Reaching the place was not easy. One had to ascent the narrow mountain pass for two hours to reach a barren region, spread in more than seven hundred square kilometers. The place was a thick forest half a century back and had been denuded thoroughly by encroachers. The whole area looked like a huge wound inflicted on the body of Mother Earth. A government agency was implementing an eco-restoration and tribal development project there with external aid. The interviewees, eight of us in total, reached the office before the appointed time of 9.30 a.m. but the process started only at 3.30 p.m. in the afternoon. The IAS officials including the District Collector took time to reach the place. Nobody even offered an apology. The Chairman was an unassuming man in spite of wielding considerable power in the government. The interview lasted for less than half an hour and I got the job.
Thankfully, the office environment was different. The heavy and repulsive setting of a government office was absent. The buildings were located at the top of a hill and the river Siruvani was flowing through the valley. Coconut trees and plantain farms made a picturesque sight. I started staying in a bungalow by the hilltop and a colleague also joined. Basheer and I would set out for early morning walk, barefooted, crossing the hills and valleys to reach a tiny waterfall where we took our daily bath. The sun would be rising. On our way back we had our breakfast from a roadside teashop which was actually the extension of a house. The front two rooms and the foyer had been turned into a small eatery. One was treated like a family member there and food would be prepared as per your whims and fancies. We used to order for puttu and a plateful of coconut gratings with home grown plantains and milk.
I started interacting with the adivasis. They used to come to my office regularly for attending workshops or training sessions. The Moopans came with their sidekicks. Experts were brought from cities to teach them language and basic accounting. Modern agricultural practice was another thrust area. The participants were given lunch and Rs.25 per head as attendance bonus. The "students" were most innocent looking and they watched the goings on as an object of wonder. It was an interesting sight to watch them, the Moopans with their faded cotton clothes and headgears, his assistants wearing shirts and mundu, women with colourful lungis wrapped around their thin torso and almost all of them chewed pan. The lips were slightly disfigured on that count. Undernourishment had made them small.
Their involvement in Participatory Rural Appraisal programs was in fact dismal. Did they trust us? I didn’t have any idea. The top-heavy officers still got their reverence.
The officers had several brainstorming sessions to find out a strategy.
"These people" do not take us into confidence, it seems.
Take a chest of betel, areca nut and lime alongwith when you enter an ooru. The adivasis believe only in people who chew pan.
This strategy had many takers in the high-level meeting.
The junior officers were different. They had the inclination but there was no space. I tried to fill in. We set out to Chavadiyur in our four-wheel drives. Parking our vehicles at the end of the motor-able stretch, we walked further. It drizzled suddenly. The plantain leaves doubled as umbrellas. The ooru took time to come alive. Again, this was not a mark of disrespect, as the natural pace of adivasis was much different from that of ours. A small adivasi ensemble with the main musician playing the wind instrument Kuzhal and others using various percussion instruments Thappu, Mani etc. emerged to welcome us. Slowly a circle was formed with dancers and we had to compulsorily join. The adivasis expected everyone around to join when they dance and eat. It would be taken as act of disregard otherwise. I did not know the simple steps of their dance, still I joined. I danced like a garba dancer (of sorts) creating a space between me and the group. I had the eye contact of each of them since I moved anti clock-wise. It was an exhilarating moment. When I got tired, I changed roles and handled the cymbals. I snatched away the instrument but nobody protested. In fact, the musicians encouraged me to keep on playing. It was revealed to me that life is a thing to be celebrated. Towards the end, an old adivasi woman became my dance partner. She kept on asking me to buy her booze. The dancing lasted late into the night and then we sat together in a circle, by the field, under the moon and the stars and ate boiled raggi, tapioca and papaya.
The oorus were flooded with illicit liquor. The bootleggers who came from outside had a field day. The outsiders hooked the innocent tribes in hooch and snatched away their possessions. Land and women changed hands.
Two young women from the Swarnagaddha ooru reached my office in the morning and wanted to invite our attention to the spread of liquor. They waited till noon before someone took note of their presence. They were in their late teens and were already married. The whole men folk of the ooru had fallen for illicit liquor which was being served like tea in kettles . The men were not spared even at their work place. The kettle was taking the rounds at the work sites as well. Those who protested were beaten mercilessly. The young women wanted their husbands back. We started off in a jeep and reached Swarnagaddha by the evening. The ooru looked deserted. As usual, they took time to gather, coming out slowly from their huts one by one and assembling at the common space to listen to us. We asked them to open out. One incident was particularly touching.
One man sets out to call Dr.Prabhudas of Government Primary Health Centre as his wife is writhing in labour pains. The hospital is quite far off and the ooru is inaccessible for vehicles. It is almost impossible to carry the patient by hand. Better option is to inform the doctor and he will always be willing to come. The man makes a beeline for the kind doctor but meets the liquor dispenser on the way. As a result, he reaches at Dr.Prabhudas quarters only on the third day. Sure enough, the inevitable happens in between.
