Travelers' Tales India Read online

  —Willie Weir, “Cycling India: Letters from the Road”

  To the Tribal Heartland

  NORMAN LEWIS

  Few know about the many millions of tribal people living in the forests of India’s interior. The author travels deep into these regions to visit them.

  TAPTAPANI WAS THE FRONTIER WITH SAORA TERRITORY, HOMELAND of about 400,000 members of one of India’s most populous and successful tribal peoples. They had been spread through Orissa since before the Aryan arrival, although continually pushed back out of the fertile plains, first by outright invasion and conquest and later by various forms of expropriation masked by legal skulduggery of the kind still generally practised. They were notable for their collection over the centuries of innumerable gods (a principal one being the earth-worm), and for the complication and cost of their ceremonies. It is their custom in the case of death to conduct two funerals, the second of which, a protracted affair known as the Guar ritual, had bankrupted many families.

  The 54 million tribals in India are roughly the equivalent of the combined metropolitan populations of New York City, Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro, London, and Shanghai. Put another way, this is nearly the entire population of France, or Italy, or Egypt, which all weigh in at about 57 million.

  —JO’R and LH

  The ladies we had seen in search of fruitfulness at Taptapani were Saoras, and the unnamed fertility god, too, was in all likelihood from their vast collection. The local girls from nearby villages belonged to a division of the race known as Sudha Saoras—sudha meaning clean—in recognition by their Hindu neighbours of the fact that they no longer ate the meat of the cow. At the far end of the Saora country where the high mountains had discouraged Hindu penetration, the Lanjia Saoras clung wholeheartedly to the old ways, and Ranjan said that the opportunity would arise to see them too.

  We left Taptapani at dawn, climbing among the misted forests into and over a low mountain range, held up for a moment by another of India’s great vistas, with yellow morning light flooding the plain streaked with the brush strokes of shadows cast by the tall palms. The first Sudha Saora village gathered shape by a stream curling through glowing fields, and we stopped, left the car and walked to it.

  It was another page of an atlas turned. On the road to Taptapani India had imitated Mexico; here were laid out the softer splendours of one of the countries by the China Sea. Here were the sago palms, first sighted from above, now seen to have pots fixed to their trunks below incisions from which dropped the sweet sap in which fermentation would begin on the same day. Something of the kind was to be seen in Indo-China of old where as here no serious obligations could be undertaken, no troth plighted and no contract sealed without ceremonial imbibings. Generally among the Saora the bride-price includes twenty pots of wine, and none of their innumerable ceremonies can be completed without libations. The theft of alcohol is their most serious crime, resulting in mortal retribution.

  At this hour in the morning the village was the scene of intense activity, with men, women, and children at work doing odd jobs and tidying up round the houses, or out in the fields pumping up water, weeding, hoeing, grinding millet, twisting sisal fibre into rope, cleaning out irrigation ditches, and bringing in bundles of long, feathery grass with which to make or repair thatches. The place swarmed with animals, with puppies, piglets, and bantam chickens, kept—since the Sudha Saora were vegetarians—as pets.

  The villagers showed their excitement at the sight of new faces, and were eager to show us round. One thing about their village stood out—its spruceness. Being outside the caste system had left the Saora with no alternative but to clean up for themselves. It was a cool place in a hot country. Unlike the Hindus, who, being basically migrants from the north, had only been on the scene for two thousand years, the Saora, having been obliged from time immemorial to defend themselves from the sun, had learned how to do it. They built themselves windowless houses with thick walls of wooden trellis plastered with mud, and two doors in line at back and front kept open to pass the air through. The thatch came as low as three feet from the ground, and was deep enough to accommodate a spacious verandah on which the family spent much of the time. The Saora took pleasure in pointing out and explaining the merits of these architectural features. They were proud of their decorative skills, leaving their walls coloured the rich maroon of the local earth and free of ornament, but carving woodwork, doors, door-posts and lintels in lively animal shapes: rampaging elephants, peacocks in flight, strutting roosters, and an occasional whimsical and inoffensive-looking tiger.

