Thinking Forest: Decoding the Warli Ontology by chinmay.thesisstudio

Thinking forest Decoding the Warli Ontology

Chinmay Shidhore

Thinking forest Decoding the Warli Ontology

Chinmay Shidhore

SEA Studio

Research Fellowship Programme 2018-2019

To all the people who love telling and listening to stories of people, places, geographies, and histories.

Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful to the School of Environment and

Architecture, Borivali, for giving me this opportunity and support to pursue a research in an area such as this and opening my mind to the immense possibilities within the scope of the research. I have received tremendous support from the staff and faculty at SEA at various important junctures during my time here. I would like to thank Ravindra Punde, Prasad Shetty, Rupali Gupte, Shreyank Khemlapure, Anuj Daga, Komal Gopwani, Sabaa Giradkar, Milind Mahale, Dushyant Asher and Dipti Bhayanderkar without whose support, this research would not have materialised. I would especially like to thank Rohit Mujumdar for being an incredible support.

I am indebted to Milind Thatte, Deepali Gogate, Prakash Baraf,

Vinayak Thalekar of Vayam and Pratik Dhanmer who continue their work in this region and for their support during my fieldwork. Most importantly, I am grateful to the many people I interviewed during the process of this research, without whom, the research project would have been impossible.

I am especially thankful to have excellent colleagues Apoorva

Sharma and Vastavikta Bhagat who helped me stay sane in the most difficult of the times during the course of my research and Apurva Talpade for being a constant support. Lastly I also want to thank my parents Hemant and Sonal for putting up with me and pushing me to work harder at every point. I thank you all!

Note:

All character and village names in the writing have been fictionalised on request from the people who were the interviewees for this work. The stories presented in the text have been collected as personal accounts from individuals and collated to form a narrative by the author.

Acknowledgements

Contents

List of Figures Preface pg. 9 1. An ecology of collectives

pg. 30

2. A home in a forest; a forest in a home

pg. 39

3. Of creatures and crosses

pg. 68

4. Devil’s fruit and movement

pg. 90

Epilogue pg. 100 Bibliography pg. 104

List of Figures 1. Fig. P.1 The Tarpa Dance pg.10 2. Fig. P.2 The Warli Village pg.12 3. Fig. P.3 Raan Bhaaji Mohotsav pg.16 4. Fig. P.4 The Shamiana pg.18 5. Fig. P.5 Gram Sabha pg. 20 6. Fig. P.6 The Handmap pg. 22 7. Fig. P.7 Palghar District, Maharashtra pg. 28 8. Fig. 1.1 The Kanagi/Kanaba pg. 38 9. Fig. 2.1 Reed weave for wattle and daub pg. 48 10. Fig. 2.2 Hybrid house (Brick+Wattle and daub) pg.50 11. Fig. 2.3 A house with no windows pg. 52 12. Fig. 2.4 Modern house pg. 54 13. Fig. 2.5 Modern house interior pg. 56 14. Fig. 2.6 Transition zone pg. 58 15. Fig. 2.7 The realm of the Garden pg. 60 16. Fig. 2.8 Traditional fishing contraption pg. 62 17. Fig. 2.9 A hamlet in a forest pg. 64 18. Fig. 2.10 The realm of the Forest pg. 66 19. Fig. 3.1 Cheda, the stone god pg. 85 20. Fig. 3.2 The shrine of Waghoba pg. 86 21. Fig. 3.3 The Church pg. 88

Preface

वडाच्या बुडाची चोरी, झािलया रावणाची चोरी रं, झािलया रावणाची चोरी । ….[1]

The trunk of the ficus is stolen, it is a deed of Raavana, it is a deed of Raavana | ….[1]

नळाला नळ जोडू नी, पाणी नेलया मुंबईला रं, पाणी नेलया मुंबईला ।। ….[2]

You’ve connected the taps, and stolen our water, to take it to Mumbai || ….[2]

वडाच्या बुडाची चोरी, झािलया रावणाची चोरी रं, झािलया रावणाची चोरी । ….[3]

The trunk of the ficus is stolen, it is a deed of Raavana, it is a deed of Raavana | ….[3]

नळाला नळ जोडू नी, पाणी नेलया वसईला रं, पाणी नेलया वसईला ।। ….[4]

You’ve connected the taps, and stolen our water, to take it to Vasai || ….[4]

वडाच्या बुडाची चोरी, झािलया रावणाची चोरी रं, झािलया रावणाची चोरी । ….[5]

The trunk of the ficus is stolen, it is a deed of Raavana, it is a deed of Raavana | ….[5]

नळाला नळ जोडू नी, पाणी नेलया भिवंडीला रं, पाणी नेलया भिवंडीला ।। ….[6]

You’ve connected the taps, and stolen our water, to take it to Bhiwandi || ….[6]

Preface

Fig. P.1: The Tarpa dance

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Fig. P.2: The Warli village

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15 September 2018,

As the morning proceedings opened to an electric mood

with bright smiles dancing in circles to the Tarpa dance with sounds of dholak and ghungroo, a veil of the thick clouds carrying the rains loomed over the ‘ वडाच्या बुडाची चोरी ’ song that speaks of a long standing battle, which a forest-dependent tribal community perceives as an appropriation of their water, forest and land resources, and more broadly, their continuing conflict with the Forest Department. The popular invocation of the mythological “demon” king Raavana in the above song draws attention to an established resource flow relationship between the tribal community’s hamlet located on the northern periphery of a metropolitan core. Allow me to dip into my experience of arrival and the proceedings of the Raan Bhaaji Mohotsav in Ghatalpada, a small hamlet inhabited by the Warli community whose seventeen households perch atop a ridge of a small mound next to a river in Maharashtra’s Palghar district. Raan Bhaaji Mohotsav, the Forest Food Festival, was a celebration of the Warli community’s relationship to the forest areas in the vicinity.

It was a humid back-monsoon morning when I set-off for a

journey to this remote region in the western ghats along with a few friends with vey little idea of what to expect. Another friend who hails from the region and knew the way to the village had joined us. He had convinced me that it would be a great adventure to go there. We followed his scooter along a severely corroded road with a thick forest foliage on both sides. At one point, the condition of the road turned so bad that our car was stuck in a deep pothole and we found no flat surface to jack raise the car. After much ordeal, we managed to pull the car up by placing the jack on some stones only to realise that Ghatalpada is a 14

Preface

village with no road connection. We would require to cross the Lendhi river to reach the village. A young boy helped us cross the river on foot. After an exhausting thirty minutes we finally made it to the other side. As we started moving towards Ghatalpada, carefully traversing through a small, slippery uphill path, we started hearing the polyphonic notes of a tarpa, a traditional windpipe instrument of the Warlis, made out of dried gourd, bamboos and wax, which produced a haunting hornlike sound. We were told that all the materials required to build the tarpa apparently came from the nearby forest.

Traversing a hundred and fifty kilometre journey that took

nearly four hours, we arrived by lunchtime and were given a grand welcome. Each one of us was received with an aukshan, a form of greeting in which an elderly woman moves a plate carrying a flame in a clockwise and anticlockwise alternate loop, a few seeds of rice and a flower facing the person receiving it. The village had a shamiana in the central space held together by a set of bamboos erected whereas the floor was a bright shade of yellow tarpaulin. A person from the village made a small speech to welcome us over there. Soon the food arrived in small steel bowls laid neatly on the floor. We were served bhakri made of rice and nagli1, and about fifteen different preparations of green leafy vegetables found in the forest only during monsoon: Kovli bhaaji, kadu kand, dangar, pendhar, shind, tetav etc. As we savoured the hot meal, the locals explained to us the various medicinal properties of these vegetables, many of which I had never heard of, forget having eaten before.

