by Norman Lewis
Ranjan, who was deeply attached to the Kondhs, described himself as particularly touched by their custom of building their villages so that the occupants of a house could stand at its entrance to greet their neighbours face to face across the street with the rising of the sun.
Indian tribal society is immediately observed as a tolerant and easy-going minority compared with the caste-dominated majority that encircles it. These primitive peoples have steadfastly rejected caste—the cruellest of burdens borne by the Hindu population. There are no crippling dowries to be provided for their daughters. As in all primitive societies, there is no drive to accumulate possessions, and therefore no rich and no poor. All students of the situation Ranjan and I were now observing at first hand have been impressed though often shocked by the relative freedom of tribal sex relationships, most strikingly exemplified in the areas where we now found ourselves. In 1947 Elwin Verrier wrote a book called The Muria and their Ghotul about the custom of a tribe in Bastar by which on reaching puberty the young of both sexes were expected to sleep together, praised for frequent changes of partners and criticised or even fined for over-exclusive relationships. Ranjan insisted that similar practices existed among the tribes in Orissa, in particular the Kondhs. ‘But do not question them about it,’ he warned me. ‘They will be embarrassed.’
Celebrated in Orissa for the peculiarity of their sex and marriage customs are the Koyas, a flourishing, handsome and intelligent people we visited in their principal village, Bhejaguda, wedged into the Malakangiri hills. Among their many gods is a divine earthworm, and their unique sexual arrangements involve a union in which the wife must always be substantially older than her husband. One such couple was pointed out to us: a boy of about thirteen was trotting at the heels of an imposing wife of thirty-odd. The wife is supposed to wait for her husband to be full-grown before intercourse takes place, in the meanwhile guarding her virginity. Of this, after we had been in conversation with some Koyas who seemed highly amused by the topic, Ranjan translated. ‘If a woman shows some impatience, her father-in-law may be called upon to do the necessary.’
The Koyas, like many tribal peoples living in circumstances in which civilised stresses are unknown, suffer from occasional attacks of boredom, and are delighted at the opportunity to fuss over strangers like us who drop in from time to time. They had grand manners, and were at pains to put their visitors at ease, and as soon as we came in sight a number of splendid matriarchs in crimson togas appeared at their doors and received us with expressions of excitement and enthusiasm. A large bed was carried into the street and covered with a clean mat and we were invited to make ourselves comfortable. More beds were then dragged out of neighbouring houses and upon these the women settled themselves to face us and unleash a barrage of smiling chatter, dealing, said Ranjan, with matters of general interest such as bovine sickness and the possession of a hen with four feet.
It was the women who mattered here. Someone had dashed off for the palm-toddy. We emptied the beakers pressed upon us, after which the women drank heartily, followed by a few patriarchs on the fringe of the gathering. What we took to be young husbands formed a meek background row, and were the last to be served. Ranjan pointed out that several had downy growths on their upper lips, achieved, he said, by the application of a kind of mud, to which were added the droppings of certain birds.
We happened to arrive when the Koyas were celebrating a ritual period of abstention from work, except for the making of alcoholic liquor. The principal activities at this time included the consumption of neat palm-toddy and the nightly staging of theatrical entertainments. To attempt to work—as a few sometimes did—was seen as anti-social and punished by severe public criticism.
A shortage of beds meant that a number of women were compelled to stand. To me they seemed to be swaying, and perhaps drunk. I mentioned this to Ranjan who put this to the headman who was also somewhat unsteady. He opened one eye with difficulty, and agreed that this was the case. ‘It makes a good impression with your friends,’ he told Ranjan, ‘if you let your hair down at a time like this.’
In this situation it was a matter of politeness to ask what god the headman worshipped, and he said, between hiccups, ‘the Divine Earthworm, creator of the world. There are many more, I am told twenty-three, although I cannot count myself. The Earthworm we borrowed from the Kondhs and are obliged to return it after this celebration. We have also two or three gods on loan from the Saoras, the most useful being a stone.’ Ranjan showed surprise and, reaching for another toddy, the headman said, ‘It is all a matter of belief. If you believe a stone is a god, then it is one.’
