Adivasi – Tribal People In Orissa, India
Written around 2001-2002
Mornings are really chilly up in the Eastern Ghats. Yet, men are descending from the forests barefooted, dressed in sarongs not much more than loincloth, European fashioned shirts covering their upper bodies. Each is balancing two big pots of precious liquid on a flexible pole across one shoulder, bow and arrows in the free hand. Women follow with huge woven baskets, covered with a single, thin blanket supplied by the government. They’re decorated with traditional ornaments of heavy metal bands on their necks and wrists and hundreds of beads hanging down from the neck all the way below the waist and wrapped around their shaven heads. It’s market day again, a time to buy-sell-barter, but probably just as importantly, to catch up with friends from other villages. Others arrive by bus from places further down, and most of the locals of the town are also present. The crowd is growing in number as the day gets older, and the colourful, heterogeneous mixture of people, even to the outsider, reveals a lot about this complex, multicultural world that is India. Onukudeli, this small, remote place with only a handful of streets, but with a massive hydro- electric power plant, is located in the mountains of the the state of Orissa, separated from Andra Pradesh by a river flowing into a spectacular waterfall and a man-made lake. The people living in the area belong to various tribes and “scheduled” low castes, or are one-time immigrants – perhaps living here for generations – from the lowlands. Although the Bondo probably are the most unique of the tribes, with very little changes to their traditional ways of life, there are an amazing number of other indigenous groups all over India.
“Adivasi”. Ancient People. The word for aboriginal people in India. A world that is more and more in the focus of politicians, organizations and the general public. But it’s more than a world, it is the peoples; the peoples who take up close to one tenth of the whole population of India, representing 437 different indigenous groups. Only in Orissa there are 62 tribes, almost one quarter of all the people living in the state, according to the 1981census. We saw this side of Orissa for the first time in Kandamal district, named after the most numerous tribe, the Kondh. Daringbadi, what locals call the “Kashmir of Orissa”, was our first stop in this rural venture. Set in a beautiful location in the mountains surrounded by thick rainforests, it’s only half a day’s bus ride from the well-visited coast. Along the winding road the Kondh women carrying firewood to sell it in town stand out with their characteristic facial tattoos and scores of earrings lining their ears from the lobe to the top. But there was already a hint what to expect. An elderly woman got on the bus in her traditional attire, and a young girl, probably her granddaughter, in a neat blue-and-white school uniform. Sign of the times – “development”, which is, indeed, so important, but still left us with mixed feelings after spending a few weeks in tribal areas.
Going to a place uninvited is a tricky business, but you can, like everywhere else in the World, “depend on the kindness of strangers”. First there was an element of confusion and even suspicion, as the only foreign faces the people are accustomed to are either officials from different organizations or missionaries, and the occasional footloose student. That anybody else would be interested in these precious fading cultures, just didn’t make sense to them. And in fact, despite the small size of the town, there is a mindbogling variety of different NGOs and schools, all involved in different aspects of rural and social development. The culture of these indigenous peoples differs greatly from the predominant Hindu and Muslim cultures of India in every sense, and even from each other; they all have their own language, art, social organisation and spiritual belief system. What used to be common is the reliance on the forest; it was their source of livelihood and also an integral part of their spiritual world. All this is changing fast. Most of the tribes became part of the bigger social order, practising sedentary agriculture now, speaking Oriya, and having adopted, or incorporated, new Gods. According to locals up to 80% of the Kondhs around Daringbadi are Christians, due to the enormous missionary activity in the forms of churches, hospitals and schools, and the lure of a western “good life”. On the second day of us being in town a Baptist priest from the furthermost state of Kerala, who flew in just for the occasion, himself a Brahmin, baptised 38 individuals in a spree, than before he got dry left the place. “You can only be a Hindu if you were born a Hindu” a local said, “but if you were born a Hindu, you can only be a Hindu.”
To have a good life, according to some, one has to have adequate shelter, food, fuel, protection – both against enemies and illnesses -, an extended family and a culture. You have to have them all. A thatched hut is as adequate as a house built from bricks and covered with tin or asbestos-cement sheets, and probably keeps warmer in winter and cooler in summer. Air-conditioning is out of the question in either case. Living on forest food supplemented with what the “slash-and-burn” type of agriculture could offer might not have put a feast on the “table” every day, but if everything was going alright, nobody had to go hungry. Education? – being able to read the forest, the sky, the behaviour of the animals like a book is a PhD for me. And even well educated caste Indians with university degrees won’t necessary get a job, either. Pharmaceutical companies are doing business like never before, but there is an ever growing longing for natural, herbal remedies. Individualism is the motto in the West, but loneliness is the fact. Assimilation, be it the “stolen generation” of Australian Aborigines, the “reservated” North American Indians or European Gypsies of Indian origin, didn’t seem to work. Maybe it’s all just an idealistic, naive, paleface-indian-in-a- concrete-tipi philosophy of someone who took Dances with Wolves and Out of Africa too seriously. And that’s exactly so, a Kutia Kondh man (one of the sub-groups of the Kondh) told us, we shouldn’t worry to much about their culture. His English, if it is at all a measurement of progress, was much better than we got used to around Orissa. They can, he assured, adapt to two worlds. They will hang on their culture, their language, their traditions – to a certain extent. But there are things which are not sustainable or ethically questionable. The shifting cultivation left much of the forest dotted with bolding spots and the animals are scarcer, especially since the trees are cut not only for local use. And he personally knows elder people who, in a Kutia Kondh tradition, went way beyond the usual puja of sacrificing coconut, eggs or animals of two or four legged varieties, and killed humans to please the gods. He made a point. But there are probably other tribal people who can’t adapt to the new system, or don’t want to. They try to keep what they believe is theirs. There was a war further up in the hills at the time, like in’92, unknown to the outside world and disguised as a loud dispute for the locals, between government forces and tribes who joined up together. Is it because of cunning entrepreneurs or the State, it probably doesn’t matter; it’s land that’s at stake.
