Sawt Falasteen - Grief and nostalgia in India's 'Jimmy Carter village'

Carterpuri, or the "village of Carter" was abruptly renamed from Daulatpur Nasirabad after an hour-long visit by the Nobel laureate in 1978.

The renaming was suggested by India's then-prime minister Morarji Desai who accompanied Carter on the visit to the small hamlet, some 30 kilometres (20 miles) from New Delhi.

"When the proposal was mooted, all the village elders immediately said yes," recalled 71-year-old resident Attar Singh, who vividly remembers the January afternoon from nearly half a century ago.

One of the last surviving members from the generation old enough to remember the occasion, Singh said he was "distressed" by Carter's death last month, and played a key role in staging a small tribute ceremony.

A picture of the former president was quickly downloaded from the internet, framed, garlanded and placed at a local war memorial where a group of village elders made offerings of salty porridge and a newly stitched traditional turban.

Singh said the porridge and the turban, along with a condolence message, were then shipped to the US Embassy.

"The entire village grieved because we considered him as one of our own," said Rajiv Kumar, a younger resident who was a toddler when Carter visited.

The body of Carter, who died at the age of 100 last month, is currently lying in state in Washington and will be buried Thursday in his home state of Georgia.

- 'Such a big man' -

Carter's visit to the village, then home to less than 500 people, was not by chance.

He was driven by a deeply personal mission: his mother Lillian had worked in the village as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1960s.

The dilapidated mansion where Lillian stayed during her time there no longer exists. It was torn down around 15 years ago to make way for a concrete two-storey structure with a line of tiny shops on its ground floor.

Little else from that era survives in Carterpuri, which now has a population of roughly 5,000.

The village council office where Carter and his wife Eleanor Rosalynn Carter were feted while bedecked in traditional headgear, is now a community health centre.

Nonetheless, Carter's visit remains firmly imprinted in the memory of Carterpuri's old-timers.

"I was a little boy then but I remember everything," said 62-year-old Motiram, who goes by one name.

His recollections include Carter smoking tobacco from a hookah and waving at the eager children who looked from the rooftops as he took a tour of the village.

But Motiram's nostalgia is tinted with disillusionment.

"Despite such a lofty name, our village has seen no progress in all these years," he said.

"If they named our village after such a big man, there should have been some work done to justify it."

H.Nasr--SF-PST