Following the meal as we sat in a group again, I came to realise

that the Raan Bhaaji Mohotsav was in fact, an occasion to conduct a 1 Nagli, commonly referred to as Nachni in Marathi refers to Raagi or finger millet, a crop produced on sloping lands in the tropics, used to roast a Bhakri or Indian flatbreads Preface

Fig. P.3: Raan Bhaaji Mohotsav

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Fig.P.4: The Shamiana

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Fig. P.5: Gram Sabha

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Fig. P.6: The Handmap

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Gram Sabha, the monthly village council meeting. A Gram Sabha, which is the smallest unit of governance in the region, is affiliated to a Mahsooli2 Gram Panchayat, which is a much bigger body of governance responsible for tax collection. It primarily consists of all bonafide residents of the village, whose names are present on the electoral rolls. The Central Government conceptualised the Gram Sabha in an attempt to democratise the decision making process at the level of the village. The agenda for that day’s Gram Sabha was to map out the vegetables on a hand drawn map of Ghatalpada and it’s surrounding areas. This exercise of mapping was happening for the first time in their village. A man brought a hand drawn map on a big green board and made it rest on a bamboo pole of the shamiana. All the villagers sat facing the board. After having spent a while to understand the orientation of the map, one after the other, they started naming the vegetables that were cooked, and started locating the vegetable that was plucked from the forest on the map. Before we could finish the tagging exercise, it started pouring heavily. The shamiana started leaking and we had to continue the exercise inside the home of a person. As the meeting came to an end, one of the villagers briefly addressed everyone mentioning the pivotal role taken up by a non-governmental organisation (NGO)3, which works with issues pertaining to land rights of villages in this region with the locals. He was constantly referring to a particular Constitutional Act called the PESA, The Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act of 1996. According to him, the NGO had enabled their Gram Sabha to gain community forest rights 2 Mahsool directly translates to tax. The taxes collected by the mahsooli Gram Panchayat are Paani Patti (Water tax) and Ghar Patti (Property tax) 3 It was through the same NGO that I had come to know about this festival through a Facebook event. The Raan Bhaaji Mohotsav was an initiative taken by the Gram Sabha in collaboration with them. Preface

under the Forest Rights Act (FRA) of 2006. This meant that the village council could take control of Minor Forest Produce (MFP)4 within the demarcated forest region assigned to them.

During the proceedings of the meeting of that day, a person

raised a question as to why were the plants being geo-tagged when they already knew where the vegetables came from. He said that even a small child in the village could find the whereabouts of all the vegetables in the village as the forest was not something that anyone was afraid of, but rather was more like a backyard for them and everyone seemed to be well versed with the entire region and the vegetables were in fact, not “resources” but rather gifts from the first rains of the monsoons. The Kovli bhaaji preparation specifically was to signify the birth of the monsoons. He said that they would always cook the vegetable before the planting of rice in their paddies because it was auspicious. After a moment of silence, a quick witted person argued back that these maps weren’t being produced for the villagers to know the whereabouts, but for the Forest Department official, who didn’t know their way around 4 Section 2(4) of the Indian Forest Act 1927 defines only “forest-produce” and this term connotes to those products whether found in, or brought from a forest such as: 1. timber, charcoal, caoutchouc, catechu, wood-oil, resin, natural varnish, bark, lac, mahua flowers, mahua seeds, kuth and myrabolams, 2. trees and leaves, flowers and fruits, and all other parts or produce of trees, 3. plants not being trees (including grass, creepers, reeds and moss), and all parts or produce of such plants, 4. wild animals and skins, tusks, horns, bones, silk, cocoons, honey and wax, and all other parts or produce of animals, and 5. peat, surface soil, rock and minerals (including lime-stone, laterite, mineral oils), and all products of mines or quarries Minor Forest Produce (MFP) is a subset of forest produce and got a definition only in 2007 when the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, was enacted. 24

Preface

the forests. The room was filled with a fit of laughter.

Granted this shift, the conflict of tribal communities in

Ghatalpada, and more broadly across the country, with the Forest Departments stand far from being settled. They continue on an everyday basis with several instances that point to the Forest Department filing police complaints against individuals or groups over the use of forest resources or creating bureaucratic hurdles over their use, on the one hand. Evolving policies and judicial orders of eviction, framed in the name of an abstract “public interest,” cite the illegitimacy of large numbers of tribal populations in forests and their detrimentality to forest conservation, on the other hand. ***

Preface

Problem Statement:

Against this backdrop, the proceedings of Ghatalpada’s festival-

meeting open out a thought provoking puzzle: Ghatalpada and other surrounding Warli villages present an ontological difference in the way they perceive the forest as a lived environment, where the forest is not imagined as being separate from habitation. The proceedings of the festival-meeting suggest that there exists a weave between the natural resources and cultural practices of tribal groups, which have a significant implication on the (un)built form. These relationships are not static but in a continuous process of transformation. There exist mechanisms, tended by “animistic” belief systems which pose the humans and other creatures as being dissimilar beings whilst recognising the similar interrelations with their lived environments. Notions of gifting, exchange or hunting characterise this mode of imagination. We can posit this on one end of the spectrum. On the other end lies an antithetical imagination which poses the forests as resources for city regions to thrive. The mechanisms that exist to safeguard the forest reserves are based in scientific resource management practices which place humans at the centre of the resource use, as being similar beings (ways in which all beings are subjected to the laws of nature), but with dissimilar interrelations with their lived environments as opposed to the other organisms. We can refer to this method as a “Naturalist” mode of imagination. Notions of production or conservation characterise this mode. They essentially establish a subject and a dependent subordinate object. When both these modes of imagination face each other, the animistic systems followed by the communities and the naturalistic systems followed by the Forest Department, it leads to certain conflict. 26

Preface

Seen from the perspective of the local communities, instances

such as the re-allocation of water resources to the city or closure of access to forests presents a break in the weave of their ‘culture-nature’ relationships causing great upheaval and gloom. In addressing the ‘how’ in this puzzle, I intend to build my thoughts on the ways in which this ontological difference advances alternate conceptualisation of nature-culture relationships.

Research objectives: Based on my problematisation, I set two objectives for this research: 1. developing a theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis of nature-culture practices in an tribal resource region, and 2. mapping and analysing local practices Research question:

How do the practices of local institutions shape and are shaped

by the interrelations of land, forest, water, humans and other organisms in Ghatalpada and how do we form lenses of reading into the syntax of the local practices in the context of scientific practices of resource use and management? In doing so, the research will draw points of clear distinction between the imaginations of nature as perceived by the western civilisation and the groups of people native to the forests. The main objective of this research is to study the implications of this difference, not with the intention of demonising or deifying any school of thought over other, but to move ahead with a comprehensive understanding of this difference. Preface

Geographical settings:

The study focusses on the Warli tribe which is situated in the

western part of India. The major Warli settlements lie in northern Maharashtra in the Palghar district and southern Gujarat. The Warli belt stretches from the western ghats (Sahyadris) in the east to the Arabian sea coast in the west. A major portion covered by the Warlis is a dense forest and the people are dependent on farming as the main source for their livelihood. . The areas are still extremely remote in terms of accessibility.

Fig. P.7: Palghar district, Maharashtra

Preface

The major recognised Scheduled Tribes in this region are the

Mahadev Koli, Warli, Kukna and Thakur. According to the 2011 census data, The ST population in this region constitutes to about 34% of ST population throughout Maharashtra. The Mahadev Koli is the largest ST at 1,227,562 (14.3%), followed by Warli 627,197 (7.3%), Kukna 572,195 (6.7%) and Thakur 487,696 (5.7%). As per the 2011 Census, 87.3 per cent of the ST population of Maharashtra is residing in the rural areas. Among major STs in this region, the statistics showing the population residing in rural areas is as follows: Kukna (93.4%), Warli (92.7%), Thakur (86.3%) and Koli Mahadev (80.3%).

The zone lies to the north and north-west of Mumbai.

Interestingly, the tribal areas start within a mere 100 kilometre radius of Mumbai, which happens to be the financially biggest city in the country. The study will encompass the district of Palghar which is subdivided into talukas from east such as Jawhar, Vikramgad, Wada, Palghar, Mokhada, and finally culminate into Dahanu in west, a small town on the coast of the Arabian sea having a railway connection via the western line to Mumbai. ***

Preface

1. The ecology of collectives

As I spent many days loitering around the village lanes in my

effort to establish a rapport with the villagers, I came to realise that the name Ghatalpada is derived from the family name of the locals residing there: Ghatal. Quite a few padas in the region are named after the families living in those padas: an entire pada is just one big family. On further investigation, I realised that smaller settlements in the vicinity of this pada were also named after the family names. How did this community find its way into the landscape in the first place? How did such a settlement pattern of kin relations get produced?

