Troubled Tribal: Sid Harth

[Sid Harth]

Volume 18 - Issue 21, Oct. 13 - 26, 2001
India's National Magazine
from the publishers of THE HINDU

The Adivasi struggle

The long-running struggle of the Adivasis in Kerala enters a crucial
phase as the State government resists their main demand of two
hectares of land for each landless tribal family.

R. KRISHNAKUMAR
in Thiruvananthapuram

ONCE again, the Adivasis of Kerala are at a crossroads. These tribal
people have become more assertive about their rights and the nature of
their demands has undergone a subtle transformation. They are now more
aware of the law and the ways of the non-tribal people, politicians,
governments and the courts. They have media-savvy leaders, invisible
'friends', and funds to sustain high-profile agitations in the State
capital. They are increasingly intolerant of hollow promises and they
threaten to storm the State Assembly and camp on the streets of
Thiruvananthapuram permanently. At times they disrupt public
festivities, walk out of meetings with government representatives or
take District Collectors hostage. They have definitely become prime-
time news material. But the question is, will they fail again?

The year 1975 once seemed a crucial one for the marginalised tribal
people of the State. Although they did not have a powerful presence in
the State, their plight had struck a chord and they had found
themselves being offered the protection of a law that promised to end
exploitation by non-tribal settlers and forest encroachers, and lack
of livelihoods.

In April 1975, the State Assembly unanimously adopted the Kerala
Scheduled Tribes (Restriction on Transfer of Lands and Restoration of
Alienated Lands) Act, which sought to prevent the lands of the tribal
people from falling into the hands of non-tribal people. The Act also
sought to restore to the tribal people their previously alienated
lands.

K.G. SANTHOSH
"Refugee camps" run by agitating tribal people outside the State
Secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram.

The tribal people were once in possession of large tracts of forests
in the State, especially in areas that are now in Palakkad, Wayanad,
Idukki, Pathanam-thitta, Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram districts. To a
large extent, post-Independence governments were responsible for the
Adivasis losing their lands. Non-tribal settlers made their plight
worse as the pressure on land increased in the plains. The land-people
ratio is very high in the State.

In the majority of cases, the ignorance and innocence of the Adivasis
were used to the hilt by the non-tribal settler "farmers". Either by
using force or inducements such as a bundle of tobacco, or by offering
a low price, they made the Adivasis part with their "ancestral land".
In most cases there was no document validating such transfers and some
tribal persons were even forced to sign on blank sheets of paper. The
non-tribal people who got possession of the lands gradually became the
virtual owners.

Over the years, alienation from their land of birth pushed the
Adivasis into poverty and dependence and forced them to search for
other forest land for food and shelter. However, the same process was
repeated in the new stretches of forest land, and these too became the
farmlands of non-tribal settlers. Political parties and successive
governments turned a blind eye to the process, as more settlers meant
more votes. (The Adivasis, who number 3.21 lakhs, account for only 1.1
per cent of the population of the State.) The social and ecological
implications of this were serious.

When the 1975 Act got the presidential assent in November that year
and was subsequently included in the Ninth Schedule of the
Constitution (which ensured that the Act would not be challenged in
any court of law), it seemed a dream come true for the Adivasis. But
it was not to be. Successive governments allowed more than a decade to
pass (during which the encroachments continued, especially in the
tribal areas of Palakkad and Wayanad districts) before framing the
rules to implement the Act. When the State government finally
formulated the rules in 1986, it specified that the Act would come
into effect retrospectively from January 1, 1982.

The rules made all transfer of property "possessed, enjoyed or owned"
by Adivasis to non-tribal people between January 1, 1960 and January
1, 1982 "invalid" and directed that the "possession or enjoyment" of
property so transferred be restored to the Adivasis concerned.
However, the Act required that the Adivasi return the amount, if any,
they had received during the original transaction and pay compensation
for any improvements made on the land by the non-tribal occupants. The
government was to advance this amount to the tribal people as loans
and recover it from them in 20 years. Only about 8,500 applications
seeking restoration were received from the tribal people, because most
of them were either unaware of the new law or afraid to accept the
offer of loans or were cheated by the corrupt encroacher-official
nexus. Hence, even after the framing of the rules, the general
atmosphere helped only to encourage the encroachers to continue to
occupy tribal land and successive governments took no action to
implement fully the 1975 Act.

THIS triggered the second important phase of the Adivasi struggle. In
1986, Dr. Nalla Thampi Thera, a non-tribal person from Wayanad
district, approached the Kerala High Court seeking a direction to the
State government to implement the 1975 Act. It took five years for the
court to give a verdict - a favourable one - on the public interest
petition. In October 1993, the court ordered the government to
implement the Act within six months. Yet the case dragged on for two
and a half years with the government continuing to seek extensions of
deadline to implement the Act.

S. GOPAKUMAR
The Adivasi Gothra Mahasabha take out a rally in Thiruvananthapuram
on October 3.

Finally, in 1996 the court fixed a final deadline of September 30,
1996 to evict the non-tribal occupants, if necessary with the help of
the police, and threatened the officials concerned with contempt of
court proceedings if they failed to implement the court directive.
However, the government responded with yet another controversial act
of amending the 1975 Act.

Meanwhile as the non-tribal settlers where getting entrenched in the
alienated land of the tribal people, the tribal people themselves were
getting increasingly disillusioned with the ability of the government
and the courts to find a remedy for their plight. Hence, although
government programmes had helped improve the lot of many tribal
people, the majority of them continued to be landless, had no means of
livelihood, and became more dependent on the non-tribal settlers for
work and wages.

As a large section of the landless tribal people had not filed
applications and were hence outside the purview of the 1975 Act, they
were ineligible for a piece of land even if the Act was implemented in
toto. By the early 1990s, the first signs of discontent were already
becoming evident in the Adivasi-inhabited areas, especially in Wayanad
district, where some extremist groups had been active for a long
time.

On the other hand, most of the land from which the settlers were to be
evicted under the 1975 Act had by the 1990s been in their possession
for 15 to 30 years. They were cultivating the land and had constructed
buildings and other structures on them. In several cases, the next
generation of the original encroachers were in possession of the
lands. When the State government could get no more extensions of the
deadline from the High Court, the politically and economically
powerful settler-farmers activated their organisations and raised the
demand to amend the "impractical provisions" of the 1975 Act.

To the consternation of the tribal people, successive governments
started to give in to the demands of the settlers. Two ordinances
seeking to amend the 1975 Act, introduced by the United Democratic
Front government during early 1996 and later by the Left Democratic
Front government, which came to power in May 1996, did not get the
Governor's approval. As pressure from the court mounted on the
government to evict encroachers by September 30, 1996, the government
hastily introduced an amendment Bill in the State Assembly.

Whatever may have been the justification for it - the impracticality
of the provisions of the 1975 Act perhaps being the most important one
- it must have been an eye-opener for the mushrooming tribal
organisations in Kerala to see the 140-member State Assembly pass the
Kerala Scheduled Tribes (Restriction on Transfer of Land and
Restoration of Alienated Lands) Amendment Bill, 1996 almost
unanimously (there was only one dissenting vote).

The 1996 Amendment Bill dashed all hopes of the Adivasis. Most
important, it made legal all transactions of tribal land up to January
24, 1986. In other words, the government made the need for the
restoration of alienated land (as per the 1975 Act) unnecessary.
According to the government, it was the only practical alternative,
given the turmoil and the political repercussions that would have been
created had it tried to evict the non-tribal settlers. However, the
tribal people felt that the government was trying to give legal
sanctity to the alienation of their land. The agitation in front of
the State Assembly, with the Adivasis, led by their leader from
Wayanad C.K. Janu, trying to enter the State legislature, supported by
a group of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) volunteers, was
perhaps an early indication of the gradual transformation of the
agitation.

This was soon followed by one of the best known incidents in the
struggle. On October 4, 1996, a so-far unknown extremist group named
"Ayyankali Pada" (named after a Dalit leader from Kerala), stormed the
Palakkad Collectorate and held Collector W.R. Reddy hostage for over
nine hours. The incident invited a strong response from the government
against growing signs of radicalism among Adivasis and also in a way
prevented the agitation from taking a turn for the worse. Later, the
President refused to give assent to the 1996 Amendment Bill passed by
the State Assembly on the grounds that the 1975 Act had been included
in the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution.

However, to bypass this difficulty, yet another Bill was passed
unanimously by the State Assembly in 1999. The Kerala Restriction on
Transfer by and Restoration of Lands to Scheduled Tribes Bill, 1999,
defined "land" as "agricultural land" (a State subject) in order to
try and get over the need to send it for presidential assent. The new
Bill also had a controversial provision to repeal the 1975 Act.

As per the 1999 Act, only alienated land in excess of two hectares
possessed by encroachers would be restored, while alternative land, in
lieu of the alienated land not exceeding two hectares, would be given
elsewhere. The thinking was that the number of applicants claiming
land in excess of two hectares would be negligible, making restoration
unnecessary. The new Bill also had a provision to provide up to 40
acres (16 hectares) to other landless tribal people - a new set of
beneficiaries - within two years. The government said that it
estimated that there were about 11,000 such families in the State.

However, the High Court rejected both the 1996 and 1999 Amendment
Bills and declared the provisions under them illegal. The State
government, in turn, went on appeal to the Supreme Court and obtained
stay orders. Several appeals against the stay orders are pending
before the Supreme Court.

It was in this context that starvation deaths were reported from the
Adivasi-inhabited areas in the State from July 2001. The outside world
came to know about it only after a group of tribal people, supported
by some naxalite groups, waylaid a mobile store run by the State
Department of Civil Supplies and took away its contents. They
distributed the foodstuffs and encouraged the tribal people who
gathered there to take home the rest of it.

On August 30, Adivasi agitators led by Janu pitched their tents
outside the Chief Minister's official residence in Thiruvananthapuram.
They were organised under the banner of the "Adivasi Dalit Action
Council", which now claims to have the support of all Adivasis in the
State. Despite two rounds of discussions with the government, the
tribal people refused to withdraw their agitation, which was more than
a month old at the time of writing.

The main demand of the Adivasis was five acres (2 ha) each to all
landless tribal families in the State. Although the government's offer
to prepare a master plan for the tribal people was welcomed by the
agitating Adivasis, they refused to withdraw the agitation until their
demand for land was met. The tribal people have lost their faith in
promises and court cases. They were sure that running after alienated
land was a futile exercise which, even if it succeeded in the long
run, would benefit only a few among them.

HOWEVER, some disturbing trends have emerged in the course of the
struggle. The Adavasi-inhabited areas have become breeding grounds for
extremist organisations espousing the tribal cause and swearing to
empower the tribal people in order to fight for their rights. There
have been sporadic incidents of violence since 1992, when such groups
encouraged the Adivasis to take the law into their own hands and
forcibly occupy government land. Since the 1990s the activities of
Hindu chauvinist organisations, Christian missionaries and voluntary
agencies, often funded from abroad, have also increased in the tribal
areas. The past decade saw the disillusioned tribal people move
tantalisingly close to extremism and communalism. Such proclivities
would certainly undermine their genuine struggle.

Yet, for the present, the most significant factor is the shifting
focus of the demands raised by the Adivasi leaders who are in the
limelight. They are no longer asking for alienated land, at least not
as emphatically as they used to in the past. Instead they demand
mainly five acres of other land each for all landless tribal families.
Another demand is the inclusion of tribal areas in the Sixth Schedule
of the Constitution in order to make them autonomous regions.

The fact that they were able to sustain their agitation by putting up
shacks outside the Secretariat, along the State capital's arterial
road, and pitching tents on the road to the Chief Minister's official
residence for more than a month itself took Kerala by surprise. Over
150 tribal families were in these camps, where food and even
facilities to continue school education of the children were being
provided by the organisers. A grand council of elders and other
leaders representing the 30-odd tribes in the State was formed under
the umbrella of the Adivasi Dalit Action Council. As a show of
strength and as part of an attempt to evolve a consensus regarding
their demands among the various tribes and organisations, it organised
an 'Adivasi Gothra Sabha' ('Adivasi Parliament') in Thiruvananthapuram
on October 3. As the government announced that it would not allow the
tribal people to establish camps permanently before the Secretariat,
Action Committee chairperson Janu declared that she was going on a
"fast unto death" before the Secretariat.

While Chief Minister A.K. Antony claimed that his government was more
sympathetic to the tribal people's cause than the previous government,
other leaders of the ruling coalition said there were vested interests
behind the agitation. There are also allegations that organisations
and political parties more sympathetic to the interests of the settler
farmers are now supporting the tribal people in order to prevent them
from demanding the restoration of alienated land, especially when the
legality of the amendments striking down the 1975 Act is coming up as
an issue before the Supreme Court.

But as Janu told Frontline, Kerala's Adivasis are not fighting the
settler farmers any longer. However, the question whether there are
vested interests behind the Adivasi agitation is overshadowed by
another one - whether the shift in demand will genuinely help the
tribal people's cause.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1821/18210490.htm

Volume 18 - Issue 22, Oct. 27 - Nov. 09, 2001
India's National Magazine
from the publishers of THE HINDU

Promise of land

Kerala's Adivasi Dalit Action Council ends its struggle over land and
livelihood issues following an agreement with the State government.

R. KRISHNAKUMAR
in Thiruvananthapuram

THE 48-day-old agitation over land and livelihood issues undertaken
for the tribal people in Kerala ended on October 16 following a seven-
point agreement between the State government and the Adivasi Dalit
Action Council. The Adivasi "refugee camps" erected by the agitating
tribal people outside the State Secretariat and the Chief Minister's
official residence in Thiru-vananthapuram and in the district
headquarters were dismantled soon afterwards. There was jubilation in
the streets, and praise for C.K. Janu, chairperson of the Action
Council, who led the agitation.

This is what the Adivasi agitation has seemingly achieved for the 3.2
lakh tribal people:

S. GOPAKUMAR
Jubilant Adivasi agitators carry C.K. Janu, chairperson of the
Adivasi Dalit Action Council, in Thiruvananthapuram.

* "Wherever possible", the government is to provide five acres (two
hectares) of land to each landless Adivasi family; at other places,
the offer is a minimum of one acre, which can go up to five acres,
"depending on the availability of land";

* A five-year livelihood programme is to be implemented in the land
thus provided until it becomes fully productive for Adivasis to
sustain themselves;

* The State is to enact a law to ensure that the land provided to
Adivasis is not alienated as had happened in the past;

* The State Cabinet is soon to pass a resolution asking the Union
government to declare the Adivasi areas in the State as scheduled
areas, bringing them under Schedule V of the Constitution;

* The government also gave a commitment that it will abide by whatever
decision the Supreme Court takes on its appeal against the Kerala High
Court order quashing the unpopular law (the Kerala Restriction on
Transfer by and Restoration of Lands to Scheduled Tribes Bill, 1999)
passed by the State Assembly in 1999;

* The government is to implement a master plan for tribal development
and the plan is to be prepared with the participation of Adivasis;

* The maximum possible extent of land will be found and distributed in
Wayanad district - at least 10,000 acres - where there is the largest
concentration of landless Adivasis.

The agitators' demand that all landless Adivasi families must be given
five acres each has not been conceded. Chief Minister A.K. Antony told
Frontline it was impossible for any government to agree to such a
demand in a State where there was so much pressure on land. But the
government had readily agreed to provide at least one acre during its
earlier round of discussions with leaders of the Action Council and
other tribal organisations (Frontline, October 26).

In effect, this is what the Action Council accepted eventually.

This does not mean that the agitation was a failure. For the first
time, landless Adivasis in Kerala have got a firm commitment from the
government on at least one acre of land. They are also to get the
protection of a new law preventing any further alienation of their
land. In Janu's own Wayanad district, the government is to make an
extra effort to find more land for Adivasis.

Perhaps the most important fallout of the latest agitation is that
both the government and the Action Council leaders have succeeded in
shifting the focus of the nearly 50-year-old tribal struggle in Kerala
from the issue of "restoration of alienated land" to one of "land for
the landless tribal people".

In short, whether Adivasis are any better off as a result of the
agitation will be known only in January 2002, when the government, as
per its promise, has to start distributing the land. The
identification of the beneficiaries would prove a major hurdle in the
interim period.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1822/18220420.htm

Opinion - News Analysis

Behind the Adivasi unrest in Assam
M.S. Prabhakara

The Adivasis’ fight is not so much for their recognition as a tribal
community as for the restoration of the tribal identity to which they
believe they are entitled.

— Photo: Ritu Raj Konwar

Vigilantist retaliation: Local residents of Dispur and Beltola beat up
Adivasi protesters in Guwahati on November 24.

The continuing violence in Assam over the last few days, in particular
the wanton vandalism and the crude and vigilantist retaliation that
took place in and around Dispur in Guwahati on November 24, has
rightly attracted wide and critical notice. However, any exclusive
concern with the violent events of that Saturday, in particular the
voyeuristic focus by the visual media on the shameful attack on the
person and personal dignity of a young woman by the mob that has been
unreservedly condemned by the people of the State, may obscure the
real issues: the demand of the Adivasis for classification as a
Scheduled Tribe, and the complex factors that inform the resistance to
that and similar demands.

