Meanwhile, the concrete jungles spread their tentacles ever wider. People are learning to live in a new world of iron and brick cages. Through television, they watch the varied sights of the world within minutes. Offices of big companies hang oil paintings of jungles and beautiful Adivasi women – and this is meant to project their appreciation of Adivasi culture. When they feel bored, the people of this world go to Darjeeling, or to Goa, to watch the sunset over the Arabian Sea.
– Shankar Guha Niyogi, 'Our environment', 1991, translated from the Hindi by Rajni Bakshi
Even without the martyred Niyogi's haunting presence, or knowing that 14 February happens to be his birth anniversary – marked here in Chhattisgarh by marauding Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (the student wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party) goons looking for young courting couples – the day could still give you a different take on life if you are stuck, as I am, in a seedy hotel in Jagdalpur, in Bastar district. This was once a small town that now shows all the signs of the unthinking, ragtag race to industrial growth and development that political voices have tended to adopt as a mantra.
Had you visited this area during the early 1980s, you would have had a different but no less disturbing picture of Jagdalpur. You would have seen the history of this area in the architecture and planning typical of territories once administered by the British – where the plums of the good life were kept for the rulers, and the leaves, twigs and wild berries doled out to the rest. In the British part of town were always to be found the broader, tree-lined roads; on either side of these, behind walled grounds and gardens, sloping tiled roofs neatly perched on gleaming whitewashed offices and bungalows – government officials protected then, as they are even today, by large wooden gates manned by sentries who come to attention when approached. That was also a pre-plastic age, and the population was far smaller. The roads were surprisingly clean, and the drains and gutters in the town almost unnoticeable.
Jagdalpur today is a living testament to the kind of greedy urban sprawl you come to expect nowadays, from any small township (or suburb at the edge of a city) hoping to hit the next rung of the high-growth-rate ladder. Take any part of this once-easygoing town and you could be standing in any area of urbanising India, right down to the Adivasis from Gujarat, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh who now also make up a large number of the construction labour class in the country's major cities. The dirt that accumulates everyday in Jagdalpur is religiously swept every morning by an army of barefoot labourers, who faithfully add to the heaps of misshapen filth they have already dredged up from the open gutters.
Jagdalpur's main road, unimaginatively known simply as 'Main Road' is its major commercial area. It consists of two squares intersecting it, each marked by monstrous caricatures of Adivasi art geared to the fledgling tourist industry that leaves most Adivasi intellectuals with heads bent in shame. One such bizarre assemblage sees black-skinned Adivasi women draped in white saris, baskets on their head, sticks in their hands. As I discuss this with some Adivasi friends over mahua wine, there is some laughter. Our women go to market with baskets on their head; we hold the sticks when we're dancing. What are they now saying – that we dance on our way to the market?
The roads off Jagdalpur's Main Road could easily be pictured as a maze of large gutters, muddied and dirtied with the debris of the beautiful life as Jagdalpur sees it today. Outside of clothing shops stand Yana-Gupta-look-alike mannequins dressed in clinging chiffon on one side of the street, and tight, groin-gripping denims on the other. Hoarding after hoarding scream the joys of consumerism, as if all anyone could want would be to trade in their old TV set for a new model, or to be told by another Bollywood actress what cream will make them fairer. Making up the banks of these odorous canals are tall buildings on either side, each touching the other in a way that keeps heat and dust suspended and blocks the free transit of air.
Everywhere you turn, every road or gully you take, is new evidence of just how ugly urban planning is if motivated by greed and encroachment. If, confronted by architecture that makes a virtue of kitsch, one looks for an archetype to capture the obscenity of transplanting forms for their own sake onto an intrinsically foreign soil, then Jagdalpur is it. You will see a roadside tea stall (its owner insistent on not selling out, perhaps) standing right next to a shuttered house close to ruin, whose resident might be approaching a bank to raise the money to put up the kind of monstrosity that adjoins it – the two-storey gleaming black marble-faced air-conditioned jewellery shop, whose joint family owners, it would seem, live upstairs. Two brand-new cars are parked outside, parallel to the open gutter. Next to the black stone laid over the gutter lies another dredged-up mess awaiting collection.
At the side of this architectural nightmare, slipping back into real life, is an abandoned plot with a family of five squatting within. Perhaps these are refugees from another town in Chhattisgarh on the make – condemned to live in a square box with no windows, made of old, discarded corrugated iron and billboard, and ironing shirts and trousers for a living. Next to them is an incomplete single-storeyed shop selling cheap saris, which in turn shares a wall with what could be a set from a movie studio – a double-storeyed mall with a shiny glass façade and a dozen television sets near the entrance showing five different channels. The mall has its own set of staircases so high that someone standing next to it, perhaps at the sari shop, would think it is a small flyover whizzing past.
