indira has a trump card of her own: the exception to the image of the hopeless harijan, Food and Agriculture Minister Jag-jivan Ram, an old Gandhi and Untouchable leader who last December became Indira's party president...
Untouchables are regular victims of brutality. In remote villages, "uppity" harijan women are sometimes paraded nude through the streets and then raped. A scuffle between an Untouchable laborer and some caste Hindus in Tamil Nadu State on Christmas Day in 1968 led to an arson attack on an Untouchable ghetto: 42 men, women and children were burned alive...