Niyamgiri–the mountain of law

An Eastern Ghat Tribe’s Struggle for Existence-II
Parimal Bhattacharya

When I came to know about the Dongria Kondhs of Niyamgiri and their battle for survival, a paroxysm of political violence had gripped West Bengal's countryside. Grisly images poured out of newspapers and television screens everyday, of men lying murdered, of women wailing and beating breasts, of dazed eyes staring out of bandaged heads. In village after village, battle lines were drawn along political allegiances, red and green flags fluttered by the roadside, arms were stockpiled in grain stores and brick kilns, gun-toting motorcyclists—their faces covered in towels—patrolled rutted village lanes. As the spiral of violence and vendetta widened, rape and murder became the order of the day.

A year before, I had toured different parts of West Bengal on a University Grants Commission project related to primary education. In fact I had visited some of those very places that had suddenly become forbidding killing fields. Village society in West Bengal has for a long time been deeply politicized and fractured. On that tour, I had heard the usual tales of distress and frustration. But frankly, I had failed to sense the fury that lay smouldering, and now erupted like a volcano. What was really surprising, the people who took up arms against each other mostly belonged to the same social class: they were basically poor lower caste subsistence farmers and petty traders. They had been living as a community for generations, sharing rituals and livelihood practices, as is the norm in any village society. And yet, all the old ties crumbled as political affiliation became the only marker of identity, that turned even blood brothers into deadly enemies.

What was even more surprising, we didn't get to hear the voices of the people caught in this internecine violence. We only heard the men who led them, the top leaders of the political parties. They, too, belonged to the same social class: urban upper caste bhadralok. We heard them debating furiously in television news channels, like ventriloquists speaking on behalf of the voiceless. We also heard members of the civil society—a motley group of artistes, painters, economists etc.—voicing support and sympathy for the suffering people. But they, too, belonged to the same urban bhadralok class. We never got to hear the subalterns, those who were at the receiving end. We only saw their silences etched on dead or shamed bodies, on photographs and telecasts: a bullet-punched chest, a gashed thigh, a mauled back, the sari gingerly drawn away, or a charred female torso lying on a paddy field, suitably blurred to protect the viewers' sensitivity.

In the middle of this deafening silence, the voice of the Kondhs of Niyamgiri reached me. Here was a people who had not outsourced their battle to a political party or group, nor had they let anyone ventriloquize their voices. Here the battle lines were more stark: a colourful tribe, a powerful mining company, and a hill paradise that the company wanted to take away from the tribe. It had the shape of a fable, a fairy tale.

I felt an irresistible longing to hear the tale, to see it etched on a paradisal hill.

Dokra and Dokri
After killing the prime demon in a fierce battle and fashioning hills and forests out of his bones and guts, Dharani Penu, the earth god, created life on earth: animals, birds, fish, insects, and then the first man and woman—a Kondh and his wife Kondhani. They lived in pure bliss, hunting and gathering in the abundant forest, and raised farm animals. They had two children, a boy and a girl; they named them Dokra and Dokri. One day, Kondh spotted a big stag near a forest spring. As he was about to aim his arrow, the deer spoke in a human voice.

'Don't kill me,' it said. 'Listen carefully if you want to save your children.'

Surprised, Kondh lowered his bow and listened.

'In seven days there will be a great flood. All living things on earth will perish. Go home and put your children in a big gourd shell. Give them enough food to last a long time. After twelve years, waters will recede and life will return on earth. Your children will remain alive. A new human race will begin with them.'

Kondh returned home and killed all his animals. He cured the meat, put most of it in a big gourd shell and had a feast. In seven days, as the deer had promised, there was a great deluge. The forests and hills went under water and the earth became one huge sea. All living creatures perished; all, except Dokra and Dokri. They stayed afloat in a gourd shell.

When Dharani Penu found this out, he was taken aback. How could a brother and a sister beget a new human race? They knew each other since birth! After much thought, Dharani Penu devised a plan: he split them up. He created two islands from the dirt under his fingernails and put Dokra and Dokri on these islands.