Pravir Chandra's children
When Jagdalpur was part of Madhya Pradesh, prior to November 2000 when Chhattisgarh was formed, it was a district headquarters. Even then it was ruled by an admixture of high-handed, possibly malleable government officials paid off by traders with an eye on future business prospects – a reality that both sides, in their new avatars, now seem to be cashing in on. Prior to this, till some twenty years after Independence, a short distance from the once-majestic Indravati River (now severely depleted thanks to upstream factories) Jagdalpur was home to the palace of a maharajah.
By all accounts, His Highness Pravir Chandra Bhanj Deo, born in Jagdalpur and educated in the US, was a charismatic man, with a taste for the mystical. He left his wife immediately after the marriage was solemnised to take sanyas, and was in his later life worshipped as a god by the Adivasis of Bastar. Although copies are no longer to be found in bookshops in Chhattisgarh, he was also the author of a book (published in both English and Hindi) titled I, Pravir Chandra, the Adivasi God. Originally from a royal family in Warangal, his ancestors were given refuge for the sake of the deity they carried with them while fleeing invaders, the black-faced Danteshwari whose temple overlooks the river. Some say this was originally the site of a shrine to Mawli, the Adivasi goddess linked to the earth, who is depicted in hundreds of huts and villages in diverse forms. Mawli has long since been displaced from the banks of the Indravati by Danteshwari.
During the 1980s, a short walk from the British side of town were the shredded remains of Pravir Chandra's whitewashed ancestral palace, housed in a campus of twenty-odd acres pockmarked with bullet holes. Right through the mid-1980s, there were still Adivasis camping in the grounds and building itself, with cattle tied to the tamarind trees and cooking fires going in several places. They were protecting the palace from the government until an heir from the childless Pravir Chandra's family could lay claim to it.
His palace was sacked by Indian policemen in 1966, and he was killed, very much like Salvador Allende, with a gun in his hand, preparing to retreat up the staircase of the grand foyer for his last stand. There is more than just folklore surrounding him, though. Older people will tell you that some 3000 Adivasis had come to protect him, armed with bows and arrows, and spears. Some say there were far less; some say there were 10,000 who first responded to the call that their raja needed help, and then thinned down to 3000 when the police arrived. Village networks say that many people were disappeared; no one has ever seen them again. Cynics, even without mahua wine loosening their tongues, say the bodies were buried in the forest in a mass grave.
Today, post-statehood for Chhattisgarh, the palace has been done up in brocade. The present ruler, Kamal Chandra Bhanj Deo, Pravir Chandra's grand-nephew, has been left with nothing more challenging to ponder than how to bring tourists to the palace.
There are three main eras in Bastar's troubled history of the past century and a half. The first marks the advent of British officials who followed the missionaries and anthropologists; those visionaries who saw the virtues of investing in forestry for the booming timber business of the time – then the natural way of dispossessing people in order to exploit the earth. Not surprisingly, in 1910 the British had to hang some dozen Adivasi leaders from the tall, majestic tamarind trees off Gol Bazaar in Jagdalpur, for having the audacity to venture near the town with bows and arrows and spears to resist their forests being taken over. The space today is marked with hundreds of kiosks, standing shoulder to shoulder and surrounding this memory with more business-as-usual.
The second phase saw the looting of a mix of British-planted and natural forests by traders in the flourishing timber industry of the 1960s and 1970s, ably backed by right-wing political forces in Raipur and Bhopal who helped them to colonise native homelands. If you see the many new Hindu temples in traditional Adivasi villages, you see the scale of the operation and the simplicity of it all. On the one hand, Hindu and Christian missionaries telling young Adivasi women it was not acceptable to show their breasts, and on the other, traders to sell them cloth to cover these. Other trinkets and consumer goods followed, with traders joining in to flaunt the law and take away the ancient lands.
The third phase is just more of the same, with the addition of 'globalisation'. This is the current mantra, of course, translated to mean that Indian multinational companies are doing to indigenous peoples in their own country what is already being doing to the other indigenous peoples in Africa and Latin America. The larger picture is one the mainstream media has been consistently refusing to talk about to its educated public: the fact that the forests that make up a large part of Chhattisgarh are the native homelands of the state's Adivasi peoples. One is also left wondering whether educated, English-reading, privileged Indians, even if the true situation is shown to them in black and white, would look at the reason for the violence now consuming large tracts of this area, the real reason that blood is being shed – the exploitation of the minerals that their modern-day lifestyles demand.
