Friends,
Some years ago, mostly between 1991 and 1993, I had an opportunity to spend some time in Western India, and before that, for three years I was in Delhi. For your information, I have even taught Urban Anthropology, for a Semester, to Master of Architecture Students of the Urban Design Department of the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, in 1990. In this course, we had some chance to do considerable fieldwork in the metropolis.
In the duration, 1991-1993, part of which time I was located in Mumbai, I started to work on a manuscript called The Urban Mind. At the time I approached a leading publisher with a book abstract, I had written about 40, 000 words by way of character-sketches of peoples, places, things and events. The publishers liked the book-plan but prodded me to try and write another twenty thousand words worth of text. In the event, that proved to be the nemesis of the work.
In this page, I would like to try to reconstruct, some aspects of that lost work.
Verrier Elwin
It is known from several of Verrier Elwin's works but more certainly from LEAVES FROM THE JUNGLE that the very first four years of Elwin's residence in India were in a hamlet of the village Karanjia, in the Maikal Hills, of the Mandla District, of Madhya Pradesh. It is also known that he came here from Bombay at the instance of men like Mahatma Gandhi. It is known that Elwin's "fieldwork" in the years to come were an emphatic plunge in a far-flung corner of the country.
Further, the aim of this visit was to develop an estimate of what had happened in Karanjia since Elwin. What had happened of his work, mentioned in LEAVES OF THE JUNGLE: the old ashrams, schools and dispensaries? Mulling over such questions I travelled from Bombay to Katni to Pendra Road, wherefrom the bus to Dindori provided a direct approach to Karanjia. The route was most scenic, winding up from Pendra Road through the Ghats of the Maikal Hills, through Amarkantak, and through the many places mentioned in his book - Kabir Chabutra, Bondar, Tikera Tola, and, finally, it reached Karanjia.
On getting-off at Karanjia, I introduced myself, and sought advice from some people about where one might start enquiries about Verrier Elwin. I was soon informed that Elwin's brother-in-law, Ratan Dhurve, lived but a short distance from the bus-stand. After sending a word, I was taken towards his house and Ratan Singh Dhurve, a very tall and elderly Gond emerged from his house and walked up to me. After a few prefunctory questions he suggested that I should spend the night with his family so that we could speak in the night and I would be sent in the right direction the morning after. I was delighted to accept the invitation and excited at the prospect of hearing about his brother in law Elwin and spending my first night in Karanjia in a Gond Home.
That night was very memorable indeed: a log-fire roaring right next to us, and stories rolling-out, just as soon as I shown him pictures from Elwin's book, that I had been carrying with me. Ratan Singh, I learnt, was but a boy of fifteen when Elwin's ashram got going and later had served for many years until his retirement. For him as also his good neighbour Yakub Khan, who presently joined us, I learnt much about Karanjia, the modern town, as indeed about a few other surviving associates of Elwin, such as Phaggu, who is mentioned in Elwin's Diary and who they said was now a very old man. They together said that since Elwin's time new problems had cropped-up in that area, such as the failure of rains for the past three years, and, in the absence of adequate irrigational facilities they had had to face tremendous difficulties. We were then joined by another neighbour of Ratan Singh Dhurve, a Gond Lady, who is also a politician and who through her monologue did much to affirm Elwin's view that among the Gonds "there is none of this subjection of women". Yaqub Khan was a grain merchant and from him I learnt that the irrigational crisis is of such paramount significance that cultivation is no longer a happy or viable profession.
In this respect there is undeniably a vast change in Karanjia since Elwin. Elwin had noted proliferate forests and game in the area and a rainfall regime complete with frwequent storms and thundershowers. In about half a century, all this has changed: the climate is drier and the soil less productive. I learnt that close to Karanjia Town an irrigational dam project was commenced over a decade ago but that till date it is still not complete, despite the presence of ample groundwater in the area. The result is low agricultural productivity, soil exhaustion under increased production pressure and the top-soil of the ground had often to be manually recycled.