We addressed the wives.
You are the strength of your men; you are the power. Tell them to straighten their backbones and take up challenges. Slam the door at their face if they come home drunk. Don’t serve them food. Bear in mind that they will be searching their mothers in you the next morning.
Are you getting the point?
In fact they got the swing of things better than we did. Illiteracy had nothing to do with understanding. We took time to grasp this aspect. Even the adivasis children were way ahead! Once we were on a routine visit to Moolaganga, an adivasis ooru situated at the Tamil Nadu border. Electricity couldn’t have reached there by normal means and we had installed solar lanterns. We stopped at an ooru named Vellamari on our way which boasted of a single-teacher-school run by the government. It had a circular floor made of cement with wall made of bamboo poles and rattan above which a cone shaped palmyra leaf roof sat squarely like a hat. A clean, airy and well-lighted classroom. The teacher had abstained for the day but the twelve students didn’t go back home. They were busy playing around. Our driver Bijoy had a degree in teaching and he took an impromptu session for the kids while we were paying a courtesy call to the Moopan. Bijoy gave them ten questions in general knowledge and the student who got the answers right would be awarded with a pen. To his surprise, four of them emerged as winners and there was an obvious shortage of promised pens. Bejoy quietly ate his words and left his own pen at the classroom. We resumed our journey to Moolaganga. The maintenance of solar lanterns took longer time as we taught the adivasis how to troubleshoot the device on their own. On our way back, we were surprised to find a small bunch of kids eagerly waiting for us by the hill-track, waving at us vigorously to halt. All twelve of them, the students of Vellimary had been waiting for two and a half hours under the sun just to return Bijoy’s pen. As our jeep stopped, they rushed towards us through the thick cloud of dust like a swarm of bees. They were under the impression that the pen had been left behind by oversight.
The officers of the government failed to see this mindset. The adivasis were reduced to a set of numbers in their laptops. “These people” were not going to improve on account of their inherent sluggishness, the officers believed. The adivasis should consider themselves lucky to be at the receiving end of the government’s mercy. The officers acted as if they were giving tip to waiters in a restaurant. The Chairman however was different. He rose from humble beginnings through sheer hardwork and perseverance. He often told us that he was born in a hut.
I was accompanying him in a jeep through the forest track, listening to the dangers of alienating adivasis from their own roots. We found a lorry blocking our way and were forced to stop by the side. The lorry belonged to an underworld don, Angamali Thomas whose henchmen had been felling trees whenever they felt like. The giant timber logs were being loaded. Chairman didn’t utter a word though he had the power to stop the act. The lorry was packed to full and got moving.
I chanced to see Raghu during my early morning walks. Sitting in front of the roadside teashop, he would be smoking beedis. Raghu was short and thinly built. He joined me without an invitation, perhaps on the assumption that I would not mind. Raghu had dropped out from high school and worked for Fr.Mani for some time. The Father was running a NGO and Raghu gave his best as a support staff, traveling far and wide. His adivasi credentials, innocent face and looks combined with the unusual gift of articulating skills made him a valuable property, an object for showcasing. Fr.Mani was working in the education sector. He had array of well-managed institutions in the area imparting primary education to specialized skills in information technology. Raghu, however, was not exactly happy with the excellent image of the NGO. According to him, it was only a cover to snatch away land. Raghu slowly moved away from his benefactor but not without asking the crucial question when he left,
Father, you are working head over heels for the betterment of adivasis. How many of them are employed in your establishments?
Raghu was tossed back to the pristine poverty of his ooru.
One day he came rushing to meet me at the office. His elder brother suffered a stroke and had to be hospitalized immediately. My organization owned ten four-wheelers and one of it could be pressed into service as an ambulance. Raghu was even willing to foot the bill. He was a member of our User Association which was doing the developmental work through community contracting. The money could be recouped from his wages. He was broke and couldn’t think of any other arrangement.
Raghu was not allowed a vehicle. The Project Director was worried about making a precedent. Barely a week had passed after the PD made a visit to Bangalore with his wife in his air-conditioned official vehicle under the guise of a training program. On another occasion while misusing his official vehicle, the police had to register a case for creating an accident. Luckily he and his family escaped unhurt.
I don’t have any idea till this date whether the elder brother of Raghu reached the hospital in time.
After a few days, the Chairman paid an unscheduled visit and I was summoned.
He gave me more than just a memo.
I was accused of undermining the interests of the establishment and abetting others to do the same.
I didn’t accept it.
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"Marginal Men " - a term coined by John Kenneth Galbraith, US Ambassador to India during the Kennedy era, denoting "people who can't see beyond their compound walls".
Moopan - Chief (of tribal people in a hamlet)
Ooru - a cluster of tribal hutments which forms a hamlet