The Adivasi, a nomenclature now adopted by the approximately 20
million strong Tea Garden Labour and ex-Tea Garden Labour community,
is not the only community in Assam seeking classification as a
Scheduled Tribe. Five other communities (the Tai-Ahom, the Moran, the
Motok, the Chutia and the Koch-Rajbongshi), all presently classified
as Other Backward Classes (OBC), have also for long been pressing for
recognition as Scheduled Tribes. The first four live predominantly in
the districts of Upper Assam while the Koch-Rajbongshi live
predominantly in western Assam, sharing broadly the same physical (and
political) space as the Bodos, the most numerous of the tribal
communities of the State. The Adivasis are, for the most part, settled
in the vicinity of the tea gardens.

Contrary to the general impression, the clashes do not bespeak any
deeply ingrained hostility between ‘tribal people and non-tribal
people,’ or between the tribal people and caste Hindus, in Assam — a
convenient distinction between supposedly irreconcilable categories
made in much of the analysis of the so-called ethnic clashes in Assam
and the north-eastern region. The Adivasis, though aspiring for
recognition as a tribal community and indeed historically belonging to
authentic tribal stock, are at present not recognised as a tribal
community. It is only in popular usage that they are referred to as
Tea Garden Tribes and ex-Tea Garden Tribes. Strictly speaking, their
fight is not so much for their recognition as a tribal community as
for the restoration of that tribal identity to which they believe they
are entitled, being the descendants of various tribal communities of
Central India who, over a century-and-a-half ago, went or were
indentured to work in the gardens of eastern India. What they are
fighting for is therefore the restoration of their legitimate cultural
patrimony.

Why and how did the descendants of the tribal people whose ancestors
were brought to Assam from other parts of India cease to be tribal
people in their present environment? The answer lies in the peculiar
rules that determine such recognition, according to which a person’s
tribal identity is irrevocably and forever linked to her or his place
of origin — in the present instance, the persons’ ancestral origins.
For instance, the progeny of a Munda, a recognised tribal community in
Jharkhand and other contiguous States, one of the 96 communities
listed under the category, Tea Garden Labourers, Tea Garden Tribes, Ex-
Tea Garden Labourers and Ex-Tea Garden Tribes in the official ‘Central
List of Backward Classes, Assam,’ who was taken to Assam to work in
the tea gardens over a century-and-a-half ago has lost his tribal
identity, though were such a person to return to his (now notional)
ancestral place, he would regain his tribal identity.

Such absurd rules and requirements do not however obtain in other
cases of migration. A non-tribal person moving, say, from Karnataka to
Assam continues to retain all the socio-cultural coordinates of his or
her identity.

Indeed such absurd anomalies govern even the movement of tribal
communities within Assam, and in the States that were carved out of
colonial Assam after independence. For instance, the 23 recognised
tribal communities in Assam are broadly identified under two
categories: the Hill Tribes, that is, the 14 communities recognised as
‘tribal’ in the ‘hill areas,’ now comprising the two Autonomous
Districts of Karbi Anglong and North Cachar Hills; and the Plains
Tribes, that is, the 9 communities recognised as ‘tribal’ in rest of
Assam, supposedly all ‘Plain’. Neither of the locational
identifications is accurate, indeed cannot be accurate, given the
facts of geography but that is the least of the problems.

More materially, neither of these two categories carries its tribal
identity when it moves out of its ‘designated areas.’ Thus, Census
figures for Guwahati city, very much in the Plains of Assam, which has
people from every part of the country and also from foreign parts, do
not enumerate a single person belonging to any of the 14 ‘Hill Tribe’
categories. Indeed, every Plains district enumerates zero population
of Hill Tribes.

Similarly, the Census figures for the two Hill districts do not
enumerate a single person from any of the nine designated ‘Plains
Tribe’ categories. The reality is different; however such personas
living outside their allotted spaces are for official purposes simply
made ‘un-persons’.

While the Adivasis’ case for the restoration of their primordial
tribal status seems strongest, the issues and demands underlying the
struggle of the five other communities seeking recognition as
Scheduled Tribes are equally complex. The Koch-Rajbongshi, also known
as Sarania Kachari, historically part of the Bodo Kachari stock, lost
their tribal identity over a long period going back to the days before
the colonial conquest of Assam through a complex process of conversion
and acculturation into the Vaishnavite variety of Assamese Hinduism.
Such advantages as the conversion may have brought have lost their
relevance in post-independence India where, increasingly, the tribal
identity is getting to be perversely privileged by non-tribal
communities. Corresponding urges and expectations no doubt drive the
demands of the other communities seeking to be classified as Scheduled
Tribes.

The State government says it is not opposed to conceding the demands
but has pleaded its inability in view of the existing rules. There are
indications that these rigidities may be relaxed, at least in respect
of the Adivasi demand. However, if the Adivasi demand is conceded, the
demands of other communities too will have to be eventually conceded.
The issue also has national implications, in the context of the
contradictions highlighted in the presently dormant Gujjar agitation
for classification as ST.

The more immediate opposition in Assam to the extension of ST
recognition to the six communities is however likely to come from the
presently recognised Scheduled Tribes. The estimated 20 lakh Adivasis
constitute about 60 per cent of the total ST population of the State
which, according to the 2001 Census, was 3,308,570.

The addition of such a large population to the present ST pool will
undoubtedly affect existing allocations in areas such as reservation
of seats in legislative structures, higher education and jobs. Put
simply, such identity struggles carry a cost, and a price.

(For a more detailed discussion of these issues, see Manufacturing
Identities? Frontline, 7 October 2005; In the Name of Tribal
Identities, Frontline, 2 December 2005; and Separatist Strains,
Frontline, 1 June 2007.)

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Dec 03, 2007

http://www.hinduonnet.com/2007/12/03/stories/2007120354911100.htm

Special issue with the Sunday Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

ADIVASI : JULY 16, 2000
Dishonoured by history
Dr. Meena Radhakrishna

The author is a social anthropologist at the Nehru Memorial Museum and
Library, New Delhi.

The following headlines will be familiar to an average newspaper
reader in the Capital:

Amar Talwar/ Fotomedia

"Haryana to flush out Criminal Tribes" (Indian Express, February 27,
1999) followed by "Bansilal orders crackdown on criminal
tribes" (Indian Express, February 28, 1999), "48 Pardi Robbers from
Guna held" (Tribune News Service, September 9, 1999), "Stoneage
Robbers - Pardhis Know No Mercy" (Express News Service, Mumbai,
November 6, 1999), "11 of criminal tribe held for dacoity in N-W
Delhi" (Hindustan Times, January 17, 2000).

In recent years, a spectre of the so called "Criminal Tribes" has
begun to haunt the middle class readers of newspapers in Delhi. There
is a marked increase in news items which claim that a gruesome murder
of an elderly couple was committed by a group of Sansis who robbed
them of all their valuables, or that a woman living alone was brutally
done to death in the dead of night by a group of Pardhis. There are
also frequent television programmes on these communities putting the
fear of the devil in the minds of the terrified spectator, and the
very words "criminal tribes" have become synonymous with criminality
of a mindless, violent kind.

Who are these so called criminal tribes - Sansis, Pardhis, Kanjars,
Gujjars, Bawarias, Banjaras and almost 200 such communities? Is it
just a descriptive label, or is it a category of some special new kind
of criminals? Such a terror in the public mind is being fanned
regarding these people that public lynchings of a hapless Sansi or
Pardhi have already become acceptable to even civilised members of our
increasingly brutalised society.

A visit to localities where most of these people drudge out their
daily lives may reveal the grossest poverty and want, shocking even to
those hardened eyes which daily witness sickly, hungry, unwashed,
unclothed children at every major crossing in the Capital. The
question then to be asked is this: if all members of such communities
are merciless robbers, why then, does the community live in appalling
conditions of poverty?

Shashi Shetye

Moreover, even educated members of these communities, who constitute a
few first-generation office-goers or professionals, are subjected to
the deep suspicion and insults by the wider society when they set out
to look for jobs, and at their workplaces: there is constant,
relentless humiliation they have to suffer at the hands of
"respectable" people. Swimming against the tide each day, they
struggle to enter the virtuous cycle of education, work and
respectability which has eluded them and their children for several
generations. Since "criminal tribes" make such sensational headlines
so frequently, the phenomenon needs to be examined historically in
some detail.

Shashi Shetye

The people mentioned above are a staggering 60 million in number, and
fall in the category of today's Denotified Tribes. The term "criminal
tribes" was concocted by the British rulers, and entered the public
vocabulary for the first time when a piece of legislation called the
Criminal Tribes Act was passed in 1871. With the repeal of this Act
(which was condemned by Pandit Nehru as a blot on the legal books of
free India, and a shame to all civilised societies) these communities
were officially "denotified" in 1952.

Intensive research on the issue shows that about 150 years ago, a
large number of tribal communities were still nomadic, and were
considered useful, honourable people by members of the settled
societies with whom they came into regular contact. A number of them
were small itinerant traders who used to carry their wares on the
backs of their cattle, and bartered their goods in the villages
through which they passed. They would bring interesting items to which
people of a particular village and a little further away - spices,
honey, grain of different varieties, medicinal herbs, different kinds
of fruit or vegetables which the region did not grow, and so on.

Almost invariably, nomadic people were craftsmen of some kind or the
other and in addition to their trading activity they would make and
sell all sorts of useful little items like mats and baskets, brooms
and brushes or earthenware utensils. Some like the Banjaras or
Lambadis functioned on a larger scale, and moved in larger groups with
pack animals loaded mainly with salt, and their women in addition to
the salt also bartered the exquisitely crafted silver trinkets with
settled villagers.

Stan Thekaekara

Some nomadic communities also became cattle traders, herdspeople or
sellers of milk products, since they bred their own cattle for
carrying their merchandise. The nomadic communities were not just
useful to the villagers on a day to day basis - they were also
acknowledged for averting the frequent grain shortages and famine like
conditions in villages where crops failed. In addition, among them
were musicians, acrobats, dancers, tightrope walkers, jugglers and
fortune tellers. On the whole, they were considered a welcome and
colourful change in routine whenever they visited or camped near a
village.

There were several reasons for these communities first becoming
gradually marginalised, and finally beginning to be considered useless
to the settled societies. First, the network of roads and railways
established in the 1850s connected many of the earlier outlying
villages to each other as also to cities and towns.

The scale of the operations of the nomadic traders was thus
drastically cut down to only those areas where wheel traffic could not
yet reach. This was the single most important reason for the loss of
livelihood of a number of nomadic communities. Further, under newly
imposed forest laws, the British government did not allow tribal
communities to graze their cattle in the forests, or to collect bamboo
and leaves either, which were needed for making simple items like mats
and baskets for their own use and for selling. These two developments
had disastrous consequences for the nomadic traders.

There was one other major historical factor responsible for the
impoverishment of a very large number of nomadic communities. The
nineteenth century witnessed repeated severe famines - during each
successive one the nomadic communities lost more and more heads of
cattle which were the only means of transporting their goods to the
interior villages. The cattle were in fact becoming more crucial than
ever, as with increasing network of roads and railways these
communities had to travel longer distances to sell their wares. Loss
of cattle meant loss of trading activity on an unprecedented scale.

The British government gradually began to consider nomadic communities
prone to criminality in the absence of legitimate means of livelihood.
There was a parallel process taking place all along. A number of
tribal chiefs, especially in the north, participated in the 1857
events, and earned the title of traitors and renegades with the
British government. Elsewhere, hill tribes determinedly resisted the
attempts by the British to annexe their land for establishing
plantations, and to try and use them as plantation labour. A number of
tribal communities, thus, would not yield to the British armed forces
and consistently fought back, though whole habitations were burnt down
in retaliation by the frustrated British officers deputed to co-opt
them. Generally, it began to be felt that most tribal communities,
including nomadic ones, were dangerously criminal. The Criminal Tribes
Act was born in these historical circumstances.

A large number of communities were officially declared criminal tribes
from 1871 onwards. The British government subsequently ran special
settlements for them where they were chained, shackled, caned and
flogged while being surrounded by high walls under the provisions of
the Criminal Tribes Act. In the name of the homegrown science of
"curocriminology" it was declared that they would be cured of their
criminal propensities if they were given work and such an
understanding had an obvious corollary: the more they work, the more
reformed they would be. They could be thus forced to work for up to 20
hours a day in factories, plantations, mills, quarries and mines all
through the first few decades of the twentieth century. This was an
era when the Factories Act had come into existence, but the British
employers were officially able to do away with those provisions of the
Factories Act which restricted the number of hours of work in a day,
or number of days in a week, or allowed minimal facilities at the
workplace.

Ashish Kothari

An important point for our purposes here is that the British
government was able to summon a large amount of public support,
including the nationalist press, for the excesses committed on such
communities. This is because the Criminal Tribes Act was posed widely
as a social reform measure which reformed criminals through work.
However, when they tried to make a living like everybody else, they
did not find work outside the settlement because of public prejudice
and ostracisation. This curious logic and anomalous situation has
continued to this day.

Once more we are at a juncture when the issue of "criminal tribes"
needs to be reviewed so that the wider public, 130 years later, does
not end up supporting measures to "flush them out" of the existing
system. What needs to be emphasised here is that police harassment and
rounding up of "criminal tribes" in the last few years has not
improved the crime situation on the ground. Less obtrusively and much
less glaringly, news items of the following kind have also appeared in
print which were earlier asserting to the contrary, confirming that
the worst criminal gangs are not constituted by the members of
denotified communities: "Police still baffled by attacks on
farmhouse" (Indian Express, January 21, 1998), "Many sensational
murders remain unsolved" (Hindustan Times, November 27, 1999).

As has happened all through the history of denotified tribes,
confessions are wrested out of "busted gangs" of Bawarias or Sansis or
Pardhis through a variety of savage methods which often involve abuse
of their women. The National Human Rights Commission, in a historic
meeting held in February, 2000 has recommended repeal of the Habitual
Offenders Act, which in effect replaced the Criminal Tribes Act after
independence. The Habitual Offenders Act has spelt terror to these
communities for half a century, as they can be still summarily rounded
up whenever there is unexplained crime. The NHRC has also promised to
take steps to monitor atrocities on these communities and reorient the
police training systems to change the attitudes of the police towards
them at all levels. It has also accepted the need to protect
denotified tribes through a comprehensive package of welfare measure,
including employment opportunities.

However, no welfare measures, or recommendations by a Human Rights
Commission can create a more humane public opinion - that is an
autonomous process which has to begin to take place among thinking
citizens on their own. These communities have merely got caught in the
web of relentless historical changes encompassing colonisation,
modernisation and urbanisation and they need to be supported in their
severe ordeal and distress. In addition to being hunted and hounded by
the police, they remain on the periphery of society because of the
suspicion and active hostility of the average mainstream person.

Six crores of fellow humans wait to regain the honourable place that
they once held and lost.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/folio/fo0007/00070240.htm

Strong sense of self and place
Amita Baviskar

The author is a sociologist and has worked extensively in the Narmada
valley. She has authored the book In The Belly Of The River.

How do you describe an attachment to a particular landscape? How do
you express what a place means when its sounds, smells, look and feel
are so deeply imprinted in your mind and soul that it becomes a part
of you? When you are away from it, you ache to return. Whatever its
shortcomings, this place is home and this is where you belong.

D. Nayak/ Fotomedia

Four years ago, while walking through Sakarja, a Bhilala adivasi
village along the Narmada river in Madhya Pradesh, in the submergence
zone of the Sardar Sarovar Project, I met a girl. She was driving some
goats along a narrow track up a hillside. I was hot and out of breath,
and seized the chance to stop and chat. It turned out that she was
alone, her family had moved to Gujarat where the government had given
them land. She had gone too, but after a few months at the
rehabilitation site, she returned to Sakarja to stay with her uncle's
family. When I asked why, she shrugged. "I like it here", she said,
"it's so open".

Looking around at the panorama of hills, streams,fields, and patches
of forest, I could see what she meant. "But aren't things better at
the new place?" I asked, "your family is there too". "I feel stifled
in the plains", she said, "I feel free here". And she went off nimble-
footed along the hillside, urging her goats on with shrill cries.

In the analysis of costs and benefits associated with the Narmada
dams, the discussion focuses on "oustees" and "PAPs" (Project-Affected
Persons) and the "rehabilitation package" of two acres land per adult
male. But men do not live by land alone. personhood comes from having
honour and dignity. And these qualities in turn spring from a sense of
self and place, at home and in the eyes of the world. These aspects of
what makes a person human and worthy of regard do not figure in the
discussion of the dam.

The discourse of the dam could never explain why a girl, scarcely more
than a child and clearly extremely poor, would choose to come back and
live in a village about to be drowned.