We had taken sweets for the children, and their mothers formed them into an orderly queue to receive them. They were a gaudily wrapped commercial product with a sharp synthetic flavour and the children sucked them reverently, frequently taking them out of their mouths to prolong the pleasure. Occasionally I noticed a child who appeared to stagger. I asked Ranjan if the boy could possibly be tipsy. The headman, blinking with difficulty, thought this over. He pointed out to us that the lined-up jugs of liquor were kept carefully out of their way, but explained that the Koya women breast-fed their children up to five years of age. ‘There is palm-toddy in these women’s milk,’ he said.
The theme encouraged the headman to philosophise. ‘There’s no sickness here,’ he told Ranjan. ‘The white people who come here offer us medicines, but we don’t take them. We listen to the Earthworm’s advice in these matters. He tells us to enjoy life, and that we do. Some of us expect to live for ever.’
Ranjan, toying with the romantic possibility of turning his back on the strain and stress of life in Bhubaneswar, marrying a Paraja girl and adopting the genial life-style of a Paraja village, had collected facts and figures that supported the divine advice. The average life-expectation of the non-tribal Indian of the capital of Orissa was fifty-seven years; that of a village tribesman was sixty-three years. The Koyas did even better than this, he had discovered, by another five years. Sometime during the next two weeks we should reach the Parajas; by then, Ranjan assured me, his decision would be made. How would he cope with the problem of ritual idleness, he wondered. It had been published in a government report that the Koyas only worked 1½ hours a day, and he suspected that the situation among the Parajas would be roughly the same.
Leisure, envied in the bustling cities of India, was in unlimited supply in these country places. Few people could have made better use of it than such tribals as the Saoras and the Kondhs who were enabled by it to fill their lives with the satisfactions of art. Almost all these primitives had developed some absorbing skill. The Saoras and Kondhs were by any standards great painters and wood-carvers. The Parajas and Godbas (who unaccountably occupy the same villages, although they are racially and temperamentally quite different) spent much of the time rebuilding and improving their houses—in one case rectangular and the other round. The Mirigans, living in extreme isolation on the frontiers of unexplored jungle, took young parakeets from their nests, so outrageously spoiling them that they could hardly be separated from their foster-parents who were to be seen with the birds fluttering round their heads wherever they went. The Mirigans carved, too, but in their case only tigers and elephants, explaining that this was no more than an act of homage, which they believed helped to protect themselves from attack. The elephants remained a problem, for they sniffed the Mirigans’ alcohol supplies at a great distance, continually raided the stores kept under the roofs, and were enraged and incited by the liquor into acts of vandalism such as tearing off thatches and butting down walls.
The Lanjia Saora village of Potasing was the undisputed capital of the naïve art of tribal India, producing anitals of the most complex kind, painted after locally famous artists sit alone in a dark place waiting for an image to form. There are special societies of women who are entrusted with the painting of certain patterns, and, as in many parts of tribal India, the women of Potasing cover the interior walls of their houses
, and sometimes even the surface of the street, with exuberant and complicated designs. Until the recent past, it was the men who carved the doors, door-posts and lintels.
The Indian government is to be praised for its exclusion of American genocidal missionary sects from any part of its territories, but it is said that it has tolerated the assault by Lutherans and Catholics upon tribal customs and religious beliefs. We were a year too late in arriving in Potasing, the Athens of the Indian primitive world, for the Lutherans were already at work, with depressing effect. We were told that they had descended on the village in an epidemic of malaria and an absence of medicine. The missionaries had plenty of Nivaquine but the magic tablets were on offer only in exchange for conversion. Our informant complained of unfairness. ‘We have twenty-three gods. Most of them have been kind and useful to us. The missionary is asking us to exchange twenty-three for one, plus a month’s supply of Nivaquine. It is unreasonable.’