  The village Gomang—the headman—now trotted into sight, a pleasant, twinkling little man who, said Ranjan, had taken time to slip on his ceremonial gear: a hat with white plumes, tunic, tasselled loin-cloth, training shoes, and a species of silver codpiece, worn in this region perhaps as a badge of office. He had a frank and ready answer for questions. Modhukamba, he said, contained twenty families, totalling two hundred people. They lived on cow’s milk, various pulses they grew and the income from the sale of tussor silk cocoons—all such production being equally divided in the presence of the village god. The elections at the end of last year had provided a small cash windfall, for he had been able to negotiate a fair price for the community votes. When I showed surprise that such a transaction could be openly discussed, Ranjan explained that vote-selling was the normal practise in all such backward areas, and a vote cast without receiving a cash reward would be unheard of.

  The mythological relationship between trees and women descends from the prehistorical inhabitants of India, when people propitiated the spirits which inhabited the jungle, sensing the deep connections between plants and human beings. To illustrate this mutual dependency, early tribal myths tell of women fertilizing trees. The asoka is supposed to burst into flower when kicked by a virgin’s foot, the mango tree at the touch of her fingers.

  —Naveen Patnaik, The Garden of Life: An Introduction to the Healing Plants of India

  Nodding his agreement the Gomang added that the settlement in this case had been unusually generous, for the candidate who had visited the village in person had even presented him with nine pots of mohua flower wine, considered much superior to the liquor of their own production. This would be utilised in the big Guar ceremony, to be held as soon as enough funds had been collected to buy a buffalo for the sacrifice. I raised the question of the Sudha Saora’s vegetarian diet, and the Gomang said that this was a rare case when departure from the rule was tolerated. The village priest, a Hindu, would abstain from the ceremony, to be performed instead by a kudan, or shaman. It was by the performance of such rituals, he pointed out, that the village’s health and prosperity were maintained. On the topic of health he added that the Hindu priest dealt with minor ailments with considerable success. As for the rest, he capped his ears with his hands in what Ranjan said was a gesture of resignation. Most of the villagers, he said, had never seen a doctor. The nearest town was many miles away, for which reason no child went to school. The whole village was illiterate.

  The Gomang was suddenly surrounded by women who made it clear by their gestures that they had a serious problem to discuss. It turned out that they were suffering from the attentions of officials operating the Intensive Tribal Development Programme and, said Ranjan, had first assumed that we had something to do with the scheme. The programme starts off from the premise that tribal people’s unsatisfactory existences can only be improved by government interference. This often takes absurd forms. V. S. Naipaul recalls a project designed to provide farmers of India, whether tribals or not, with bullock carts fitted at unimaginable cost with pneumatic tyres and ball-bearing wheels. Bastar, along with Bihar, is considered as being one of the most exploited and wretchedly backward areas in the world, yet the Illustrated Weekly of India reported that a start had been made to improve the situation of the region by the installation of solar lights in some villages, “which of course do not function.”

  In Modhukamba the government Micro-Pro
ject seemed even more lunatic in its inspiration. In such communities cow dung is as highly valuable as we had found it to be in Bihar, above all as an ingredient in an ointment applied to sores and for mixing with vegetable dyes. The ITDP had turned up, built a large underground concrete chamber, ordered the villagers to fill it with their precious manure, and closed and sealed the lid, through which a number of copper tubes led into the village houses. The villagers were told that this arrangement would supply gas for their cooking fires—they only had to turn on the tap. This they did, but there was no issue of gas. “None of the projects worked,” said the magazine article. “Every programme is ill conceived and found to be utterly irrelevant in a particular context.” In the case of Modhukamba there was no wood to be had in the neighbourhood, the women said. No other fuel but dung. What were they to do?

