Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains

by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

  The men were small and lithe with bulging calves and fringes falling over handsome, chiselled features. It was a scene that seemed to belong to another age entirely. If you’d parachuted me in blindfold, not for a second would I have thought this was India. It could have been the Brazilian Amazon, Siberia or a Navajo reservation in Utah. Surely these people were the descendants of those who had walked across Beringia to the Americas 13,000 years ago.

  Over the next few hours a stream of villagers drifted in and out – all of them, said Sadhu, coming for a look at the English visitor. Emboldened by alcohol, one middle-aged man with a pistol at his waist and a bandolier of bullets worn across a woven, striped jacket said, ‘I luff you,’ then burst into peals of laughter.

  ‘He two wives and eight children,’ said Sadhu, joining in. ‘He romantic. Watch out!’

  Around midnight Sadhu showed me to the communal bedroom. I unrolled my sleeping bag on a narrow bed and fell happily unconscious, the sound of voices and laughter drifting through the wall. At various points Sadhu, his sister and unidentified others stumbled into the three other beds, and every time I awoke I could hear the sound of men talking and laughing next door. I tried to imagine what subjects would be covered during an all-night Idu bender: who had the biggest mithun; the bear they’d caught on their latest hunting expedition; how this season’s rice planting was going; whose wife made the best smoked rats. At 6 a.m. most of them were still going, with a few smoking breakfast hits of opium for good measure. Others were passed out under blankets. The silent Indian boy squatted by the fire, handing out plates of rice and meat and cups of sweet, milky chai.

  My breath smoked in the chill morning air as Sadhu led me through the village’s scattered huts, their rounded thatched roofs reminiscent of the upturned bows of boats. The Talo River roared through a deep gorge somewhere below and on all sides rose the mountains, each one a green fortress guarded by ranks of leafy sentinels. After a few minutes we reached the festival ground, a well-trampled space half the size of a football pitch, surrounded by huts and temporarily erected shelters. At one end was the khundu, the sacrificial area, where six male mithun would soon be tied to a wooden post and slaughtered. At the other end was a bamboo platform for butchering the carcasses. The mithun were tethered in a grove of trees just beyond this, chewing their cud in total ignorance of the fate about to befall them.

  In a dark hut beside the butchering platform three male shamans, igu, sat in a row beside the fireplace, watched by a half-cut crowd. They’d been singing all night, a repetitive, mesmeric chant in a dialect unintelligible to the normal Idu, offering up the mithun to Inni Maselo Jinu, the supreme creator of the Idu, and leading the mithuns’ souls to the afterlife. Even in this age of rampant globalization the Idu inhabit a world of spirits, both good and evil, and the igu are powerful mediators between the spheres of the seen and the unseen. Central figures in Idu life, these shamans heal illness, preside over births and deaths and are involved in every aspect of the community. In the middle of the three sat the chief igu, a man of indeterminate age with flawless bronze skin, a particularly fine cane helmet and the top half of a leopard’s jawbone sewn into his dao strap. He sang in a strange, contorted voice, his hands moving up and down as he beat and shook out the slow, galloping triple rhythm on a small handheld instrument that was part drum, part maracas, part bell. The other two repeated him, a line behind, to create a rolling, hypnotic effect. Unlike Amazonian shamans, who use powerful hallucinogens such as ayahuasca, the vine of life, the Idu shamans rely on just chanting, music and the power of their guiding spirits to achieve trance states. The igus can sing for four or five days at a time like this, fuelled by no more than tea and a non-hallucinogenic plant root called kalita, which they believe has the power to ward off evil spirits. When it was time, the chief igu went outside and chanted beside each mithun, brushing their backs with a leafy branch to signify Maselo was ready for them.

  Being a pescatarian, I can think of better ways to start my day than a bout of animal sacrifice; even the whiff of a British butcher makes me feel nauseous. But I felt it polite to watch, although I was the only woman who did. Standing about ten metres from the khundu, I looked on as the first mithun was led up, plodding towards his death with the docility of an old Labrador. Nor did he struggle as he was tied to the post, or as three men held him by the tail and another brought a dao down on the back of his muscular neck with a resounding thwack. On the second thwack the beast fell silently to the ground, the top of his neck split open in a crimson slush of flesh, bone and arteries. The men laughed and dragged him aside by his tail, then went to fetch the next one. Steam rose from the bleeding wound and the village curs gathered expectantly, but the mithun’s sides were still heaving and it was twenty minutes before it let out an awful rasping sound, kicked for the last time, and died.