Twelve years is a long time and the memory of their origin faded in the minds of Dokra and Dokri. They grew into young adults, leading solitary lives in the two islands separated by a creek. Life had returned on earth by this time. Dokra hunted in the forest, caught fish in streams, picked fruits and roots, and had a contented life. He saw the seasons change; saw how the flowers bloomed, how the forests became a riot of colours and echoed with bird songs and the humming of bees. He saw how the deer mated in the sun-dappled shade of putush bushes, and how the doe's waiting thighs quivered in the presence of the ardent stag. Dokra would lower his bow and watch in amazement. He would bathe in a pool and see his reflections in water; he would see his own body bloom. The muscles on his chest would quiver like a doe's thighs, would go on quivering through the day. Dokra would cast aside his bow and arrow, climb a tree and would lie on his back upon a tall branch all day long. A strange longing would consume him like slow forest fire.

From the high branches of the trees the other island could be seen, an emerald line across the foamy blue creek: the sister island. One day Dokra fashioned a raft out of driftwood, rigged it with creepers and set sail for the other island. He found Dokri there, picking berries under a huge tree. Her long wavy hair fell around her shoulders and covered her body like a cloak. It seemed as if he had seen her somwhere, in a dream perhaps, or in the rippling water of a stream. For the life of him Dokra couldn't remember. Seeing another human being, a woman, for the first time, his chest began to quiver again like a doe's waiting thighs. Dokri came up to him, light footed, and touched the tremulous muscle with a finger. Dokra saw that her lips had turned violet with the juice of crushed berries.

They had twelve children. The firstborn was a Gond, next came a Kondh, the third one was a Bhunjia; and thus followed - a Paharia, a Dal, a Lodha, a Baiga, a Paraja, a Bhumia, a Koyea, a Binjhal and a Bheema. Each of these twelve children, a different tribe each, begot another twelve. The firstborn was a Munda, next came a Shabar, the third one was a Bonda ....and so on. Thus the earth filled up with numerous tribes. Each tribe had its own myth, its own tale. They lived in these tales.

Happily ever after? Well, not quite.

A Cursed Tale
Tales are inscribed in memories. They are handed down from generation to generation through folklore and songs. Sometimes the tales of a tribe are inextricably linked to a geographical location. They never write them on paper, palm leaves, stone tablets or government land deeds. And thus the state easily displaces the tribes from their tales, throws them out of the lands on which these tales are etched. Uprooted, they go seeking work in mines or as farm hands. They go to faraway places, to work in the laying of roads and railways lines. These roads and railway lines take them further away, in tea gardens and brick kilns. They go to live in unknown places, under open skies, in shacks made out of beaten tar drums.

In the evenings, after a hard day's work, they gather around a small fire and exchange their tales. These are tales of misery, of displacement from ancestral lands, but also tales of a happy life in the middle of bountiful nature. Each tale has its own colour and smell, and yet they mirror one another. Thus they learn how people were uprooted when bauxite mining began in Damanjodi, how dozens of villages were buried under the steel city of Rourkela, how a tribal habitat was washed away due to the lndravati Dam Project, how the green valley of Talcher turned to charcoal when the collieries were set up there. They also learn about the resistance movements going on in Gandhamardan, Kashipur, Paradwip, Chandipur and Kalinganagar.

Everywhere, tales of the tribes are cursed. Pundits call this resource curse. Perhaps it is no coincidence that some of the poorest people live in the most mineral-rich areas in the world. Resource curse has wiped out vast tracts of hills forests and village lands, before and after the independence. One of the largest such destruction happened here in Odisha, due to the presence of a prime resource: a river. Hirakud dam has flooded two lakh acres of forest and agricultural lands, uprooted more than one-and-a-half lakh people. But that was long time ago, our country had just got her independence. So what if some of us had to sacrifice something 'in the interest of the country', as Jawaharlal Nehru had famously said during the inauguration of Hirakud? He spoke on behalf of 'some of us', like a ventriloquist, since those 'some-of-us' were poor voiceless tribals.

Yet resistance did take place even then. Mundas were fired upon and killed when their land was forcibly taken for the locomotive factory at Chittaranjan. But the gunshots and death cries didn't reach us, the drums of nationalism were still ringing in our ears.

Times have changed. The drums of nationalism have decayed, they give out a hollow tired sound. It would be difficult to have another Hirakud now without a murmur. The suffering people have found newer ways of protest and resistance. The world, too, has shrunk due to the spread of telecommunication and the media. Recently the country has passed two new laws about the rights of the people who live in forests.

