Adivasi Gallery

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After almost six months in India, I am now ashamed of my blind spot. In my mind the struggles of indigenous peoples were associated with Australia, New Zealand and the Americas. In fact there are an estimated 220 million Indigenous people in the world, 67.7 million are in India - more than in any other single country. Tribal groups put this figure at nearer 100 million despite this at the UN the Indian government have denied that India has an Indigenous population at all, or rather that the whole Hindu population is Indigenous. I soon realised that I needed a crash course in the Adivasi struggle.

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Through a friend of a friend, of a friend I wound up at Delhi Forum talking to Bineet Mundu about tribal issues. He happened to mention that there was a conference that would address many of these happening in Ranchi, Bihar. I invited myself along, as it turned out this did not matter and I was welcomed with open hospitality which is enshrined in Adivasi culture.

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The conference was the annual get together of the Program for Social Action (PSA); a fellowship of people orientated action groups. This year the get together was in a tribal area and was to address tribal issues. The delegates would prefer that I say it took place in Jharkhand, which is a homeland for many Adivasi tribes. Culturally and geographically most of Jharkhand falls in Bihar but parts of Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and West Bengal are included with in its boundaries. Politically, according to the Indian government (and the colonial British) it does not exist.

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The Conference proper began on the second day, the previous day being taken up by field trips to tribal struggles within Jharkhand. After introductions from all present and a tribal song Xavier Dais began the proceedings with the remark:

"Those who can sing the song can join the revolution. Those that can translate the song to the non-Adivasi world can lead the revolution."

Indeed much of the day was spent discussing how can you define what it is to be an Adivasi to the outside world. Not an ease proposition partly due to the diversity that exists in the Adivasi culture but also due to clash between Adivasi concepts and those of the non-indigenous world. The main problem that seems to exist is trying to pin down Adivasi spirituality so that others with appreciates it and hopefully except it.

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The title of the conference was in fact Peoples' Spirituality and Emerging Fascism. For fascism I suppose that you could read Hindu Fundamentalism, a phrase the press has liberally used recently. My western brain was having difficulty getting itself around using words such as fascism and fundamentalism in association with a religion such as Hinduism; we are told that India has not disintegrated into complete religious hatred due to the acceptance by Hindus of other cultures.

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Stan Lawduswamy addressed the plight of Adivasi in terms of Marxism. My first reaction was that this was a bit old fashioned. I am, after all, from a country that not only went through its industrial revolution 300 years ago but also in recent years has seen Thatcherism/Reaganomics and the fall of the eastern block, emerging into "New Labour". However, the repression of the Adivasi fits Marxist theory perfectly in that subsisting people farming their own land become displaced, landless labourers on meagre daily wages. Since the Adivasi culture is symbiotic with their environment that they have occupied for thousands of years, such a persecution and subsequent decent could be seen as genocide.

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The relationship between Hinduism and tribals is exceptionally complex and the boundary defies definition. This, in it's self, is a problem because the non-Adivasi world thrives on definitions, in fact it can not function without them. During the course of my project I have visited a number of different tribal areas and to my western eyes some tribal villages definitely seem more Hindu than others. I should point out however, that even in villages with pronounced Hindu traits an overwhelming Adivasi "feeling" prevails - don't ask me what this is, its just something that I found I could pick up on.

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A big worry for the Adivasi is that the Hindu right want to claim the Adivasi as backward Hindus, assimilate them into "main stream Hindu culture and slot them into the cast system. Since the Adivasi culture is firmly knitted with their land the assimilation process in the worst scenario begins with the removal of these lands through one means or another and ends with the inhabitants of whole village communities literally disappearing. Searching in urban for Adivasi displaced by various development projects, as I found, can be very difficult since nobody keeps track of where they end up.

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At the conference Stan Lourduswamy pointed out that a consequence of the Hindus right wing's claim that the Adivasis are their own is that they have become the issues over which the actions of Christian Missionaries are being fought. He sated that Adivasi are neither Hindu nor Christian because (even after conversion), their tribal identity remains separate from formal religion. This is a concept that he claimed is not understood by the outside world, especially the NGO community.

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The Hindu approach to the Adivasi was summed up by Dr Ram Jeevan Singh Munda So that even this white outsider could grasp it. He said that Hindu groups will simply say to the Adivasi - "you are like us". Dr Ram then drew an analogue : you can try to describe papaya to a person who has never tasted one, he said, by saying "it is like mango" - that person will go away thinking he knows about papaya because he has tasted many mangos. Papaya is not like mango however - it is like papaya.