If the government were to cut out the propaganda about taking development to these ancestral Adivasi lands and instead enforced measures offered by the Fifth Schedule of the Indian Constitution (dealing with Scheduled Tribes and their lands), these forests and indigenous cultures could easily be protected. Yet the fact of the matter, as some have been noting since Shankar Guha Niyogi brought this to light during the 1970s, and for which he was murdered, is that in the name of industrial growth and development the tribal populations are being rendered extinct. Others, far more cynical, even as the mahua swirls in their mouths and its bouquet overwhelms the senses, feel we are witnessing a very sophisticated approach to ethnic cleansing.
Three sheaves
Imagine that you are thinking these dark thoughts while lying beneath a grim dark-beige ceiling that meets walls of the same morose colour. You are stuck with an air conditioner that looks as though it was never intended to work. The window above, for so reason, is welded to the frame. 'Welcome to Bastar in springtime,' you end up singing in slow, 4/4 time, 'welcome to Bastar in springtime.' Meanwhile, the stained fan above you whirrs, its percussive hum and clunk set off by the soulless light of a naked neon bulb. The room's cheap furniture is covered with light-orange matte laminate; the thick musty rug is reminiscent of stagnant water.
Before Shankar Guha Niyogi, Verrier Elwin was another who attempted to empathise with, and live in, Bastar among the Adivasis. He observed:
Tribal India is to be filled with thousands of small schools, and while the bright eyes of boys and girls will be trained to decipher the script of languages other than their own, they may not be taught to recognize and love beauty. Their minds may be constricted to believe that all that is natural, open and simple is somehow bad. Their hands may be trained to produce inferior yarn with which to conceal the loveliness of their bodies, but not to make beautiful things with which to decorate hair and throat and arms. There is danger that they will be led to reject the old life and that they will be given in its place little idea of how to love rhythm and vitality, exuberance and delight.
Not much has changed over the past thirty-odd years. Where the grandfather of this hotel owner once probably bartered with Adivasis in the Abhuj Mari forests, taking tendu leaves from them and giving them salt in exchange (or Lux soap cakes that most instinctively licked after opening), the grandson, now entrenched in Jagdalpur, will buy wooden carvings of Hindu deities made by Adivasis, with their own belief systems, and give them cash in exchange.
Coincidence or just dread, springtime in Bastar is also the link that marks my fourth trip over 27 years to this now-misshapen town, stretched by the scramble to create infrastructure. As is now increasingly visible, the push to 'develop' the place will mean a cycle of doom for the forests of Chhattisgarh. More importantly, this infrastructure comes at the cost of displacing the indigenous peoples who share and protect these forests because their own lives depend on them – and, after that, giving them silver coins with one hand and turning them into cheap, unorganised industrial labour with the other.
It is not as if this public-private partnership, a fat-cat government and its machinery allied with fat-cat Indian multinationals, has not been documented and railed against. From what dirty hole, one might ask, comes journalism's 'neutrality', which everyone seems to cherish?
On the hotel bed, flapping under the fan, are three sheaves of paper. The first, showing his blurred face but vibrant eyes, is a document on Shankar Guha Niyogi circulated by Jan Vikas Andolan. It was brought out to celebrate Niyogi Week, 22-28 September 1992, a year after the poet was assassinated by goons at the behest of traders and industrialists. It contains a commemorative article titled 'His work and thinking', and includes the last article he wrote, 'Our environment'. The article comes through as a work of love and respect, detailing how the idealism of an individual, as normal as anyone can be, can translate into practising a wider, more inclusive politics.
Also on the bed is a photocopied transcript of an interview with Nandini Sundar, a professor of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics. Sundar offers a scathing indictment of how governance in Chhattisgarh has come to mean implementing the imperatives of Indian multinationals, where in the name of fighting India's Maoists, the government and industry are systematically dislocating Adivasi populations from the forests. As everyone brazenly admits, in the forests lie the minerals that industry will dig for, and the water resources they will suck dry. One trader in the area, for instance has a sophisticated pipeline carrying high-grade ore in water from Bastar down to the port, from where the ore can be sent straight to Japan.
The third sheaf, perhaps the most depressing, is barely six months old: photocopied pages of the comprehensive cover story on Chhattisgarh by Down to Earth magazine, from September 2010. Its cover reads:
56,000 MW. Chhattisgarh's proposed thermal power capacity. Its sponge iron capacity will equal India's. Cement production capacity will be half that of the country. What does this mean to the people of the land? Is there water for so many industrial projects?
The introductory blurb expands on this tone:
Chhattisgarh is set to become the largest producer of thermal power, cement and sponge iron. The push is on to install 77 per cent of India's current thermal capacity, 51 per cent of the country's present cement capacity and 31 million tonnes of sponge iron capacity, which is equal to India's current capacity. The price of this fast-track industrialization will be forests, agricultural land and the state's 32 per cent tribal population.