So now they brought another tale, the tale of Corporate Social Responsibility: a new tale to wrench out the old tale of a tribe.

After they occupied village lands on the foothills of Niyamgiri to set up a big alumina refinery, Vedanta Limited 'adopted' a few of the nearby villages. Signboards proclaimed 'Our Vedanta Village'; buildings for free primary schools, clinics and midday meal centers were erected. Free sewing machines were distributed among the women; workshops were set up to teach the tribal people saal leaf plate making. The company's PR team even recorded Dongria Kondh folk songs and released the album with much fanfare at a five-star hotel in Bhubaneswar. (Where would the saal trees go, and how would the Kondhs sing their songs once the mining started on Niyamgiri, was another matter.) Through giant hoardings and colourful advertisements splashed across newspapers and prime time television, the company sang a litany of hope. 'We bring smiles on the faces of the poorest of the poor,' it went. 'We mine happiness.'

At a place like Kalahandi, this litany rang out loudly: a super rich trans-national mining company has come to usher in development in one of the poorest regions in the country. It had the shape of a fairy tale.

But the people for whom this tale was meant did already know how such tales ended.

Of all the 640 odd districts in India, Kalahandi is arguably the most easily recognized; perhaps next only to Kargil. This has been so since 1980s, when the news of starvation deaths and distress sale of children exploded in the national media, and the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, freshly-minted and young, made a widely publicized visit. But when I decided to go to Kalahandi, I found it to be not an easy proposition. I also discovered how little I knew about the western part of a neighbouring state. I did find out Kalahandi on a map; I also learned that the district headquarters was Bhawani-patna, which had no rail link. But how to get there? How to reach Niyamgiri from there?

The Odisha Tourism Development Corporation office in Kolkata couldn't offer any help. Almost all the well-known tourist spots in Odisha are along the coast. The only place in the western part of the state about which they had some information was Koraput.

'These are tribal areas,' the official at the Wellington Square office said coldly. He was a Mahapatra, a Brahmin, born and brought up in the coastal region.

'Tribal area, mining area,' his assistant added. 'We have such great tourist spots all over Odisha, why on earth would you want to visit Kalahandi?'

They had a map of the region: thin blue lines twisted across swathes of brown and green. Were these roads? 'Yes, ghat roads across hilly areas,' the official nodded. No, he had never ventured along these roads.

The foggier the destination, the sharper grew my curiosity. A magical hill and a colourful tribe who lived there continued to haunt me. I read everything I could lay my hands on about the region. Like elsewhere in India, here too the most exhaustive writings were by British civil servants. But though Odisha was part of the Bengal province till 1912, there was no district gazetteer of Kalahandi from British times. Then I came to know that this was part of the Eastern India Agency Tract that stretched along the Eastern Ghats. Kalahandi was made a tributary state in 1865; its kings paid taxes to the British agent and received protection in exchange. Even in early 20th century, large parts of the state were covered with dense forests and inhabited by tribal people.

Another small but significant fact came to my notice: it is pronounced as Kalahandi—which means 'pot full of art' —and not Kalahandi, as the rest of India calls it. Kala means black in Hindi, so Kalahandi means blackened pot. This region was once part of the south Koshal empire, ruled by Naga dynasty kings for more than a thousand years. Art and culture flourished during that period and made Kalahandi a place befitting its name. Other sources claimed that the name Kalahandi had been derived from Karundamandal. Karunda is gems and, in ancient times, semiprecious stones were found in the river beds here. Traces of an ancient civilization were strewn all over the district: ruins of castles and caves with prehistoric paintings. The largest Stone Age axe in the world was discovered here.

Whether Kalahandi meant a storehouse of art or a cache of gems was a matter of historical debate, but the way it came to mean a soot-blackened pot, became a metaphor for hunger, told something about the continuing tale of imperialism in independent India. Niyamgiri and the Dongria Kondhs were but an episode in this tale. A fabulous episode surely, one that could spawn even a Hollywood movie.

