Special issue with the Sunday Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

ADIVASI : JULY 16, 2000

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Strong sense of self and place

Amita Baviskar

The author is a sociologist and has worked extensively in the Narmada valley. She has authored the book In The Belly Of The River.

How do you describe an attachment to a particular landscape? How do you express what a place means when its sounds, smells, look and feel are so deeply imprinted in your mind and soul that it becomes a part of you? When you are away from it, you ache to return. Whatever its shortcomings, this place is home and this is where you belong.

D. Nayak/ Fotomedia

Four years ago, while walking through Sakarja, a Bhilala adivasi village along the Narmada river in Madhya Pradesh, in the submergence zone of the Sardar Sarovar Project, I met a girl. She was driving some goats along a narrow track up a hillside. I was hot and out of breath, and seized the chance to stop and chat. It turned out that she was alone, her family had moved to Gujarat where the government had given them land. She had gone too, but after a few months at the rehabilitation site, she returned to Sakarja to stay with her uncle's family. When I asked why, she shrugged. "I like it here", she said, "it's so open".

Looking around at the panorama of hills, streams,fields, and patches of forest, I could see what she meant. "But aren't things better at the new place?" I asked, "your family is there too". "I feel stifled in the plains", she said, "I feel free here". And she went off nimble-footed along the hillside, urging her goats on with shrill cries.

In the analysis of costs and benefits associated with the Narmada dams, the discussion focuses on "oustees" and "PAPs" (Project-Affected Persons) and the "rehabilitation package" of two acres land per adult male. But men do not live by land alone. personhood comes from having honour and dignity. And these qualities in turn spring from a sense of self and place, at home and in the eyes of the world. These aspects of what makes a person human and worthy of regard do not figure in the discussion of the dam.

The discourse of the dam could never explain why a girl, scarcely more than a child and clearly extremely poor, would choose to come back and live in a village about to be drowned.

Whenever I am in the Narmada valley, I am overwhelmed by the rugged majesty of this place. The Narmada is a beautiful river, aptly called "the giver of bliss". At the same time, I am daunted by the hard lives of the adivasis who stay along its banks. The land, forests and river yield just enough to live by and, in bad years, not even that. Modest crops of sorghum and maize, pulses and oilseeds, are the product of unremitting toil in the monsoon months and, if the rain fails, even this labour cannot stave off starvation. In bad times, the forests stand the adivasis in good stead; there are tendu leaves,mahua flowers, gums and fruit to be collected. If all else fails, adivasis must migrate in search of work.

The effects of an uncertain and inadequate livelihood are writ large in the people's lives. Almost every adivasi woman has known the trauma of an infant or child dying an untimely death. Without enough food and medical care, people suffer entirely avoidable illnesses with phlegmatic fortitude. The absence of schools denies children a chance to learn and improve their lives. Poverty puts people at the mercy of a callous government bureaucracy and rapacious traders to whom adivasis do not matter, except as people to be pushed around and cheated. The exploitation of adivasis has a long history that can be traced to the state's refusal to recognise adivasi rights to lands and forests, and the almost total failure of the welfare state in this region. Every year, crores are spent on "tribal development" but the only people who get richer are the traders and officials with their new Maruti cars and their rising houses in town.

Despite its hardships, this life is all there is for adivasis, and they value it. Amidst the vicissitudes of drought, malnutrition and exploitation, what keeps adivasis going are the certitudes of community, their faith in the bonds of kinship, the knowledge that relatives will help out in times of trouble. Walking along the Narmada, one witnesses as small yet steady traffic of travellers - a youth in a smart turban with a bow and arrow in hand going off to visit his married sister, or a middle-aged woman carrying a pot of buttermilk for her ailing mother. Their little courtesies indicate the larger structures of material and emotional aid that enable adivasis to hold their own in a hostile world.

It seems marvellous that such spartan material circumstances should generate a vibrant life of the mind. The adivasi world is richly imagined and interpreted through myth, story and song. The central thread of this repertoire is the gayana, an epic poem that describes how Narmada created the world. Will the gayana, and all the other aspects of Bhilala knowledge and practice that are anchored on the banks of the Narmada, survive relocation to a new place? Does it matter that people will have to surrender so much of what they hold dear for the sake of a dam?

Whether the dam will bring water to the thirsty people of Kutch and Saurashtra, and I don't believe it will, we must be clear about who is paying the price for this transfer of resources. As Arundhati Roy asks, are we prepared to acknowledge the true "cost of living"? Our lifestyles are made possible because adivasis in the Narmada valley and elsewhere are forced to give up the little that they possess. To add insult to injury, they are told that leaving their lands and river will entitle them to an "attractive rehabilitation package" and the gifts of development - hand pumps, schools and health centres. As the headman of Kakadsila village asked the District Collector, "For forty years, you didn't come to our village even once. You didn't care whether we lived or died. Now when you want our land you come with folded hands and make promises. Why should we believe you?"

The wisdom of this scepticism is borne out by most experiences of resettlement. Waterlogged land, no livestock, fragmented families, hostile neighbours, no commons to collect fuel and fodder - sums up rehabilitation so far. Adivasis end up as urban refugees, permanent members of an ever-growing army of footloose labour. If this is what the future holds, no wonder that adivasis make desperate choices, vowing to stay on in villages slated for submergence.

Though their chances of victory look increasingly grim, adivasis continue to fight. For fifteen years, these villagers have borne the brunt of a sustained government campaign to oust them. They have been denied development inputs, their lands were forcibly surveyed, protest brutally suppressed, and false cases filed against them. Now the threat of submergence looms ever larger. "Leave now", say government officials, "or you will drown like rats when the water comes". And yet, despite the might of the state, people continue to fight because their sense of self, their only vision of a good life, is rooted to this place that they call home, the Narmada valley.