Just the numbers, given district by district, are enough to arouse great distress – leave alone the young, disgruntled Adivasis who actually have to live in the state. Major industrial projects are listed as thermal power plants, steel plants, cement plants, 'sponge iron' plants and mining projects. Korba district, for instance, has 22 existing industrial projects and 37 planned; Bilaspur, 51 and 32; Raigarh, 51 and a staggering 246 planned; Janjir-Champa, 14 and 97; Raipur, 119 and 200; and Durg, with 104 already there and 97 to come.
Industrial complex
Both the state and central governments, as well as the various excavating industries eyeing the minerals, are silent on plans for the districts bordering Orissa to the north and west, and those bordering Andhra in the south. These are areas now closed to the general public and open only to India's paramilitary forces, as they ready the terrain for development to proceed. If you go to the weekly markets these days, some twenty or so kilometres south of Jagdalpur, the forests are already cut and the land owned by traders. Yet do not be surprised by the occasional air-conditioned tourist taxi, disgorging tourists of various shape, size and colour. They are still in search of the displaced Adivasis.
The market itself is a surreal experience. One sees babies in the arms of young mothers, groups of pretty-eyed girls and unmarried women with ribbons in their hair – fronds of flowers tucked behind their ears perhaps the only sign that love can still be in the air. There are also old men and women sitting on their haunches in groups around the women selling mahua wine and grain beer in leaf cups, staring dim-eyed at the cheap goods from China that the trader-immigrants in Bastar display every week. Young children stare wide-eyed at small plastic pandas from China, whose mouths open wide while their eyes glow red.
After 27 years of transformation here, two things are immediately apparent. The most glaring is that you see almost no young men, certainly very few between the ages of, say, 17 and the early 20s. The second is that the sheen has somehow vanished from the bodies of those around you in the hustle and bustle. This could be due to the huge quantities of dust in the air, now inevitable after forest areas adjacent to the roads leading out of Jagdalpur have been cleared. During the 1980s, the Adivasi communities might have been 'un-developed', but they were doing well with their natural foods and medicines, and their bodies shone with oil and health and happiness.
Now, all that has changed. As Dr Binayak Sen was saying all along before they clapped him in irons, what Niyogi was saying before they pumped six bullets into him, to what Nandini Sundar and her many 'conspirators' have been hammering home: the government has cut the forests of the Adivasis, the industries have taken away the roots and tubers and leaves they need to be healthy, significantly reducing their access to water, and now the new born and young are suffering from severe malnutrition.
It is not just the mahua wine that could dream up such a bizarre script, though that would certainly help. You could catch a first glimpse of this script while going for a late meal to Jagdalpur's Kerala Hotel, one of only four passable places in the town to eat something other than 'pure vegetarian' food. At most times during meals you will see young, well-built, fit, often handsome Adivasi men aged 18 to 24, dressed in starched, razor-sharp pressed khaki uniforms, each carrying a polished policeman's lathi, and each conscious that they are being watched and, perhaps, even admired.
It is then that a script worthy of the best traditions of the absurd will emerge. At one time, cynics in the know will tell you, an industrialist wanted to grab land from a slum elsewhere in India, a place where Hindus and Muslims had been living fraternally for years. How to go about doing so? Send secular goons on both sides to fabricate a whisper campaign; then cut a cow and shove her carcass into the temple courtyard, or cut a pig and push it in the mosque. Then, send in the same goons to direct proceedings until every hut has been destroyed – and then, as if you didn't know, seized, by law.
In Bastar, the same type of cynics will tell you things are far smoother and safer in such situations. All you need is the simmering discontent of the indigenous peoples of the area, frictions almost deliberately left on the boil since the early 20th century, and all you need to do is sit back and fund all three sides of the conflict. Fund arms for the paramilitary forces, made up largely of superbly fit Adivasi men and women; give arms to the state-sponsored Salwa Judum, also made up of able-bodied Adivasis; and reach arms to the Maoists, also made up of fighting-fit, young indigenes.
Back in the hotel room, the television stutters and blinks, and hundreds of tiny cockroaches come crawling out of its insides and scurry across the screen. It is not summer, thankfully, during which last year Jagdalpur saw temperatures hit a high of 53. The room is relatively cool, but it is still the same air trapped in a closed space – slowly but inevitably condemned to consume itself, perhaps even heading to the terrible point where, if no window opens, life itself must cease. That is as apt a metaphor as any for how, thanks to civilised human notions about labour and capital and honesty – or business, investment, industry, growth and wealth, so-called virtues that drive the well-to-do to take as much from the earth as she has to give – our planet too, or certainly the Chhatisgarhs of it, seems that it must surely come
to pass.
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