The Bombay Gazetteer for Thana district of 1882 vividly speaks

of an unusually strong presence of native tribes in the northern and north eastern tracts of Konkan. The 1872 census identifies the presence of about nine distinct social groups who were indigenous to the lands. They were the Agris, Koli, Warli, Thakur, Katkari, Dubla, Vaiti, Kukna and Dhodia. The Mahadeo Koli were an exception to these aforementioned communities. They are said to have descended from the Deccan plateaus of Central India in the fourteenth century.1 Rest 1 30

Bombay Gazetteer, Thana, Volume XIII, Part I, p. 68 The ecology of collectives

of the communities have been settled in this part of Konkan since prehistoric times according to the Imperial Gazette. Dr. Wilson, an eighteenth century British historian denotes that this region was one of the seven parts of the Konkan strip of India. From South to North, he mentions, that the seven Konkans are Keral (Kerala), Tulav (land of the Tulu speaking communities in modern day coastal Karnataka), Govarashtra (modern day Goa), Konkan (land from Sindhudurg to Raigad in Konkan), Kerahat, Varalat (land of the Varali) and Barbar. Varal, as Dr. Wilson mentions, would mean a tilled land and the uplanders who tilled and cultivated rice on this land in this part of Konkan were the Varali (or Warli).2

An another possible hypothesis is formed by a Maratha

historian and scholar V. K. Rajwade in his Marathi book: Mahikavatichi Bakhar. He proposes that the Warli were mentioned as a tribe of nonAryan descent by Katyayana (c. 300 BC) who was a Sanskrit grammarian, mathematician and Vedic priest in his Vartikas (scriptures about the history of ancient India). The name Warli was a derivative of the terms varud - varudaki - varuli - varali. The Vartikas mention that the tribe was an inhabitant of the Vindhya and Satpura ranges of central India and migrated westward towards the western coast of the country from the hills in Khandesh, the northwestern border of the state of Maharashtra.3 Interestingly, quite a few people from the region still claim their origin to be somewhere from the forests of the northern hills. The languages of the various communities are also at times a mixture of the dialects of Marathi and Gujarati on the borders of both the states. But as one goes further southwards, the languages seem to be very close to the other communities in the region like the Koli or the Kunbi. 2 3

Dr. Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes II V. K. Rajwade, Mahikavatichi Bakhar, 1924, p. 82

The ecology of collectives

In the first volume of the Tribes and Castes of the Bombay

Presidency, Enthoven describes the Warli as actually being a subdivision of the Bhil community, found not only in Khandesh, but also in some tracts in the southern parts of Gujarat. It is not unlikely that the Warli share ancestry with the Bhil, as is also shown by a coherence in their customs and other cultural traits.4 An another British scholar from roughly the same time, Latham, in his writing forms a hypothesis that the blood of the Marathas would be to a certain extent that of the Bhil and the Koli, as they were the only communities indigenous to north Konkan. The others who came in much later were the Rajputs descending from Rajasthan. It is however very difficult to reach a satisfactory conclusion as to what could be the origin of the Warli.

As I spent more time in the village, I came across many more

people who would tell me their versions of the stories about the origins of the Warli. I thought that it could be of some help to understand the origin of the tribe if I probe into the subject through the lens of caste. I found some interesting explanations of the possible origins of the community. Allow me to quote two of the most interesting explanations.

An old woman who Ganpat dada took me to had this to say:

The god after having created humans wanted to equip them to service the earth. So he created some gifts that he would give to some people. He made a book with all the knowledge of the world and handed it to a person. He became a Brahmin. He created a sword and handed it to a person. He became a Kshatriya (king). He created a spade and handed it to a person. He became a Mali (gardener). Eventually, he created a plough and handed it to a person. The person asked the god how would he use the instrument. The god asked the person to use it to clear the 4 32

Enthoven, Tribes and Castes of Bombay Presidency, Vol. I, p. 156 The ecology of collectives

waral (brushwood) and then till the earth. He thus became a Warli. Waral or Wavar as it is referred to as in some villages, is the small dry grass that grows on the fields.5 In a way, this explanation connects back to Dr. Wilson’s hypothesis of the Warli being uplanders clearing, tilling and cultivating lands in this region.

I once asked an another person of whether there existed any

rifts between the different castes that exist within the region. His interpretation of caste was a much different one. He said that the names and origins of the castes came from the way the grain was stored. He pointed at a massive woven basket of bamboo which stores rice. He told me that it was called Kanagi or Kanaba, a basket made from the Kashti bamboos found locally on the region. A person who would store their grain in a kanaba would be a Kunbi. Likewise, some people would build a granary with earth which would resemble an anthill or a Warul. People who would store their food in such a structure would be the Warli. Every village would have specific methods for storing their grain and their caste identity would be determined on their method. If a person migrated from a village to another place with a different system for storing grain and lived there long enough, the person would automatically be known by the new caste. He argued that the modern interpretation of a watertight caste system was therefore a Brahminical construct reinforced by the colonial recordkeeping habits of segregation and had no relevance in the region, at least in erstwhile times.

To truly comprehend the lens through which the form of

collectives that get formed between nature and culture, we must first put it in perspective to the imagination of collectives as seen by the naturalist mode of identification. The simplest formula of 5

Author’s interview dated October 09, 2018.

The ecology of collectives

Fig. 1.1: The Kanagi/Kanaba

The ecology of collectives

identification practiced by the naturalists is that of defining the body for what it is evident (for instance, a mango tree is different from a ficus), a perspective that we have been taught to see and understand the world through. Humans are imagined in disparate collectives categorised on the basis of the languages spoken, attire, customs. An important aspect of this categorisation is the exclusion of anything that exists as an independent entity. In other words, nature. The paradigm that gets developed through this imagination pitches itself in stark contrast to the “lawlessness” of the nature.

It is believed that humans have the ability to form collectives,

make rules, transform their environs, create values and institutions to disseminate them. The paramount premise to form such collectives lies in the belief that the cultures which humans form are unparalleled in nature. And therefore even the collectives that animals or other non-humans form are seen as patterns in their social organisation subservient to those formed by humans as they not only lack the consciousness of forming a unit as a result of reflective choice to live together but also the faculty to device new rules by exercising free will. In recent times, naturalist patterns emerge to glorify some of the forest dwelling human cultures which are supposedly “closer to nature” in the sense in which they don’t use any heavy state apparatus or coercion to organise themselves. But if we are to comply to this school of thought, we blind ourselves to the possibility of seeing cultures that are possibly borrowing their institutions from the organisations and institutions of many other non-human cultures.

Phillipe Descola in his book ‘Beyond Nature and Culture’ argues

that animism and naturalism could be imagined as two different ways of imagining collectives. Within animist imaginations, nature could be thought of as an analogy for culture. Whereas naturalism would create The ecology of collectives

a clear binary between the ideas of “nature” and “culture”. In doing so, naturalism becomes completely anthropocentric, by assuming the lack of “humanity” shown by other non-humans and humans showing qualities of a moral higher ground which other organisms lack. On the other hand, animism assumes its stance as being anthropogenic as even non-human aspects of nature get imagined as human, thus breaking the hierarchies upon which naturalism is founded.