  The same happened with the next four. The men hacked and laughed and jibed at each other’s ability to kill, and the mithun fell silently to their slow, ghastly deaths. Soon the area around the khundu looked like a bovine Somme and the air steamed with death. But the final mithun saw and smelt the carnage. He guessed what fate awaited him. He fought and bellowed all the way, five men hauling him by a rope, another five yanking at his tail. When they did manage to lash him to the post, a young man hewed at his neck with sickening ineptitude while the others laughed and taunted his inefficiency. I could feel the bile rising in my throat, my stomach churning in revolt. Gagging, I slipped away and vomited behind a tree. I live in the St Werburghs area of Bristol, a wonderfully alternative community where crystal healing and vegetarian shoes are the norm. It was Saturday morning, and in an hour or two the good people of my street would be pouring hemp milk into their tea and making scrambled tofu for breakfast. And here I was kicking off the weekend with a grade-A bloodbath.

  I didn’t want to judge the Idu: this was their culture, and had been for centuries. They are hardy, self-sufficient, unsentimental people who rear and kill their own meat. They’re not soft and mawkish like most of us in the West, whose meat comes ready-wrapped in cellophane. In many ways their method was far more humane than our industrialized systems of rearing and killing animals. Their beasts roam freely in the forest all their lives and know nothing about their death until the very last moment. If I were a mithun, I’d rather this than a short, mechanized life in a cattle-feed lock, deprived of freedom and pumped full of antibiotics. But I wish the killing was more efficient, and the death not so horribly prolonged. No animal deserves to die like that.

  Amidst much laughter and jollity, the mithun were immediately sliced, chopped, skinned, dismembered and carried away. Men staggered past with whole heads across their shoulders, the eyes blue and staring with death. Hunks of flank and rump were lashed onto lengths of bamboo and carried to the butchering area. Cane baskets were filled with oozing, slimy intestines. Everywhere men were elbow-deep in blood and shit, one of them so drunk he kept slipping on a slick of intestines and dropping his armfuls of meat. In the midst of it was Sadhu, my gentle, quietly spoken host, squatting as he cut out the tongues and strung them onto sharp threads of bamboo. On the butchering platform a circle of men sat among heads, legs, haunches and piles of flesh, slicing it all up for the pot, their bare feet dark red and sticky with blood. Everything would either be eaten at a feast this afternoon, or divided between all the attendant families of the clan. Nothing would be wasted.

  Meanwhile the women stood under shelters stirring great vats of rice and mithun meat, or handing around plastic cups of chai and bamboo flagons of yu, a weaker version of the lethal yuchi. Still feeling a little queasy, I joined a crowd of them and self-medicated with a flagon of yu. By noon I’d had several and was communicating in fluent nonsense with a diminutive, puckered old lady who had an uncanny resemblance to E.T. She sucked her toothless gums and chortled at everything, lost in happy senility.

  The rest of the day passed in a sunny orgy of drinking, butchery and carousing, an Idu version of Glastonbury, just wi
th more blood and gore. At intervals I’d retreat to Sadhu’s house to escape the swarms of tiny, biting dam dum flies that had come in place of the rain. No bigger than a pin-prick, these little blighters are endemic in parts of Arunachal Pradesh and seek out human flesh with the precision of a guided missile. You don’t feel a thing when they sink their nasty little proboscis into you, but afterwards the bites swell into madly itching blood-blisters. Already my wrists, hands and neck were dotted with red.

  On one of these occasions a group of people were sitting by the fire watching an episode of India’s Got Talent on television. It seemed impossible to believe that the heavily made-up wannabes on a stage in Delhi 1,600 miles away belonged to the same century as these dao-wielding tribesmen of the Mishmi Hills, let alone swore allegiance to the same flag. Another time, the news was on and Modi was standing on a podium waving to an adoring crowd.

  ‘Your David Cameron is very handsome,’ said Sadhu, after telling me how much he liked Modi.

  When they weren’t glued to India’s Got Talent, Sadhu’s female relatives would try to teach me Idu. I’ve often noticed how, when you travel alone, among people with whom you share no common language, you are reduced to the position of a child. And so it was here. They pointed at their noses, mouths, ears, the fire, firewood, and so on, repeating slowly and loudly the words, then hooting with laughter as I tried to pronounce them. With no written script, spelling was largely guesswork, but soon the back of my diary was scribbled with Idu words.

