Making matters worse, government records and statistics fail to capture the essence of their daily lives, and stories and stories from the tribes themselves are conspicuously absent from mainstream literature.
For example, Maria girls from Bastar practice sex as an institution before marriage, but with rules: you can’t sleep with a partner more than three times. The Hallaki women of the Konkan coast sing all day long in forests, fields, the market and protests. The Kanjars have looted, looted and killed generation after generation and will show you how to roast a lizard when you are hungry. The original inhabitants of India, these Adivasis still live in forests and hills, with religious beliefs, traditions and rituals so remote from the rest of the country that they represent an anthropological richness of our heritage. Unfortunately, this rich heritage is hardly documented.
It is this lack of documentation on the personal history of Native American tribes that author Nidhi Dugar Kundalia has attempted to remedy in her latest book: White as milk and rice, stories about isolated Indian tribes. Kundalia’s book not only brings interesting stories about the cultural and social heritage of the Adivasis, but also aims to ask several relevant socio-political questions such as how has India’s changing environment and economy affected these tribal communities? How has their movement out from the isolated depths of the forests and remote mountains, and partial integration with the rest of society, changed them? How do these changes affect individuals? Are they bringing these individuals into conflict with the larger goals of their tribal societies and villages?
The book is written in an interesting format, in which the author identifies a main character from six different tribes – the Halakkis of Ankola, the Kanjars of Chambal, the Kurumbas of the Nilgiris, the Marias of Bastar, the Khasis of Shillong and the Konyaks of Nagaland – and guide readers through their daily lives, while giving us a historical and cultural context of their tribes. Therefore, despite being non-fiction, this book reads like fiction, full of intimate details about the lives of the protagonists.
For example, in the introduction to the book, about the Kurumbas of Nilgiri, Kundalia writes:
Identity issues among these tribes are deeply rooted because of the years of injustice that has been done to them. Take the example of the Alu Kurumbas: in 1901, when Thurston first conducted a study on the Kurumba tribe in the Nilgiris, the prefix “Alu” was missing; it seems to have been a recent development, a phenomenon only a few decades old. ‘Alu’ in Kannada means milk, which means good and harmless like milk. Before that, the tribe was feared for their sorcery and witchcraft practices, and it robbed them of work, education, and integration and interaction with the other tribes in the region. It is quite possible that certain parts of the Kurumbas themselves, in order to dispel or harm the negative opinion that the locals had about them,
added the new Alu prefix for better status and wider adoption.
In the chapter about Kurumbas, we find a wonderful story of a little boy named Mani, who goes on a job hunt in the nearby village of Badaga and is mesmerized by the concrete houses in which the villagers live. Here’s an excerpt from that chapter:
…Like most other children in Hulikkal, a small village in the Nilgiris, Mani lives in a one-room mud hut where pots and pans are pushed aside every night to make room for mats where they can feed their parents. hear making love, or whatever it is, through the mosquito net that hangs between them. He slides on the ground; his upper back ached from being thrown against walls by his angry father when he returned from the village of Badaga unemployed. “I can’t afford the giant morsels you eat anymore,” he’d yelled, beating Mani. Mani wonders what it must be like to grow up in the grand Badaga houses he saw today, where children sleep in different rooms, thick brick and concrete walls separating them from their parents.
…Earlier in the day Mani and his uncle had walked uphill after getting off the bus; had taken the long walk
his legs ached, but it didn’t bother him. He was willing to cross many more such hills. Because there were no trees, that part of the Nilgiris was filled with gusts of wind that stung his eyes until tears ran down his cheeks. When his uncle spoke, the winds carried his voice louder than he intended: “I told them you already know how to sow”; he had brought him here for a day job in a tea garden. Mani nodded, though he had barely worked in the fields: they only had a small plot of land where they grew vegetables and some millet. On other days, they ate what they collected — yam roots, herbs, and honey — from the forest they lived in or rice given to them by the government.
This village, meanwhile, housed only the Badagas, an educated, prosperous tribe that had migrated to the Nilgiris in the early twelfth century. The estate owner his uncle took him to had political aspirations and everything he did was transaction-oriented, driven by a desire to get votes. Among his favorite constituencies were the hamlets of the Kurumbas, also some of the poorest people in Nilgiris, and the area beyond.
“Call him appa,” his uncle insisted, in Alu Kurumba, a mixture of Tamil and Kannada. “Remember, you’re a Kurumba. Don’t stare at their relatives.’ Mani nodded, though his uncle had told him this many times before, just as he’d told him to dab his hair and not say stupid things: they’re all trained, so don’t talk jungle hocus-pocus.
…It was only in recent years that his forest tribe, the Kurumbas, began working in the fields of Badagas during the day. Until a few years ago, whenever the tribes of the forest came into view of a Badaga, the word flashed through their village, and women and children ran to the safety of home and hid inside until the Kurumbas were gone.
…The Kurumbas, they said, had drugs that could put all the inhabitants of a Badaga village to sleep before sneaking back into the woods. Their top sorcerer, an odikara, could make openings in the fence, and the Badaga’s cattle, under his spell, would follow him through without so much as clucking or bleating. They could apparently turn into bears and kill people, just as they knew how to counter the other spells, to remove or prevent misfortune.
Many decades ago, when Badaga’s grandfathers were little boys still clinging to their mothers’ waists, one of their elders returned from a Kurumba settlement outside the jungle, where he went to explore a plot for a tea plant. He came back breathless, almost stuttering that their end was near and that a monster was nearby. Now a Badaga knew that if a Kurumba wizard cast spells, he could be satisfied with rice, oil, salt, and clothing. But what was this big brown animal he was screaming about, his eyes glowing red?
As the story goes, the goats, chickens, and cows were restless; they were sure the older man was a
furious Kurumba-turned-monster. All night long they cried in their barns and tapped the ground, and the villagers slept
restless, imagining figures and shapes in the hilly darkness. The elders of Badaga today are still afraid of the wizard
Kurumbas, who often turn against them; however, their school-age children have less faith in the Kurumba’s magical abilities.