The recent Hollywood film Avatar was set in the year 2154. Man had scoured the outer space in search of minerals. They spied the green planet Pandora, where there was a vast reserve of a new magic mineral. But a tribe called Navi lived on Pandora, and they would never let their habitat to be ruined. A war began, between the indigenous people and outsiders, between survival and greed. A familiar story.

But would all our earth's minerals be exhausted by 2154? I wondered. Would there still by any nature left? Or would it turn into a brown withered planet? Pits of abandoned mines visible from outer space, like eye-holes on a skull, dust storms blowing across continents, burying slowly the remains of a civilization...

To be freed from this nightmare, I clicked open Google Earth. No, it still was a bluish green planet, drifting across the cosmic darkness like a bird's egg nestled in feathery clouds. I pressed the mouse and zoomed in, gently pushing away the clouds and gliding over the expanse of green continents. The satellite images had enough clarity to reveal, at a height of two thousand feet, tiny shadows of trees, winds rippling over the surface of water bodies. I typed Kalahandi > Odisha > India into the search box and, in an instant, I was swooping upon ochre plains and chequered paddy fields, winding river courses, corrugated hills. At Lanjigarh, Vedanta's alumina refinery was rather easy to spot–neatly arranged dominoes, walled in, russet mirror of the waste mud pond, capillary-like roads. And then, abruptly, a thick dark green blob. Niyamgiri!

The satellite picture made it clear why Niyamgiri was a vital wildlife corridor: it stretched between the two sanctuaries of Karlapat in the north-west and Kotagarh in the east like a bridge. As I continued to press the mouse and zoomed in, the image crumbled into pixels. I was left with a deeper longing for the smell of earth, the whisper of leaves, the cool taste of the springs of Niyamgiri. It was like what Dokra had felt for the emerald island across the creek. He had built a raft with driftwood, rigged it with creepers and had set out. And I, in this age of superfast transport and communication, was straining to go to a place in an adjacent state.

The Return of the Demon
Well into his middle age, Kumuti Majhi was like any other Kutia Kondh man at Sindhabarali, a quiet hamlet in the foothills of Niyamgiri. He grew millet and oilseeds in a little patch of land and collected fruits, honey and medicinal herbs from the forests. If he had to venture out of his little world and go to the nearby town for some work, he saw brown parched lands all around—like the one his forefathers had left hundreds of years ago to settle here in the green shade of Niyamgiri.
Then, one day, all hell broke loose. Huge cranes and bulldozers rolled in at Lanjigarh like a marching army, and razed four villages to the ground. The giant alumina refinery came up, as if by magic. Tall chimneys spewed black smoke and darkened the skies; terrible noise and blinding lights drove away all the birds and animals from the hills and forests. Overnight, Lanjigarh was transformed into a grimy factory town teeming with strangers. Days and nights filled up with the noise and dust from an endless convoy of trucks carrying in bauxite from a halt station at Dahikhol. Huge ponds of red liquid toxic waste came up; it contaminated the waters of Bansadhara.
The bauxite that was unloaded from railway wagons at Dahikhol and came to the refinery in trucks, actually came all the way from Jharkhand. It was planned to be a temporary arrangement, to start work at the refinery in a hurry. The real purpose of setting up a refinery at Lanjigarh was to mine bauxite on top of Niyamgiri and haul it down directly through conveyor belts. For this, a conveyor belt corridor was erected along the forest-covered hill side. Also, a wide all-weather road began to be built all the way to the top. The hills bristled with machinery and men in yellow helmets.

No birdsong, no barking of deer. It seemed even the rustle of leaves and the ripple of springs had stopped. Niyamgiri echoed with the ear-splitting groan of ancient trees being felled by electric saws.

To Kumuti Majhi, it seemed as if the mythical demon had returned. The hill that had been giving them food, medicine and shelter for ages, seemed to be crying out for help. He could hear the call. He talked with his fellow villagers and they resolved to resist. They picketed in front of the refinery gate, blocked the roads leading up the hill, stoned the bulldozers. Brutal police crackdown followed; people were coerced and beaten up. Kumuti Majhi, along with several others, were sent to jail. Vedanta unleashed a massive publicity campaign to influence urban middle class opinion; it also co-opted a section of the local people.