In case of the Warli, the formation of collectives is neither

animistic, nor naturalistic. Even though it has no parallels with the naturalist mode, it is different yet complementary to the animistic mode of imagination. On one hand, the humanisation of the non-human elements of nature is almost inexistent in the praxis of the people, the collectives that get formed borrow heavily from the institutions of other natural species. It can thus be regarded as a totemistic mode of imagination of collectives. Encyclopaedia Britannica defines totemism as a system of belief in which humans are said to have kinship or a mystical relationship with a spirit-being, such as an animal or plant. The entity, or totem, is thought to interact with a given kin group or an individual and to serve as their emblem or symbol. It can be seen as a system in which humans and non-humans are jointly distributed in complementary collectives in contrast to animist collectives where humans and non-humans are separately distributed in autonomous collectives. For instance, in an animist collective, a collective would comprise of only a single specie of monkeys, having the same social organisation as the humans, it will be different from the collective of tigers, which might also share the same social organisation. But in a totemistic cosmology, a collective could be formed within heterogenous species of animals, which would include humans. These species would take the form of humans and live within the collectives freely. This is 36

The ecology of collectives

evident by the last names of the people of the Warli community. Each sub-division of a community would further be divided into smaller exogamous groups of people. These exogamous groups would manifest as patrilineal clans or kul. Each of these clans have a separate last name which is taken up by all the members of that clan. This meant that a person would have to find a partner out of their own clan, even if the person could not trace back how they are related to the other person. No two people within the same kul would ever marry. The last names of these clans would be taken up based on a number of factors, like animals such as Vagh (tiger), Kolhe (fox), Nadag (bear), trees such as Mad (coconut), Ambat (mango/tamarind), Kakad Vad (banyan tree), birds such as Mor or Murha (peacock), Komb or Kom (cock), fruits like Dodka or Dodya (gourds), professions such as Sutar (carpenter), Gavli (milkman), Vanjari (herdsman), Pardhi (hunter), titles such as Naik, Mankar, Talathi or at times, the names were taken up without any explanation. 6

The population is scarcely spread across the entire region

in villages. All the villages have a forest region in their vicinity. It is impossible to separate the forests from the settlements as there would be no hard boundary to separate the two. It is not uncommon to find a single Warli home in a very remote area, far from any other habitation. These villages would be further sub-divided into smaller settlements of fifteen to twenty households. A settlement of this scale would be considered a pada. A pada was a spatial manifestation of a clan. The pada would then typically take up the name of the clan. In some cases, the pada would also take up the name of a geographical feature or a tree. For example Mahupada is named after an old Mahua tree, or Kelicha pada is named after a small banana orchard. Chalatval is named after a 6

K. J. Save, The Warlis, p. 15

The ecology of collectives

turn which one has to take to reach the pada. Because of this, one can find many padas with the exact same nomenclatures.

It is believed that each of the clans or kul would have an

independent patriarchal ancestor. The descendants of this common ancestor would be known as kuli. This meant that there was a bloodline that two kuli shared. With time, as the people moved and migrated from place to place to settle in smaller settlements, their patrilineal names travelled with them. Therefore today, it is possible to find people with the same last name living in very distant villages. This commonality causes people living very far from each other to forge a blood relationship in the form of kutabi or kutambi. It is almost impossible to find a Warli who can trace back the pedigree of their ancestry beyond three to four generations. The organisation of the kul is very complex and loose. It may be traced within many other clans, spread throughout the geography of the region, living with members of the same clan or other clans.7 ***

7 38

K. J. Save, The Warlis, p. 23 The ecology of collectives

2. A home in the forest; a forest in a home

Not very long after my first experience in Ghatalpada, did

I find myself gravitating back to the village. I decided that I wanted to pursue my fieldwork in this village. Ganpat dada, a person from Ghatalpada was kind enough to take me in his house. I had spoken to him briefly the last time I had visited. It was an ordinary day in the life of Ghatalpada. People carrying hay for the bullocks, kids playing in the central space with old rubber tyres, smoke from the chool rising from the Mangalore tiles of houses. I entered Ganpat dada’s home, a cool and dark space. It struck me how even when the welcoming freshness of his home contrasted the inhospitably diverse nearby forest, it seemed like an extension to the forest itself, with birds, domesticated animals and insects filling up the habitable spaces within the home. Of course, I brought with myself the city dweller’s perspective of imagining a home, soon to realise that it was too narrow a perspective.

The floor of the house was coated with dry cow dung. This is

a common practice in the rural parts of Konkan. It is done as a pest repellent. The small cracks in the floor had ants carrying the food particles which Ganpat dada’s son had dropped while having his A home in a forest; a forest in a home

breakfast - a pendhar bhaaji placed in the middle of a nagli bhakri. I just sat there trying to make small talk with him, but he just shied and ran inside a dark chamber. It dawned upon me that the space I was sitting in was unusually dark. I realised that the windows to the home were completely shut. They were sealed from inside using ply sheets. Ganpat dada told me that a home is only meant for sleeping. There was no necessity for it to be well lit during the day anyway. It was blazing outside. Here lies a paradox : even though the home was closed off for even light to enter the space inside, it felt like the boundary between the home and the forest did not exist as a hard line but was in fact a set of loosely placed markers that transitioned from the home to the fields to the forest.

I thought that it would be nice to speak to a village elder to

know more about the history of Ghatalpada. Prashant dada, one of my interlocutors in the village, introduced me to Lahoo dada, his elder cousin and also a village elder. A sixty something man with salt and pepper hair, Lahoo dada’s hands had become course over time because of the heavy physical activities on the rice paddy. His skin had become dark because of the many hours he had spent under the blazing sun. He sat there in the padvi of his home in shorts. With hens running around him, he was busy weaving a rope with the Ambadi fibres to tie his goats in the barn behind his home. His was one of the oldest homes in the village. Lahoo dada sat there with a bowl of water to wet his fingers as he would weave the fibres into the rope. His wife, Kumud tai, brought a small chataai for me to sit on. I tried my hand at the weaving and failed miserably. Embarrassed, I focussed my attention to our conversation about the origins of the village. One thing seemed to be clear : the idea of determining the programme of habitation as an opposition to the idea of “wild” nature was ill founded. How did this relationship between 40

A home in a forest; a forest in a home

the home and the forest come about?

Lahoo dada’s story takes us back right to the nineteenth century

where Ramji Ghatal, a young boy, was born in a small dark Warli hut in Talasri Zilla of the then Bombay Presidency, today’s Palghar district. He was the oldest amongst his siblings - four sisters and three bothers. His house was made with materials like the Karvi reeds, cow dung, mud, some bamboos and the timber and leaves of the Saagwan tree. Every once in a while, a part the house would have to be rebuilt. The Karvi reeds would form a mesh and later be coated with a mixture of cow dung and mud. The bamboos would provide the vertical support for these panels. They would call it a kudachi bhinta. The wall panels would last for about three years before having to be replaced. This method is commonly referred to as wattle and daub in modern architectural building construction literature. This construction would not allow the people to make any fenestrations in the house. Thus, the house would traditionally have no windows.

The structure would be raised on a plinth made of black basalt or

dabar which the father would extract from the mountain in the vicinity. The plinth was rammed onto the earth’s surface. The superstructure was so light that it would not necessitate for a foundation to be dug. The plinth was coated with cow dung once every three months. Later, it was flattened with a tool with a flat surface and a handle - the pitni or chopni made from the timber of the Saag tree. All the vertical members or khamb to support the home would also come from the Saag tree. The timber of the Saag is such that it does not corrode from the bottom end because of moisture, which touches the ground. A peripheral timber frame called the potbandhani1 would support the weight of the roof. Generally it was the mother’s duty to collect the cow dung and apply 1

Potbandhani literally translates to a belt, used to tighten the trousers

A home in a forest; a forest in a home

a coat on the floor. The father would then beat it with the pitni. The gender roles, when it came to the building of a house were hard lined since centuries. Generally, most of the work that happened here was gendered. The father would take up roles which required the use of brute force like felling of trees or wild boar and hare hunting, whereas the mother would take up more tenacious roles, like fetching water from the well or collecting firewood.

The leaves of the Saag tree had a lot of uses. Every year, Ramji

would collect them in the time just before the onset of monsoons when he would go in the forests with the cattle. He would make a pile of these leaves and press them in a stack and store them for them to be dried. These leaves would form the cowlings for the roof of a Warli home. Once the monsoon would be over, the leaves would be soaked in water overnight and then used as cowls the next day. Before sunrise, Ramji would have to climb on the rafters of the roof and start laying the leaves in a cascade from the eaves to the ridge. These leaves would provide for a decent weather proofing from the harsh sun and the lashing monsoons. They would then be coated with a layer of dhudicha gavat : a type of wild grass growing around in abundance. To ensure that the grass wouldn’t disperse because of the wind, Ramji’s father would climb atop the roof and lay a set of various dry branches which his mother would bring in bunches from the forest which lay close to their home.