Insufficeit road-links of Karanjia with the interiors have a predictable impact on the movement of people and goods and therefore on the development of the markets servicing the region. By oral testimonies I heard the population of the town is about eleven thousand individsuals while that of rural Karanjia about eleven thousand foru hundred. With this increase in town and country population there is no doubt need for hospitals and despite the noteworthy histor of this area the government has remained unresponsive to its obvious and by all accounts repeated demands for these basic facilities. In Karanjia, as in many other such potentially productive rural areas, one is repeatedly confroted with the absurdity of the Indian urban areas taking much and giving little or nothing in return.
The following morning, refreshed and reenergized by the nights rest I am, accompanied by a youngster, dispatched to the distant village of Bade Bhaiyya as Elwin is still popularly known in that area. I am escorted by Heera Singh, Ratan Singh Dhurve's young son and his bycycle. Heera is also a cultivator by profession. Then we arrive at Raitwar, that is Elwin's old residence location. I meet his son, Vijay Elwin, right away and am welcomed warmly into his home built in Gond Style.
After the prefunctory introductions and exchange of preliminaries Vijay unfolds before me a photo album that has several early photographs of his family. This includes several lovely black and white photos of Verrier Elwin, Mira Behn, Acharya J.B. Kripalani as well of Vijay's mother Kosibai, who was away from Raitwar at this time. The photographs reveal Elwin as fluctuating between a tweedy Oxonian and a Khadi clad Gandhian. Soon we are joined by some teachers of the local primary school who very enthusiastically share their views and experiences of teaching in this forgotten corner of the country. The primary school at Raitwar, says one of them, has in all eighty-eight students upto standard five. However, most often the grades obtained by them are very poor for the lack of proper school attendance due to their periodic proccupation with dometic chores and agricultural duties.
However, the educational establishment at Tikera Tola, where Elwin's old ashram was located is much better. The Motilal Nehru Chhatrawas of the local school over there has games facilities as well as good residential blocks, which in this backward area is a matter of some local pride. A student finishing from the high school here and wishing for college education has to travel to Dindori, about sixty kilometers away towards Mandla or to Jabalpur, Shadol, Bilaspur, Pushparajgarh and other far-flung places. Of employment for the Gonds and other technically backward youths of the area, there seems to be enough on account of reservations for them. These are, however, inevitably outside Karanjia itself. Such an out-migration of youths while it relieves some pressure from land it does little credit to the many vacancies in the local primary schools that lie unfilled.
Let us face squarely the fact that the agricultural sector would be the largest employer in Karanjia for years to come for which improvements in this sector are an urgent necessity. The past three years have been bad rainfall years and who would blame the Karanjians that there is open talk of bungling in the much touted irrigation dam project? This irrigation debalce is all the more ironic since local knowledge of the residents has it that there is groundwatersince the great river Narmada flows as near as Amarkantak. On the positive side there seems to have been a great reduction in unlicensed money-markets resulting in the waning influence of the mahajan and a significant rise in borrowings from government banks.
To conclude, the greatest worry of Karanjia, since Elwin, must remain its forests, land, diet and health, as well as the proper education of its young. Of Bade Bhaiyya there remain only pleasant memories. Alas anything could be said of Tikera Tola where Elwin arrived after a "dramatic journey" from Pendra Road half a century ago and where his ashram flourished for many years.
The Story of a Road Pothole
One fine day, for several hours at a time, as an exercise in Urban Anthropology, I decided to stand surruptitiously, next to a very large pothole, next to the Pune Railway station. The exercise was to observe who gets inconvenienced by the pothole and how. No body broke a leg. Yet it was very funny watching the buses, cars, bullock-carts, people, bicycles navigate the pothole. On Indian roads there exists a whole book of mantras for safe-driving and the sorts, mainly, navigating accross the sea of potholes. Once somebody observed that the Zebra-Crossing in India is the most likely location where someone gets run-over. When I returned for further observations on the pothole the following-day, lo and behold the pothole had been mended by Civil Administration!
