The Vocabulary Of The Jungle

The two terms, 바카라˜adivasi바카라™ and 바카라˜tribe바카라™, are used almost interchangeably to denote the communities that live largely beyond the margins of 바카라˜civilization바카라™. The word 바카라˜adivasi바카라™ refers to the native residents of a land who, thus, also have the first right over all the forest and mineral resources lying therein. Whereas 바카라˜tribe바카라™ is an administrative-legal term to denote those communities that have been granted certain rights under the law. Also, while the word 바카라˜adivasi바카라™ always refers to the communities that live in or come from forests or relatively inaccessible terrains, tribes can also be found in urban or semi-urban areas.

However, none of these terms바카라”adivasi, scheduled tribe or tribe바카라”is a merely social-anthropological category. They have deep political and cultural connotations. Coined during the British rule, the nomenclature 바카라˜tribe바카라™ unjustifiably clubs together many diverse and heterogeneous communities into a monolithic block. Worse, since the contribution to the gross domestic product has become the overarching parameter of evaluating a community, the tribes or the adivasis, having a negligible footprint on production and consumption, are rewarded with obscene adjectives like 바카라˜backward바카라™ and 바카라˜anti-modern바카라™.

Abujhmad in Bastar has many cows and buffaloes wandering about, but the adivasis are not interested in selling milk. They don바카라™t even milk the cows for themselves. The Naxals tried to teach them to use bullocks for farming, but it hasn바카라™t become common. Iron is perhaps the only metal that has a word for it in Gondi.

If anything, modern thinking mandates that one evaluate a community by its intrinsic traits. Imposing one바카라™s concepts on the other is terrible intolerance, backwardness. Life suddenly assumes different hues once the lens of the GDP growth is taken off. One can then hear the poetry of silence and ambivalence that Bastar weaves. A family can pass an entire day with few verbal exchanges. There is little need to communicate even with immediate kin, much less with the outside world. Travelling through the jungle on a motorbike, I바카라™ve often met people who, when asked for directions, readily come along to drop me to my destination. Their unplanned travel doesn바카라™t end there. They stay back in this village, without worrying that their family back home might be waiting or concerned about them, as there is no mode of communication to explain their sudden disappearance. Any home in the village will give them shelter in its courtyard, a little mahua and rice. The visitor will help the host in fetching salfi or hewing wood before making the return journey to their home in a day or two. Bastar is an epic of slowness that worries little about the twin ideals of scientific temper and rationality. I once thought that V.S. Naipaul was right when he termed the adivasis a 바카라˜stunted바카라™ species. My visits to Bastar erased this perception. Abujhmad refuses to surrender before modernity and responds to history with its own mythologies.

A modern state governed by codified laws needs certitudes in its language and operations. It cannot afford to be ambiguous. A large population of India lives an existence that is almost an antithesis to the ideal. From giving directions about a place to making a statement under oath or even writing love letters, people often cherish prevarication. Not necessarily with an intention to mislead or deceive, but because they enjoy answers that don바카라™t bring any closure, but raise new and even confounding questions. It바카라™s the sign of a civilization that refuses finality, cherishes the unfinished, and swears by the contingent and contextual. A modern state and its interlocutors cannot easily appreciate this trait which appears even more entrenched in Bastar.

Writings on Bastar by outsiders, who perhaps cannot but use a modern vocabulary to decode the jungle, thus verge on becoming translated texts whose metaphors and similes may well be against the spirit and language of the wild. They transcribe and interpret Bastar in gestures that it is barely cognizant of. Their narrative eventually speaks to their constituency in the city, from whom they seek to derive legitimacy. The coordinates and referents of their arguments often remain steeped in a lexicon alien to Bastar.

One such oft-used phrase is 바카라˜interior Bastar바카라™ or 바카라˜the interior villages of Bastar바카라™. But very few of Bastar바카라™s residents are conscious of living in an 바카라˜interior바카라™ land. They don바카라™t divide their jungle into 바카라˜accessible바카라™ and 바카라˜remote바카라™바카라”words that denote the hierarchy created by the city for its own purpose and convenience.

If one converses with a community in a language it doesn바카라™t speak, if one remains ignorant about their language and writes about them in an alien tongue, then one바카라™s narrative can never escape the possibility of being incomplete and, at times, distorted. I often felt a formidable linguistic disconnect with the adivasis. For almost every question of mine, they had an answer for a question I had never asked. I repeated the question, paraphrased it, elaborated and explained it, still our conversation often remained tangential. It also reflected the distinct epistemic character of Bastar. The adivasis live in a cosmos that does not require many questions, much less answers. A moment is often complete in itself. Their life is at complete variance with the city바카라”which is founded on questions. During my travels in the adivasi zone, I met a number of people, raised a lot of questions, about personal topics like love and sex, and also about minor issues. But I cannot recall anyone ever asking me even one simple question about my life or work.

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Mahua and salfi are the national drinks of Bastar. Marriage, love or a fake encounter killing바카라”men and women drown every moment in mahua. It helps them embrace life as well as grief with dignity. Vetti Mandavi lives with his old wife in a deserted village of Balibeda. He was paralysed a few years ago. He looks like a crumpled bundle of cloth, lying on a tattered dusty blanket near a fire that simmers through the day. A loincloth, a lungi and a thin blue shirt. The clothes seem heavier than the man. The smoke emanating from the fire makes him cough repeatedly, but he doesn바카라™t move. A dog ambles about lazily, chickens hop around him. The thatched shed has gathered innumerable layers of soot.

He is in severe pain, but I never hear him complain. Not a single word. The vocabulary of the jungle doesn바카라™t seem to have a word for such pain. Have I ever heard any resident of the interiors of Bastar cry or wail, or even complain? People harassed or tortured by the police do express their pain, but only when they are repeatedly asked about it. I have lived in many villages across Bastar, but cannot recall anyone sharing their sorrow with me. Perhaps they don바카라™t share it with each other either.

I often find people elsewhere creating opportunities to regurgitate their grievances바카라”how unfortunate their life is, how hollow their destiny, how their own people have cheated them. But Bastar has an unassuming embrace of sorrow, separation and death. I earlier wondered whether the impossibility of their lives had muted the emotion associated with loss. Perhaps not. Their embrace of nothingness, an all-encompassing nothingness, is absolute.

(This appeared in the print edition as "The Melodious Quietude")