Inexplicably, as in this case, evangelists in the Third World see godliness as incompatible with the pursuit of art, so the art has to go, and the Lutherans in Potasing worked with zeal to destroy all the pictures that could be found, and defaced or ripped out innumerable carvings. The effect was all the more grim because areas of woodwork where the carving had been stripped away were often patched in with metal or concrete.
People had also been compelled or persuaded to part with their beloved anitals. A government-appointed postmaster—who also managed to be the Lutheran representative on the spot—took us to see the one remaining example of Sudha Saora art, now kept in a locked house. It was very large, painted in white upon a red background, recalling the paintings of palaeolithic hunters on the walls of caves. Soara manikins pranced and capered in ceremonial hats under ceremonial umbrellas, rode elephants and horses, pedalled bikes and were carried by fan-waving attendants in procession. They played musical instruments of the past but shouldered the guns of the present. Gourdfuls of wine awaited their pleasure, displayed like Christmas gifts on the branches of palms. The postmaster shook his head in disbelief at this relic of the wanton past. Before Potasing’s desecration there had been no locks on doors throughout tribal India, but the destroyers of art had insisted on locks, and four out of five houses in this strangely deserted village were locked up. I asked why this should be.
‘They are working in the fields,’ the postmaster said. ‘They are very active in employment.’
‘But this is an in-between season, with nothing to do.’
‘If there is willingness to work it is always to be found. In the old times people were lazy. They were drinking much alcohol. That was bad. We have cut down those palm trees that were giving that wine. For those who were carving wood, we are making enquiries. Soon they may be making toys for shops.’
This, then, was the struggle faced by the tribals in India. The world of art for art’s sake, of amateur dramatics, self-entertainment and the long, lazy summer was slipping away, and the world of regular work in the employment of others, of money and buying and selling, was about to reach them by the roads to be built and the airfields to be opened. It was a bleaker prospect than they realised, for India was hard on the poor and those of lowly birth, and all the more if they were women. The year of my visit, 1990, was the Indian Year of the Young Girl, and the newspapers, including the respected Times of India, unhesitatingly reminded their readers how atrocious their fate could be. Young Indian wives, they informed us, whose families had failed to produce promised dowries, died by the hundred, even the thousand, by ‘kitchen accidents’, i.e. by incineration on kitchen stoves. Shocking things, too, happened to under-privileged males. The newspaper that day recorded the case of an untouchable who had married a high-caste woman and was beheaded by her brothers—the girl herself being locked up in an asylum for fallen women. The same page recorded the fate of a bonded labourer who made a dash for freedom: he was punished by the amputation of a limb—a penalty commonly inflicted in such cases, said the paper.
The postmaster would have been the last person to question in such matters. He radiated optimism. ‘Everything is different in Potasing now,’ he said. ‘We cannot say it is all work. On Sunday we are attending church. Practising to sing hymns. They are telling us that soon a bus will be coming on Fridays for the cinema at Gunupur, for which we are all very glad. But if we do not sell, how can we have money to buy?’
Down the road at Rayagada a kiosk had opened to sell such country medicines as dried bats, curative snakeskin, and above all hornbill beaks, administered in a ground-up form for every known illness. There was a trickle of cash here in circulation, but most of the customers, unable to cope with it, still arrived with vegetables and bags of rice with which to negotiate a deal.
We were at the very end of scenes of this kind. Until now, what I had seen of the tribal heartland was the India of Calcutta as it had been 2,000 years ago, and there was no affinity, no point of contact between the people who had remained unchanged in these mountains, and the brand of human society that was slowly dosing in on them, and into which they would shortly be absorbed.
Ranjan was clearly a romantic whose romanticism was the product of the stresses of mundane life in Bhubaneswar and the vision of an attainable Eden over the horizon. He was a Brahmin wearing the sacred thread, and in theory firmly sustained by his religion, but he was doomed to work in an office among colleagues of lower caste although often with more money in their pockets. His common-enough tragedy was that of so many Indians: the cost of finding dowries to marry off his three sisters had ruined his family. He longed to have been born in the free air of the tribal land in which he had spent part of his childhood.
