Bastar Dispatches: A Passage Through the Wilds

By Narendra

Abujhmad in the deep interiors of Bastar is inhabited by the Abujhmadias, a primitive hunter-gatherer tribe whom Verrier Elwin has called the Hill Murias. Abujhmad stands today as one of the few mirrors left the world over wherein modernity can view itself - its calamities and collapses. Abujhmad asks no questions of itself nor provides answers; neither are there searches, quests or creation of utopias, ideas and ideologies, elaborate languages, agricultures, technologies and endeavours.Based on the author's over thirty years of association with Abujhmad (he is probably the first outsider to live there) and its contiguous areas in the Bastar division of Chhattisgarh, Bastar Dispatches brings out how forests and the wilds, humans and animals, distances, spaces and the skies, the knowns and unknowns together make up societies and intimacies. There is a nebulousness, an 'undefined' to Abujhmad's ways. Written in what may be called the Adivasi sensibility of nurturing the tentative, the book provides a compelling narrative of a people at peace with themselves and nature, their dialect, their festivities, their delightful interactions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Jul 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9789353020330

Narendra

Narendra's association with tribal communities commenced in 1980 when he began living in the Abujhmad region of Bastar. He is the author of Bastar Dispatches and A Sense of Home.

Book preview

Preface

IN 1975, I WENT to Puducherry from Delhi. In the 1970s many of us did not know what to do with life. I stayed in Puducherry for a little short of a year. Soon enough, there came a feeling of disappointment and heaviness – one that had made me leave Delhi, college, home and hearth. There was no money either. Aurobindo Ashram was letting me stay out of generosity. One evening I left Puducherry forever, to walk along the sea and reach Kanyakumari, the southern tip of India, hopefully after a month. It was to be a ‘pilgrimage’ in atonement of sins that I did not know about. The pilgrimage was abandoned after a night’s walk. Stormy winds were blowing in from the sea. Darkness and the roar of the raging water – with not a soul in sight – were unexpectedly bizarre and scary. I did not have the wherewithal to continue with the ‘pilgrimage’. After a night halt in a village, I reached Cuddalore next morning and by evening was back in Puducherry.

Having lived and wandered there for some more time, I reached Paunar in the hope of meeting Vinoba Bhave. Gandhiji has deeply interested me since childhood, and there was a compelling wish to meet someone who had been close to him. My only knowledge of Vinoba was a chapter on him when I was in Standard IV or V. I was fortunate that though Paunar Ashram was meant for women ascetics only, I could stay there for about a year. One of the most striking memories of Paunar is Vinoba emphasizing the need to ‘cultivate patience and perseverance lest one fall spiritually sick’. My next stay was at Sevagram Ashram – Gandhiji’s very own. After a year there, I reached Joura (district Morena, Madhya Pradesh) and got involved with the Gandhian experiment in the surrender of dacoits¹ . Without my being aware of it, a lifelong association with Gandhism was building slowly.

During such wanderings, I reached, somewhat serendipitously, Chhattisgarh sometime in 1979. It was then that I went to Bastar for the first time. If memory serves me well, I had not heard of Bastar prior to that. It was also then that I heard of Abujhmad² for the first time. Curiosity led me to skirt around its eastern periphery on a borrowed motorcycle. Thus began an inadvertent, lifelong romance with the region. I had practically little or no knowledge of Adivasis till then. But since childhood, I had experienced a strange, unknown and irrepressible longing to be somewhere. The longing found refuge in Bastar. It was like a homecoming.

Almost an entirely Adivasi region, Bastar was a single district till 2000. It lay to the south-east in the then state of Madhya Pradesh. In 2000, Chhattisgarh was carved out of Madhya Pradesh as a separate state. As a single district, Bastar was larger than Belgium and the Indian state of Kerala. Bastar was divided into five smaller districts between 2000 and 2005. The writings that follow come from my engagement with the somewhat back-of-beyond Abujhmad in Bastar. I left Abujhmad in 1985 but to this day it continues to churn within me. There remains a deep self-doubt about articulating the spirit that is Abujhmad.

I went to Abujhmad in 1980 on a field study project of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), ‘Tribal Perceptions and the Modern World’. My stay there continued for the next five years. With an estimated population of about 13,000 and spread over 4,000 sq. km (the core area being about 1,500 sq. km) of, at places, impenetrable vegetation, Abujhmad lies in the deep interiors of Bastar. It has not been surveyed by a government agency nor is there a noticeable government or other presence save in the form of a rusted and rare handpump or a dysfunctional school in an outlying village or two. Till the coming of Maoists in the late 1980s, it has had little or no contact with the outside world. The more interior villages like Ehnar and Nelnar had not known the impact of the wheel.

