Friends,
It is years since I read James Clifford and George E. Marcus's Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. I have always been fascinated with this work since it suggests that ethnography is not so much a scientific effort as literary. That it may be useful to narrate a culture as we experience it rather than to tie or bind it down to some time-honoured conventions. On this page, I would seek to narrate Paharia ethnography in the framework suggested by Clifford and Marcus. I thank Nondini Gooptu for having presented the volume to me.
Ajay, 2008.
On the subversion of the role of the anthropologist
I recall vividly that once upon a time I lent Rs. 20/- to a Paharia man to fetch me some iron arrowheads. He promised he would deliver after the market-day, that was a few days away. I thought that arrangement would save me a daytrip to the lowland market and that I could in the use the time to do some archaeologically significant work. Weeks passed after that transaction. No man. No money. No arrowheads seemed to appear. I imagined that after a year and a half of residence in that village, I had settled-in, deeply enough, to win some confidence of my neighbours. Not so as this incident showed. Therefore I asked after the man. When I visited his house, I learnt that he was away in the forest. I returned. A few days and few further visits later, when, I learnt that whenever I visited him that he was always away in the forest, that he was trying to escape, me much in the way that Paharia men are used to escaping the cluthces of the lowland moneylender or Mahajan) when he visits the village to collect his usurious dues.
When this realization hit me I was plainly aghast. I had always considered myself superior to the moneylender in that he lent money, and, whereas I paid wages to the Paharia to assist me in my archaeological surveys. thus what was the reason that, in this case, the lender-lent relationship had been transposed onto me? i do not have the answer just yet. do you???
On Paharia healing
It is a fact that as on date there are very minimal health services available to tribals in their remote hilly abodes. In the absence of that native healing practices using herbs, incantations (and in one case recorded (in 1905) by P.O. Bodding a Norwegian Missionary located at Mohulpaharia Santhal Mission, south of the rajmahal hills, even neolithic ground and polished axes are curated in Santhal houses to this day and used as a cure for many ailments like carbuncles and difficult pregnancies). The Santhals call the balck neolithic axes Ceter dhiri which in santhali means the lightening stone. Santhals, according to Bodding, belive that such objects are deposited on earth whenever the lightening strikes a tree or the ground.
Once during my fieldwork with the Paharias...in a remote corner of the rajmahal hills, i was, one night awakened, to the sounds of tom-tom drums going full beat...and i was wondering where the sounds were coming from...sometimes from the north, some times from the south, sometimes from the east, sometimes from the west...then i took-out my torch and got-up to investigate the why and wherefores of the drum-beats...as i stepped-out of the hut that i had been sleeping-in, my lungi turned-up, i saw that a furious wind, was sweeping the neighbourhood and whipping the tom-tom beats around, such that they seemed to be coming from all directions...i asked a few of the village-men as to why the drumbeats were on at this late hour...and they replied that an Ojha a native-healer was at work in one of the huts...naturally this was after-all an ethnoarchaeological matter, with the help of some of the men, i made my way to that distant hut.two men sat outside it, beating drums, and a huddle of people inside that dimaly lit hut were busy with something...i made my way in and sat down on the mud-earth...a seance was in progress, to cure an infant of his ailment...some kind of fever, probably malaria. the Ojha sat in the middle, transfixed in a trance, a curious drawing made of atta (flour) on the ground in front of him, and an egg, in the centre. the Ojha was completely in posession of a spirit, and beating about hither and thither, emitting starnge sounds, the crowd silent, the child in her mothers arms, the assistant to the Ojha, his interpreter of the divine communications, quite active...the ghost or spirit in posession of the child, finally, spoke...he/she asked for four goats to be sacrificed...the father of the child frankly scoffed at the spirit and asked it to lump it, since that was too high a price, the spirit stated that in that case a few cockrels would do...that deal was final...the Ojha regained his consciousness, asked for some water, and gave the child something to drink, and assured her fever would come down. the crows then dispered. i asked, before leaving whether the cockrels would be given to the Ojha or what? i was told that nothing of the kind would be done, the father would go to the forest and kill the cockrels and cast them about at a specific place and that would be end of the matter. the child would be well thereafter.i did not return to that hut again to check-out whether the sacrifice had the desired effect, but i assume that that did happen.
Jowra, the hunter
It must have been something in the Rajmahal air that day. I was a bit depressed - as if the skies would fall down on me. Jowra is a short stout and a very happy go lucky man. He walked up to me, where I was squatting in front of my hut, and said "Let's go on a Shikar!". I looked up to him as I would to my grandad and said O.K. Jowra fetched from his hut - a stout spear, a hatchet, a few daggers, an axe, a bow and some arrows. I thought we were going to kill and elephant.
Then a long dreary walk in the hot sun, mile after mile, nothing much said. Soon we were near a cluster of large boulders, one on top of another, with an overgrowth of plants and shrub. Jowra said "Bagh"! Bagh means a Tiger. That really put my foul-mood back in shape and I started weighing my pros and cons of surviving this Shikar as I was armed only with a Nikon Camera with an 85mm Nikkor (original) potrait lens.
Then Jowra started to crawl through an opening under the boulders and signalled to me to follow suit. He had by then thrust an arrow into his bow. The opening was so small that there could not have been any speedy retreat. He ploughed forward hushing my occassional question. Then we were well inside and there was some headroom to sit on one's haunches. There were two openings side by side that had some foot-imprints in front of them. The larger ones belonged to a leopard and the smaller one to a porcupine. at that time of the day both the neighbours were out on a shikar themselves so that was the end of ours!