  At around four, by which time so much yu had been consumed it was a miracle anyone was still vertical, a prodigious feast was served. We sat in rows on the ground while lines of men and women handed out palm-leaf plates, then piled them with armfuls of boiled mithun, greasy chunks of fat and heaps of rice. They served it from baskets as big as oil drums and with hands still dark with blood and filth, the helpings so huge most of it was rolled into the palm leaves or skewered onto strips of bamboo for later. Politely turning down the meat, I settled for just an armful of rice.

  ‘Madam, after fooding?’ said an older man, sending a glass of Blender’s Pride down the line of greasy revellers.

  All this time the shamans had been chanting in their hut, calling up the favour of Inni Maselo Jinu, Nani Intaya, Ela, and the countless other spirits of the Idu world. After nightfall the chief igu did a swift costume change and began to dance – a slow, shuffling movement with his head bowed and his bare feet turned out at angles. Now he wore a richly embroidered red skirt, a headpiece of cowrie shells hung with tufts of yak’s tail and a sadly magnificent bandolier of yellowed tigers’ teeth, some six inches long. I was surprised to see this. I’d heard the Idu believed the tiger was their brother and didn’t hunt or kill them. Behind his back hung a small pair of cymbals that clashed together as he moved. This was followed by a sort of shamanic open-mic session, during which various members of the audience put on the igu’s outfit and imitated his moves. At one point a near-unconscious drunk was carried in by two others and deposited on the floor in a blethering heap. There followed much thigh slapping, hectoring and uproarious laughter as he was manhandled into the costume and levered upright, making a valiant attempt to dance.

  In life as hard and historically brutal as the Idu’s, comedy has always played a crucial role in their society and, looking around me, I saw that every face in the hut was lit up by a wide, joyous smile. Much later, drunk and happy, I walked back to Sadhu’s under the first clear sky I’d seen in India, stopping to scratch the belly of a black pig lying in a muddy pen behind the butchering platform. From what I’d heard, tonight would be his last.

  Sunday was the day of ili moo, the pig sacrifice, but unlike the biddable mithun the four black pigs sensed there was murder afoot. They squealed and ducked and dived in frantic bids to evade capture, and it was half an hour before they’d been wrestled into the mud and trussed by their legs to lengths of bamboo. A large black female with tusks and an upturned snout was the last to be caught, sending several of her assailants headlong into the sludge. By the time all four animals were squealing, shaking and gasping in a row on the butchering platform, the jubilant young men were black with mud and pig shit. The smallest pig, my friend from last night, lay defeated and trembling, his ears twitching as he squealed. Unable to watch their misery any longer I went for a walk along the road, only to return half an hour later at the moment of their horrid demise. I’d been told it was quick, a sharpened bamboo stick straight to the heart. But as men pushed the green sticks into the pigs’ chests there erupted a hellish cacophony of squeals and shrieks, and it was minutes before it ended.

  Within seconds of their final squeals the pigs were lifted onto burning pyres and men were rubbing the singed hair off their bodies with long wooden poles. Blood bubbled out of their wounds and the fat popped and crackled in the heat. Afterwards they were carried to the butchering platform, where daos sliced through their thick outer layers of fat with the ease of knives through soft butter. In no time, chunks of fat and flesh were being thrown into baskets and the platform was slimy with blood and guts. The speed of the transition from living, breathing animal to lard, blood and bone was shocking. Give me tofu sausages any day.

  The only way to recover from the horror of it all was to hit the yu, and by midday I was well on my way to unsteady inebriation. I was by no means the only drunkard in the village: on the platform one man had passed out mid-butchery, head lolling on his chest, legs stretched out between piles of grey fat; in the igu’s hut several older men were asleep on their bearskin bags, the floor around them a blitzkrieg of discarded flagons and empty whisky bottles. It was like Stonehenge on solstice morning, apart from here the men chanting were real shamans, not bongo-bashing hippies on acid. Now the chief shaman had been joined by a new igu, an exceptionally good-looking man of about forty. Maybe it was the drink, but as I watched them chant I imagined him being signed by Storm models and sashaying down catwalks in New York and Milan. When someone offered me another flagon of yu, I declined. One more glass and I’d be anyone’s.