The small Abujhmadia community lived on food gathering and hunting, with shifting cultivation as a supplement. Shifting cultivation was not practised every year or by each family. Still in a somewhat primeval stage, the region had neither trade, nor industry, commerce, occupation or other modern apparatus. But neither was there hunger, starvation, beggary or lingering disease. Whereas an average village consisted of 3–4 scattered huts, an average family had 4–5 members. Amidst the primeval silence of dense wilds, the Abujhmadias³ continued to live in their tiny bamboo-and-thatch huts.

Within a few months of reaching Abujhmad, it was evident that the area and its people call for a different sensibility. Their dialect had no more than 300 to 500 words and they counted only up to five. ‘We do not need more than that.’ Night and its dark universe were a phenomenon I had not experienced or imagined earlier. Much of Abujhmad was confounding and bewildering. After the first 5–6 months, my involvement with the project rapidly decreased.

After leaving Abujhmad, I retired to the contiguous areas. My interest in and study of the Adivasi thematics continued informally till 2013. The thematics of Abujhmad and Bastar had, in a manner of speaking, become intimate for me. Places beckon one to be with them; just as on the day when the time is over they bid goodbye with neither regret, nor lamentations or sadness on either side.

In course of my association there, I found striking echoes of both Gandhi and Vinoba; this was particularly true in Abujhmad. Gandhiji’s Hind Swaraj and Vinoba’s asceticism echoed with a striking regularity.

Introduction

ABUJHMAD IS NOT A mythical construct. Large parts of contemporary Bastar were much the same till maybe a century ago. There are strong echoes as such in two classical works¹ of the 1930s and ’40s on the rest of Bastar. Barring these two authors, probably no one else has tried to study Bastar as intimately and tenderly.

Ethnicity has acquired somewhat of a normative significance in contemporary understandings: someone who is ethnically an Adivasi is called Adivasi. Modern polity gives centrality to ethnicity in its arrangement of things. Ethnicity has its functions but is far too insular and divisive. Living amidst the wilds and distanced from the world outside, the Abujhmadia has thrived in historic isolation. Such isolation has not been in his metaphysics and epistemology. They have joined him in a delicate coherence to the mysterious landscape and its ‘beyonds’ whereby the significance of being human stands quite changed. He lives well outside the issues and parameters of ethnicity and all that it entails. In the formulation of such metaphysics and epistemology, he has had only a little role, though he is comfortable with it. His wilds crafted his ethos and sensibility. His dialect – like all dialects – and its mystique too come from there.

There is something uneasy in the definition of an Adivasi the world over. Concerns over Adivasis and forests are in a stalemate. There is a similar stalemate in the outside world’s comprehensions and debates about forests, wilds, land, water, animals, energy, justice, culture, freedom, ecology, spirits and the skies. Such dissonances occur when referents for an ancient community come from modern categories as state, progress, democracy, development, economics, governance, market, equality, ecology and the rest. They have little or no echo in the Adivasi’s experience or memory.

The Adivasi way of life has been compelled to comply with referents such significations that have damaged the rhythms and flows of his wilds and landscape, social cohesion, self-esteem, modes of governance, non-profit economy, spirits and skies, gods, goddesses and ancestors, gender relations and, eventually, his way of life. Even though Abujhmad remained outside its reach, modernity has marginalized the rest of Bastar by working against its own referents or by taking virtually no notice of them. Bastar now draws its signification and sustenance from the outside world, which reinforce the modern world view in its land. Neither the land, nor self-image nor legitimacy is now its own.

Though now spoken of differently by the Maoists and others, in the 1980s, Abujhmad meant dense wilds, human sacrifice, witchcraft, man-eating tigers, aggressive loinclothed men and bare-breasted women. It was used as a synonym for savage and uncivilized. The Abujhmadias on the contrary are a very generous people; very shy, timid and extremely graceful.

Unless married to contemporary sensibilities, there is nothing much that can be classified as an Adivasi identity. As against neat segmentations of an anthropological kind, there is indistinctiveness of a cultural type. Such indistinctiveness is crucial to the Adivasi’s self-image. When asked who is an Adivasi, the elder in Abujhmad had replied, ‘Anyone who loves the forest is an Adivasi.’ Abujhmad could well be used as a referent for the Adivasi universe in India and the world at large.

The pages that follow have predominantly Abujhmad as referent.

Where once centrality was given to ecological–cultural cohesion – and their transcendent referents – now stands an all-engulfing polity in the rest of Bastar. Inextricably linked to the global political and economic grid today, the Adivasi has issues that are no longer connected to those of his own recent or distant past. For him survival does not any longer depend on his wilds, landscape, metaphysics or epistemology but on being a functional link in the chain of the profit economy, democracy and freedom of a secular and terrestrial kind; and on the very destruction of forest and landscape that fostered generous sensitivities of cohesions and continuities.