  Every experience of this journey contradicted the picture of rural India as presented by the films. India has always been shown as overbrimming with people. Here it was lonely. Having left the main coastal road with its unceasing procession of lorries, there was no traffic at all, and on this and succeeding days we drove all day without encountering, except in an occasional small town, a single private car. The fact is that there is virtually no travel in the interior of India. There is nowhere to stay, nowhere to eat, and it is not particularly safe.

  We were now making for the area of Gunupur on the Vamsadhara River close to the border with Andhra Pradesh, where the main concentrations of so-called primitive Lanjia Saora are found in high mountains and thick patches of forest. Once again the scenery had undergone an almost theatrical change: a harsh Indian version of the Australian outback: red rocks tumbling through a wood, the black, bustling untidiness of hornbills in the high branches of trees with sharp, glinting leaves and orange trunks, terracotta earth, the copper faces of Saoras cutting wood with the sound of metal striking metal in a forge.

  A dhaba in this isolated spot offered no alternatives for the midday meal: a narrow hut with crows fluttering over the scraps at the entrance and a three-legged dog licking at something splashed on the floor. This possessed its own landscape in miniature of eroded hills and dales—even a river in the form of a black dribbling from the kitchen area. Plates made from leaves stitched together with something like toothpicks were stacked on a shelf and a man in a dirty singlet with a bad skin condition of the forearms took down three of them, and wiped away the red dust using the rag with which he had just pushed the sodden rice left by the last customer from the table top. Onto each of these leaf-plates he ladled a dollop of rice then went off to return with earthenware saucers containing fiery mixtures of vegetables cooked with chillies.

  The moment had arrived once again, after so many years of lack of practise, to eat soggy rice with the fingers, an operation never at best elegant in the eyes of the onlooker and intolerably messy until the knack has been acquired. The local method was to pick up and compress the gobbet of rice with the tips of the five fingers, raise it to the lips, then propel it into the mouth with a sharp upward thrust of the thumb. Thereafter—and this was new to me—the diner would dislodge the grains of rice adhering to his fingers with a jerk of the wrist scattering them about the floor where the three-legged dog awaited.

  Discreetly I studied the performance of Ranjan and our driver, watching for fine points. Both, as to be expected, were excellent. The rice I scattered went in all directions; their scatterings were contained within the circumference of a circle no more than a foot across. The meal was conducted in total silence on our part, that of the dhaba staff, and the two Saora woodcutters, with fine, aqua-line, slightly predatory faces, seated in a far corner and flicking their fingers free of rice with graceful, patrician gestures. At the door the man in the dirty singlet waited to pour water over our hands. The crows were trying to get at a silver lizard that had taken refuge from them under the Ambassador.

  Suddenly we were in an area of Christian missionary effort and conversion. The Indian government had consistently opposed the presence of missionaries in wholly Hindu areas, but tolerated Christian evangelism in tribal country such as this, persuaded that the integration of the tribals into the national society can best be effected by the demolition of tribal customs and religious beliefs. The Catholics and Lutherans have long shared the harvest of souls and continue, often in fierce competition, to confuse potential converts who find it hard to understand why the same God is to be reached by such widely fundamentalist sects of the kind involved in recent years in Latin-American scandals in which they have been charged with forcible conversion and genocide.

  The first indications of missionary presence and success were graveyards with large white crosses planted in the red earth on the outskirts of tribal villages. Cremation, said Ranjan, had always been practised except in cases of persons dying from unnatural causes, whom it had been customary to bury. Burial was thus associated with tragedy, calling for discussion among the elders as to the extra funeral rites required to succour and appease an unhappy soul. In all parts of India, Ranjan said, it was the same. The missionaries bought conversion with food and medicine. They were the only source of antimalarial pills in the anopheles-ridden mountain villages of the Saora country. If the Saoras were only required to say, “Yes, I believe in God,” before receiving the handout, he thought it would have been an excellent thing. It turned out that much more than that was expected in exchange to complete the deal. The Saora had to convince the good father, or the Christian evangelist, that they no longer believed in the Earth Mother, the gods of fire and water, the gods and goddesses in charge of the fertility of a whole assortment of crops, in the Lord of Thunder, the Guardian of Roads, in Thakurani, the blackened pole under its thatched roof defending the village, in the goddesses of each individual household, the cobra god to be placated with flute music and fed with rice and milk, and Labusum, Divine Earth Worm and Creator of the World. The Saoras saw no objection to adding the Christian deity to the others, but even with the magic tablets within their grasp were profoundly troubled at the obligation of doing away with all the rest.