Whenever I am in the Narmada valley, I am overwhelmed by the rugged
majesty of this place. The Narmada is a beautiful river, aptly called
"the giver of bliss". At the same time, I am daunted by the hard lives
of the adivasis who stay along its banks. The land, forests and river
yield just enough to live by and, in bad years, not even that. Modest
crops of sorghum and maize, pulses and oilseeds, are the product of
unremitting toil in the monsoon months and, if the rain fails, even
this labour cannot stave off starvation. In bad times, the forests
stand the adivasis in good stead; there are tendu leaves,mahua
flowers, gums and fruit to be collected. If all else fails, adivasis
must migrate in search of work.

The effects of an uncertain and inadequate livelihood are writ large
in the people's lives. Almost every adivasi woman has known the trauma
of an infant or child dying an untimely death. Without enough food and
medical care, people suffer entirely avoidable illnesses with
phlegmatic fortitude. The absence of schools denies children a chance
to learn and improve their lives. Poverty puts people at the mercy of
a callous government bureaucracy and rapacious traders to whom
adivasis do not matter, except as people to be pushed around and
cheated. The exploitation of adivasis has a long history that can be
traced to the state's refusal to recognise adivasi rights to lands and
forests, and the almost total failure of the welfare state in this
region. Every year, crores are spent on "tribal development" but the
only people who get richer are the traders and officials with their
new Maruti cars and their rising houses in town.

Despite its hardships, this life is all there is for adivasis, and
they value it. Amidst the vicissitudes of drought, malnutrition and
exploitation, what keeps adivasis going are the certitudes of
community, their faith in the bonds of kinship, the knowledge that
relatives will help out in times of trouble. Walking along the
Narmada, one witnesses as small yet steady traffic of travellers - a
youth in a smart turban with a bow and arrow in hand going off to
visit his married sister, or a middle-aged woman carrying a pot of
buttermilk for her ailing mother. Their little courtesies indicate the
larger structures of material and emotional aid that enable adivasis
to hold their own in a hostile world.

It seems marvellous that such spartan material circumstances should
generate a vibrant life of the mind. The adivasi world is richly
imagined and interpreted through myth, story and song. The central
thread of this repertoire is the gayana, an epic poem that describes
how Narmada created the world. Will the gayana, and all the other
aspects of Bhilala knowledge and practice that are anchored on the
banks of the Narmada, survive relocation to a new place? Does it
matter that people will have to surrender so much of what they hold
dear for the sake of a dam?

Whether the dam will bring water to the thirsty people of Kutch and
Saurashtra, and I don't believe it will, we must be clear about who is
paying the price for this transfer of resources. As Arundhati Roy
asks, are we prepared to acknowledge the true "cost of living"? Our
lifestyles are made possible because adivasis in the Narmada valley
and elsewhere are forced to give up the little that they possess. To
add insult to injury, they are told that leaving their lands and river
will entitle them to an "attractive rehabilitation package" and the
gifts of development - hand pumps, schools and health centres. As the
headman of Kakadsila village asked the District Collector, "For forty
years, you didn't come to our village even once. You didn't care
whether we lived or died. Now when you want our land you come with
folded hands and make promises. Why should we believe you?"

The wisdom of this scepticism is borne out by most experiences of
resettlement. Waterlogged land, no livestock, fragmented families,
hostile neighbours, no commons to collect fuel and fodder - sums up
rehabilitation so far. Adivasis end up as urban refugees, permanent
members of an ever-growing army of footloose labour. If this is what
the future holds, no wonder that adivasis make desperate choices,
vowing to stay on in villages slated for submergence.

Though their chances of victory look increasingly grim, adivasis
continue to fight. For fifteen years, these villagers have borne the
brunt of a sustained government campaign to oust them. They have been
denied development inputs, their lands were forcibly surveyed, protest
brutally suppressed, and false cases filed against them. Now the
threat of submergence looms ever larger. "Leave now", say government
officials, "or you will drown like rats when the water comes". And
yet, despite the might of the state, people continue to fight because
their sense of self, their only vision of a good life, is rooted to
this place that they call home, the Narmada valley.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/folio/fo0007/00070220.htm

To be governed or to self-govern
Dr. Smitu Kothari

The author has been involved with PESA, is a tribal rights activist
and is with Lokayan, Delhi.

Over four years ago, without visible drama and fanfare, India's
statute books witnessed a new addition that represents one of the most
significant legislative changes in post-Independence India. Those
concerned about the social health of the country have been largely
oblivious to this historical legislative change. Even those that are
concerned about the rights of historically oppressed and discriminated
communities seem to have by and large (with a few exceptions) fallen
short of adequately responding to the enormous potential it has for
one of India's most culturally plural and diverse constituents to
secure a future that is dramatically better than today.

Prem Kapoor/ Fotomedia

I am referring to the provisions concerning self-government in
Scheduled areas (primarily adivasi areas identified for special
protection in a special schedule - section - of the Constitution)
after the enactment of the Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to
the Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996 (I will refer to this as PESA in the
rest of this essay). The provisions also question and potentially
transform the structure and powers that have been given to Panchayats.

For nearly two centuries, adivasi communities have spearheaded the
most remarkable struggles for social justice in the country. They were
among those who first resisted British colonial interests much before
the independence movement - a contribution that (despite a few rare
accounts of historic movements in a few regions) remains largely
unrecognised. Predominantly living with India's forests, they faced a
steady assault on their livelihoods when the British legislated the
crown's control over India's forests in 1865.

With one legislative change, they became trespassers in their own
forests victimised by externally motivated systems of forest
management that directly violated various facets of their economic and
cultural survival. Their forests and other resources in their areas
were increasingly seen as commodities, their lands expropriated as
private property and their growing dependence on ruthless moneylenders
linked with powerful feudal landlords and local politicians led to
massive land alienation, and permanent or seasonal migration. The
final act of violence legitimising these onslaughts of systemic
violence on a largely unsuspecting population was the imposition of an
alien judicial system and "law and order" machinery that subjugated
them further compounding their vulnerability and subservience. Their
own, highly subtle and organically embedded systems of conflict
resolution were undermined. The result of all these processes was the
erosion of their dignity, the devaluation of their identities and the
disrespect of their ways of living.

Unfortunately, after Independence too, the Indian government retained
the same laws and continued the erstwhile colonial attitudes and
policies over adivasi communities. They continued to be victimised,
their cultures and lifestyles disrespected, their resource base
exploited, with hardly any benefit accruing to them. In actual
practice, such state policy was aimed at assimilating them into the
"mainstream" on terms that they had very little say in. In effect,
while they participated in elections, the promise of democracy and
justice was largely denied to them.

In fact, in most areas there was further erosion of the relative
autonomy and dignity that they enjoyed in their communities, thanks to
the additional steamroller impact of party politics and the consequent
homogenisation of a rich heritage of cultural diversity. Participation
in the electoral process was no guarantee of their own democratic
rights being respected. Instead, elections have substantially lost
legitimacy as reliable institutions for ensuring cheap, quick,
reliable and transparent justice for rural people, especially those
belonging to disadvantaged groups.

In the first two decades after Independence, in anticipation of
policies that would change colonial attitudes and practice, there were
fewer agitations and revolts in adivasi India. It was not long,
however, before disillusionment started setting in with the
realisation that the brown sahib's governance was largely driven by
the same mentality and attitude as those who had colonised them
before. There were remarkable exceptions as a few enlightened
administrators and community leaders asserted the rights of adivasi
communities. Gradually, in a growing number of places, agitations and
mass assertions became the emergent culture of what began as mere
disillusionment. Coupled with the expressions of countervailing power
from below were efforts by a few sensitive administrators and support
groups. In the mid-1980s, people like the then Commissioner of
Scheduled Castes and Tribes, B. D. Sharma, used his constitutional
office to highlight the plight of the adivasis and the constitutional
responsibility to them. Numerous collective mobilisations
crystallised, including several demanding greater autonomy from
exploitative external forces. Another important development was the
formation of various alliances cutting across adivasi community and
region.

General Gaur/ Fotomeida

Notable among these are the Bharat Jan Andolan (Indian People's
Movement), the National Front for Tribal Self-Rule, Adivasi Sangamam
and the Indigenous and Tribal People's Initiative all of whom
spearheaded a series of agitations representing the growing unrest in
adivasi areas.

Relenting to these widespread agitations by adivasis protesting
against continued violations of their customary and resource rights by
state and non-state actors, the Parliament set up a committee headed
by an adivasi MP, Dileep Singh Bhuria. Mr. Bhuria's report argued that
adivasi society had been marked by its own representative systems of
governance through the Gram Sabha (village council comprising the
assembly of all adult village residents), which should be legally
recognised as the primary centre of adivasi governance. Released in
1995, the report also argued that the long-standing demand of adivasi
control over productive land and forests should be conceded to and
that administrative interference in adivasi affairs should be
minimised. The government largely ignored the Bhuria Commission's
report reflecting the continuing dichotomy between the real needs of a
majority of adivasis and an exploitative governing structure.

Public agitations, including several major events in Delhi, have since
been stepped up. The assertions of the adivasis were powerfully summed
up in one of their central motive slogans, "Our Rule in Our Villages."
This declaration did not imply secession from India but the
affirmation of relative autonomy from what was experienced as an
intrusive and exploitative state apparatus and the unjust social and
economic order that it legitimated at the expense of their
livelihoods, identities and systems of self-governance. In December
1996, the Parliament passed PESA finally (at least legally)
recognising the adivasi right to self-rule.

PESA is historic because it legally recognises the capacity of adivasi
communities to strengthen their own systems of self-governance or
create new legal spaces and institutions that can not only reverse
centuries of external cultural and political onslaught but can also
create the opportunities to control their own destinies.

If implemented in both letter and spirit, the Gram Sabha of the
village would become the focal institution, now endowed with
significant powers. For instance, under section 4(d) of PESA: "every
Gram Sabha shall be competent to safeguard and preserve the traditions
and customs of the people, their cultural identity, community
resources and the customary mode of dispute resolution."

Shashi Shetye

Many administrators, academics, even activists working among adivasi
communities argue that the institution of Gram Sabha is non-existent
in most adivasi areas and that the law does not recognise the dramatic
social and economic changes that have taken place in adivasi society
in the past two centuries. They argue that modernity, the external
market, representative democracy and centuries of exploitation have
transformed adivasi communities to the point where a recovery of a
cohesive community could well turn out to be a romantic invocation
with no basis in reality.

What is not recognised in this critique is that PESA is a dramatic
opportunity to undo a history of wrongs and that it is flexible enough
to mould to local conditions. For instance, even if an institution
called Gram Sabha is unknown or has eroded, it can provide the basis,
under changed conditions, of a new democratic institution that the
adivasis themselves would come to recognise as an organic entity that
facilitates the restoration of their comprehensive rights. PESA even
makes it possible to redraw the administrative boundaries that
presently inform their governance. India's administrators and policy
makers have been reluctant to even recognise PESA because it empowers
the Gram Sabha to approve development plans, control all social
sectors - including the processes and people who implement these
programmes and policies - as well as control all minor (non-timber)
forest resources, minor water bodies and minor minerals. As and if all
this happens, it could result in outcomes that may well prove
dramatic. For, PESA also gives powers to manage local markets, prevent
the manufacture and sale of alcohol and not just control land
alienation but seek its restitution.

Understandably, administrators see a grave threat to their power and
privilege if local communities were to pave the way for more
autonomous systems of self-governance. In effect, the potential of
PESA is to make these state functionaries play a transformed role of
facilitating processes for the devolution of power. Their role would
then also assist in restraining forces that prevent the realisation of
the comprehensive rights that PESA provides.

The most far reaching potential and impact will be ecological. PESA
would restore primary control over natural resource systems to the
Gram Sabha. There is some concern that in the age of commodification
and commercialisation, if given rights over resources, adivasis will
themselves become predators. Communities (like the Warlis who are part
of the Thane district based Kashtakari Sangathna) who have begun to
realise the potential of PESA argue that while the dangers do exist,
this should not be used as an excuse to delay the implementation of
PESA and in fact efforts should be made to discuss how the whole gamut
of democratic institutions need to be rethought to strengthen local
autonomy and provide checks to its misuse. The reality at the moment
is that as communities assert greater control, they encounter apathy,
even hostility from local administrators who are under pressure from
external and internal interests who want to retain their exploitative
hold over adivasi India.

The reluctance of those who have historically enjoyed power to accept
such devolution and eventual loss is understandable. Some of this can
even take vicious forms as those in power try to subvert local unity.
In an eloquent yet grim assessment of the present situation, Harsh
Mandar, a senior officer of the IAS states, "The seriousness of the
situation is that for tribal policy in India, darkness continues to
prevail. Protective laws are rarely implemented, budgetary measures
like the Tribal Sub Plan strategy have failed to achieve genuine
financial devolution, and educational strategies have been
assimilative and destructive of the moorings of tribal culture. Light
at the end of the tunnel can be seen only in a powerful and radical
recent law that provides for self-governance by tribal communities.
However, so far, the state has forgotten or subverted the
interpretation of its own law. The perils of the tribal identity and
survival remain as real as ever."

There are several internal challenges that also have to be addressed -
internal hierarchies and discriminations, traditional practices like
witch-hunting that have become means to suppressing the growing
assertions of women, etc. Building safeguards and processes that
address these endemic problems are an equally serious issue that must
be simultaneously faced.

It is time, however, that the administrator, the planner and the
politician realise that the growing aspirations of historically
discriminated and exploited peoples will no longer give way. Across
the country, there is growing demand for greater transparency of
government functioning and greater participation in defining what the
content of development should be. Additionally, there are steadily
growing instances of innovative efforts to redefine the structure and
content of democratic institutions so that power emanates from the
people. This has brought into sharp focus the severe limitations of
representative democracy and the need to recognise and strengthen
structures of direct democracy, particularly where communities depend
on natural resources for sustaining their livelihoods.

Similar mobilisations have been witnessed in indigenous and tribal
regions all over the world and several major global alliances have
been formed. These, coupled with the efforts of many groups to
articulate their concerns before a special sub-commission and the
human rights committee of the United Nations, can also be seen as part
of an effort of deepening democracy at all levels - from the local to
the national and the global - firmly rooted in local democratic
processes, contrary to and often in dramatic opposition to the current
trends of economic centralisation and undemocratic political
processes.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/folio/fo0007/00070180.htm

A society in transition
Suresh Sharma

The author is with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies,
Delhi.

Words like "tribe" and "tribals" have come to acquire extensive usage
in our discourse on social science and social change. They denote
both, an anthropologial category akin to its classical form as it has
been in the Americas, Africa and Australia, and as a metaphor for the
most victimised segments in our society. The expression "tribal
identity" has sharp political resonance. But that resonance is felt
and read almost entirely in ethnic-social terms. The cultural and
cognitive salience that underlies the tribal sense of unique
distinctness and possibility remains dim and almost invisible.

M. Anand

The modern faith stems from an axiomatic certainty of immense
consequence. The grand certainty is that the continually enhanced
human capacity to reshape the material world is an unfailing assurance
of human liberation and freedom. Progress is the sovereign quest of
modern civilisation as also its cardinal referent for meaning and
significance. Hence the perception that tribal cohesions represent the
survival of archaic social formations which the ever expanding reach
of the modern historical process would in time transform and
completely recast. And true enough, the power to reshape the material
world has linked and unified the most distant corners of the earth.
But for communities and rhythms of life, towards which words like
tribe direct our attention, modern unification has meant a virtual
half-life on the very margins of modern life and discourse.

Consider in this context the intellectual and cultural lineage of the
discipline of Ethnology. Its origin and orientation are unmistakably
modern. Its mission is to understand and make sense of social facts
and forms of thought that clearly do not belong to the modern
universe. Levi-Strauss sensed in ethnology a belated sence of remorse.
As an intellectual artifact it is inherently ambiguous. It seeks
remembrance for facts and forms, which it knows, are marked out for
extinction by the very mode of doing and thinking from which ethnology
arises. Recognition of definitive difference constitutes as it were
its formative substance. And all the while, it knows, that this
difference has at best a bleak future in the modern world. In its rare
moments of repose modern thought invests rhythms of living forsaken by
history, in the words of Levi-Strauss, with "nobility. Unaware of
having eliminated savage life", it seeks to appease the "nostalgic
cannibalism of history" with mere shadows preserved with great care in
museums and libraries.

One could ask at this point, as to what is the nature and significance
of the survival of tribal life in India? Is that survival in any way
different from what survives of tribal life in the Americas? Or, is it
the case that what survives of tribal life in India is also no more
than a shadow of what had once been full and truly complete unto
itself.

In India, the tribal situation is marked by two paradoxical facts: the
absence of neat demarcations of the tribal as a homogenous social-
cultural category, and the significant magnitude of what is accepted
as comprising tribal reality. No one can demarcate a clear divide
between the tribal and the non-tribal in India. The intensely fluid
nature of boundaries between the tribal and the non-tribal are evident
in the insuperable difficulty in arriving at a clear anthropological
definition of a tribal in India, be that in terms of ethnicity, race,
language, social forms or modes of livelihood.