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Some time after the conference I was talking to a Christian Adivasi. He told me he did not like the institution of the church and he found it difficult to conceive a single god in a Christian way. God, he said, exists in the land, water and forest not a building or institution. "So", I said, "you are not a Christian, you believe in worshiping in a tribal way". He tried to explain that he is a Christian but also tribal. I'm not sure I got his point, I just tried to accept that something that conflicted in my head did not in his.

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All these arguments where brought back to me during the Pope's visit to Delhi. I read in the newspapers that a group connected with the VHP (Vishu Hindu Parishad) took a delegation of tribal leaders - a Hindu right wing organisation -) to perdition the Pope. Their grievance? Christian missionaries converting tribals. Remembering the stance taken by both at the PSA conference by both Adivasi and non - Adivasi delegates. I thought this gesture sent out a misleading view to the world of the threat from the Adivasi from religion.

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The plight of tribal women caused by displacement and Hindu fundamentalism where highlighted in a talk given by Jyatsna Tirkey. In particular she mentioned that the Hindu right wing was keen to deprive women of freedom and to prevent any form of liberation. The intrusion of Hinduism into tribal life she said endangered the traditional position and freedoms enjoyed by Adivasi women. There was a heated debate about whether these freedoms are actually enjoyed in practice - land being registered in the man's mane was cited as an example. In response Dr Ram Munda forwarded the idea that this had been forced by the British and subsequent Indian governments whom, registered family and communal land under the name of only one man. He continued that such bureaucratic intrusion, lien to the Adivasi culture, over time had lead the men to believe the land to be theirs - an idea that goes against traditional collective values.

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The PSA conference prepared me for the months ahead; all of the issues raised appeared over and over again. I was only photographing issues that followed a western development model however, repeatedly I saw that the Adivasi are paying the human and social price for these projects. The claim that Adivasi are not indigenous peoples and the path from subsistence and land ownership to landlessness and subjugation kept cropping up.

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In Bihar and Orissa rich deposits of metal ores and coal lie on the Adivasi's lands but they never profit. Villages in Orrisa have fought bauxite mines and doing so have incurred the wrath of the government. Promises of land, jobs and compensation have repeatedly been broken. Anyway, a job is for life if you lucky were as land is for generations.

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In Koraput district of Orissa I visited a village (Chikapa) which has been displaced twice; once officially by HAL (Hindustani Aeronaughtical Ltd.) and once half officially by the Kolab Reservoir (built for the industrialisation of the surrounding area, including bauxite mining and processing). Since the second move was not sanctioned by the government (as far as I understood they were told simply that if they did not move they would be bombed) they are currently an 'illegal' settlement and not eligible for government aid (for schools etc.). Each time the village has resettled it has shrunk due to people giving up and heading for urban slums where, they disappear from Adivasi culture forever. Incidentally the residents of Chikapa are worried about a third displacement to make way for a HAL staff leisure complex.

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The problems which occurs when Adivasi resettle their own village were brought home to me at the Bargi dam on the river Narmada River. Here, faced with the inadequate resettlement policy put forward by the developers, the submerged villages moved to higher ground and encroached on government and forestry department land. It took about ten years for these villages to become 'recognised' by the state government, only then did they get schools, a drinking water supply and the fishing rights for the reservoir which has swallowed their lands. Bargi is also a shocking case study on the psychological effects of displacement. Deprived of spacious villages built on their own land the death rate among the elder sections of the community increased dramatically for three years.

One of 700 Adivasi activists who boarded a train without tickets to get to an anti-dam protest. Nandurbar, Maharashtra.	NBA activist. Maheshwar, Madhya Pradesh.

Further down Narmada the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) threatens to displace many tribal villages in three states. Some have already been displaced by the dam site its self. The between people still on in their villages and people in the resettlement sites is not hard to detect. Were as those who have not yet been displaced are relaxed in their surroundings and welcoming, those in the resettlement site are defensive, withdrawn and ill at ease. Alcoholism , a common symptom of displacement

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At both the SSP and Bargi the resettled tribal women are keen to express the pressures they face. Because they can more easily get casual jobs they must do hard labouring jobs as well as fulfilling their traditional domestic role domestic. Deprived of land the men often seem redundant and lost, even if they can not find work they do not take on any of the women's traditional duties while they are out day labouring. With no land many of the Bargi ousts have ended up in Jabalpur slums where the women labour on road construction and many of the men pedal cycle rickshaws, an occupation that is fast becoming traditional among the new urban Adivasi.