Why the tribes? In the adjoining district of Ganjam, when we visited Soroda for the invitation of a representative of an NGO met by chance, we were asked. We felt a bit like stepping out of Dickens’s “Beggar and Prince”, mistaken for some high level government officials on an election campaign-tour with all the compulsory garlands of flowers and promise-you-all-speeches, when they took us down to some of the villages of the lowland. The farmers of these low-caste places are enduring a long draught and water is what they want most of all, and perhaps a few cows to start a dairy farm. We saw two existing water reservoirs, one too low for them, the other dry as the Kara Kum desert. They could fetch enough water from the hills to fill up a new reservoir if they had the money to build a new dam, the NGO claimed. Despite the “think big” message of the biggest of all, “think small” might be more suitable. Adopting new, simple technologies, different approaches, more projects on smaller scale instead of few bigger ones, perhaps would …, who’s to tell. Probably the educators should be educated first, all the way from the top down.
The tribes of the area, Kondhs and Sauras we met, live much like these farmers. Two parallel long houses facing each other, divided for all the families, is the village. The animals are kept between the houses, which is also a communal ground for all the social activities, and the fields are scattered around the compound. The outlay preserved its traditional form, but the people have abandoned their colourful ways. Smile, just like music, is a universal language, and people returning from the fields and kids herding the cattle home soon overcame their shyness and suspicion, seeing a stranger with two sticks held together by a string throwing a rubber object in the air. Even our companion from the NGO had a go with the diabolo amusing kids and adults alike. As the sun went down and people finished with their choirs for the day, we asked them if they could sing some of their songs. First the two bravest boys got into singing some gospels in Saura, but later the men and women joined in and the instruments were brought out. But it was still only gospels. It took quite some time before they overcame their inhibitions and moved on to their traditional songs and dances, in which even we had to participate. It was getting late, and there was work to do in the following morning, but we all got carried away in the cold night on the wings of the sound of the woman and man chorus answering back to each other, women and girls in concentric half-circles according to their ages, men and boys facing them the same way. Moving first against each other like teasing the other group, they set in a circular motion, drums dictating the pace, chasing each other around and around, one never being able to catch up with the other.
In the morning the kids started school with a prayer, the bigger ones took the animals to graze. As we sat around sipping hot tea, we asked if they were happy with their lives. One of the elder men finally understood what we meant, and said they were better off before they were repatriated here, but had no choice as resisting the government put them in prison before.
I didn’t really expect to see much untouched traditional life anymore. Going to Onukudeli, passing huge aluminium and MIG fighter-jet factories in the highlands of Koraput district, and monumental dam projects what Nehru called the “temples of modern India”, it all came as a surprise. The Bondo is a sensitive issue – probably some feel that a country trying to secure a place for itself in the Hi-Tech world of tomorrow can’t afford to have people of yesterday. Probably there is also an element of rivalry between Christians and Hindus to “civilise” these peoples. But it is mostly honest, well intentioned move on the side of the government to lift these people up, even if sometimes it seems a bit misguided. A clash of different cultures, different value systems and a lack of understanding. The official development measures of introducing money to those who didn’t use this commodity, through imposing land taxes, might have been inevitable; introducing TVs and radios are probably a bit unrealistic, even dangerous; promoting fertilisers and pesticides when even other farmers can’t afford it, besides the availability of other alternatives, seems unnecessary. But there are definitely some scary sides of the Bondos’ “spirit of independence and sense of superiority”. Sago palm wine, which they sell on the market and use themselves profusely on a daily bases since early childhood, is one factor in many of the disputes, quarrels and homicides. Probably the pressure of the changing world around them and the inability or unwillingness to adopt to it, with the loosening of social pressure from within the tribe, also contributes to it. These tribes, along with others, were listed until the early fifties in the late colonial times under the “Criminal Tribes Act”, and they still carry the stigmas of being backward, dirty, anti-social and having a “criminal bent of mind”. Substance abuse, domestic violence, crime, deaths in custody and so on are part of contemporary indigenous life in other parts of the world as well, but it is more complex than simply genetics.
The Gadoba, who also live in the area, fit in the new society better, with loosing their cultural heritage only on the surface. It’s only the elderly women who still decorate themselves with their traditional jewellery, and almost every village has got at least one solar panel to be able to tune into a radio station with loud Bollywood hits, but when the festive season comes after the harvest or on the various social occasions, their traditions come alive. They adopted Hinduism within their own system, and the village priests still offer puja to their own spirits and gods along with the deities from the Hindu pantheon, and every house has got one room reserved solely for their ancestral spirits. Herbal medicines are used widely, but when all fails, they consult doctors. Village matters are still discussed by the panchayat in the central gathering place encircled with huge monolithic slabs of rocks, but topics include building roads or connecting to the grid.
It’s an interesting and educational place. For the outsider it is hard, perhaps impossible, to understand this all. The Bondo, Gadoba, Didayi, Domb, Sobor and so on, have been living in a symbiotic interdependence for centuries. Tribes and scheduled castes are involved in different aspects of life, each restricted to doing either ceremonies or music, pottery or other things. It’s more of a clan system that grew out of the unit of the single tribe, but from which, in turn, the caste system of India has originated. A social evolutionary chain, that now goes even beyond – in the town, after another market day, engineers and workers, shopkeepers and housewives are looking forward to just another ordinary weekday. The phone has been connected not so long ago and now there is a new long-distance booth. It is only a matter of time before Onukudeli joins the cyber age – the world of paralel realities. What the future holds for the Adivasi is anyone’s guess …, as the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, said, “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”.