D. V .Jainer/ Telepress Features

The Constitution provides for the notification of certain communities
as tribal. The notification is on the basis of a varied mix of ethnic,
social, linguistic and economic criteria. Hence the prevalent usage as
also the only available working definition of a tribal in India:
Scheduled Tribes. It would truly be impossible for anyone to say that
all the diverse communities listed as Scheduled Tribes conform to the
notion of a tribal in its classical sense. At the same time, it would
be impossible for anyone to say that all communities that can
primarily be regarded as tribal are included in the schedule of
Tribes. And yet, for all practical purposes, be it legislation, social-
political intervention, collation of data or social theory, the
schedule of tribe notified by the Government is the only meaningful
referent.

Almost every thirteenth Indian is a tribal. Social magnitudes and
their persistence as distinct entities over long durations are of
immense significance. For they suggest, in however diffused and
indirect ways, the structure of cognition and judgment by which a
civilisation seeks or could seek to orient itself. The sheer magnitude
of tribal survival in India directs attention towards ways of
reckoning and engaging with differences that are strikingly unlike the
modern historical process. In the brief span of a few centuries,
peoples and cultures as old as Man on earth have been swept to near
extinction from the vast continents of America and Australia.

To speak of the strikingly different ways of reckoning and engaging
with difference as characteristic of India's past is not to suggest
that it is a past without blemish. The past of tribals in India
bristles with cruel inflictions. For thousands of years tribal
communities have been pushed steadily deeper into the hinterland of
remote hills and forests. Vast stretches of land, upon which they had
lived their lives, worshipped their deities and nourished their own
dreams, have been lost to them. But with all that it remains a past of
interaction, utterly unlike the modern past of tribal extinction.

V. Muthuraman/Wilderfile

One could speak of the tribal presence in India at two levels. One,
the fragmented and fragmentary tribal presence in the very midst of
non-tribal life. Two, the tribal presence in tribal contiguities
comprising regions that are or were until recently predominantly
tribal. The historian Kosambi records in prescient detail the
fragmented tribal presence in the midst of non-tribal life. In the
early Fifties, he had to just step outside his house in Poona to
encounter the still unfolding "historical processes" of "interaction
of obsolete with modern forms". In the shadow of the Law College dwelt
a "nomadic group of rus phase Pardhis" whose men wear only the "loin
cloth" and "never take a bath", but retain the "natural cleanliness,
mobility, superior senses" of the wild. Pardhis are "expert bird
snarers". But hunting and trapping animals can no longer provide
enough for even bare survival. Forests have shrivelled and "game has
almost vanished". Besides, "not one of them can afford a hunting
license". They have been reduced to making a precarious living by
trapping birds, "begging and petty stealing". The idea of "racial
purity" makes no sense to them. On the "payment of a fee" strangers
could always be admitted into their clan. The names of five of their
six exogamous clans "have become the surnames of feudal Maratha
families: Bhonsale, Powar, Cavahan, Jahdav, Sinde". And Kale, the name
of their sixth clan has become a "Citpavan brahman surname".

Tribal presence in regions that are predominantly tribal signifies a
distinctly different historic quality of tribal-nontribal interaction.
Such regions constitute what could be termed tribal contiguities.
Within tribal contiguities, choices available to tribal communities
for working out their own equations between man and Nature have not
been entirely foreclosed in favour of a more advanced mode of
livelihood. True, powerful non-tribal rulers did seek to control over
tribal contiguities. But pre-modern conquest could never exact more
than a nominal annual tribute. The divide in these regions between
resistance and restraint, submission and defiance was always somewhat
fluid. Nature, little touched by Man, was an unfailing refuge beyond
the reach of invading armies. One could speak of the texture of this
interaction as a complex of impingements and relationships between
several distinct social cohesions and modes of livelihood subsisting
in close proximity.

In a rough and ready sense settled cultivation or kheti, could be said
to be the defining feature of non-tribal life. And shifting
cultivation or jhum could be said to be the defining feature of tribal
life. Open plains watered by rivers have been the prime regions of
kheti hills and dense forests have been the prime regions of jhum. The
Gangetic plain has been the largest prime region of kheti. The
Vindhyan highland has been the largest prime region of jhum. Between
these two modes, kheti represents what in modern cognition would be
designated as the manifestly more evolved and higher level of man-
nature equations. Quite in accord with modern expectation, the region
of kheti even in the pre-modern context tended to expand and enclose
new areas. But in the long and complex process of extending its reach,
kheti in the pre-modern context could never completely displace jhum.
The significant fact is that in the very process of extending the
reach of kheti came to be mediated by varied modes of livelihood,
which partook of the world of both kheti and jhum.

Social and technological mediations within these two modes of
livelihood are ordered differently. Kheti marks out a permanent human
presence riveted to a particular piece of land. The same plot of land
is cultivated year after year, from one generation to the next. From
that plot of land nature is sought to be more or less completely
banished. It requires constant human care. In the event of failure or
withdrawal of human care, Nature does return to the lands of kheti but
almost always in a shrivelled and degraded form. The spatial
boundaries worked out in kheti tend towards more or less straight
lined geometric patterns. Within the fields of kheti, man's mastery
over nature is complete and unrivalled. Nothing that man does not like
or find useful is allowed to survive. The considerable surplus this
activity generates makes possible trade and exchange of goods and
services, urban centres, as also varied range of skills, crafts
cultural links over vast distances. Along with all that, it also makes
possible mechanisms of coercion and dominion: steadily enhanced
revenue demands, standing armies and imperial ambition. But in years
of scanty rainfall or epidemics, hunger and death ravage the lands of
rich yields.

Jhum, in sharp contrast to kheti, marks out only a fleeting human
presence in the midst of untamed Nature. The cultivated patch of jhum
keeps shifting. In the little jhum clearings on hill slopes, Nature in
all its wild resilience and variety retains its sway albeit a little
subdued. Crops once sown on a jhum slope require virtually no human
care. After the crops have been harvested, jhum slopes merge back into
Nature. The spatial boundaries worked out in jhum tend to be somewhat
like the intensely diffused uncertain lines found in nature. Jhum
secures an ample supply of crops useful to man. Its yields in
comparison to a kheti field are much smaller. But jhum, by allowing
nature to linger on its slopes ensures that harvests never completely
fail. Famines simply never happen in the prime regions of shifting
cultivation. The surplus generated is small and chiefs in the world of
shifting cultivational have had to rule without the support of a
standing army or a regular supply of revenue.

Shyam Jagota

The tribal presence within tribal contiguities and its fragmented
survival in the midst of non-tribal life may seem at first sight to be
far removed and unconnected with each other. But a deep and complex
relationship subsists between them. For they together define the place
and possibility for tribal life and self-sense in the civilisational
matrix of India. Consider in this context the rise to political pre-
eminence of the tribal kingdom of Garha in central India during the
Sixteenth Century. The stark simplicity of the explanation given by
the Abul Fazal, the grand Mughal chronicler, for the rise of Garha
invokes rhythms distinctly tribal. For a very long time, records Abul
Fazal, rulers of Garha had commanded "reverence" in the region. Yet,
they remained powerless until mid Fifteenth Century to translate this
"reverence" into political control. Implicit in this fact is the
resilience of the distance between reverence and the ability to garner
a disproportionately large share of the local surplus. To this day
something of that sense and reality remains alive and vivid in the
everyday rhythms of living.

Unfettered access to nature furnishes the vital clue to the manifest
capacity of tribal cohesions to survive as a distinct entity, despite
a long and not always peaceful history of interaction with powerful
centres of political authority. Definitive shifts in the relationship
between tribal communities and political power began with the
consolidation of the modern colonial state in the mid-nineteenth
century. As the effective reach of the modern state extended deeper
into the hinterland, access to nature came to be progressively
restricted. Choices available to communities even in the remotest
parts came to be ever more rigorously foreclosed in favour of the
requirements of the state and the world market. Land revenue
settlements initiated the process of appropriating vast stretches of
tribal lands as "reserved forests" and "government lands". In the
tribal contiguity people have lived on a combination of gathering
forest produce, grazing, craft skills and shifting or intermittent
cultivation. The idea of personal property has been very weak. It is
the idea of usage, which defined access to the livelihood resource of
the locality of the region. The notion of modern property has
destroyed access to what had always been a shared livelihood resource
accessible to all the inhabitants.

True, life and livelihood of tribal communities in the past were
always simple and sparse. But prior to the modern onslaught the rhythm
of life in the remotest hamlet was vibrant with a profound sense of
its own intrinsic worth. Cultural sensibilities and modes of
livelihood subsist in a relationship of intimate distance. Destruction
of modes of livelihood are also moments of profound cultural loss. The
sense of one's self and the world are traumatically shaken. It is
imperative that the modern sensibility learns to own in adequate
measure the destructive consequences inherent in the modern process.
For instance, unlike the West, ecological devastation in our context
has also to be comprehended as a question of livelihood and survival.

Tribal survival in the modern world would be possible and meaningful
only if we learn to recognise it as presence with its own intrinsic
worth, and not merely as a grim illustration of the logic of progress.
We have to learn to converse with tribal sensibility about its
meditations on the nature of the human presence, and the inherence of
limits in the fact of life itself. That perhaps may in some measure
serve as a corrective to the selfish and ultimately suicidal self-
centredness of modern civilisation.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/folio/fo0007/00070140.htm

Call us adivasis, please
Gail Omvedt

The author is a consulting sociologist, based in Kasegaon.

If Adivasis were to start writing their own Discovery Of India, it
would be something like this: There are those who talk of India's
"5000 year-old culture," there are those who talk of its "timeless
traditions." If India has a timeless tradition, it is ours. The
cultures running back for tens of thousands of years are the cultures
of the many Adivasi communities in the subcontinent. We are Bhils,
Gonds, Oraons, Mundas, Hos, Santals, Korkus and Irulas, the large and
small groups of people who live today in the hilly areas of the
country and are scattered across its central belt, we who have kept
ourselves apart from feudal States and Brahmanic hierarchies for
thousands of years, we who have resisted hierarchy and maintained our
ancient collectivities and ways of life.

K.Prabhakar/Fotomedia

We were here before the founders of that Meluhha known to far-off
Mesopotamia built their cities on the plains of the Indus. Before
Mohenjo-daro and Harappa and Lothal, before drains were laid out,
before seals began to be stamped and goods traded and granaries made,
we lived off the forests, gathering the abundant food we found,
sometimes burning down the trees for planting but always moving on to
let the forest regenerate. We traded occasionally with the Indus
cities, but we remained free; they never conquered us or tried to
conquer us.

We were here before the Aryans came thundering in their chariots
through the mountain passes; they could break the dams, flooding the
plains and destroying the remnants of the Indus cities but they could
not destroy us. They knew us as Nishada and Naga; they called us
Rakshasa, they burned the forests to destroy us and free the land to
fashion their agrarian society stamped with the hierarchy of caste.
They were the ones who remembered us as their enemies. Ekalavya was
one of our great archers, so skillful that the hero of the Aryans,
Arjun, could not stand before him. But they assaulted him, cutting his
thumb, destroying his ability to fight - and then fashioned a story in
which he accepted Drona as his Guru and agreed to surrender his thumb!
Ram was one of their heroes, given the task not only of destroying the
Dravidians but also of slaughtering the rakshasas in the forests.

Ashish Kothari

While the Indus civilisation was destroyed, its remnants absorbed into
and providing the foundation for the developing Indian civilisation,
our culture did not die. It is true that some of us were conquered and
turned into village-bound peasants, or, enticed by religious cunning
and the flourishing village society to become the Bahujans and Dalits
of that society, farmers, craftsmen, labourers. All of these sections
bear even today the marks of our democratic forms of government -
panchayats, collective traditions, clan solidarity. But in accepting
Brahmanism they accepted a tyranny of the mind, a poison of
superiority and inferiority, purity and pollution.

We who refused this, who were not conquered, who were not enticed, who
remained outside, who remained free - we are the Adivasis of today.
Not all of our cultures are the same. We speak different languages,
some Dravidian, some Mundari, some like those of the Nagas similar to
the languages of China and Tibet, some related to the languages of our
more caste-bound Indo-European speaking neighbors. Our religions are
also different. Some follow the sarna religion with traditions linked
to sacred grove, some know only the general sacredness of all nature
and its beings. However, whatever their variations, our religions are
of this world; we know nothing of karmakanda and moksha; our gods are
not divine beings of mystery beyond our ken, but people like
ourselves, our ancestors, even our friends.

Shyam Jagota

We fought the British colonisers when they came. Our heroes like Birsa
Munda, Khazya Naik, Tantya Bhil are remembered in our songs and
legends but forgotten in your textbooks. Why is this, you who are so
concerned about the history of national independence in your
textbooks? In many ways, though, the British conquered us more
thoroughly even than the earlier Aryans, taking away our autonomy as
they extended control over the forests, making us "encroachers" on
land that had been ours for ages. And they were the first to call us
"tribals," for thinking of us primitive was the only way they could
explain the difference between our equalitarian, community-oriented
cultures and the hierarchical lives of peasant caste societies. With
this, they romanticised us on the one hand, but also characterised us
as children and arrogated to themselves the authority to control our
lives and grab the wealth of the forests.

After Independence, with State control of the forests continuing, with
cultivators moving in to capture our lands, and companies moving in to
grab our timber, we became more "marginalised" than ever. Our
rebellions had forced the British to pass some laws to protect us -
but after Independence, those who held the land rights were called
"landlords" and the people who had been encroaching on our lands got
control over them as "tenants". The post-independent elites have
continued the policy of the British they claimed to fight, calling us
"tribals," treating us like conquered people, with few schools, no
industry, no development, and above all maintaining in their own hands
the control over our forest wealth.

Now as a result we have become landless labourers and poor farmers and
day labourers, and some, forced to migrate from lands we have known
for generations, the poorest of the refugees crowding the cities. You
call us "girijan" and "vanvasi" as if we only knew hills and forests.
We have the least education of all the Indian people and we are among
the poorest; it is only those Adivasi communities in the North east
who have States of their own who seem to have any prosperity, so not
surprisingly many of us fight for States like Jharkhand. Now you are
trying to weaken us with religious divisions, claiming some of us
"Hindus" and others "Christians," and inciting vicious attacks by your
thugs under the name of protecting Hinduism.

M. Anand

You constantly tell us to "join the mainstream" of independent India.
But what is this "mainstream" you speak of? Is it the mainstream of
cultures which force widows on to funeral pyres, of harassing young
brides for dowry, of mumbling chants and pujas in a language that not
even the priests really understand? Women in our societies may not
quite have full equal rights, and we should change that part of our
traditions that tries to keep them subordinate, that attacks them as
"witches" if they try to claim land rights. But they are still more
independent than women in the caste societies. Our young people chose
their own partners, and our weddings are more democratic - where one
Brahman or Christian priest controls the marriage ceremony among the
so-called great religions, in our traditions the whole community sits
together and announces its "agreement" to the marriage.

Finally, many of you romanticise us, and talk as if "development" is
something for others, as if we should be "tribals" forever and live in
a timeless world apart. We don't want to live apart, we want to be
part of a true mainstream of equality and liberty, one we will fight
for along with all others. We want schools, hospitals, education,
computers, but we don't want them as gifts, with you pretending to be
patrons. Give us back the lands and forests you have snatched away,
let us develop our own wealth, let us have the profits gained out of
sharing with the world our knowledge of medicines and herbs, and we
can have all the development we need, under our own control. We are
not against trade and exchange, but we want to be able to control the
terms and conditions on which we trade. We want a development that
will preserve the best parts of our culture, our sense of community
and collectivity, our equalitarian life, our freedom. We do not
believe that should be so difficult in the world today, but you seem
to be following a different path. And finally, why not drop such
senseless terms such as "Scheduled Tribe" and "anusuchit jamati" in
the Constitution also and call us by our proper name, "Adivasis"?

http://www.hinduonnet.com/folio/fo0007/00070100.htm

Rethinking tribals
G. N. Devy

The author is engaged in documentation of tribal literature and is
Secretary for Denotified and Nomadic Tribes Rights Action Group.

Ever since the Portuguese travel writers and missionaries decided to
describe the vast variety of ethnic and occupational groups and sects
of the Indian subcontinent in terms of "caste" and "tribe", the terms
have stuck to society as long-worn masks that start becoming one's
real personality. The result is that today no Indian describes society
without taking recourse to the categories "caste" and "tribe". In the
initial period of India's contact with western nations the two terms
were used as synonyms, the difference lay only in the social status of
the groups they described. The synonymy was finally shattered through
a legal intervention by the colonial rulers when an official list of
communities was prepared by them (in 1872) as the list of tribes. A
similar list was prepared in the previous year for communities that
were mistakenly thought of as 'criminal' and were covered by the
provisions of an inhuman "Criminal Tribes Act of India, 1871." Since
then the "tribes" are perceived as a distinct segment of Society.