Lahoo dada fondly remembers the older times when he would

as a kid, climb atop the roof of his father’s home to set the dried Saagwan leaves every alternate year before the monsoons. Today his home is much different to that of his father’s. He has a home made out of burnt bricks and Mangalore tiles, much sturdier than the earlier type, the one which he grew up in.

At some point in time, as the population grew, it became very 42

A home in a forest; a forest in a home

hard to find the karvi reeds in the forest. Subsequently, some hamlets experimented with dried rice stalk or penda or wheat stalk as a substitute for the karvi reeds. But it would start decaying much earlier, perhaps in a year or two at best. Thus, the people had to resort to other means for obtain materials for building there walls.

Rice paddy requires a very thick layer of top soil for the

cultivation to sustain. The people would extract some of this soil from their respective fields to cast bricks. By about 1980s to 1990s, the urbanisation had already started gaining pace to the south of the region as Mumbai started developing towards the North. This enabled them to get their hands on moulds of bricks to start casting. As there would be no mechanism or resources to transport the bricks from brick manufacturers, the households would set up small kilns for themselves. They would collect dry firewood or phaanti from the forest and lay the dried casts of bricks atop them and bake them. They would introduce some small pieces of rice stalk to the mud mix to ensure that the bricks would burn well when put in a kiln. It would require about fifteen thousand to twenty-thousand bricks to construct a home. It would take a household a whole week to undergo the process of casting all the bricks required for the construction of the home. Sometimes, a family would just cast bricks in a year and keep them wrapped up in tarpaulin or plastic sheets to protect them from the elements for a year, till they would gather enough money to construct a part or a whole new home the next year.

Building a new home would be a herculean task for this newly

adapted method of construction. A heavier superstructure would require a foundation to be dug. Concrete would have to be brought from the city to construct this foundation in the form of a plinth beam. The timber for the roof would be recycled in most cases. But the Saagwan A home in a forest; a forest in a home

leaves were now replaced with Mangalore tiles. These tiles have to be manufactured in factories. As a result, smaller building construction markets started sprouting in areas like Khanvel which is on the border of Maharashtra and Dadra Nagar Haveli. For the very first time, the people from the region would have to travel very long distances to procure materials for building their homes. This marks a shift in the dependency on the forest region. ***

It is very easy to actually make an argument for the relationship

of the home to the forest looking at the dependency of materials required for the construction of the dwelling. But it is only after we understand the various markers that loosely separate these realms of dwelling and forest can we understand the true nature of the relationship of the home to the forest. To further our understanding of the form of this transition from the dwelling to the forest, we must first investigate the spatiality of the habitation. We could imagine this transition through the realm of the home, the realm of the garden and the realm of the forest.

The area right outside the dwelling, which is in many cases is

beaten earth is an area where most of the domestic life unfolds. This is the place which the woman covers every week with cow dung as the children play around. It is a natural extension to the dwelling. Yet, it already marks the transition to the realm of the garden. The realm of the garden, which in most cases is the domain of the woman also marks a transition to the realm of the forest. This area is intimately visited by all, but it has characteristics of “wild” behaviour. The children frequent this area to gather tubers or catch small birds. The women and children go there to gather small juicy fruits, collect leaves, or catch fish by making 44

A home in a forest; a forest in a home

bamboo entrapments on rivulets. Everyone in the village is very well acquainted to this realm. Most of the markers are named after trees or by the various geographical features. It is beyond this area, that the true hunting zone begins. With grass as high as my own height, I was quite hesitant in the beginning of my fieldwork to visit this zone. But as time passed I realised that the people from the villages would know each and every nook and corner of the “wilderness”. Lahoo dada told me about the legend of Hindya, the mythical character who represented the hunting clans. Legend has it that hindya was a prolific hunter who would know every animal in the forest. He was so skilled that no animal could escape his entrapment. He would go to the forest everyday and bring a hunted animal to the village to his home. He hunted leopards, peacocks, rodents, snakes, all animals that existed within the realm of the forest. This led to the depletion of the animal demographics of the forest. Once, hindya had guests coming over from a nearby village. So like everyday, he ventured into the forest. But to his surprise, he could not find even a single animal. He searched the forest for hours but still could not catch hold of even a single prey. Disappointed, he started his journey back to the village. Just as he was about to enter the realm of the gardens, he was stopped by a woman - the spirit of the forest. She asked him to stop hunting so profusely. She told him where he could find a peacock for that day to serve his guests. Hindya agreed to her and reached the place she informed him about. Subsequently, he managed to catch the prey for himself for that day. Since then, hindya realised that he could not go hunting as he willed. He and his descendants have been following the norms laid down by the spirit of the forest ever since. The prey is not merely a beast, but a fellow of the forest which has to be treated with the same respect as they would treat the other humans. A few people told me that there are spirits who take the form of little A home in a forest; a forest in a home

people who live in the forest who guard the porcupines. If these people decide, only then can a hindya hunt a porcupine successfully at night. A good hunter is not a person who merely knows the topography of the landscape, but who also knows the spiritual geography of the forest.

Hunting would take place much more in the erstwhile times as

opposed to now, where dense forests are being depleted for the timber at alarming rates by the state forestry. But even today, there are people who are experts in tracking an animal at night merely looking at the paw marks of hare or other smaller animals. Hunting would take place at night and the hunters would live in the deepest of the forests during the day. One can find small shacks made out of branches and leaves in the hearth of the forest even today. Naturally, this realm of the deep forest is the least frequented amongst all three. But by no means is it perceived as “wild” as it bears a resemblance to their cultivated or domesticated surroundings.

In committing to the acts of cultivation and extraction for the

forests, the people leave a mark on the forests. However, the impacts of their actions are very barely detectable. These impacts are essentially periodical shifts in the habitats of birds, animals, insects and vegetation. The story of the hindya provides us with the evidence that the hunters aware of the physical shifts in the geography of the landscape brought about by their actions. This awareness can be extended to all the humans living in he vicinity of the forest. The Warli, being horticulturists, have cultivation of rice paddy held in very high reverence. Every time a paddy yields a crop, the land has to be kept fallow for a few years. This is the time where the land recuperates its fertility. It is also the time when the wild nature of the forest takes over. The forest bleeds into the territory of the realm of the garden creating a spatial dance with the village boundary. The forest gets domesticated like an extension to the 46

A home in a forest; a forest in a home

realm of the garden as opposed to being imagined as an antithesis of habitation. ***

A home in a forest; a forest in a home

Fig. 2.1: Reed weave for wattle and daub

A home in a forest; a forest in a home

Fig. 2.2: Hybrid house (Brick+Wattle and daub)

A home in a forest; a forest in a home

Fig. 2.3: A house with no windows

A home in a forest; a forest in a home

Fig. 2.4: Modern house Notice the windows of the house have been sealed off.

A home in a forest; a forest in a home

Fig. 2.5: Modern house interior

A home in a forest; a forest in a home

Fig. 2.6: Transition zone

A home in a forest; a forest in a home

Fig. 2.7: The realm of the Garden The rivulet marks the transition to the forest region

A home in a forest; a forest in a home

Fig. 2.8: Traditional fishing contraption

A home in a forest; a forest in a home

Fig. 2.9: A hamlet in the forest

A home in a forest; a forest in a home

Fig. 2.10: The realm of the Forest This was an exercise which the author was a part of to

identify the indigenous species of plants.

A home in a forest; a forest in a home

3. Of creatures and crosses

As the thin sheet of dusk would fall upon the fields, the stories

would start filling the hearts of the people. Stories of the gods, stories of the goddesses and stories of the white ghosts that would send shivers down the spines. Amongst all other mythical characters that young Ramchandra’s grandmother told him stories of, the one that seemed to particularly encapsulate his imagination was Bhiwabali, the mighty, responsible for holding up the load of the entire universe on his strong arms. Wide shoulders, bulky feet and a hefty build, Bhiwabali was such that he could easily defeat an Irani henchman in a duel.

