‘Our head is on the top, trees have head at the bottom’: lessons from Bastar-1
After walking 175 km in Narayanpur district, part of Bastar region for a week along with 35 shodh yatris, mostly young people and majority from Gujarat as always, we learned a great deal about richness of Gondi tribal communities. Be it cultural, institutional, intellectual, ecological or even architectural wisdom, there were insights that we learned which previous 4000km had not exposed us to. Were we afraid, No. In fact, colleagues from sristi Purushottam, Ramesh, mukesh and chetan besides several local friends who had helped us in preparing for the walk since February, were asked by a senior police officer, ‘how could you go so easily in the interior region? Don’t you feel afraid, why don’t you take protection from the state?’ But then that shows the wedge between local administration and the local communities. This chasm should be bridged soonest to find peaceful resolution of current developmental impasse. We have a few suggestions on this but before that let me narrate few lessons we learned.
While passing through a few villages, we noticed graves outside the village. We were curious as to why would tribal bury their dead. We were told that when a healthy person died, then she was buried but when the deceased was sick, she was put to fire. As if that was not enough, while going to Edka village, we noticed another unique institution. On the samadhi sthal of an outstanding person, a sculpture was built by bhula bhai ( an artist invited from a little far off village) to celebrate the skill of the deceased. So a teacher, herbal healer, artists etc., were show cased on their samadhis. What a way of inspiring the younger generation passing by these samadhis. We had not come across such a way of celebrating the skill of the outstanding achievers. Protecting mud walls through tiles on the top was another unique practice. With heavy rains in winter as well as monsoon, these would wash away otherwise.
They had enormous knowledge of biodiversity and its applications. But the tragedy was that like most other tribal regions, they were treated only as a collector of raw material, no value was added locally. How would their incomes increase if value was not added locally. A network of distributed facilities for such a purpose was a crying need of the region. We did try to give village knowledge registers in each village. But that has to be done institutionally through local village councils combining village biodiversity registers as a part of VKRs. How rich is their ecological sense can be gauged from the discussion we had with Maru bhai, who said, “we, the humans have head on the top, trees have head at the botton”. When they had to cut the twigs for fire wood, they would do so only from one side of the tree one year, other side next year.
The top level civic administration was extremely keen to learn from our walk and chief Secretary along with many other secretaries listened to our learnings after the yatra. We will share how Gujarat social entrepreneurs can help them in acquiring the skill of water harvesting. Some change will have to follow soon, if the peaceful alternatives for development have to have a chance.
Anil K Gupta