K. Ramesh Babu

In fact, it is necessary to recognise that every community has certain
"caste" characteristics and certain other "tribal" characteristics,
the degree of which may differ from community to community.

History has indeed been extremely unkind to the tribal characteristics
of the people. The entire burden of the logic and the rhetoric of
modernisation has sought to "detribalise" the vast range of
communities. Besides, those communities that are now marked as
"tribal" have not been viewed with any degree of respect by the
alienated middle classes and intellectuals. None of the brave fights
of the tribals against the British has ever been treated as part of
the "national" struggle for freedom. From the Bihar uprising of 1778
to Lakshman Naik's revolt in Orissa in 1942, the tribals of India
repeatedly rebelled against the British in the North-East, Bengal,
Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh. In
many of the rebellions, the tribals could not be subdued by the
colonial might, but terminated the struggle only because the British
acceded to their immediate demands, as in the case of the Bhil revolt
of 1809 and the Naik revolt of 1838 in Gujarat.

The fact, however, is that there is so much in the tribal way of life
that the country needs to emulate. Tribals are not known for raping
their women, beating and abusing their children, exploiting nature
beyond satisfying the minimum human needs, lending money at interest,
burning widows, and above all things segregating and stratifying
labour in terms of caste.

A century and a half of deeply flawed education which has taught us to
ape the West in every respect, has also taught us to leave the tribals
out as the apes of the great Indian society. And, all that we have so
far doled out in the name of tribal policy is but an attempt at
extermination of tribal identity so that they remain without a voice
and make space for our progress, become our low-grade clones and
provide us with cheap labour. In the process, we have forgotten that
much that is valuable in society, culture and heritage is of tribal
origin, that in fact the tribal still has so much with him which we
stand to benefit by learning.

Aditya Dhawan

Rarely have we looked at the tribal communities as leaders, at least
in certain areas of life, who can reveal to us what civilisation truly
is all about. Hence at the turn of the century we must open this
question again and work towards formulating a comprehensive tribal
policy which will help both the nation and the tribal people. The four
principles that we must follow while conceiving such a policy ought to
be related to the recognition of the diversity of tribal communities,
their special educational needs, an utmost concern for their genetic
mutations, and the recognition of the peculiar character of tribal
polity.

It is necessary to recognise that all tribal communities are not
alike, that they are products of different historical and social
conditions and that they belong to four different language families
and several different racial stocks and animistic moulds. Some of them
belong to the primitive stock with a continuous cultural history,
others have been pushed out of the mainstream and have been "drop-
outs" of our main history, yet others are created by various legal and
economic interventions in society.

Therefore, no uniform policy is ever likely to benefit all tribal
communities throughout the country. Next, if the huge work-force has
to be given special skills which will improve their economic status,
the existing formalities for educational advancement will have to be
suspended, and a new kind of non-formal educational structure will
have to be evolved. Thus special tribal academies which combine the
merits of regular schools and the open universities will have to be
instituted.

A National Tribal Academy, to regulate the education network will have
to be created for this purpose. Similarly, those tribal communities
which have become victims of the mutated gene diseases, such as the
Korkus and the Bhils, will have to be provided with a special kind of
health monitoring system so that the country does not quietly write
off these as communities with defective genes. A close attention will
have to be paid by social medicine research to the incidence of sickle
cell disease.

Siddhartha Mitra

And finally, it is necessary to recognise that the tribal polity is
more closely regulated by the aesthetic pulse rather than ethical
drives, and, therefore the implementation of the tribal self-
governance provisions will have to go hand in hand with a special
programme for encouraging tribal arts, oral traditions and their
unique skill in craft. If we fail to recognise this difference which
is vital to the social organisation of tribal communities, and fail to
respect it, we will end up creating bands of forced nomads who will
multiply the urban chaos already overburdened with problems.
Ultimately, what is good for the tribals is also in the interest of
the national common good.

One would like to hope that the new millennium at last brings some
relief to the ninety million tribals and sixty million denotified and
nomadic tribals of our country.

However, the situation as it prevails now clearly indicates that these
are but pious thoughts. The entire lot of denotified tribals has been
left at the mercy of the crime-merchants. In their lifestyle, death in
police custody for men and getting sold several times over for women
is a routine experience. Neither the Central Government nor the states
has made any concrete plans for a long-term upliftment programme. And
whatever provisions do exist are not known to have ever reached the
target beneficiary. The situation is so alarming that in many states
the governments do not even have complete lists of the nomadic and
denotified groups.

The political leadership in tribal areahas been a victim of the party-
system. When the tribal representatives get elected, they quickly get
submerged in the main concerns of the party to which they belong; and
in these, there is at best a nominal place for the tribal issues. On
the other hand, when tribal masses express their dissent, it is
understood as an anti-state activity, resulting in an unnecessary
burden on the state- funds at one end and a blatant violation of human
rights at the other.

Dilip Sinha

Those tribals who have accepted facelessness as the only option for
survival and have migrated to cities have yet to find a place even in
the city slums. The slums too have their caste-structure; and tribals
do not fit into it easily. Their children remain without any education
and add to the already swollen ranks of child labourers.

Colonialism has left many undesirable legacies for us to negotiate.
But its impact on our self-perception has been among the most
disastrous of those legacies. The categories of "caste" and "tribe"
have coloured our vision of society so much that no time in the near
future will we be able to recognise the people we call tribals by any
other token but "tribal".

The new millennium policy therefore will have to be designed to create
a general respect for the term "tribal". Verrier Elwin had tried in
his time to create a sense of respect for tribals.

The policy of cautious intervention that he advocated unfortunately
turned, when put in practice under tokenism. Today, it is necessary to
think of a genuinely pro-active policy which is aimed at helping the
tribals by creating a favourable climate for the general tribalisation
of Indian communities. It is ultimately in the continuous segregation
of tribals with castes that will makes India a more humane culture. If
it happens, it will be a major battle won in favour of human dignity.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/folio/fo0007/00070060.htm

Through Adivasi eyes
Mari and Stan Thekaekara

Reams have been written about adivasis by so-called experts. Much of
it is subjective interpretation, an exercise I have always been wary
of indulging in. For this issue, therefore, my husband Stan and I
recorded reflections of different adivasis on how they view life,
their religion, politics, the past, the present and the world around
them. This then is what the adivasis themselves had to say.

Shyam Jagota

Govinda, a Mullakurumba elder from Onimoola hamlet, Erumadu village
began! "Thirty years ago we had hundreds of cattle. There was enough
manure to cultivate as much as we needed. Only after all the land has
gone do we understand the value of it. We used to hunt every week. We
were good archers. Now we sit at home even for Uchchar, our biggest
hunting festival. We used to make a kutty bow even for the tiniest
baby in the village. He had to hold this for Uchchar. When we had land
life was better. Now everyone has more money because they work as
labourers. But that cannot last you till you die. It's only for the
able-bodied, only as long as you can go for work."

On agriculture: "Our people prefer cowdung. You can see the places
where they have used "English vallam" (chemical fertiliser)." He spat
in disgust. "The soil is totally ruined. We never use "English
vallam". Our people can taste the difference in the rice grown with
"chanagam" (cowdung) and the other rice. We feel eating rice grown
with "English vallam" brings illnesses. For us whatever we get from
the land is enough. Our people were never greedy. We could have
claimed the entire hillside where we live. We didn't. Now we're hemmed
in by outsiders."

Chathi, a Paniya tribal leader from Kayunni grinned, "We say whatever
we get is enough. But our non-tribal neighbours say whatever they get
is not enough." Chathi who 10 years ago had never been out of his
Nilgiris district has been to Germany and back. Not for him an NRI
existence though!

Stan Thekaekara

"Life in Germany is good for the Germans," he announced wisely. "But
for me, my village is enough. Germany was nice, but it is like a
dream. When you wake up after a dream you remember the nice parts but
you do not expect to get all that you saw in the dream. What use is
money? I know people who have gone to Dubai and come back rich. But a
man must live among his people, his community, his gods. If I cannot
see these hills, these paddy fields, hear our adivasi children laugh,
hear our music and dance for our festivals, I would pine, grow sick
and die."

Shanthi, a Paniya school teacher was also invited to Germany. "My
father and the old people used to talk about the importance of
preserving our culture etc. But for me these were only words. When we
went to Germany thousands of people were willing to listen to our
stories, our music, to come and watch our dancing. I realised the
importance of sharing which we take for granted in our adivasi
society. People there who had lost their sense of community and
sharing envied us. Only then I realised how all this could slip away
if we don't hold on to it. Leaving home made us value our simple life
much more."

Ammani, a Paniya woman leader is typical of her tribe. Strong and
forthright, she told us a story of how she solved a family problem.
"My husband is very supportive and a good man. But he got into
drinking. It is something I wouldn't tolerate. We had decided in the
Sangam to fight alcohol. I warned him a couple of times. One Saturday
night, he turned up drunk again. I locked the door and told him 'you
can stay out all night, you won't enter this house drunk again'. It
was a hard decision because it was the monsoon. He begged me, 'I'll
get ill, how can you be so heartless?' But I steeled myself and let
him be. That was the last time he came home drunk."

Stan Thekaekara

Kapalla Chinnu's son Krishnan is a young Mullukurumba from Erumadu
village. He is a curious mixture. Worldly-wise yet appreciative of the
old ways. Everyone was discussing the budget. KCK was disgusted, "What
kind of government will hike the price of rice and kerosene and cut
the price of cell phones? And I thought the BJP would be better."
"You've seen the old and new ways. What do you think of the changes in
everyone's lifestyle?" We asked him.

"The sense of community is disintegrating," he began. 'Take a wedding.
Previously it was the entire community's responsibility. Everyone
helped. Everyone contributed. For my wedding I had to go away to
Gudalur for a day. The bunches of bananas had to be buried to ripen.
I'd forgotten. But someone else did it for me. I didn't even have to
ask. Everyone thinks for you. But when couples go off on their own,
they have to do everything themselves."

"There are new differences emerging. Earlier every family in the
village was more or less the same. Now if I decide to bring my child
up traditionally, I know in my mind that its the best decision. But my
neighbour sends his child for computer classes. What chance has my
child got with farming and hunting in today's world? When he grows up
won't he curse me for not educating him like the others?"

Stan Thekaekara

He laughed. "In the old days if a woman had ten children, everyone
looked at her with awe and said 'That's some strong woman, she's borne
ten children.' Our children were our wealth. Now they would look with
pity and say, 'Devamme (My god)! ten children! Poor thing she must be
some stupid ignorant woman.' Earlier, our children, the stock of
paddy, our cattle were the signs of wealth. Now it is only money."

Chathi moved to rituals. "When someone dies we question the gods. For
us gods and people are equal." KCK added, "We don't worship our gods.
That is the difference. We ask their advice, their help. But we scream
and curse them when someone is ill or dies."

Kali and Badchi, two Bettakurumba women added to this. "It is our good
fortune," Badchi explained "that our gods live with us in our villages
and among our people. So we don't have to go to find them in any
mosque, temple or church. Religion, the fuss about conversion, being
Hindu, Muslim or Christian is difficult to understand. For us the gods
are important not the religion."

Radhakrishnan, a Paniya leader from Devala was shocked when he visited
an old people's home in Germany. "At first we thought it was a
hospital. They told us 'no, they live there'. 'Why?' we asked. 'Do
they not have children?' 'Yes, but their children cannot take care of
them'. We could not believe it. This kind of progressive, wealthy
society we could not comprehend. We decided no matter how wealthy or
advanced we become, we must never let such a thing happen to our old
people, to our adivasi society."

And that, for me, said it all. Any further comment would be
superfluous.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/folio/fo0007/00070480.htm

Curators of biodiversity
Dr. K. K. Chakravarthy

The author is Director, Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya
(National Museum of Mankind), Bhopal (MP).

The tribals of India have been seen by some developmental planners as
agents for the destruction of biodiversity though they are its
curators and victims of its destruction due to thoughtless
developmental interventions. Two hundred years ago, before the
establishment of British colonial rule, most of the Indians could
claim to be tribals, living in a state of harmony with organic and
inorganic communities in nature. The British created the issue of a
separate tribal identity by inventing categories like tribal and non
tribal, criminal and non criminal tribes, included or excluded
territories, to isolate rural Indian communities from one another. The
British opened up rural India to western technology - railways, roads,
banks, courts, forest contractors, liquor, flesh and poppy traders,
land grabbers, comprador and bureaucratic capital. With this began the
degradation of the biocultural habitats of rural Indian communities
and the erosion of their coevolutionary dependence on the country's
ecosystems.

Kamal Sahai

Because of their thin physical presence, the British had confined
themselves to indirect rule in India and their penetration in the
rural hinterland was thin. After their departure in 1947, the
destruction of biodiversity was accelerated by an interventionist
policy of development. Universal democratic mechanisms superseded
ecospecific community systems of subsistence, resource management and
self governance.

Internal colonial elites aligned themselves with external colonial
elites, to carry homogenising developmental processes, geared to mega-
irrigation, power, forestry, building and mining projects, into the
farthest hills and forests. Rural or tribal India continued to be a
stage affixed to urban India, and was subjected to the self assumed,
redemptive, civilising mission of the latter. The colonial
jurisprudential concepts of res nullius and terra nullius assigned
land and forest, that had not been assigned by the sovereign, and were
not under visible occupation, to the sovereign. These concepts have
been allowed, even after Independence, to supersede the precolonial
Indian jurisprudential approach, akin to lex loci rie sitae, whereby
law derives legitimacy from the relationship, traditionally
established by the people, with their land and forest.

In this manner, the biocultural democracy of Indian communities,
sustained by principles of symbiosis, reciprocity, diversity and
sustainability, are being eroded in the name of political and economic
democracy. Fragile and biorich ecosystems, like coast lines,
savannahs, mountains and rain forests, managed by tribal communities,
have been invaded by biocultural pirates. Whether it is in the primary
sectors of agriculture, industry or mining, secondary sectors of
drugs, chemicals and foods, or, in the tertiary sectors of education,
culture, and social services, social and ecological categories have
been steadily reduced to economic and industrial categories.

The tribal has been stereotyped as a consumer rather than as a
producer, since, as per colonising discourse, the tribal only
reproduces with nature, and the real production takes place in
organised factory or laboratory conditions. The role of the forest as
the source of physical and psychological sustenance for biocultural
diversity has been ignored for treating forest as a timber mine, for
monocultural commercial plantations, as empty land for development, as
carbon sink or ecological park. The consumptive tribal uses of
forestry for shelter, food, fodder, medicine, mulch, fire wood, has
been dissociated in planning from their non consumptive uses of
forestry, including photo synthesis, climate regulation, soil and
water conservation. The sui generis community intellectual property
right regimes of tribal stake holders and stewards of biodiversity are
being integrated into the western individualistic IPR regimes, without
their prior informed consent, consultation or compensation. The onus
of proof for establishing the novelty, uniqueness, stability,
uniformity or biosafety of tribal knowledge systems is being put on
the tribal community by individuals regarding, court, lawyer and money
mediated laws and institutions. As a consequence, there is a beginning
in the unprotected flow of knowledge from gene-rich India to the
capital-rich West, and a protected flow in the reverse direction.

The result, despite positive political, institutional and financial
commitment to tribal development, has been large scale displacement
and biological decline of tribal communities, a growing loss of
genetic and cultural diversity, and rising trends of shrinking
forests, thinning soils, sinking aquifers, crumbling fisheries,
surging temperatures, increasing unemployment, hunger and conflict.

The solutions are implicit in these problems. The developmental
planners have to stop acting as teleological agents of history and
refrain from appropriating biocultural diversity curated by tribals,
by treating them as passive objects of history. The affirmative
discrimination in favour of homogeneous developmental interventions
for the tribals has to be reoriented to replenish the variety of life
sustaining technologies, adapted by tribals in response to specific
agro climatic situations. The validity of slow track "tribal" science
has to be recognised over fast track "modern" science. High yielding,
fast growing, mass producible, monocultural, hybrid species adapted in
the green revolution in agriculture, white revolution in dairying,
blue revolution in fisheries, have to give way to the slow growing
poly cultural, natural species, grown, gathered or managed by tribals.
Support has to be extended to the variety of tribal water management
strategies of drip, terrace, diversion and least interference.
Different tribal architectural technologies, adapted to thermally
efficient local material, have to replace uniform use of steel,
concrete and glass. The diversified trophic base of tribals of
nutrient giving food and medicine, should be prized over a homogenised
trophic pattern, dependent on a few animal and plant families and a
limited fruit and cereal basket. The multiple forest use and
conservation approaches, adapted by tribals through niche
specialisation, seasonal restriction, restriction by life history
stages, sacred groves, should replace exploitative silvicultural
approaches.

The holistic, neurophysical, psychosocial folklore medicinal knowledge
of tribals should be processed into a digital bioinformatics data base
in global knowledge network for IPR protection. The developmental
process has to be enriched with inputs from the life enhancing
knowledge which has been codified, classified and communicated
transgenerationally through tribal oral traditions. The layering of
the languages of tribal cultures should be unravelled by linguists and
glottochronologists, to recover the blend of beauty and utility, form
and function, equity and efficiency in tribal biodiversity
conservation approaches.

