Capturing the Kurumba honey gatherers on film a close look

By Shibani Chaudhury

May 1999, Nilgiris, India:

Wiry, bronze faced Malli squats in the sunshine below honey cliff, encircled by tea bushes, reminiscing. She speaks of time when her people, the Kurumbas hunter gatherers and honey harvesters, lived off the Nilgiri forests. time when the modern world had not caught up with them; when the forests fulfilled their every need; life that was exquisitely interwoven with the rhythms of nature.

We had come across Malli while walking to remote honey cliff, laden with film equipment. She fell into step with us, muttering to our Kurumba companions, doubting our capacity to walk all the way to her hut, where the honey hunting team was waiting

This was our third visit to Kurumba country. We already had lot of footage for our film, HONEY HUNTERS OF THE BLUE MOUNTAINS; this time we were looking for the soul.

While we waited for Raju, the honey hunter and his band to set up their honey collection, we decided to interview Malli. She spoke from her heart. As she chanted bee song her words dissolved into tears. We did not realize that she would distil the entire experience for us. Our impromptu rendezvous with her crystallized our thought, made her loss poignantly palpable to us.

A spate of colour and fragrance surges through the Nilgiris in May. The forests abloom, the bees forage in frenzy. It is nearly time for the monsoon clouds to descend on the mountains. Deep in the crevices of the Nilgiri cliffs the rock bee colonies are saturated with honey.

Just before the rains arrive, it is time for the bees to migrate to lower areas this is honey gathering time for the Kurumbas.

Documenting the Kurumba way of life, we came face to face with the bewildering realities confronting many indigenous tribes and their territories in India today. Utterly marginalized, drawn into the alien whirl of economics and politics these nimble forest dwellers often become penurious pawns in the outside world.

External factors such as land use change, government policies, forest department regulations, alternative economic opportunity; have impaired their original socio economic and cultural identity.

The ecology of the Nilgiris is also similarly threatened. Wild bees such as the Apis dorsata are crucial indicators of the ecology that sustains them. With forests diminishing, the quantity of honey produced has become correspondingly lower.

Still; come the honey hunting season, the Kurumbas cannot resist the primal urge to mount the cliffs, hanging precariously on forest vine ladders suspended from the top of 300 foot cliffs, to gather honey from the massive combs of the Apis dorsata.

Hands and feet bare, face uncovered, protected only by layer of clothing and column of smoke, the honey collector balances confidently on the free swinging suspended ladder. His feet grip the rungs woven with forest vine. His hands wield smoker and bamboo spear with which he jabs off thick slabs of the honeycomb into suspended basket. Thousands of bees swarm around him as he harvests their sweet treasure. Honey gathered off these cliffs is rare often made from blossoms found only in the deep forests.

Usually to Kurumba men comprise each honey hunting team. They collect forest vine, weave the ladder according to the height of the cliff, prepare the smoke and suspend the ladder. We were amazed at their agility. Sure footed as the Nilgiri Tahr (a mountain goat), they walk on branches, tread on the edge of precipices, heedless of the endless drop. They come alive on the rock face this extraordinary ability of the Kurumbas enthused us to capture every nuance of their craft.

My colleague, Rita Banerji lay prostrate on a rock on the edge of the cliff, half hanging over, filming. Kurumba youth hung onto her shirt as safety net! Way below us, Mike Pandey our director and camera person perched precariously halfway down the cliff beneath the colonies to be harvested, camera whirring. The rest of the precipice plunged into the valley below.

As the smoke smothered the combs, armies of bees shot up at us, while thousands rocketed downwards in explosive bursts. We were in the thick of bee storm. It was our first honey hunting shoot.

It was dusk by the time they had gathered all the honey on the cliff. As we waited to walk single file in the dark along the edge of the cliff, following the unerring steps of the Kurumbas leading us, they handed us sticky bits of comb dripping with honey, urging us to put it whole into our mouths. We did. It tasted divine bitter honey straight off Nilgiri cliff. The buzzing of the bees disturbed by the hunters had still not died out, even as we drew the last drop out of the chewy remains of the comb in our mouths. The Kurumbas had shared their first harvest of the season with us. We had been accepted.

But acceptance did not necessarily mean co operation, we learned soon enough. We fixed schedules, set up our camera positions, waited for hours. Sometimes they would arrive with their paraphernalia, on time, but would then dawdle lighting fires, brewing coffee. We waited, action stations, listening to forest sounds, observing minute insects in the fallen leaves around us. The day would go past, then they would start just as the sun went down so we had barely any light to shoot in, sometimes they would call it off after whole day’s wait, often they would just not show up. The Kurumbas redefined “time” for us.

When we returned again this year, they knew we meant business. They were ready to let us in, it made filming much easier. The Kurumbas showed us around this time. We went to Catherine Falls, sight we will cherish always. At the thundering head of the waterfall, watching the Kurumbas wander along the stream flowing swiftly, inexorably towards the chasm, you could obliterate the traces of human encroachment and let yourself live one timeless moment in an un-violated space; witness to man and nature in symphony.

That is how we met Malli the wise, wizened, expressive woman. She was the voice of the Kurumbas being that fitted perfectly into the human place in nature. She embodied ancient natural wisdom steadily being laid to waste submerged in deluge of human greed

We of the modern world are the anomaly. Left to the uneducated, barbaric tribals the forests would never have suffered. Their world probably would have continued in ecological safety and plentitude into the next millennium. That is something to think about.

Over decade of making films on the natural world in India: witnessing ecological devastation, documenting habitat loss and dwindling animal population, watching indigenous people being marginalized had inured us. We were beyond shock, not past caring.

Malli’s tears her voiceless lament, rekindled our belief in humanity, in the nobility of simple human values, in the primal wisdom of living by the natural order.

Riverbank Studios is film production unit based in New Delhi, India. At its helm is Mike H. Pandey well known filmmaker and nature conservationist. The Riverbanks production THE LAST MIGRATION Wild Elephant Capture in Sarguja was the first Asian film to win Green Oscar at Wildscreen 94. Currently they are working on documentary on the Kurumbas of the Nilgiris, with Keystone.