  Malaria is endemic in tribal areas of the interior, and treatments to prevent it change from year to year as mosquitoes become immune to drugs. The best way to prevent malaria is to avoid being bitten by mosquitoes. Wear clothing that covers the arms and legs, sleep under mosquito netting, and use good insect repellent.

  —JO’R and LH

  Back in the rainy season when malaria reached epidemic proportions the Gomang of another Saora village had discussed his problems with Ranjan.

  “We Saora have many gods,” he said.

  “You do,” Ranjan agreed.

  The Gomang, like the rest of his people, was innumerate.“Could you help me to work out the number of these?” he asked.

  Ranjan and the Gomang totted up the various names, adding two or three who were considered too powerful or dangerous to be mentioned by name, and could only be alluded to in a roundabout and placatory fashion. A total of twenty-three was agreed upon.

  “Most of them have always been kind and useful to us,” the Gomang said.“The missionary is asking us to exchange twenty-three for one, plus a month’s supply of Nivaquin. It seems unreasonable.”

  Potasing, a Lanjia Saora village built on a hillside thirty miles away, was recommended by Ranjan as one of the least afflicted in the zone by the government’s efforts to uplift the tribal peoples and guide them along the paths leading to national integration. He found it—as I did—mysterious that the main targets chosen so far for these endeavours should have been remote mountain villages, most of them difficult to reach. In these areas the teams had made a start by knocking down cool, solid and practical Saora houses and replacing them with rows of concrete cabins with corrugated-iron roofs, located normally without access to water or refuge from the sun.

  Incomprehensibly to Ranjan, Potasing, which would have been easy to reach and demolish, had so far been left alone. It was a village of eighty-five families, one of a group de
scribed in a recent government report as “in a real primitive stage, nevertheless of instant visual charm.” The low houses with their plain, immensely thick walls of red mud had been fitted into the contours of the hill in a way that recalled the harmonies of Taos. As in the case of Modhukamba, doors, door posts, and lintels were richly carved and painted with flower and animal motifs, and like the lowland village it gave the impression that daily routines of house-scouring and sweeping went on. Here mountain rivulets ran down through the lanes with butterflies by the hundred at their edge, opening and closing their wings as they sucked at the moisture.

  Someone had run to fetch the Post Master, who appeared in Potasing to have taken over the function of the Gomang of old. He was pleasant and eager to be of assistance, a young man in well-pressed slacks, a wrist watch with a metal band, a button lettered PM pinned to his white shirt, and a fair amount of English. His official duties, he said, occupied little of his time and left him free to pursue his spiritual studies. He announced that Potasing was now a Christian village, and that he himself in the absence of a resident Catholic priest was empowered to act as deacon in charge of the welfare of the religious community.

  The mass conversion at Potasing—so close to the road and the Hindu sphere of influence—had been a major achievement carried out in five years. In other cases where Christians had allowed their guard to drop—”Christian inspiration slackened” were the words he used—the Hindus had moved in. “But now we are giving battle on this front,” the PM said. The battle was to be against illiteracy, which impeded access to the Scriptures. We were informed that there were twenty-four places for pupils in the new village school. And how many attended classes? I asked. “One,” he said, in no way abashed by what would have seemed to me a melancholic truth. “The teacher is sent by the government. He is to teach in Hindi,” he explained. “This they are not understanding.”