Just as 95 per cent of the DNA has been dismissed as junk, valuable
crops and herbs as weeds and scrub because of ignorance about their
functions, so tribal knowledge about biodiversity protection has been
ignored as irrelevant. To the tribal, nature is homologous to the
maternal womb. It is a source of his affinity and consanguinity. Its
denizens, animate or inanimate, are his siblings, lovers and friends.
The hum of the forest, the wind, the dance of the fire fly, the stalk
of the crane, the prowl of the tiger are part of tribal dance and
music. Every pebble, river, mountain is instinct for them with life,
vibration and purpose.

Tribals officially constitute about 7.5 per cent of the country's
population. But, they have preserved 90 per cent of the country's
biocultural diversity. They have protected the polyvalent,
precolonial, biodiversity friendly Indian identity from biocultural
pathogens. The question of tribal survival is also a question of the
survival of this identity.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/folio/fo0007/00070280.htm

Treading lightly on earth
Ashish Kothari

The author is founder of Kalpavriksha, Pune.

It is a sign of our times that the one group of people who have hardly
participated in the global parleys on "sustainable development," are
the ones who probably live most sustainably. Adivasis in India,
natives in the Americas, aborigines in Australia... variously termed,
but all characterised by a lifestyle far more in tune with nature than
any of us who call ourselves environmentalists or eco-
developmentalists.

Amit Khullar

I do not pretend to know even a tiny fraction of the lifestyle of
India's adivasis, but can cite others who do. Adivasis consider
themselves a part of nature, not outside of it, and examples of this
abound. The widespread phenomenon of sacred spaces and species is well-
known: entire valleys in Sikkim, forest groves ranging from a few
trees to a few hundred hectares at thousands of sites across India,
totemic animal and plant species that are not exploited.
Anthropologist Savyasaachi details the universe of the Koitors of
Abujhmarh Bastar, in which a complex set of rituals combines rights to
use land and forests with the collective responsibility to protect
nature. Forests cannot be owned, as they are a creation of nature.
Even in shifting cultivation, universally condemned by the "modern"
agricultural scientist and the forester, there are rules on how to
treat the forest so that its regenerating capacity is not
extinguished.

Vasumati Sankaran tells us of the fishing methods of the Korkus of
Maharashtra. From temporary bunds across streams to the use of plant-
based poisons, these methods are sustainable and cause no irreversible
harm to aquatic biodiversity. My friend Madhu Ramnath, once a student
and scholar like many of us but with the guts to give up urban life
and take up long-term residence with adivasis in central India, gives
other examples. Forest-dwellers here tell of the changes in season, of
the oncoming rains, by close observation of the behaviour of flowering
plants, ants, and mushrooms. Deviations in the seasons are predicted
through deviations in this behaviour . . . with probably as much
accuracy as our sophisticated meteorological devices!

Are their footsteps still light?

Respect and even awe of the adivasi lifestyle cannot blind one to some
of the problems inherent in such ways of living, and the changes that
have taken place in them. Social, political, sexual, and many other
forms of exploitation have existed traditionally, and continue to
exist, in adivasi society. But the much more serious problem is the
way in which adivasi cultures and livelihoods have been transformed
over the last few decades.

Two simple stories tell it all. Madhu Ramnath recounts the changes
that came into the resource use patterns of adivasis in central India.
Traditionally, these people used to fish in a stream by making a
temporary barrage of sticks and stones, and using plant based poisons
to stun the fish. The barrage would be dismantled at the end of the
session. Then came the Kanger Ghati National Park of Madhya Pradesh,
with the objective of conserving the area's dwindling wildlife.
Fishing was banned. But the adivasis still needed fish for survival,
so they started sneaking in, swiftly killing fish with DDT, and
rushing out. The same people had a tradition, that the wild mango
trees in the forest would not be harvested till the birds had had
their first feed. This ensured that seeds were spread out through fall
of fruits or by animals, and hence the trees regenerated.
"Development," meanwhile, brought in a mango pickling plant in an
urban area nearby. With a great demand for raw mangoes, the villagers
began to pick the fruit even before it had ripened, thus hastening the
decline of wild mango in the area.

Ashish Kothari

Such stories can be told from virtually every part of tribal India.
Excessive and indiscriminate demand of the urban market has reduced
adivasis to raw material collectors and providers. It is a cruel joke
that people who can produce some of India's most exquisite
handicrafts, who can distinguish hundreds of species of plants and
animals, who can survive off the forest and the streams with no need
to go the market to buy food, are labeled as "unskilled" by our
economy! And it is supremely ironical that areas with the highest
deforestation rates in India include the predominantly tribal parts of
north-east India, where, till the Supreme Court recently put a halt,
timber logging was being carried out by the same communities that
earlier nurtured these forests. The reasons? The insatiable demand for
paper, plywood, furniture, housing, from the rest of India.

Centralised politics and governance have done as much damage as the
external market. Though Independent India's leaders appeared to give
special attention to the needs of adivasis, actual governmental
programmes have only served to destabilise the self-governance systems
in tribal areas. Universal franchise is fine as a principle of
democracy, but when it divides a hitherto well-united community
between two or more political parties, and when this causes the
breakdown of carefully evolved systems of common property governance,
we must question it. We must also cast a doubtful eye on centralised
resource management systems that are sometimes counterproductive. The
example of the Kanger Ghati National Park is symptomatic. Wildlife
conservation is a laudable aim, and protected areas are a powerful
tool for achieving this, but such steps can boomerang when they ignore
local human realities and sensibilities.

And so, in many parts of India, no longer are adivasis living "in
harmony with nature." But we who influence public policies and
programmes, for whom the markets and the State runs, must look within
ourselves for the reasons for this change. Fortunately, adivasis
themselves are forcing such a rethink among us.

Revitalisation and Resistance

G.B.Mukherji/Wilderfile

A quiet revolution is spreading through local communities. Alarmed at
the dwindling natural resource base around them, tired of waiting for
governments to deliver on promises, and concerned about the increasing
rootlessness of their own youth, adivasis and other communities have
begun reviving aspects of their culture and traditions that enabled
wise management of resources, and resisting external and internal
pressures of destruction.

At Mendha (Lekha), Gadchiroli district, Maharashtra, a tiny village of
300 Gonds have stayed off a paper mill that was destroying their
forests, and halted (in association with thousands of other adivasis
of the area) two huge dams that would have submerged their lands. They
now protect and manage 1800 hectares of forests, including relatively,
sustainable extraction of bamboo and other products. They have
initiated livelihood programmes, built irrigation tanks and biogas
plants. But much more remarkable is the political, social, and
intellectual empowerment they have achieved. Through a unique
institution called abhyas gat (study circle), comprising villagers and
guest experts, they have striven to obtain greater understanding of
ecological, political, and policy issues. With the aid of local NGOs,
the villagers are now armed with a high degree of knowledge about the
policies and rules that impinge on their lives. And the gram sabha is
so powerful, that no government agency can now work in this village
without its permission. Such a movement of adivasi self-rule is
spreading in many parts of India, though not always with the same
successful results as seen in Mendha (Lekha).

Tribals and non-tribals have teamed up in several hundred villages of
Alwar district, Rajasthan, to regreen the land. With several hundred
small johads (checkdams) placed at sites chosen with local knowledge,
an area that was chronically drought-prone just 15 years back has
become water-surplus. Seasonal streams have become perennial,
catchment forests are reviving and being protected. Several villages
of the Arvari river basin have even formed a Arvari Sansad
(Parliament), for decisions regarding land, water, forest, and
agricultural use, and for dispute resolution.

Shashi Shetye

All these examples, customary or community-based rules of resource use
have been drawn up, some of them new. Residents are fined or
ostracised for violations. Major decisions are taken by the adults of
the village, not by a supposedly representative panchayat. Women are
encouraged to participate, though in many areas this is as yet far
from satisfactory.

Equally critical are the paths of resistance that many adivasi areas
are displaying. Koel Karo, Bodh Ghat, Inchampalli, Bhopalpatnam,
Rathong Chu . . . big dams that were proposed by our development
planners and would have destroyed adivasi homelands and forests, have
all been halted by mass movements. As part of the larger fishworkers'
movement, adivasis on our coasts are fighting off ecologically
destructive and economically inequitous commercial trawling and
aquaculture. At the Nagarahole National park, adivasi groups fought on
the ground and in the courts, to halt a luxury hotel project.

All the above examples do not yet amount to a comprehensive response
to the threat faced by adivasi cultures and the biological diversity
they live within. The overall slide continues. Mass hunting
(unsustainable and cruel in today's context), increasing consumerism,
and corruption among the tribal elite, remain burning. But these
examples of revival and resistance are signs of hope, indicators of a
growing trend. If the rest of India wants to, it can learn from them.
It can attempt to understand the dynamic nature of adivasi lifestyles
and traditions, to use sustainable practices as a mirror to showcase
our own rampantly destructive consumerism. It can respectfully give
much greater decision-making and planning powers to adivasi
communities, including in conservation programmes. In so doing, it can
jointly forge a way to once again live lightly off the earth. If, on
the other hand, adivasi India sinks with the sheer weight of our ill-
conceived development models and ideas of "progress," we too will sink
with it.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/folio/fo0007/00070300.htm

A symbiotic bond
Mari and Stan Thekaekara

The writers are with ACCORD, an NGO in the Nilgiris working for tribal
development.

"What do you see as the difference between your people (the adivasis)
and the others?" I asked Badichi, a Bettakurumba adivasi woman. We
were discussing religion and Badichi lived in a forest village called
Chembakolly in the Gudalur Valley of Nilgiris district. Her reply was
confident and direct. It left me absolutely speechless. "It is our
good fortune," Badichi explained, "that our gods live with us in our
villages all the time. We don't have to go to any church, mosque or
temple to find them, pray to them or offer puja. They are a part of
our lives."

K. Ramesh Babu

Adivasis or indigenous or aboriginal people the world over, have never
given a name to their religion. We knew all about the Bettakurumba
seances and calling of the spirits. But anthropology had programmed
us, putting everything into neat little boxes unimaginatively labelled
"animism" and "ancestor worship". Adivasis do not "worship" their
ancestors, although this is a long held anthropological fallacy. But
they revere the spirits of their ancestors and integrate them into
their society. These spirits return after death to guide and protect
the tribe.

Death in adivasi society is not seen as the end of life - it is an
integral part of life. The adivasis talk about the spirits of their
dead using the present tense enhancing the perception that the dead
are very much part of society still. When anyone dies their spirit is
gathered to the fold of the ancestors to remain forever with their
people.

This is a universal truth for all aboriginal and indigenous people
from Australia to Africa to North and South America. It is embodied in
the immortal words of Chief Seattle's speech in 1854 when the American
Indians surrendered their ancestral land to the white conquerors. "The
white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to
walk among the stars. Our dead never forget the earth for it is the
mother of the red man. We are part of the earth and it is part of us."
The ashes of our fathers are sacred. Their graves are holy ground and
these hills, these trees, this portion of the earth is consecrated to
us." "You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet
is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land,
tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin'.

The same sentiments were echoed by the Kattunaicken, Paniyas and
Mullukurumbas we spoke to. Each tribe had different names for their
gods but they were kinship names like Mutthachan (grandfather) and
Ajji (grandmother). Their relationship with their gods was an equal
one. The Mullakurumbas who have much in common with the Keralite Nair
traditions often have Hindu gods and goddesses in their homes but
their everyday rituals remain linked to the ancestors. All the tribes
celebrate Sivaratri.

Mahasweta Devi points out that adivasis predated Hinduism and
Aryanism. She argues that Siva was not an Aryan god and that in the
8th century, the tribal forest goddess or harvest goddess was absorbed
and adapted as Siva's wife.

"Goddess Kali definitely had a tribal origin, the goddess of hunters"
asserts Mahasweta Devi. Kali and Mari are common adivasi names.
Religion and culture are inextricably linked to each other. Most
discussions on adivasi culture tend to dwell mostly on customs,
traditions, dress, dance, music and exotic rituals. However what has
struck us most forcibly after over a decade among adivasis, was the
fact that adivasi values are the most beautiful and least discussed
aspect of their lives. Their values are what make their lifestyle the
only truly sustainable one in the world. Anyone, anthropologist,
activist or humanist, who lives closely among these people comes away
convinced of the beauty and value of adivasi culture.

The whole of adivasi society is built on a rock solid foundation of
equality. It is based on an unconditional acceptance of all life forms
including trees, water, the earth. This acceptance is based on a
recognition of all things being mutually dependent on each other. What
is often referred to as their symbiotic relationship with nature.
Since this acceptance is total and unconditional, it automatically
means that the other person or element in a relationship is treated
with respect. Equality therefore in adivasi society is not some
distant dream or goal to be attained - it is an integral part of how
their society is structured. It is the natural outcome of treating
everything with respect.

People are given respect and status according to their contribution to
society but only when they are performing that particular function.
Hence a priest or hunter is treated with respect when he is calling
the gods or leading the hunt. After the event, he is equal to anyone
else in the village unlike in our society where priests, politicians
or officials are supposed to be treated with deference all the time.

Much of this attitude stems from the fact that it was a non-
acquisitive society. This non-acquisitiveness is the very core of
their culture and it impacts on everything - their relationship with
nature, their social environment and even on their economy. Hunter
gatherers collected what they needed, enough for the day. Then they
relaxed till the supply of food - tubers, fruit, fish or meat was
finished, before going out foraging again. People never had any need
to prove their wealth or status by accumulating possessions.

The way these values are integrated into everyday life is what
astounds people who live among them. We have seen children digging up
a tuber from the forest and then cutting out the eyes delicately and
replanting them with great care. They take from the earth just what
they need. But they nurture it because they respect it. Most of the
adivasis had utmost contempt for chemical fertiliser and pesticides,
what they termed "English manure". We get enough from the earth. And
the rice we get using chanagam, (cowdung) is tastier and good for
health. The other, chemicals, gives plenty but it leaves the soil
ruined. You must not treat the soil, the earth like that, "farmer
after farmer told us."

Yet, this attitude is constantly denigrated. They are written off as
lazy because they do not work from dawn to dusk in order to accumulate
gold, dowries, big houses or bank balances.

For most of us, sharing is linked to our concept of ownership. Where
does the issue of sharing arise if everyone owns everything equally?
"Sharing" in this case does not arise from the generosity of the giver
but is the inherent right of the receiver. This is part of the
philosophy of indigenous people. When the Mullakurumbas go hunting a
share is given to every family in the village, even those who were
absent, sick or could not participate. An extra portion is added for
any guest in the village and even non tribal passersby will be offered
a share. Not sharing is something they find difficult to comprehend.

"Over on Maanjeri hill you will find the turmeric, in the Padhari
river there are mussels. And if you will share with me your tobacco,
my friend, together we can go there".

This Paniya song captures the tribal attitude to knowledge and
education. Knowledge, like the land and the air and water is common
property - everyone must share it. Some Paniya would have discovered
turmeric on the Maanjeri hill and mussels in the Padhari river and
what does he or she do with this knowledge? No intellectual property
rights, or discovery patents here. On the contrary a song is composed
and sung - what better way of making it public. Not only is it made
public, it is also offered free - all that is asked in return is
companionship.

This attitude to knowledge has been constantly exploited by
researchers and scientists who claim "discovery" of some new flora or
fauna when in fact it was shown to them by adivasis who had used it
for centuries. It is the Columbus "Discovery of America" syndrome.

The main threat to adivasi culture and religious beliefs comes from
the fact that it does not exclude others. The very nature of this
philosophy has left them wide open to exploitation, both material and
spiritual.

The most difficult threat to deal with however, comes from the
onslaught of modern consumerist culture, cinema, popular music,
fashion, TV all of which combine to tell the young adivasi that in
order to be smart and fashionable they should modernise their dress,
language, manners and customs. Indeed this is an onslaught that all of
traditional Indian culture is facing. And the change in society is
visible.

Romanticising adivasi culture makes little sense. Somewhere, we need
to have a blend. An understanding that technology can be used to
create not merely a more comfortable world but a compassionate kind,
just, truly human one. A society that is driven not by the "market"
but by a vision for an equitable, decent world for all human beings.

We need the adivasi voice to resound, to be heard above the clamour of
the global marketplace.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/folio/fo0007/00070340.htm

Vicious cycle
Dilip D'Souza

The author was given a Fellowship by the National Foundation for India
to write about denotified tribes.

In 1871, the British passed the Criminal Tribes Act. It notified about
150 tribes ("communities" is probably a more correct word, but I will
stick to the more-used "tribes" in this article) around the country as
"criminal". It gave the police wide powers to deal with members of
such tribes, including restricting their movements and requiring them
to report at police stations regularly.

Tribal hunter's necklace, North East.
Picture courtesy the Crafts Museum, Delhi.