The next leg of our journey together would reach Kangrapada, which he would be revisiting after a year’s absence. There—although nothing had so far been decided—he might take the plunge, marry the Paraja girl and exchange the heavy responsibilities of civilisation for the calm satisfaction of tribal life.
The encounter with the Parajas which had led to Ranjan’s inner confusion had happened almost exactly a year before. Quite by chance, the travel agency he worked for had employed him to explore this remote corner of south Orissa bordering with Andhra Pradesh, where a few villages tucked away in the jungle were marked only on the largest-scale map. The majority of such villages were to be reached with difficulty, and on foot, but a minor road took him by car to Koraput. Here he learned of Kangrapada, a village at the end of an unfinished jungle track. It had only been visited by a government official and the occasional itinerant trader.
He went there and found it extraordinary. The village had been splendidly built in a jungle clearance in such a way that every house was shaded by the trees. Stranger though he was, he was received everywhere with smiles. Kangrapada was saturated with a kind of drowsy calm. People gave in to pleasant impulses. A man would pick up a musical instrument, strum on its strings, and those within hearing often started to dance. All the Paraja girls were pretty and returned an admiring glance with an encouraging smile. An old man who spoke enough Oriya to be understood explained the workings of the community to him. Except for the money-lenders, everyone was welcomed in Kangrapada with open arms, the old man said. The jungle was full of edible berries and fruits so no-one went hungry. There were no disputes or quarrels, little sickness and people lived to a reasonable old age. He ascribed this pleasant state of affairs to the full-time presence in the village of the goddess Hundi, represented as a pile of stones round which benches had been built where the elders sat to discuss local affairs in loud, clear voices the goddess could easily overhear. Any problems arising from their discussions could be instantly settled by Hundi on the spot. Nothing could be easier in Kangrapada than to strike up a warm and instant friendship, as he did, with a member of the opposite sex. This, Ranjan decided, was Eden.
He slept that night in the village and was about to leave next morning when he found himself encircled by elders who gently restrained him. Once again an Oriya speaker was found who wa
rned him that he had succeeded in offending Hundi by not formally presenting himself to her and requesting her permission to be in the village. It would be necessary to sacrifice a buffalo to her before removing his car. His admiration for the people of Kangrapada grew when he was assured by them that the goddess was very easily moved by a hard-luck tale, and that the villagers would set to work to persuade her to change her mind. This they were able to do and the demand for the sacrificial buffalo was reduced to one for a white cock costing ten rupees.
Ranjan spent another pleasant night in the village and at leave-taking in the morning the Paraja girl brought her father to say goodbye. He had obviously made a good impression on the family, for the father said that if Ranjan wished to marry his daughter he could do so without payment of the usual bride-price. He also assured Ranjan that the villagers would build a house for them in a matter of days. Taken by surprise, Ranjan asked to be given time to consider the proposition, and the Parajas, reasonable as ever, smilingly agreed. Back in Bhubaneswar, he discussed the situation with his friends, most of whom seemed alarmed. The marriage of a Brahmin to a tribal was unheard of and there was some uncertainty as to whether or not there was a law against it. There followed several months full of setbacks to his suit of one kind or another, but now he was on his way to resolve his future.
The nearest place to Kangrapada in which we could stay the night was Koraput, and the made-up road passing through it had tipped all the refuse of any small provincial town into its narrow streets, and urban noise filtered from it far into the silence and peace of the tribal backlands. An Indian television crew filled the meagre spaces of the hotel: they were friendly men with loud, confident voices and a command of American slang. Ranjan found it hard to explain what they could be doing in a town full of buffaloes going through the rubbish, and unemployed rickshaw-pullers, and in the end he plucked up courage to ask them. They replied that they were down from Hyderabad to make a film about a village where round houses were made. ‘Kangrapada?’ Ranjan said.