I am diffident to talk about Abujhmad because I do not have any measure of that society; or even of the one that is my own. I do not know either’s ‘story’. I have only a short experience of Abujhmad and surrounding Bastar. It is of a meagre kind and would have negligible value or relevance in these times. There is nothing concrete, no visions or findings that are sure of themselves to communicate. It is an irregularity of sorts. Discourses rest on visions, findings and the power vested in their vocabulary.

Mine is only an experience of Abujhmad, with its underlying tentativeness. When translated, or integrated into contemporary discourse and language, Abujhmad tends to get challenged and diminished if not distorted. Its communicability is, and shall remain, an idiosyncrasy of speech, and there is an irregularity about such speech. In such articulation will come the deflected and the disparate that may not be Abujhmad. There is a certain tentativeness and concealment to Abujhmad. I have tried not to divest it of its characteristics. It disregards articulation. Hence, my diffidence.

These writings are based on my field notes, observations, memory and reflections of the period 1980–85 and partly on my experience of the surrounding areas of Bastar till I moved away in 2013. They remained and churned within in the intervening years. There was not the wherewithal to write till moving away. Beginning that year, these writings came as field dispatches privately circulated amongst a few friends.

Along with field notes, observations, memory and reflections, the pieces are also based on conversations and unaddressed issues that arise out of an engagement with a people and their universe. They are also influenced by how Adivasis have been over the years since I first saw them and how they appeared with the passage of time. I have tried to keep fluid the temporal ‘boundaries’ between primitive Abujhmad and relatively developed Bastar. There is a to-and-fro movement, a fluidity without which the region could not be. The writings are short. As directly from the field and as raw jottings, they can only be short. Everything in the region is short and small – the hut, village, distance walked in a day, family size, trails, lifespan, conversations, engagements, vocabulary, counting and much else.

I could not have written these pieces in any way other than the one presented.

1

Abujhmad: First Impressions

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct...

—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

WHEN DID THE JOURNEY to Abujhmad begin? When do journeys begin, anyway? It is always difficult to ascertain.

It was a chilly winter morning of 1980. I had set out from Narayanpur for Sonepur, some 35 km away. I was going to Abujhmad for the first time. The earlier few months had been spent at Kanker, a little over two hours away from Narayanpur. Now a district headquarters, Kanker was then a sleepy subdivisional township. It is surrounded by immense, ancient boulders precariously poised atop each other. At places, they rise to nearly 300 metres as though placed thus by some nameless hand; always appearing in imminent danger of rolling down and crushing the township.

In hindsight, my information and impressions of Abujhmad were very limited – as they could be just that – yet I suffered from a sense of relative sufficiency of understanding. As a later realization, it was an intellectual and cultural equipment almost wholly inadequate and unsuited to determine the region’s magnitude. The more one lived there, the more the realization that magnitudes as such cannot be accessed or comprehended without continuous interface. To know, one must unfailingly present oneself. Mediations and approximations are helpful but not enough. My earlier stays or travels to other forested parts of the country had not equipped me suitably.

A township of about 3,000 families, Narayanpur is the subdivisional headquarters of Abujhmad, though not everyone in Abujhmad knows of this administrative factotum. Nor does the township mark a presence, barring in a village or two, in the 4,000 sq. km of Abujhmad Hills west and south-west. A small market, bank, hospital, police station and post office complete Narayanpur. It is the road-head; thereafter one is ‘on one’s own’.

One doesn’t choose one’s name. Like much else, names are given by others. Literally translated as ‘Inscrutable Land’, ‘Abujhmad’ is a nomenclature given by outsiders. The Abujhmadias call their land ‘Meta Boom’, ‘Land of the Hills’. Anthropologist Verrier Elwin who stayed during 1941–42 in Benjli, a village 3 km from Narayanpur, called the community ‘Hill Murias’. They are relatively untouched by ‘civilization’; they may be called primitive by most standards. However, it is in their hills that the key to many an Adivasi facet in Bastar is found; Bastar was what Abujhmad is. It is about the only remaining indigenous referent when talking of Adivasis in India. Else, they are like anybody else with modern referents; ‘like anybody else’ is also how the government and civil society alike describe Adivasis.

However, Abujhmad does not fall under active government jurisdiction as such. There is no road, building, school, hospital, shops or market, or such necessities of ‘civilized’ living. Since the times of W.V. Grigson, commissioner of Bastar (1932) and ethnographer, outsiders are barred access to these hills. It is the region’s quite extraordinary inaccessibility that has helped Grigson’s diktat remain in place. Often there is no barrier greater than unbounded Nature. It is said the Mughals wanted a revenue survey but gave up eventually. With little or no contact, or intrusions from the outside world, Abujhmad continued to remain in its historic isolation till the Maoist takeover in the 1990s.