Independent India repealed this Act in 1952, thus "denotifying" these
tribes. That is why they are now called denotified tribes (DNTs).
Except that term is rarely used. Half a century later, they are still
nearly always referred to as criminal. While studying DNTs on a recent
fellowship, I heard industrialists, journalists, farmers and policemen
call them that. For there is a view that just will not die: DNTs are
congenital criminals.

And it is this view, more than anything else, that defines the way
DNTs live today.

A typical example is a report in The Telegraph (Calcutta) of July 31,
1998:

"Madhya Pradesh: Chief Minister Digvijay Singh has expressed concern
over a series of recent robberies in MP by Pardhi tribals, identified
as having criminal antecedents. These tribes (sic), listed as criminal
ethnic groups, have defied the efforts of the Government to
rehabilitate them. The CM said state projects to provide these people
with education did not have any impact on their criminal instincts."

"Criminal antecedents," criminal ethnic groups," "criminal instincts,"
this is the kind of language that is still routinely used to describe
DNTs. Now some of them do indeed commit crimes, and serious ones too.
Still, hardly all of them, and hardly on a scale that would justify
such a blanket prejudice.

If society and Governments look at "these people" this way, the police
is no exception. This means that DNTs are invariably the first
suspects in area crimes. What happens to them when rounded up is no
surprise: they are usually, and brutally, beaten. Sometimes they die.

In 1998, activists filed writ petitions about two such custody deaths:
one in the Bombay High Court and one in the Calcutta High Court. They
also informed the National Human Rights Commission about the two
deaths. In a little-known victory for justice, both efforts resulted
in compensation being awarded to the families. One came through a
direction from the NHRC, the other via a judgement in the Calcutta
High Court. While the compensation is welcome and may act as a
deterrent, the really revealing thing about these cases is what they
say about attitudes towards DNTs.

Examining police affidavits, I was astonished at how carelessly
drafted, almost deliberately filled with lame mistakes, they were. It
is as if these officers were arrogantly certain nothing could touch
them - even though they had hammered a DNT to death. It is as if they
considered laughable the mere thought of being accountable for a mere
DNT's murder.

Take the case of Budhan, a 30-year-old member of the denotified Kheria
Sabaras in Purulia Distirct, West Bengal. Taken into custody on
February 10, 1998, Budhan died in the Purulia Town police station on
February 17. The police claimed he committed suicide. In response to a
writ petition about his death (No. 3715 of 1998, Paschim Banga Kheria
Saber Kalyan Samiti vs State of West Bengal and Others, filed on
February 23, 1998), Purulia police officers filed several affidavits
in Court.

Consider these extracts.

On page three of his affidavit, Biplab Dasgupta, Purulia's Jail
Superintendent, says that as soon as he reached home that February 17
evening, he got a call about Budhan's death. "(I) rushed back," he
goes on, "and at about 6.25 p.m. I entered the jail . . . (and) found
the said Budhan Sabar lying on the floor (dead)." However, on page 10
of the very same affidavit, Dasgupta says

"I saw the body at 6.18 p.m. on 17-2-98."

One affidavit, one supposed event, two different times. A simple
mistake?

In paragraph three of his affidavit, Syed Liakat Hossein, the Sub-
Divisional Officer in Purulia, says: "I proceeded on February 17, 1998
to District Jail, Purulia, at 7-30 p.m. to inquire into the alleged
suicidal death of . . . Budhan Sabar." In paragraph 4 - the very next
one - Hossein says: "I entered into the District Jail . . . at 7.15
p.m. on February 17, 1998." And as if that 15 minute difference in
consecutive paragraphs were not enough, Hossein's Annexure "A" says:
"I proceeded to the District Jail, Purulia at 8.30 p.m. on 17-2-98 to
enquire (sic) into the alleged suicidal death of . . . Budhan Sabar."

One affidavit, one supposed event, three different times.

The jailer, Kumaresh Roy, began his statement thus: "While I was
working in the office on the evening of 14-2-98 . . . (I was informed)
that (Budhan) committed suicide in cell."

Apparently Kumaresh Roy could not be bothered to get even the date
right.

Ashoke Roy of the Barabazar Police Station was the officer who
arrested Budhan. In paragraph four of his affidavit, Roy says he
picked up Budhan for interrogation "in connection with Barabazar
Police Station Case no. 37/97 dated 15-9-97." (This was a bus robbery
Roy claims Budhan was a suspect in). In paragraph 10, Roy says:
"(Budhan) disclosed startling facts in connection with . . . Case no.
37/97 dated 5-9-97."

One affidavit, two different dates for Case No. 37 of 1997.

One or two such discrepancies might be put down to typos. But this
entire series speaks of an attempt to cover up: an attempt so shabby
that we must conclude that these officers were confident their
affidavits would not even be read. But they were. "(They were) several
other contradictions and inconsistencies in the affidavits," observed
Justice Ruma Pal in her judgment (July 6, 1998) in the case. "(T)here
is no credible evidence of the alleged suicide of Budhan."

Justice Pal ordered a CBI investigation into Budhan's death,
departmental proceedings against the police officers involved and
Ashoke Roy's transfer out of the district. She also awarded Rs.
2,00,000 compensation to Budhan's widow Shyamoli.

Good news, and yet this is just one case. The attitudes in those
affidavits are what DNTs all over the country face every day, right
now. Potential harrassment is a constant preoccupation. The chances of
being reasonably treated if arrested are minimal. Rights and justice
are utterly unknown concepts.

All this, because of the easy belief that DNTs are criminal.

The result is the profoundly insecure lives DNTs live. Their huts are
regularly demolished by expanding municipalities; they must live
outside village limits; villagers do not like DNT children in schools;
one or the other member of their little communities is constantly in
jail and cases drag on in court; and periodically one or the other
member is beaten to death.

Any wonder, then, that many DNTs are still largely nomadic? And their
wandering lifestyles fuel still more suspicion. That vicious circle
has a lot to do with the state's continuing willingness to view DNTs
as criminal, to treat them that way.

To kill them that way.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/folio/fo0007/00070360.htm

A better quality of life?
Dr. Roopa Devadasan and Dr. N. Devadasan

The World Health Organisation defines health as a complete state of
physical, mental, social, and spiritual well being and not merely an
absence of disease. The common man, the world over understands this
better than many health professionals, and no one is better placed
than the adivasis to actualise this state of well being; for as
communities they have not lost a holistic vision of life.

M. Anand

Unfortunately, in society, the polarisation between the rich and poor
is increasing. Adivasis in India are struggling to make both ends
meet. Displaced from their natural forest habitats, their economic,
social and psychological poverty is steadily increasing. It is in this
context that we must look at tribal health.

Tribals in different parts of India, and even within the same
geographic regions are at different stages in this transition. At one
end of the spectrum are those "untouched by civilisation". These
groups still inhabit the forests that are closely linked to every
aspect of their lives. It must be stressed that these people generally
enjoy a healthy lifestyle. Their daily routines with periods of work
and rest are linked strongly to seasonal cycles. They often have a
balanced diet accessed through agriculture, hunting and food
gathering. Here people's concept of health is more functional than
biomedical, in that a person is considered healthy unless she/he feels
incapable of doing normal work assigned to that age/ sex in that
culture. The cause of illness is also attributed to specific acts of
commission or omission, "spirits", or in some cases physical factors
in the environment. Healing can take place through a herbal
preparation or an act of atonement, all advised by a shamanic medium.
This scenario is steadily changing, and will rapidly be a thing of the
past.

At the other end of the spectrum is the adivasis displaced completely
from the forest, whose modern lifestyle mirrors many of the problems
of our age. As opportunities in mainstream society are limited, these
people suffer all the ills of the very poor. In addition, they suffer
social discrimination as the outside world has a stereotyped image of
the "uneducated junglee". Through interaction with other groups in
society, they may follow a more clinical/ biomedical model of health
and disease and accept other systems of medicine - allopathy, ayurveda
and siddha. However, as there is a difference in the very expression
of the symptom complex, understanding of the causation of illness and
even the language used for communication, there can be huge gaps in
the process of healing.

The vast majority of tribal people lie somewhere in between these
poles.

The list of illnesses that they suffer from is similar to their non-
tribal counterparts. They suffer from communicable disease and non-
communicable, lifestyle induced disorders, the proportions varying,
depending on which pole they are closer to. A minority suffers from a
few genetically determined disorders like sickle cell anaemia,
thalassemia and G-6-PD deficiency. The difference lies in the extent
of suffering that the tribal undergoes, which is further accentuated
by an unsympathetic health service. The derogatory behaviour of the
staff undermines their confidence and self-esteem and builds on their
existing fear. This is turn results in a tremendous reluctance to
approach the health services. A classic example of this is the high
maternal mortality among their women.

Our own experience in understanding tribal health needs stemmed from
our trying to respond to the needs of the five tribal groups living in
the Gudalur taluk of the Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu. As fresh graduates
with a strong community health training from CMC Vellore, we joined
the NGO-ACCORD in 1987 and started looking for solutions. Greatly
supported by the community organisation work that had already begun
among the tribal people to fight for their land rights, the sanghams
and the health workers that they chose became our partners in the
search. We discovered that whenever the hamlets had access to forest
and land they were never impoverished, nor their children
malnourished. The bountiful Mudumalai forests met all their basic
needs. When dispossessed of their basis resources like land, or access
to forest, they quickly fell prey to their exploitative non-tribal
neighbours, and soon found themselves in debt.

Caught in this trap, their predominant emotions were fear and
mistrust. The attitude of these non-tribals (ranging from their
neighbours to the health professionals) did not help. So they
preferred to die a dignified death in the village rather than seek
medical help.

The village health workers through sheer hard work and perseverance
were able to build their faith in the alternative allopathic system we
proposed. As we went along we learned to look at health through their
eyes and facilitated their own system of healing being transferred
wherever we could. While we started out hoping that as the fear went
they would slowly access the government systems, with time we realised
the futility of expecting the Government Taluk hospital and the
Primary Health Centres to function. In 1990, the Gudalur Adivasi
Hospital came into being, now a 30-bedded institution owned and run by
the Adivasi Munnetra Sangam. In keeping with all the lessons learned,
the staff is entirely adivasi and their own philosophy and culture
provide the foundation for its management.

In terms of a learning experience that has also been validated in
other tribal belts in the country, some things are outstandingly clear
and bear reflection and acting upon. There is an immense need for
sympathetic sociological research towards improving the quality of
life of the adivasi people. For raising the level of health for these
people, a multisectoral, holistic effort must be implemented. It is a
myth that tribal people do not utilise modern systems of medicine.
Rather poor utilisation is due to geographical, financial and socio-
cultural barriers. Inefficiency and lack of accountability of the
health services and the ever-present corruption only add to the
problems of these people. Finally, in the context of the growing
concerns about the ecosystems and environment, an increasing interest
in herbal remedies, and a return from the reductionist scientific view
of health to a more holistic perspective, we have much to learn from
the adivasis. After all their very survival from another era must
teach us something.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/folio/fo0007/00070380.htm

A history of alienation
Pankaj Sekhsaria

The author is an environmental activist with Kalpavriksh, Pune.

The history of the Andaman and Nicobar islands is today a conveniently
comfortable one: of the British and "Kalapani"; of World War I and the
Japanese occupation, of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, Veer Savarkar,
the first hosting of the Indian National Flag and of modern mini India
where all communities and religions live in peace and harmony.

Pankaj Sekhsaria

But like all histories, this one too, is incomplete. It is the story
of the victors, of the people who have today come to dominate these
islands. The vanquished as they say, have no tales to tell. The
history of these islands as we tell it, as we are told it is, is
silent in many parts. There are gaping holes that are conveniently
allowed to remain so.

This history says nothing of the past, the present and the future of
those people and communities that originally belong to the islands.
For that matter, the islands belong to them, but ironically the people
who write the history are we, the modern democratic Indian state. The
people in question are the ancient tribal communities that live here,
particularly the negrito group of the Andaman islands - the Great
Andamanese, the Onge, the Jarawa and the Sentinelese. These are
communities that have lived and flourished here for at least 20,000
years, but the end could well be round the corner. Just a 150 years
ago the population of the tribal communities was estimated to be at
least 5,000. Today however, while the total population of the Andaman
and Nicobar islands has risen to about four lakhs, the population of
all these four communities put together is not more than a mere 500.

These communities of thousands of individuals with a living lineage
going back to 20,000 years have been brought to this sorry state in a
mere 150 years. It definitely began with the British and their
policies. And was continued with clinical efficiency (sic) by modern
independent India.

Pankaj Sekhsaria

Independent India was only about a couple of decades old, a young
thriving democracy as would have been called then. But this vibrant
democracy was then already set on course to becoming a coloniser
itself. From colony of the British to coloniser of the Andaman islands
(and many other places too), the step for India was an amazingly easy
one, almost, it would seem, a natural one! In the late Sixties an
official plan of the Government of India to "colonise" (and this was
the term used) the Andaman and Nicobar islands was firmly in place.

The forests were "wastelands" that needed to be tamed, settled and
developed. It did not matter that these forests were the home of a
myriad plants and animals that had evolved over aeons. It did not
matter that ancient tribal peoples were already living here for
centuries, neither that they were physically and spiritually sustained
by these forests. The idea that forests could mean more than just the
timber the trees provided had not even taken seed in the national
consciousness. The Nehruvian dream of massive industrialisation was
still calling and the rich evergreen forests of the islands promised
abundant timber to fuel it. The tribals, too, had to be civilised;
brought into the Indian mainstream. There was no question of trying to
understand, forget about asking what was it that the Onge, the
Andamanese or the Jarawa wanted themselves.

Tribal cultures the world over are intricately linked with the forests
they live in. The story or should we call it the "history" of modern
civilisation is largely one of the taming and the destruction of the
great forests of the world and the innumerable tribal communities that
lived therein. The Andaman islands is a good example. By various
means, both intended and unintended, the tribal communities have been
constantly alienated from their forests, their lands and their very
cosmos that is built around all these. One of the subtle but classic
examples is the Hinduisation of the name Andaman itself and the
attempt to pass it off as the only truth. The standard and universal
answer to the question of its origin is the well known Hindu god
Hanuman. That the state too conveniently believes this is evident from
the fact this is the story that goes out in the sound and light show
that plays every evening at the Cellular Jail in Port Blair. No one is
bothered that there are many other explanations why the Andamans is
called so. Researches On Ptolemy's Geography Of Eastern Asia," a book
written by Colonel GF Gerini in 1909 makes incredible reading in this
context, but obviously not many have bothered to read it. It is hardly
surprising then that we care even less to know what the tribals call
these islands.

Pankaj Sekhsaria

The repercussions of this dominant mindset is all too evident when one
looks at what is happening to the forests and the tribal communities.
The Great Andamanese have been wiped out as viable community. This
community which had an estimated 3,000 members about a 150 years ago,
is today left with only about 30. The Onges of the island of Little
Andaman (they call it Egu-belong) today number only 100. The 1901
census estimated it to be 601. Till a couple of years ago the Jarawa
were extremely hostile to the outside world. This hostility and self-
maintained isolation in the impenetrable rainforests of these islands
had ensured that their community, culture and forest home remained
intact and unharmed. It was however, never our intention to let them
be. The Andaman Trunk Road was constructed through the heart of the
very forests the Jarawa call home. It destroyed precious forests and
bought in various developments that are proving to be disastrous for
the Jarawa. As a result of a combination of such factors, most not
known or understood, the Jarawas recently shed their hostility and
have begun to come out from their forests "voluntarily." It could well
be the first step on the route that the Great Andamanese and the Onge
were forced to take many decades ago. Annhilation! A huge epidemic of
measles recently affected the Jarawa and a number of them are
undergoing treatment for tuberculosis.

The lessons of history have not been learnt. May be they are being
deliberately ignored. It could well be worth our while to get these
tribals out of our way. Only then can the precious tropical hardwoods
that stand in their forests and the very lands that these forests
stand be put to "productive" use. Little Andaman is a classic case.
Thousands of settlers from mainland India were brought and settled
here and the forests were opened up for logging in the early Seventies
as part of the "colonisation" plan. An Onge tribal reserve was
created, but for more than a decade now this reserve has been violated
for timber extraction. The attitude of the settlers who today live on
the land that belongs to the Onge only reflects that of the powers
that be. They ridicule the tribals as uncivilised junglees. Vices like
alcoholism were introduced; the addiction is now used by the settlers
to exploit the resources from the forests. Poaching and encroachment
inside the Onge reserve too, are ever on the increase.

In the early Sixties, the Onge were the sole inhabitants of Little
Andaman (Egu belong). Today, for each Onge, there are at least 120
outsiders here and this imbalance is rapidly increasing. What more
needs to be said?

Copyrights © 2000, The Hindu.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/folio/fo0007/00070400.htm

Cultural expressions
Jaya Jaitly

The author is President of the Samata Party.