The gods, his grandmother would say sitting under an umbar

tree, resided in the heavens and controlled the cycle of life and death. They created mother earth and sprinkled it generously with a kaleidoscopic arrangement of flora and fauna. Death, like life was certain. One day, as the earth wept profusely, the gods ran down from the heavens for her. The world had become a ludicrously burdensome place. It had become too cumbersome for her to bear all the weight. Thus she wept. ‘Take some creatures off my body’ she pleaded. The gods had to produce a two directional path of life and death. They made

Of creatures and crosses

a list of creatures they would have to grant a death to. But Narandev or Sun, the lord of light pleaded with them that he was responsible for bringing day to the earth. Moon pleaded that he would bring the night sky to the earth. Sukesar, the lord of happiness pleaded that he brought joy to the world. The lord of wind pleaded that he blew over the world and helped the plants grow. Dhagesar, Gajesar and Vijesar the lords of clouds, thunder and lightning pleaded that they brought the rains to the world. Without them, the world would cease to exist. They had to be immortalised. What remained of the other lords were Thapesar, Lipesar and Khachesar the lords of building, plastering and pits for storing rice. They too had uses that were essential for the earth to survive. So the gods granted death to a man, Pandu who they had no use for. Pandu was a man with long hair and overgrown nails. He fled across the seven seas to escape from the clutches of death. His seven sons set sail in search of him, only to find an old ascetic who gave them plums. He told them their father’s location. The sons ate all the plums and planted the seeds in the belly of the earth. But none of them produced any fruit for the first seven times. They produced fruit in their eighth blossoming, but only to fall down as raw fruits. The youngest son got just one ripe fruit which all of them carried to their father. As they marched towards their father, they made him some bread and porridge. Pandu, the father succumbed to the smell of the fruit as soon as he was presented with it. The fruit bore the death of Pandu. Even as he tried to hide from it, he couldn’t escape the overarching embrace at the hands of death. Such was their fate too.

Death was so frequent not only because of malaria, but also

because of the hardships of the farm. He had heard a story of a man who got pierced in his heart by a crowbar by the henchman of a landlord because he had tried to steal money kept on a table. Moreover, Of creatures and crosses

a genetic disorder called sickle cell anaemia, having a tremendous presence in the region made matters much worse. His people had very little control of their lives. But death was not a choice either. It was inevitable, and it could come at any moment. Even mother earth sank under the seas once. All the life on the planet ceased to exist. Even the birds disappeared from the face of the planet. Then the gods had to reconstruct the earth from mud balls. Mud balls, which only a gocheed1 would possess. The gocheed would not yield, so the gods had to threaten her to give them the mud balls. They collected the stones from the stone world and Narandev got hold of the goddess of the stone world. She agreed to supply the gods with as many stones as they would need to reconstruct the earth. Narandev secured the earth with mud and stones. The gods got Bhivda thakar, the stone sculptor who would make the pillars for the world, and Chavda the carpenter, who would craft the timber beams for the world. Dhanji the iron smith provided the gods with nails to hold the structure of the world. But the gods had to confront an important question. Who would be the architect of the new world? The sun, the moon, the wind, the thunder, all were ready to shoulder the responsibility, but none could see the whole reconstruction process through. Finally, the gods went to Gungheri raja (or Gondya Kumbhar) the lord of pots. Gungheri raja separated the different varieties of mud that Narandev got him from the gocheed using a golden sieve into separate mounds of sticky, red, black, milky, coarse and fine grain and soaked it in water for sixteen days. As the mud was ready to be moulded as clay on his golden wheel, he started kneading the earth into a ball. First the earth ball was the size of a sesame seed, then the size of a ricegrain, growing gradually into tur2, 1 Gocheed is a type of a gadfly that makes her home by gathering mud balls. 2 Tur is a type of a pulse grown commonly in the tropical region. Commonly referred to as pigeon peas. 70

Of creatures and crosses

val3, plum, mango, coconut, a room, a house, a house with a front and back yard, a hamlet, a village and hundreds of villages. Eventually, he completed the construction of the earth. A planet that lay barren. It had to be replanted with seeds. Isar and Ganga Gauri4 started planting the seeds in all the directions of the planet. They collected the seeds for the plants from the world of ants and squirrels. The earth proliferated once again because of the mercy of the gods and the nature. Ramchandra was sure that however inevitable death was, he, like all other Warli folk were always protected by the gods.

Some gods needed to be seen around physically to feel safe in

the form of shrines. The gods in the heavens were not the only ones to protect them. The most important of them was Waghoba, whose shrine was erected by Ramchandra in Ghatalpada. The tiger god was a lord of cow herdsmen. The god assumed the form of a tiger and moved about the forest. His watchful prowl kept the cattle safe while grazing. This did not mean however that killing a tiger was taboo. Ramchandra knew of a few people in the neighbouring villages who would hunt tigers. Along with the tiger god, Ramchandra had seen his mother adorn the plate where she placed Hirva5, a plate of silver smeared in red lead. Hirva was the lord responsible for their family. Every year his father would change the rice from the plate, placing fresh rice after the harvest. Hirva was known to have seven wives. They lived in the same plate as Hirva and had morphed into seven supari nuts placed around him. He would be offered the flesh of a peacock, which pardhi, the hunter lord would bring to him. Peacock meat was not uncommon. It tasted like 3 Val is a type of a pulse grown commonly in the tropical region. Commonly referred to as field beans. 4 Isar and Ganga Gauri are tribal names for the Hindu gods Shankar or Ishwar and his partner Parvati respectively. 5 Hirva literally translates to the colour green in the Warli variety of Konkani. Of creatures and crosses

chicken. Ramchandra himself went to the forests sometimes to hunt for peacocks. Only when someone fell sick, their family tied a Hirva totem to the peacock. It was called kusa bandhane. No one would kill this peacock then. The spirits lived everywhere. After organisms die, they becomes a spirit and manifests themselves into the various elements of nature. Such spirits were known as the Cheda. There were five types of stone gods- Korvani cheda, Munjya cheda, Bata Vir, Cheda vir and Chokha vir. Sometimes the cheda took shape in the form of frogs or snakes and lived near the spot where he buried his treasures. If someone tried to dig open the treasure, that person would be bitten by the cheda and would lead to illness. The Girha lived near the palm trees near a river bed. If the girha held a grudge against someone, they would drown in the river. Sanvari was a female spirit. She would live in big boulders in the forest. Certain rocks with shendoor were the physical manifestations of the Dongar Sanvari Mauli, the goddess of the mountain who protected the forest. Sometimes Sanvari devi would lure young unmarried men into her trap and kill them if they tried to cut trees around her. She was supposed to have reversed feet. The thought of Sanvari devi harrowed Ramchandra even after his marriage. He would always go to the forest to collect firewood with his wife. Some trees were also spirited. Especially the Umbar, bel and peepul trees. While the Umbar and bel trees were considered sacred, the Peepul tree was the home of a Barambha, the male spirit who would entice and capture young women. The barambha was a white spirit with a white face and white robes. At times, an albino child would be mistaken as a barambha and he would be presented with offerings. Sometimes, there would be stories of a barambha resembling an Irani man. *** 72

Of creatures and crosses

It so happened that my first field visit to the hamlet had turned

out to be completely unplanned. Earlier that day, I had visited an NGO’s office in Jawhar to discuss how to go about into the villages to begin my field study. Ganpat Ghatal, the person who I had met during the Raan Bhaaji Mohotsav happened to be there coincidently at the same time in the office. We spoke briefly and he invited me to his home in Ghatalpada. Ganpat dada was travelling with a friend of his, Sudhir Jadhav, a middle aged man from a village next to Ghatalpada called Khardipada. They asked me to follow them. Fortunately I had carried a couple of changes for the trip. So I accepted his invitation and we started off for the village at about four in the afternoon.

This time I was wiser to not travel in a car. I went there on my

father’s 110 cc motorbike I could trust with all my heart; a bike that would never give up on me on the belligerent roads of the ghats. As our bike engines whirred on the looping roads of the Western ghats to reach Ghatalpada, my mind kept sinking into an abyss of questions. Not only the complex ones to address and advance the research, but also simpler, much more fundamental ones. Where was I going to eat? Was there a provision for toilets? Where would I sleep? How was the village going to treat me? After all, I was going to show up at the village unannounced.