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In the case of the SSP some Hindu right wingers have claimed most of the tribals being displaced have for some time been substantially 'Hinduised'. This argument was used to woo World Bank funding for the project. However, as the Morse Report (an independent review into World Bank involvement in the SSP) has pointed out the Narmada Adivasi fulfil all of the World Bank criteria for identifying Indigenous populations and therefore are entitled to the protection granted by the World Bank to Indigenous peoples.

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The cruelty and cultural assassination of resettlement was shown to me at Nagarahole as well as the SSP. At Nagarahole tribals resettled into concrete boxes, which are dispersed on a deforested plan, complain they miss their beloved forest - their new homes they new home holds nothing for them they say. Further more, because the land they have been given can only sustain them for six months of the year these resettled Adivasi must leave their new homes for four months of the year to work on coffee plantations in a neighbouring district. Those resettled from the hilly Narmada valley in corrugated iron houses placed on the flat lands of Gujarat complain lament the lose of Narmada, the centre of their spiritual lives.

Migrant labourers working on the coffee harvest having their wages calculated on the weight of beans they have picked. Near Nagarahole, Karnataka.

As I learnt more I realised that India has many laws in place to protect the disadvantaged. So why do they face such threats? Why are those laws ignored by government backed development schemes? And why must the Adivasi fight tooth and nail to get these laws implemented? During my project I got a little confused myself as to who the Adivasi are; some seem so much more Hindu than others, some have embraced technology and consumer goods more than others. I thought back to some conversations that I had with Xavier Dais and concluded that the Adivasi are not museum pieces that must remain 'authentic' and unchanged, they must be free to develop as they wish and at a pace that suits them. Even if the direction and pace of this change is not to the liking of the non-Adivasi world, their human rights must still be respected. The view of the developers at the SSP quoted in the Morse report that those in factory made shirts are "detribalised" is clearly ridiculous.

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On the first day of the PSA conference I accompanied a group of delegates to visit the Koel Karo area of Ranchi. Not many people outside of activist circles have heard of Koel Karo. Not even all activists have but those who have speak of it in reverent tones. Here the Munda tribe, with no outside assistance, has prevented a dam from being built for nearly 30 years despite three attempts to lay the foundation stone. It should be noted that they have a noble history of fighting to protect their land ever since Birsa Munda gave colonial Britain a bloody nose, they also have a tradition of producing intellectuals (of which Dr Ram Munda is a fine testament). Both of these traditions have helped the Munda in their current struggle, current because plans to proceed with the dam have still to be shelved scrapped. After six months of my travels the story of the Koel Karo struggle is still offers the greatest encouragement.

The Koal River, under threat of being damed.

As the conference proceeded so did the language problems faced by those who seek to unite the Adivasi struggle (the Munda alone have three recognised languages). Each talk was accompanied by a murmur of translation. Some of the speakers seemed to switch between two or more languages spontaneously without even realising they were doing so. This brought howls of protest from the translators who requested "would the speaker kindly stick to one language only".

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There was diversity in opinion as well as the language used to express it. With the assembled activists, campaigners, social workers and intellectuals (Adivasi and non-Adivasi) coming from twelve states the discussion sessions were lively.

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The conference had to overcome some adversity of its own. It was staged at a complex owned by the Lutheran church. While we where at there a group of German Lutherans where also resident. During a cultural program which involved joyous drumming and dancing the caretaker of the complex told the delegates that they would have to stop since there had been a complaint from the German visitors (a complaint, it turned out, that had been assumed but never actually made). This rattled some of the delegates who said that nothing had changed with independence. Later, due to a double booking, on the last day of the conference the Adivasi where forced to vacate the main hall in favour of a Christian group. Typical.

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As a foot note I would like to mention that one Sunday, whilst in Bhopal, I made a visit to the Tribal Habitat Museum. While there I watched while well to do Hindu families in their Sunday best inspected immaculate examples of tribal houses placed in sterile surroundings. To misquote Indiana Jones, "this does not belong in a museum".