The organising of Indian society has been among the most highly
complex in the world and its intricacy and depth have contributed to
its great endurance over two millions. A Hindu society divided into a
hierarchy of castes and considering itself amenable to change and
advancement but only within the compartments of caste, has found no
spiritual conflict in living with tribal societies which have their
own highly sophisticated social mechanisms while being considered
simple and primitive. Many scholars believe that rigid Hindu society
in fact had a subterranean need for the vitality, robustness and
sensuality of the tribal cultures, and thus constantly reinvigorated
itself with facets of these cultures.

V. Muthuraman/ Wilderfile
Toda temple.

According to Richard Lannoy in The Speaking Tree, a study of Indian
culture and society, "Every well-documented case of a great creative
Indian personality abounds in evidence of such contacts with the non-
rational culture of excluded peoples and classes". The major waves of
ingress into India divide the tribal communities into the Veddids,
similar to the Australian aboriginies, and the Paleamongoloid Astro-
asiatics from the north-east. Some of them evolved group totemism
which can still be seen in the Birhore tribe of the Chota Nagpur
region of Bihar. The Mongoloids who spread further into Bihar and
Orissa are the Mundas of today. The third were the Greco-Indians who
spread across Gujarat, Rajasthan and Pakistan from Central Asia.

Wooden tribal mask, Bastar, M.P.

Caste Hindu society never consciously tried to assimilate tribal
communities into their fold but in the process of economic, cultural
and ecological change, tribals have attached themselves to caste
groups in a peripheral manner and the process of de-tribalisation is a
continuous one.

The most significant forum for interaction between tribals and caste
Hindus has been at weekly village markets. Artisan castes have
traditionally produced and marketed their wares at these haats and
consequently moulded them to suit the tastes and needs of their local
clientele. In Orissa, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh where the tribal
population is considerable there are also a preponderance of village
haats. In the north-east too there are large and small marketplaces
where tribal women sell their handloom textiles, medicinal herbs,
foodstuff and various types of forest produce. Handcrafts combs, mud
pots, bamboo, baskets, musical instruments and wooden cooking
implements are among the items that may be termed as tribal products.

K.Ramesh Babu

While it may be stated that any hand-made item for decorative,
ritualistic or utilitarian purpose within their cultures can be termed
as tribal craft, it may not necessarily be true that all such items
are made by the tribals themselves. In areas where the population is
largely caste Hindu in composition, the crafts made for tribals are
often actually fashioned by Scheduled Caste artisans and mistaken for
tribal crafts in urban minds. What is interesting however, is that as
in Orissa, many of the Hindu communities have absorbed the cultural
practices of the tribals.

Courtesy: The Ford Foundation, New Delhi.
Warli tribal painting.

Festivals, wedding rituals, and other forms of social interaction
follow all the tribal procedures. The articles they manufacture for
tribal votive offerings at times of marriage, sickness, birth and
death thus acquire a personalised meaning for the producer. While
studying the lives and markets of such artisans it was found that in
areas of missionary activity, where tribals were converting to
Christianity and giving up the use of votive objects such as dhokra
metal figurines, artisans were fast losing the clientele that
sustained them and were having a seek markets for their products in
larger cities through development agencies and government
organisations. Age old cultural-economic links are thus breaking down
as a result of social change. The process of industrialisation also
replaces artisan products at village markets. Metal buttons, hair
clips, combs and other forms of female fashion accessories among
tribals are giving way to fluorescent plastic substitutes leaving the
already impoverished Scheduled Caste artisan further deprived.

In Bihar many social work and development oriented organisations work
among tribals to bring them a modicum of education, health and
sanitary conditions. Among them the Birhore tribals have seen
remarkable change in the past few years. Highly skilled in producing
woven cloth for saris, lungis and scarves, grass baskets, hats and
fans, they have been gradually brought out of their cave-like
dwellings and have begun to discover the possibilities of using their
skills to produce articles suited for urban needs. The Rathwas of
Chota Udepur in Gujarat are another tribe discovering the urban world
through their craft skills. They fashion semi-glazed pottery, the
forms of which are highly aesthetic and sophisticated. Women use their
leisure hours to make head necklaces and the men recently learned the
more "settled" skill of wood carving to make distinctive statuettes.

Marie D'Souza/ Fotomedia

The most significant forms of creative expression of the Rathwas are
their ritual wall paintings pertaining to the myths of creation and
their deities, Babo Ind and Babo Pithoro. Mythological ideas of the
Rathwas combining realism and symbolism, are depicted on walls in
their homes and elaborate rituals are conducted in the process of
their making and consecration. The Warli tribes of Thane in
Maharashtra, the Gonds of Madhya Pradesh, the Rathwas of Gujarat all
express an energetic assertion of adivasi cultural identity through
their paintings at a time of socio-political change.

Outstanding innovators like Jivya Soma (Warli), Jangadh Singh Shyam
(Gond) and Mansingh Rathwa (Chota Udepur) ared bringing their
community art greater recognition and encouraging others to present
their work to an urban and international audience. But today these
paintings are also being done on cloth and paper and sold as tribal
art, and when the paintings are further translated onto modern utility
items they will, no doubt, enter the world of "tribal craft" as a
rather sad transformation of myth and cosmos to market and commerce.

Almost all tribals (except in the north-east and Lakshadweep)
characteristically adorn themselves with many silver, white metal or
brass ornaments ranging from hair clips and combs to necklaces, shirt
buttons, earrings, armlets, bangles, waist belts and anklets. Even men
use ornamental shirt buttons and wear earrings and amulets. These
items are generally made by settled Hindu and Muslim artisans and is
applicable also to the nomadic communities of Jammu and Kashmir. The
Gujjars and Bakarwals descend from the Greco Indians and are
interrelated with the Gujjars of Gujarat and the tribes settled around
Gujranwala in Pakistan. Their finely embroidered caps, mirrorwork
embroideries (Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh) and distinctive freestyles
consisting of innumerable tiny braids and ornamental hair clips have
offered ideas for the designs of the "ethnic chic" style of urban
fashion. Their embroidered blankets and quilts use geometric motifs
common to Punjabi phulkaris, Iraqi rugs and Central Asia textiles.

Tribal communities are greatly fascinated by the comb. They are made
of wood, bamboo, horn, metal, yarn wound onto wood, root fibre, gum or
latex from trees. Patterns and designs vary according to communities.
Not only are they used for setting the hair in place but as necklaces,
gifts, sacred objects, magic rituals and as a form of communicating
affection to a loved one. Tribes in Orissa who specialise in comb
making are the Santhalis, Dharnas, Koyas, among others. Most tribes in
Madhya Pradesh and Nagaland also make distinctive combs, while in
Thana Mandi in Jammu a small oil container within the comb releases
oil into the hair while combing.

Tribal textiles almost always demonstrate the identity of the
community. Border designs and colours used for sarongs or shawls
define the village of the tribe. Motifs in the north-east symbolise,
mountains, streams, houses, snakes, birds or a temple. Specific
colours are worn by designed priests on ritual occasions. There are
ways of differentiating between a shawl woven by a hill tribe and a
plains tribe and the chieftain's shawl is always distinct. Sometimes
shawls are woven by one tribe and embroidered by women in another
tribe, as among the Dongrias and Damas in Orissa. The use of the
colours symbolise forest, fertility, unity and peace, gods and the
sacrifices of animals.

Aditya Dhawan

Close knit communities like the tribals interweave their forms of
cultural expression. Painting, wood carving, weaving, songs,
festivals, birth, death, animals and forests are components of a cycle
which metamorphose together to give their philosophy and understanding
of the cosmos a holistic dimension. Artefacts such as cattle belts,
buttermilk churns, spice grinders, blankets, jewellery, totems,
garments and votive articles have the unmistakable imprint of
community identification. It is only after these serve their basic
purpose., whether ritualistic or utilitarian that they become crafts
for the marketplace. A better understanding of their skills and
offerings to the composite culture of India will help in preserving
the true value of these crafted objects.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/folio/fo0007/00070420.htm

A Toda friend
S. Anandalakshmy

The author is a Consultant in Child Development and Education.

While sorting out papers, letters, slides and photographs as a
necessary antecedent to moving house (a moving experience in more ways
than one: the past keeps appearing in more rapid flashbacks than in an
Ingmar Bergman film), I came upon an archival picture of a beautiful
Toda woman that I had taken in 1975 in New Delhi. It was Pelgiji, with
her hair worn in ringlets, deep set eyes and a wonderful dignity of
bearing. What a presence! Befriending her was not difficult and I
found that what we shared as persons seemed much larger than what we
did not share in customs and rituals. But let me begin at the
beginning of the story.

S. Anandalakshmy

The year was 1975, the month, November. Delhi was pleasantly cool in
the early winter and the Mandi House area was the hub of the Universe.
Naturally! A crafts show with a difference was being held, titled
"Craftswomen at Work." The women had gathered from all over the
country and the exhibition area in the interior of Rabindra Bhavan had
become a hive of activity. One could see the process of something
being made, seeing it grow, evolve, become more complex, get
embellished or get transformed. The variety was astounding: Zardosi
from U.P., delicate bamboo baskets from Tripura, a Kalamkari hanging
from Andhra Pradesh - the list was unending, seemingly. It was greatly
satisfying to make a transaction directly with the artist. While
moving around, one came upon two Toda women, doing their traditional
red and blue embroidery, on table linen and household linen,as well as
on shawls. The Ooty of one's childhood was instantly revived and I
spoke to them. "You can speak Tamil?", they asked with joy. "There is
no one here we can talk to. Our words are getting stuck in our
throats." I invited them to have a meal with me in my small apartment
at the College and then go sightseeing on Sunday.

When asked what they wanted to see in Delhi, they said, "Gandhi
Samadhi" and "Nehru Samadhi". I included the Red Fort also in the
itinerary and they were thoroughly happy. At lunch and in transit to
the various sites, we talked. I found that the name Pelgiji meant the
sound of silver bells and she lived up to her name, while her
companion took part mostly with nods and smiles. Pelgiji told me that
the land that the Todas held dated back to a pact with the British.
Each family had access to 15 acres of land, which the young male got
when he turned 21. No one was allowed to cultivate more, even if some
land was lying fallow. Only men could enter the house of prayer and
the entire community was cohesive and tightly controlled.

Pelgiji mentioned that her husband, Muthakken would be coming to Delhi
for the Republic Day the next year and that she would suggest that he
call on me. (That cordial visit did happen).

I got a standing invitation to visit Ooty as their guest - an offer I
regret not taking then. Twenty five years later, if I do go, will they
remember me? I wonder.

A Toda friend
S. Anandalakshmy

The author is a Consultant in Child Development and Education.

While sorting out papers, letters, slides and photographs as a
necessary antecedent to moving house (a moving experience in more ways
than one: the past keeps appearing in more rapid flashbacks than in an
Ingmar Bergman film), I came upon an archival picture of a beautiful
Toda woman that I had taken in 1975 in New Delhi. It was Pelgiji, with
her hair worn in ringlets, deep set eyes and a wonderful dignity of
bearing. What a presence! Befriending her was not difficult and I
found that what we shared as persons seemed much larger than what we
did not share in customs and rituals. But let me begin at the
beginning of the story.

S. Anandalakshmy

The year was 1975, the month, November. Delhi was pleasantly cool in
the early winter and the Mandi House area was the hub of the Universe.
Naturally! A crafts show with a difference was being held, titled
"Craftswomen at Work." The women had gathered from all over the
country and the exhibition area in the interior of Rabindra Bhavan had
become a hive of activity. One could see the process of something
being made, seeing it grow, evolve, become more complex, get
embellished or get transformed. The variety was astounding: Zardosi
from U.P., delicate bamboo baskets from Tripura, a Kalamkari hanging
from Andhra Pradesh - the list was unending, seemingly. It was greatly
satisfying to make a transaction directly with the artist. While
moving around, one came upon two Toda women, doing their traditional
red and blue embroidery, on table linen and household linen,as well as
on shawls. The Ooty of one's childhood was instantly revived and I
spoke to them. "You can speak Tamil?", they asked with joy. "There is
no one here we can talk to. Our words are getting stuck in our
throats." I invited them to have a meal with me in my small apartment
at the College and then go sightseeing on Sunday.

When asked what they wanted to see in Delhi, they said, "Gandhi
Samadhi" and "Nehru Samadhi". I included the Red Fort also in the
itinerary and they were thoroughly happy. At lunch and in transit to
the various sites, we talked. I found that the name Pelgiji meant the
sound of silver bells and she lived up to her name, while her
companion took part mostly with nods and smiles. Pelgiji told me that
the land that the Todas held dated back to a pact with the British.
Each family had access to 15 acres of land, which the young male got
when he turned 21. No one was allowed to cultivate more, even if some
land was lying fallow. Only men could enter the house of prayer and
the entire community was cohesive and tightly controlled.

Pelgiji mentioned that her husband, Muthakken would be coming to Delhi
for the Republic Day the next year and that she would suggest that he
call on me. (That cordial visit did happen).

I got a standing invitation to visit Ooty as their guest - an offer I
regret not taking then. Twenty five years later, if I do go, will they
remember me? I wonder.

http://www.hinduonnet.com/folio/fo0007/00070500.htm

Poor health services plague Thane Adivasi area
Meena Menon

Funds are there but the healing touch is missing; comunity-based
monitoring undertaken

Post-mortem: A public hearing in progress under the National Rural
Health Mission at Sayvan village in Maharashtra on Thursday. — Photo:
Handout

SAYVAN (Thane district): “I brought my wife to the Sayvan primary
health centre when she was bitten by a dog, but they asked me Rs. 50
before treating her,” said Janu Babar. He did not know that treatment
for dog bite is free for Adivasis. They just have to produce a below
poverty line (BPL) card. If they don’t bring the card, they will have
to pay Rs. 50 as refundable deposit. Eventually, Janu paid Rs. 120 to
get his wife Devli treated in a private clinic.

This was one of the issues raised at a public hearing on the National
Rural Health Mission (NRHM) at the Sayvan PHC in Dahanu taluk on
Friday. The exercise is part of community-based monitoring of health
services being conducted in five districts of Maharashtra.

Out of Maharashtra’s annual budget of Rs, 1,000 crore under the NRHM,
only Rs. 860 crore was spent last year, according to Dr. Nitin Jadhav
of Sathi, State coordinator for community-based monitoring. Before the
hearing, NGOs conducted a study of the five villages which come under
the PHC, catering for a population of 41,000.

A report card of the study presented at the hearing, presided over by
Dr. Anand Phadke of CEHAT, an NGO, revealed that the situation is
quite serious in four villages where the people did not even recognise
the multipurpose health worker (MPW). In some cases, the auxiliary
nurse and midwife (ANM) did not perform her duties. Medicines are in
short supply and the State has no stock of tetanus injection. The ANMs
spend their money to buy it and get reimbursement later.

The area, inhabited by Adivasis, has reported cases of malnutrition,
infant and maternal mortality. Last year in one hamlet alone, four
infant deaths were reported. However, the NRHM is supposed to provide
“untied funds,” as Dahanu taluk health officer Madhukar Rathod pointed
out. At the public hearing at Ganjad on Thursday, he said it was
raining money. Each PHC gets Rs. 1.75 lakh while sub-centres are given
Rs. 10,000 for expenses.

Of the Rs. 32-crore budget for Thane district last year under the
NRHM, Rs.19 crore was spent, Dr. Rathod said. Despite all this money
coming in, the situation had not improved. More serious was the
problem of doctors not attending to patients and people having to pay
for services.

At the Ganjad hearing, an Adivasi complained that she was refused
treatment for a badly cut hand when she went to the PHC at 7 a.m. on a
Sunday. She had to go to another hospital, where 18 stitches were put.
When the two PHC doctors were asked to explain, they said it was too
early on a Sunday and so they did not treat the woman, according to
Dr. Jadhav.

When Bharati Mahale took her sister-in-law to the Sayvan PHC for
delivery, no doctor was present and she was asked to take the pregnant
woman to the sub-district hospital at Kasa, 15 km away. The ambulance
driver charged her Rs. 150 for diesel. At Kasa, the doctor made them
wait and when Bharati lost her patience, she was almost assaulted. Her
sister-in-law was then taken to a private hospital and Bharati had to
pay another Rs. 300 towards diesel charges.

It is not only patients, doctors too are suffering. T.R. Bansode,
medical officer of the Sayvan PHC, said he had not been paid salary
since March. The PHC itself is a shambles, there is no water and
electricity. The operation theatre remains closed and the delivery
room is dusty. The laboratory is non-functional.

The rain of money has not helped much. Kavita Raote, who had a second
daughter three months ago, said the infant was not vaccinated. It was
a home delivery, but no ANM visited her within a week, which is
mandatory. Kavita is entitled to Rs. 800 under the Matrutva Anudan
Yojana and Rs. 500 under the Janini Suraksha Yojana, but she got no
money under either scheme.

Sunday, Jun 22, 2008
ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version

http://www.hindu.com/2008/06/22/stories/2008062260321100.htm

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...and I am Sid Harth