We stopped briefly to buy some chicken from a small and the

only chicken shop on the way. I felt myself feeling a sense of relief after I realised that there would be chicken for dinner. After riding for about an hour, we reached the shores of the Lendhi river. ‘Park your bike here’, Sudhir said and made some space in the front yard of his house ‘It will be safe here’. Sudhir’s home was one of the last homes of Khardipada, a hamlet slightly larger than Ghatalpada. He ran a small general store selling biscuits and essential goods from his home. As I Of creatures and crosses

parked my bike next to his, Ganpat dada waited for me as he knew I would require help to cross the river. By this time, the heat from the sun had subdued as it had started its descent from the sky. We moved slowly towards the river, traversing through the boulders the river had crafted over centuries.

As I reached Ganpat dada’s home, both of us found ourselves

grappling arduously with the awkwardness that filled the room. The evening sun lit up the space dimly as the door was the only source for the sun to enter Ganpat dada’s living room. As Ganpat dada changed into his sleeveless bundi, the light rays highlighted his skinny yet strong body. He was a short man with a thin moustache. By no means did he appear as a person who could impose his presence in a room full of people. But his physical appearance was no measure for the respect he commanded in the village. Not only was he much more educated than other men in the village, but also was he a well travelled man. He was the only person from their village to visit Kerala in an aeroplane. Ganpat dada told me that he finished his Bachelor’s degree in Marathi from Thana and had plans to pursue a master’s degree. All the other younger boys referred to him as kaka and held him in great reverence.

He had three sons, Ajay was the oldest, Arun was the middle

one and Amit was the youngest. Ajay had finished studying till the tenth standard. Both the younger children were put in a school which he referred to as an ashram shala in Palghar where their stay and food were taken care of by the school itself. They had come home for the weekend and were about to leave for Palghar the next morning. ‘There was once a school here’ said Ganpat dada pointing at an old dilapidated concrete building across the street with crusty old walls. The teachers would have to come from a very long distance to the school to teach. There were only six pupils who would go to the school. So eventually, 74

Of creatures and crosses

they had to shut the school about three years ago. ‘The building is however used by the Gram Sabha of Ghatalpada to occasionally conduct their meetings’ he retorted with a somewhat sombre look on his face.

The sight of chicken running around the house was not new to

me this time. What was new however, was a set of four little birds, whose legs had been tied by a thread hanging upside down from a timber joist in his home. It was his younger son Amit who had brought them there. ‘These little kids!’ exclaimed Ganpat dada gently snickering at his son. ‘He must have brought it from some open nest on a tree’ he said. Then he picked the birds from the hook and kept them on the floor. He asked his wife Venutai to take them inside and feed them to the cat. I found the thought of feeding young birds to a cat quite unsettling. The idea of catching birds to feed your pet was not something I had ever experienced. But here it was. His demeanour towards all his sons was the same. But I sensed a certain affinity Ganpat dada shared with Amit, his youngest son.

Ganpat dada offered me some tea. He said he had planted some

lemongrass in his backyard and would like me to try it. I nodded. The teacup left a dark circular stain on the floor as I picked it up for a sip. It evaporated soon on the brown floor plastered with cow dung. The tea was black and bitterly sweet. He said that no one from the village or the surrounding villages has any milk. Milk was never a constituent of their diet. All the households had cattle. But their milk was reserved for the calves. Only in very rare cases would the Warli consume milk. All their nutrient requirements came from rice and other grain, fish and meat.

Soon it was too dark inside the house. The cerulean sky above

had started turning into a shade of deep blue. Venutai was inside the kitchen, beyond a dark room where the kanagi for rice was kept. She Of creatures and crosses

called Ganpat dada to help her with the slicing of the meat. Ganpat dada switched on a CFL bulb in his living room and went inside to help her. The CFL bulb wasn’t bright enough to illuminate the whole room at all. It was just enough. One of Ganpat dada’s sons started the TV, an old cathode ray set which was kept on a small shelf in his living room. We found a way to break the ice as we found some solace in the TV. India was playing a cricket match against England and Rohit Sharma was giving the British bowlers a run for their money. As we watched the match, Venutai came from within the hearth of their home and served us dinner, hot rice and chicken curry, peppered with locally grown chillies. ‘This would not have been possible ten years back’ Ganpat dada said,’there was no electricity here’.

In my head, I had assumed that since Ganpat dada had invited

me, I would be staying at his home. But soon after the match was over, Ganpat dada said that he had arranged for me to sleep in a different place, a newly constructed hall where all the younger men would go at night to sleep. I was slightly taken aback by that. He said that there were minuscule insects in his home called vilki in his home that would trouble me at night. ‘These insects are so small’ he said, ’they can hardly be spotted by the naked eye’. They move slowly on the skin of an individual at night. He said that they will bother me if I was not accustomed to them. So we pushed towards the hall with flashlights in hand. The sky above was lit up because of the bright moonlight from the full moon. At one point we were surrounded by a swarm of kiooncha or jhingaoo.6 I could see the hall he was talking about from a distance under the light.

There was a fence was made of woven strips of bamboo, behind

which lay all the houses in the settlement in a small huddle. We crossed 6 76

Kiooncha or Jhingaoo translates to a firefly. Of creatures and crosses

the fence and continued to walk along a small paulvaat amidst a thicket of waist length grass. The flashlights attracted a hoard of small moths flying aimlessly around the rim of the torch. It was a longish structure, placed outside the fence of the village. There was no house around the structure. The roof was a sheet of corrugated steel. It had polished Kota flooring in the verandah and walls painted in white. The windows had sliding channels and frosted glass. There was also a small grill outside the windows. By no means was this building built in congruence to the traditional building methods deployed by the locals in this region. The language of the structure belonged to a much more modern perspective of imagining building technology. As we entered the structure, I realised that it was actually a small church. There was a giant red cross placed on the wall opposite the entrance. It was built some three years ago and was inaugurated by a reverend in that area. There was a carpet of patakas or paper banners hovering below the roof. As the fans started rolling, the patakas started fluttering wildly. The space was very well lit with energy saving LED lamps. It had a small raised concrete platform and a podium to address the people from. Ganpat dada said that I would be safe here from any pests. I was baffled at the sight of a church and asked him how come would a building such as that would come about in their village. Ganpat dada paused for a moment, and said that there were a few people in the village who had converted to christianity. I knew this was going to be a long conversation and thought that it would be best to let it pass for the time being. He handed over a small chataai to me to sleep on. Soon there were other young men in the room and the lights went out.

The fold of the events of that day in Ghatalpada open a trapdoor

into a network of faith based networks that have been operating here. Contrary to my belief of the community following a practice of Of creatures and crosses

religion that has shaped and is shaped by the dependency on the forest resources, newer institutions of faith have been taking shape over here. This raises a few important questions. When did such institutionalised religious practices find a headway into the region? How have these religious practices start shaping newer relationships of the people with the forest? What relationship do the people following newer religious practices share with the locals still practicing traditional religion? ***

As Ramchandra shifted to Ghatalpada, the first thing

he did was to construct his home along with Vadu. During the first days of monsoon, both the families shifted on the rice paddies to start the plantation process. As they returned, they discovered that the home of Ramchandra Ghatal was plundered. He shifted his home little further southward. A few days later, as both the families returned from fieldwork, they realised that Ghatal’s home was looted again. If this would continue, Ramchandra Ghatal would have to go back to where he came from and toil on Irani farms. This was out of question. Soon his neighbour, Vadu fell ill. Not only did Ramchandra find himself grappling with his own situation, but also could not understand the dynamic that was driving the situation. He was convinced that it was the evil doing of a spirit from the forest. It had to be propitiated.

Ramchandra’s wife Lakhmi Janjar, hailed from a family of

bhagats. She was the sixth child from the fourth wife of a renowned Bhagat,7 Devaji Janjar from her village. Devaji Janjar was a celebrated Bhagat. Some said that he was a man who kept herbs so strong with him that they could stop the bullets from the guns of the British forest 7 78

The term Bhagat translates to a Shaman Of creatures and crosses

officials. He was looked upon as an arbitrator whenever there would be a dispute in any village nearby. His body was frail now. His beard had turned white like cotton blossoms. Now in his nineties, his power had waned over the years. Earlier, there were stories of him domesticating tigers in the forest. He would go and live in areas in the deepest, thorniest corners of the forest, where no one would dare to set their foot. It was said that he had taken his vidya from a saint who lived in the mountains. No one knew how he found the saint. But after all, Devaji was a man of mystery. So he started practicing the dark arts of Aghori vidya. He drank his own urine and consume his excreta to sharpen his abilities to spot out the bhutalis in the region. He could simply take the leaf of the Palas tree and a few rice seeds and look into the past and the future of a person. He had a deep understanding of the various medicinal properties of trees and herbs in the forest, so remote that hardly anyone even knew about the existence of such species. So strong was his magic that he was dreaded by the folk in the nearby villages.

