Written in stone

At cold daybreak, the men in Alaundi village emerged sleepily from their mud houses, chewing neem-twig toothbrushes and hugging shawls closer. Wordlessly, they walked through shrubby jungle, towards the warmest spot in a golden paddy field, where the March morning sun shone bright on the tribal council chiefs: three men sitting with a notebook, a cell phone and a laptop.

With the cell phone, secretary Ashirwad Horo called all the laggards, and in the notebook he wrote the meeting’s agenda, ‘Adivasi versus the State of India’. He opened the laptop to a Power-Point presentation with taut summaries of sections of the Indian Constitution that held both promise and betrayal – the rights of indigenous tribes to land and forest. A month ago, the village had inscribed these lines on a three-metre-tall stone slab it erected at its entrance. ‘No one