  That afternoon the Idu feasted on lumps of boiled pork and chunks of fat, threading what they couldn’t eat onto strips of bamboo. I ate rice. Again. Afterwards some of the revellers began to drift back to their huts and nearby villages, clutching leaves stuffed with mithun, pork and lard, and dark bundles of what looked like sticks. It was only when my friend E.T. pulled out one of these sticks and thrust it towards my face, cackling, that I saw a pair of incisors and a tail and realized they were dried rats. She peeled off a flaky, blackened bit of skin and moved it towards my mouth, grinning. As much as I was open to trying things, dried rat was taking it a little too far, and I recoiled with a poorly disguised grimace.

  Despite the horror of the sacrifice my affection for the Idu was undimmed. That night, as I listened to the slow, evocative songs of the igu, an old man passed out snoring across my feet, I felt blissfully content and at home among these exotic, smiling people. Every journey is an exercise in unshackling yourself from the safety and routine of everyday life at one end, and letting go of your fears of the unknown at the other. And on every journey there’s a moment when the bonds are loosed, when at once the journey inhabits you, and you inhabit it. Sir Richard Burton described a similar feeling in his diary, as he sailed from Bombay to Africa in 1856, at once ‘shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Civilization’.

  It was a month since I’d left home, and it had taken travelling to this faraway village in the Mishmi Hills, thousands of miles away, to reach this moment of equilibrium. Later, on the way back to Sadhu’s, I stopped to gaze at the sparkling vault above, its magnificence and my drunken happiness moving me to tears. On my return Sadhu was already snoring gently in one of the other beds and the house was silent, so I slipped into my sleeping bag and went blissfully to sleep.

  The following morning the festival had all but come to an end. A few diehards remained i
n the igu hut and I told them I was nga Anini bawe, going to Anini, the closest thing to an Idu goodbye. They all waved cheerily and wished me chi pay na ba, a good journey, and the chief shaman stood up to take my hands in his. He didn’t speak a word of English but his round face beamed with kindness and wisdom and I had the odd feeling he could read my very soul. I hoped we’d somehow meet again.

  On the drive back to Etalin, Sadhu pointed out the site of a proposed dam on the Talo, one of seventeen planned for the Dibang Valley and 168 agreed for Arunachal Pradesh. Many people I’d spoken to in Roing were strongly opposed to these dams. The deals were rife with corruption and money laundering, they told me, and the Dibang Valley’s sandy, unstable soil made it unsuitable for such projects. The valley had been the worst-affected area in the 1950 earthquake, the violent tremors unleashing massive landslides and floods that wiped out half of the Idu population, a catastrophe from which their numbers have never recovered. It was madness, they said, to even consider building dams in unstable mountains prone to such seismic activity. The structures would also be built by tens of thousands of labourers from Assam and beyond, many of whom would remain there.

  ‘You’ll need a microscope to find us Idu after that,’ one man had lamented.

  The most controversial project is the proposed 3,000 MW Dibang Dam, a 288-metre behemoth that will submerge thousands of hectares of virgin, largely unexplored forest and create a 26.7-mile-long reservoir visible from space. Already 300,000 trees are being cleared to make way for its construction. Rejected by Manmohan Singh’s government, it was pushed through by Modi within months of his election. Surfing to power on a wave of promises about achhe din, or ‘good days’, Modi’s government saw environmental issues as far less important than Progress and Jobs. At the same time, he signed agreements on tens of other controversial dams in the state, curbed well-known environmental activists, cancelled the licences of Greenpeace and 9,000 other foreign-funded NGOs, and softened environmental restrictions on coal-fired power stations. The Dibang Dam, due to be India’s largest, was approved on the back of an environmental impact assessment that was labelled farcical by many observers and no study whatsoever of its effect on downstream areas. Smaller hydroelectric projects have already led to rivers in other parts of the state running dry and lifeless, and the Assam Valley, home to around thirty-two million people and a fecundity of flora and fauna, depends on the ebb and flow of the Brahmaputra for its survival. In the absence of studies, it’s anyone’s guess how badly the dam will affect the already flood-prone region. While many of the 168 ‘paper dams’ will never be more than that, it’s no wonder protests against the Dibang project and other major dams planned for Arunachal Pradesh have been widespread.