Gangi, The Wise Old Woman
In my very first week of taking up permanent field residence in a Paharia village, I was introduced to Gangi, who I promptly photographed with my black and white AGFA CLICK III Camera. Later, my friends and photography mentors, at the Film and Television Institute of India, at Pune, commented that it was a very Cinematic shot. She had many lines on her face, a permanent twist of humour, and she sort of squinted at the Camera or Me as the shot was taken. She then turned to repairing the Chulha (clay over, hearth etc.) of the hut that I had been ensconsed in. No wors were spoken with her for over two years that I worked in and around that village.
I was to learn much later that She was the oldest living person in that village, with many relatives, in nearby villages, like Gando, and had married no less than seven times! Each time giving-up a useless husband. As She and I were both quite devoted to the children of the village, especially the mentally retarded ones, so there was some ground for her to show me some consideration.
Paharia Mortuary Customs
Paharia Mortuary Customs are so indeed different from ours. There were a few deaths in the duration of my stay, but I never, even once either asked to accompany the funeral procession to attend the rituals, nor did I seek to do that. What I did do, is one at least one occassion, request my informant to take me to the cemetery, and explain to me a few things about Paharia Mortuary Rituals. He took me to a spot inside a Mango Grove well away from the village. It has a few graves with stone circles. These boulders were all the local lateritic boulders found commonly in the hills. Some of these had a few discarded cheap tin plates and broken clay-pots indise them. Where is the body? I asked. He said, inside the ground. Usually a pit that is about ten to fifteen-foot deep is dug and the decesased who has been laid-out on a country cot is lowered into the pit. The pit is then filled-in with mud and seales. Later much later, while surveying in the foothills of the northern face of the rajmahal hills, far far away from paharia settlements, i came upon an abandoned village with graves of the same type dotting its outskirts. I asked my informant and field-guide if this had been a paharia village. he said no. this used to be a jolaha village. jolaha are weavers by profession and a sub-caste of muslims.
The Story of the Retarded Children.
Almost the first thing that struck me like a blow in the face, in 1981, when I first approached the hills for fieldwork, was the widespread mental retardation amongst Paharia children. They were both mentally and physically retarded. I am not sure that people in that village, as I, could really understand the reason for this. What was the reason? Then I came accross a story in the India Today, a leading Indian news feature magazine that carried a story about such retardation as being rampant in Eastern India. The story was constructed on the basis of a report of the Indian Council of Medical research which suggested that the low levels of iodine in local drinking water is the cause. Low iodine levels tends to cause Goitre mostly amongst women. And when these women conceive in all likelihood their offsprigs would be mentally and physically retarded. In 2008, I imagine that the Paharia stand informed that they must buy iodized salt as a recourse to this problem, however I have a further word to say about how they handle their retarded offsprings. In lowland society, the main run of civilized Hindu or otherwise, a retarded child is seen as a curse, a burden, and they are subjected to all sorts of cruelty unless their parents and rich enough to afford special care and education and the like. However, amongst the Paharia, I noticed that retardation brought no especial discrimination against the children. They were given their proper diet and lo and behold also put to positive constructive work. It was commonplace to see a retarded child driving a herd of goats into the forest to graze them, his bundle of lunch on his back, and a stick in his hand.
The forests that never grow
A strange thing. In all of my twenty-five years of fieldstudy in the rajmahal hills the forests there seem to have remained the same size. In that duration there have been several social forestry and other forestry programmes. So what happens to the trees? Is there illegal felling? Just as there is illegal boulder-mining. Recently the Jharkhand government has built a road into the northern face of the hills that makes it easy. Among other things, for tractors to make their way all the way to the top of the hiills. In plain sight these crooked contractors go up the range and mine the basalt boulders that are brought downhill to equally numerous and illegal rock-crusheries that supply ballast for roads, railways and all other seekers.
Starry, Starry night
On many occassions a cot was laid-out in the front courtyard, as is usual practice among the Paharia, especially in the hot-weather, and we slept under the stars. The sky over Rajmahal is very clear and on a cloudless-day one may see more than the major constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. In November and December it is especially a pleasure to sleep outside of the hut, since people are scattered all over the hills, watching over their growing crops, and the sound of flutes, and an occassional drum, to scare-off the animals, resonates in the hills. In other parts of the year, by sleeping-out, you may see the forest-fires that are lit to clear plots for agriculture. There are some wild-pigs (Sus scrofa) about and they tend to get at the Maize.
The Man who had 1200 Bighas of land.
This past year, in the summer, i made a two-day visit to the village of my study for a quick rekky and to try-out my new sony handycam to soot some footage. This time i was parked in a 5x5 ft. sq. pucca room, with one window, that has been built in the village and is supposed to serve as a groceries shop. in the interim it is the local guest-house. on a vey hot afternoon, with nothing to do, i was lying on a cot my feet placed up on the wall, fanning myself to keep the flies away when in-walked a paharia-man suitably well dressed for what he had to say. he said that i should recognize him since he was just a litlte boy when i had first commenced my fieldstudy in that village. now he was a young, man-of-the world, wering a cheque-shirt, some pens and diaries thrust into his chest-pocket and looking very pleasant. he said that he had been left 1200 bighas of land by his ancestors, all of them in the hills. however, he was more intersted in extracting kala-sona, black-gold, or boulder-wealth from his land, as it was not physically possible to cultivate that large piece of land; not all of it was cultivable either.
Ajay, 2008.
