On her trip to Odisha, POONAM JAIN travels into the minds of people who lead simple lives in the Niyamgiri Hills
The state of Odisha has been growing at a Karma Cola speed. You’ll hear the middle-class in Bhubaneswar happy with the glass façade IT companies and five-star hotels on one side of the town; and on the other hand, the more informed and knowledgeable people that I meet in the tribal areas seem worried about all the so-called development.
To find magic and mystery that is missing from my life, I travel to Muniguda in southern Odisha. The two human rights lawyers I’m travelling with are discussing Vedanta — not the sacred text, but the global mining company that hopes to extract bauxite from the biodiversity-rich Niyamgiri Hills. But there is someone getting in their way — a tribe called Dongaria Kondh, to whom nature and mountains mean something entirely different. Ask these tribals what religion they follow and they will say, “Mountains”. Any development by destroying their mountains and forests clearly spells death, and they seem to be aware of it.
When I hear this, I’m struck at how evolved they must be for wanting to preserve the biodiversity that provides them not just their livelihood, but also a safe environment. Their lifestyle and religion help keep the wildlife-rich forest intact. At Muniguda, I voice my interest to meet Felix Padel — who happens to be the great-great grandson of Charles Darwin — after browsing his book at the Tribal Museum in Bhubaneswar, called The Sacrifice of Human Being: British rule and the Konds of Orissa. He’s away, lecturing at a college in Ahmedabad, his friend Debajyoti Sarangi of Living Farms NGO tells me.
Padel’s books are an eye opener on what we are doing to these tribals. The Baptist missionaries are converting them, and the Hindu fundamentalists are teaching them bhajans in order to counter the missionary onslaught. We are getting it all wrong, simply because we don’t know the pleasures of celebrating our differences. There is a huge risk in having a homogeneous world.
We visit the New hope NGO later in the day where a three-day workshop for the tribals is in progress. Sarangi is an organic farmer and one who has studied closely the wisdom of tribal farming practices. He organised this workshop in the hope to restore their pride, because, knowledge is power. The younger children of the Kondhs, sadly, influenced by urban life, call their parents “andha-kondha” — the blind Kondhs, when their parents refuse to adopt the ‘modern’ farming practices involving genetically modified seeds, chemical pesticides and same-crop farming. These two words have produced the effect that even the most expensive artillery fails to achieve — damaged self-esteem. Once the self-esteem is broken, the human becomes a machine for the organisation to control. It’s simple; the rules are in fact so simple that we could easily miss the point.
Later, we all head to the farm of Debal Deb’s, whom we had met at that workshop. A biologist, he is known for conserving 700 varieties of traditionally grown rice, all collected from the farming folks in eastern India. He is fighting a silent battle against the big, powerful agricultural biotechnology companies who seek to ‘save the world’ by propagating engineered seeds. Deb’s farm is very close to one such sacred grove that he has identified and is helping preserve.
The sacred groves, as we know, are patches of natural vegetation dedicated to certain local deities. These help preserve a rich variety of insect, bird and plant population. The impact of the deities on conserving bio-diversity is huge.
Deb lives in a simple hut with a dry toilet and a running stream serving as an all-purpose source of water. The scatological act in the dry toilet is one of my most divine experiences, an act which we humans usually associate with being profane. The stay is doing me good. “If you can find god in the most mundane of your acts, consider yourself blessed,” says my sister dryly, who has refused to use the toilet, quickly adding “but, we all find God at our own time,” cutting short my attempts of cajoling her to use the toilet.
We leave the next morning and head towards Chatikona in the Rayagada district, to the weekly haat or market of the Dongaria Kondhs. We buy some Dhokra jewellery. Ideally, it should cost less, but since foreigners are thronging these tribal markets as part of the infamous ‘human safari’ tours organised by many professional and well-known tour companies, the tribals are aware of the price it will fetch them.
Later in the day, we finally drive up to Niyamgiri and visit one of the tiny villages of the Dongarias. Most villages are not as authentic as they must have been originally. Each of us who meet them rub on them our worldly smartness, for the young man while styling my hair, tries to sell me an iron hair accessory by typing an unusually high figure on his swanky red cellphone.
A few piccas, crude cigarettes, and photos later, we head back, wondering if our visit left a positive impression on them; worrying that their next encounter might be with some ‘powerful’ people who want to take their mountain god away.
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