Encounter with Wahida Rahman
I am a movie-buff, and I spent a lot of my time in Mumbai (from about Jn to May, 1993) watching movies. This is when I wans't reading in the library of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Molecular Biology Unit. Professor Obaid Siddiqui, Professor-in-charge of the unit, was fairly convinced that my project to study the evolution of human intelligence was suitable enough and relevant enough for purposes of using their library and was therefore instrumental in having a proper identity-card of the Intitute issued in my favour which provided me access to all parts of the Institute. I even got to see a delightfuly 3D display of a DNA put -up by the unit. The only condition the Professor imposed on me, and rightly so, was to have to give the assurance that at the end of the six-months of reading I would have to give a seminar on the subject to his unit. Fair enough, I said, and proceeded to read some heavy books on the subject. Yes, he did tell me that the size of the brain should be calculated in terms of the body-weight of the organism. Thus, for example, although we are much smaller than elephants , for example, the ratio between our body weight and the size of the brain, makes our brain larger than an elephant's.
The institute had a delightful refectory and a private sea-front on which scholars could take long walks and think about particle physics or, as in my case, think at length about which movie to see next. Oh, Yes, I managed to take a look at I. Mahadevan's Concordance of the Indus Script, in the TIFR Library. This is a work he had accomplished at this great Institution, and thus I think I must have ruminated somewhat about the Indus Script as well.
Thus it was that I was lead to the movie theatre next-door to the Prince of Wales Museum. Oh, the lovely airconditioned movie halls of B'bay! I bought my ticket and was hanging around, just outside the hall, watching various movie posters, when a face stood-out in the crowd. She was wearing a saree and stood by herself, as if waiting for someone, on the sidewalk. For a movie-buff that I was and am it took just a split-second to recognize who she was - the greatest of the great stars of Hindi Cinema, the great Wahida Rahman.
The Forest Resort Mudumalai National Park, Nilgiris
Bored with my business or the lack of it,I scooted further south. Bangalore. I visited the great IISc, The Indian Institute of Science, and walked into the department of ecological science to meet Professor Madhav Gadgil. I did meet him and spent a good hour and met some of his students and was given very good coffee. Basically, I wanted to know about the tribes inhabiting south india,as i was planning some quite uncalled for fieldwork. Professor Gadgil, and his students, cautioned that I must not venture too deep into any forest of that area since almost all of it was appropriated by Veerappan. Yet they let me know about the Vidyasagr Vikas ashram some distance from Bangalore that is an NGO and is working with tribes. They also must have mentioned the mudumalai reserve. i then spent some time in their lab and watched a student working with bees! Later in the evening i had delightful south indian delicacies with a group of IISc students.
A bus from Bangalore takes you to Chamrajnagar and from there you can goto Vidyasagar Vikas Ashram. Not much to see there except the very good development work they are doing and you sort of have to sit on the ground and have your meals. I was escorted into the forest near this ashram only too briefly to do any significant fieldwork. I was only too amzed that the local tribes make such dwarfish huts that it would be impossible for anadult to even think of standing in them. i enquired why this is so. pat came the reply, this is to save our houses from the elephants. apparantly elephants do not mind low-slung houses.
not content with this encounter, i took a bus from chamrajnagar to Mudumalai national park mainly to see some real elephants to discover their true likes and dislikes.
Mudumalai,in my opinion, is probably the best national park in the country. In the forest department reception area they have a large sign borad that gives information about the species of animals found in the forests here and their frequency counts. after a day or so of stay in this sublime resort, where rhesus monkeys also abounded, i ran into another Ajay, fromthe Bombay Natural History Society, the famous BNHS, in which library i had the occassion to flip over the origin of the species and a few other journals related with human evolution. Ajay took me to his bungalow, a lovely cottage on a hill, and i had lunch with his family. We then set-out, with his local helpers, in his project jeep, a Mahindra, for a foray into the forest. Elephants in this part of the country are either camera-shy during the daytime, or like to sleep it off, however, we did come accross some very large megalithic burial sites and that was my contribution to Ajay's databank. Ajay was working on the elephants, i suppose radio-collaring them and then the " Hello...elephant 1 to elephant 2" sort of thing.
In all I must have spent a few days in the reserve and learnt many a thing about animal behaviour, salt licks and the like.
Ajay, 2008.
Ajay, 2008.