But the resistance movement continued. Social activists, environmentalists and aid agencies like 'Action Aid' and 'Survival International' came out in support. The country's corporate media was muzzled with advertisements, but the tale of a magical hill range and the threatened existence of a so-called primitive tribe reached out to the world. It caught the imagination of a variety of people. A shadow of suspicion thickened around Vedanta's activities at Niyamgiri. Big institutions, including Church of England and Norway Pension Fund, withdrew their investments in the company. Celebrities like Michael Palin and Bianca Jagger supported the Dongira Kondhs' fight for survival. Pressure mounted on the government of India, and the Ministry of Environment and Forests sent a team of experts to Niyamgiri.

The team's report was unequivocal: mining bauxite atop Niyamgiri would endanger the very existence of a tribe, it said, who numbered around eight thousand and inhabited that hill range only. This would also violate two laws —namely, the Forest Rights Act, and the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act—that the government of India had passed in recent years. Based on this report, the central ministry issued a ban on mining atop Niyamgiri.

This, too, had the shape of a fairy tale: of a powerful mining company and a small tribal group whose very existence was dependent on the ecology of a hill range; of a people's resistance movement unfolding in a remote pocket of India and its resonance in the western world; of the federal structure of our country and its legislation that stopped, although temporarily, the destruction of a unique biodiversity hotspot. In the midst of an overwhelming despair and cynicism, here was a tale worth telling, a tale that was like a patch of green in the middle of a parched landscape.

The conventional ending of a tale—... and then they began to live in peace and happiness forever and ever—was a distant mirage at Niyamgiri. The company lay in wait at the foot of the hill, continuing to expand the refinery's capacity, the unfinished conveyor belt stretched along the green hillside like a hibernating reptile. Restless greed sharpened its fangs around the corridors of power in Bhubaneswar and in New Delhi. Its last line was yet to be written, but the tale surely had a magical shape.

This magic lured me on top of Niyamgiri one mellow winter afternoon.

Corridors of Life
Once upon a time, dense forests covered our subcontinent. Numerous living species thrived, from the tiniest insects and birds to giant herbivores and carnivores. These giant animals used to roam over large areas in search of food and habitat. Then the forests began to vanish. Vast swathes of land came under cultivation. Towns and cities came up, so did mills and factories. The forests shrank like scattered islands, countless species became extinct. And then, not very long ago, the very people who had felled trees and claimed forest lands came together to conserve what precious little was still left. They threw out the people who had been living in forests for centuries and put up signboards—SANCTUARY, NATIONAL PARK, RESERVE FOREST. Barbed wire and forest guards fenced out the humans who had dwelt in them. They also fenced in the forest animals, cut out their freedom of movement.

But big animals like tigers and elephants would always need very large areas to move about, to find food and to mate. Surely no signboard or barbed wire would keep them in. They found out narrow jungle patches to move from one forest area to another. These came to be known as wildlife corridor.

Corridors do exist, in the animal world and in human society, especially since the society began to get more and more fragmented. Curious people find these corridors and reach out. They work in their own specific fields, like solitary islanders, but get to know what is happening elsewhere in these fields. Technologies of communication have opened up these corridors. Thus, while working on a primary education project in West Bengal, I came to know about Sikshadeep. It was a Bhubaneswar-based organization working with innovative models to spread of primary education in remote tribal areas of Odisha. I also came to know about Angshuman Raut, the driving force behind Sikshadeep and a well-known translator. We hadn't met, but knew each other through a mutual friend. I wrote to him, stating my desire to visit Niyamgiri, and asked if he could help me in any way. Angshuman's response was prompt and warm: Come over to Bhubaneswar, he wrote back, we'll arrange your tour to Niyamgiri; we might also send someone who knows the area to accompany you.

One early November morning I boarded the Falaknama Express at Howrah station. The new complex at the southern end of the station, deserted and swaddled in thin mist, was slowly waking up from the cold early morning torpor. Across the railway tracks, a woman and her young daughter were rolling dung patties and sticking them briskly on a wall. They were dressed in rags, their bared limbs pale and shriveled in cold. Weak sun fell on a tuft of paddy shoots upon the dung heap. An inconsequential scene. But, on my return from Niyamgiri, I would never be able to see such a scene in that light.
[concluded]

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 26, Jan 6-12, 2013

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