The way to Sonepur was a generally climbing and extremely rough dirt track, often squeezing into a trail; full of pebbles, stones and boulders, winding and climbing; and with many a river and stream to ford, over makeshift bamboo bridges or jumping from boulder to boulder. With a bagful of clothes, some basic rations and utensils, books, notebooks and pens, in the very first few kilometres I began regretting the bicycle that was supposed to be helpful. But then, being without one may have been a greater regret; at least the descents – howsoever infrequent, bumpy and hazardous – were relieving to the extent I did not have to walk them too. For the greater part, however, one had to haul the bicycle and goods on foot.

A journey it was! Thereafter, it was a continuous travel into the unknown, and maybe the unknowable, within and without; into the darker and mystifying wilds, the inner loneliness and painful dispossession of equipment and apparatus one carried within and without; and the keen sense of awe and vulnerability that accrued. All fears seemed to come alive as though they were always there since time immemorial, unknown and buried within, which – when they surfaced – were alien and unrecognizable. Experiencing a fear that one cannot recognize, which is unfamiliar and unknown, evoked responses not known earlier: an unprecedented sense of vulnerability and veneration.

The first few kilometres did not really seem to be such a wild-like stretch. I had had earlier occasions to pass through or live in such landscapes in other parts of Bastar and elsewhere in Chhattisgarh; but on this stretch, there were no villages or other forms of habitation. ‘Seen’ is a relative word. One doesn’t always first see the object, but the contour and form and how it relates to the surrounding circumstance. Often there is more to the world than one can see or hear. Despite his human anatomy it was initially not easy to see an Abujhmadia in the forest though he may be only a few metres away. His colour, appearance, gait, posture and silence left no easily discernible boundaries between him and his wilds. He was a part of the wild; wild was the starting point, not man. This nuances the modern world’s political, economic and intellectual temper. We often reinforce such temper in absence of something that could mirror it.

The only sound along the way was the gurgling of rivers and streams, whose courses were many a time covered by ancient trees. Contrary to expectations, there were no birds; nor could they be seen across the sky. Birds belong more to agricultural economy than the wilds. Even the stray dog – that irrefutable evidence in India of warmth and nearby human habitation (an issue sociologists have ignored) – on its usual and rather hurried trot was not to be seen either. There were only trees, vines, bushes, mammoth boulders, rocks, huge anthills, trails, sky, clouds and intensely unfamiliar silence. The gurgle of waters increasingly merged into that strange and almost visible quiet. As one moved deeper inside, such unknown’s silence – within and without – became inseparable from the region.

Contemporary economics calls the forest economy as survival economy. Such terms, in their significance, convey a certain postulate that derives from a sensibility of plenty and depletion. The Abujhmadia does not live his life with such notions and categories. Away from them, he depends on food gathering and hunting, with a supplement of shifting cultivation, and – above all – immemorial freedom that provides for his needs. Needs in the outside world are determined by modern science, technology and market; man is subservient and close to marginalization. Since ancient times, the Abujhmadia has enjoyed freedom with the forest, hunted its animals, gathered its fruits, bathed in its rivers and streams; revered and used it. Yet he does not have a conviction that the forest is his, nor would he ever want to fight for it though he shares an indivisibility with it

It was 2 p.m. when I made a halt at the Bengur stream. After bicycle, the insignificance of my watch was apparent too; as of so much else in due course. But one clings. At the Bengur, in its utter wilderness of pebbles, rocks, boulders, anthills, fallen and termite-eaten trees, the only sound was of gurgling waters; louder than was possible to hear one’s own words. After partaking of chapattis and sabzi from the bag, the earlier idea of a short rest was abandoned. The need and longing for human habitation was strong. Rest has much to do with another human being. It was unrestrained and undomesticated nature with its unfamiliar presences. ‘A walk in the forest’ or ‘beauty of nature’ belong to a different lexicon.

One could not see far towards the horizon; there was the endless continuum of foliage and quiet. But my watch and somewhat dimming overhead sky suggested evening was not far away. Curls of rising smoke somewhere nearby gave away the location of Sonepur.

Sonepur is the only non-Abujhmadia village in Abujhmad. It is an oddity of sorts. A predominantly Halba¹ village, it has a family or two of Jogis² and Pankas.³ It was the only village that evoked some familiarity, phonetic and otherwise. A fulsome village of about seventy families with its settled agriculture, milch cows and occasional buffaloes, three occasionally working handpumps and adequately clothed bodies, it is quite ‘far’ from an Abujhmadia village. And, without that peculiar human smell – not always an affront to the nostrils – that one gets in an Abujhmadia’s presence, Sonepur had marked its distance.

Journeys seldom end up at predetermined destinations. The trail you tread on is only a conjecture; there is always a certain ambiguity if not obscurity, a certain dimness bereft of the ‘certain’. Trails are ‘indeterminates’ with their own inconclusive inner disposition.

Abujhmad was still far away.

2

A Nest in the