He started marrying women in his early teens. But they would

all die one after the other of supposedly natural causes. Eventually he realised that it could be the wrongdoing of bhutalis or witches in the region who envied his vidya.

Strange were the ways of the bhutalis. Witchcraft was an

institution within itself. They formed secret societies within villages. They would pick young unmarried girls and train them to practice the dark arts. A young apprentice would be restricted to marry a man during her course of training as a bhutali. The bhutalis would not be restricted to practice their arts even after marriages. There would be stories that would float around of bhutalis placing hexes on individuals and the individuals dying of natural causes in a matter of a few days. If a bhutali was suspected of killing an individual, there were instances of Of creatures and crosses

beating the bhutali to death within villages. In a way, a strong bhagat could undo the hexes placed by bhutalis. Devaji Janjar was one of them. He had three pupils that he had taken to teach them the art of being a Bhagat.

Ramchandra and Lakhmi decided to approach Devaji to provide

them with a solution to their eeda-peeda.8 Devaji asked Ramchandra to initiate a Raval. A raval was an event which had two important attributes: it was a sort of an initiation ceremony for the senior bhagat to train his pupils and undergoing through a Rawal would free Ramchandra from any hex placed on him and the second attribute was that it was a sort of an ode to Kansari devi, the goddess of corn for a good yield in the next cycle. Ramchandra had seen what a raval was like as a child. He took a navas to uphold the raval. He went near a tamarind tree close to the river bed of the Lendhi. It was him who would have to bear all the costs for raising a mandap or math of the Kirmira tree for the raval to take place. He planted a bunch of makhval or marigold plants around the mandap.9 The ceremony was initiated at night with Devaji sitting along with his subordinate bhagats. About thirty to forty people attended the Rawal. They were all men. Devaji placed some wooden stumps into the ground to envelop an area. He threw some sand within this envelop while chanting some mantras. This was, he instructed, the area of the bhutalis and it should not be stepped on at any cost till the end of the raval. Bhutalis would try to sabotage such a ceremony according to some stories. But a strong bhagat always smelt the presence of bhutalis in the vicinity and drove them off.

Every man was asked to take a bath in the nearby river before

8 eeda peeda translates to problems caused because of possession by an evil spirit. 9 Here, ‘math’ or ‘mandap’ refer to the physical setting within which a Raval operates. 80

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starting the raval. All the men who were going to attend the Rawal were instructed to abstain from any sexual activity. Even basic conversations with their respective wives were prohibited. If there was a defaulter, the bhagat would know it. They would be unable to get possessed by the spirits of the jungle. Discipline was sacrosanct.

It was the vare10 that would possess the individual during a raval.

The vare could be any creature from the landscape, a tiger, a buffalo, a fish, a crow. Every vare had specific characteristics. If a tiger possessed a man, the man would jump on his place. If it was a buffalo, the man would go near the water and take a dip in the water. It was necessary for a person to be possessed. That spirit was the mode through which the bhagat would converse with the hex. There would be some men who would be coming in for the first time to such an event. They would have to first learn how to get possessed by a vare. The bhagat’s subordinates would induce the vare in their bodies. At times, they would violently shake their bodies to introduce the spirit animal into their bodies. At times, the spirit animal would change form. The bhagat would undo the hex by using his charms on the vare. The most interesting feature of the Raval was that all the men were referred to as Mauli or Mother. So whenever there was a Raval, all the men would be addressed as a mother.

The raval continued till the Waghbaras.11 On the last day, all

the men gathered at Ramchandra’s home. Every man brought a cock for sacrifice and some toddy which they themselves extracted as a fee for the bhagat. Ramchandra’s troubles magically got subsided because of the intervention of his father-in-law. His home was never plundered 10 Vare translates to Wind. So the belief is that possession of the body happens as though a wind enters the body of the person being possessed. 11 Waghbaras is the twelfth day of the dark half of Ashwin month of the Hindu calendar which roughly corresponds to September-October post harvest season. Of creatures and crosses

ever again.

Vadu however, failed to get possessed by vare. He had consumed

too much toddy before the ceremony. He kept on falling ill. Eventually he moved away from Ghatalpada and started a small hamlet of his own by the name of Vadupada. Today Vadupada lies about a kilometre away from Ghatalpada. It is commonly known as Gavatepada.12 ***

By around 1920’s the work of the Christian missions had already

begun. Different missions like the American Wesleyan Protestant mission or the Jesuits from Poisar following Roman Catholicism had entered the region. It was through their work, that some of the Warli youth were freed from the debts of the landlords. The modus operandi of the missions was fairly simple. They would repeatedly visit padas and offer financial aid or distribute food. The missions also helped improve the level of education amongst the children in the tribal villages as they opened schools and churches in the region. Slowly, they would ask the people to convert to Christianity. Although the Warli loosely associate themselves to Hinduism, it was a an unorthodox method for practice of Hinduism, especially brahminical Hinduism. For a long time, the tribal communities have been looked down upon by the upper echelons of the Hindu society. The belief that they brought was that the new god would be kind to all and accepted everyone unlike their tribal gods who would get angry at them from time to time. The new god would not require any sort of animal sacrifice either. Regardless of the obvious benefits of conversion, most of the tribal communities opposed the idea of converting to a new religion. For Ghatalpada, the 12 82

Gavatepada literally translates to a hamlet of grass. Of creatures and crosses

idea of a new religion was too far fetched, for it was so far away and from the missions that had begun their work in Palghar, Dahanu and Umbergaon. Ramchandra hardly even knew about the new religion.

Ganpat dada however, hailed from a very different time. He

had finished his basic education unlike any of his ancestors. He was aware of the importance of education and the path that would ensue if he continued to study further. About ten years back, when Venutai gave birth to their youngest son, he was still attached to his original religion. But soon after, Amit fell sick due to a stomach disorder. Ganpat dada and Venutai were not going to resort to the Bhagats like their forefathers. Ganpat dada believed in western medication. He was financially not strong enough at that point in time and contacted the missionaries. The missionaries responded promptly and helped Ganpat dada with the medications. Slowly, Ganpat dada was convinced that it was the new god that would alleviate him from his poverty. About six years back he converted to Roman Catholicism. Soon after, Ganpat dada’s elder brother Vinayak dada followed. The Church offered them a stabler life as opposed to their earlier life. Looking at their cases, two other families from Ghatalpada followed.

As soon as they changed their religion, their relationship to the

village changed drastically. For all practical purposes, Ganpat dada and his family were as Warli as any other family in their hamlet. But they were targeted by the villagers for having changed their religion. Major fights broke out after their conversion. They were deserted. One of the family even shifted back to their original belief. Eventually, Ganpat dada had warned them to stop attacking them. He would have go to the police to lodge a complain for harassment. He never had to go though. Things had mellowed down before that.

Ganpat dada’s relationship with the other Ghatal only improved

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after he came to know about the the Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) or PESA act and how their village was eligible to become a beneficiary under the act. He, by the virtue of his education, was able to comprehend the scope of the act and implement it successfully within the village. A lot of young men gathered under his supervision to start conducting the Gram Sabha every month. The mountain that lies to the western side of the village is now officially referred to as Maalkicha dongar. This means that any forest activity that happens within the boundary of the hill has to happen with the permission of the Gram Sabha of Ghatalpada. With initial success to regularly conduct the Gram Sabha, he started regaining the trust back from the villagers who had once disavowed themselves from him. Looking at their village’s improvement, a few other villages like Khardipada and Kelicha pada also joined in to register themselves under the PESA act. ***

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Fig. 3.1: Cheda, the stone god

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Fig. 3.2: The shrine ofWaghoba

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Fig. 3.3: The Church

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4. Devil’s fruit and movement

Ramchandra Ghatal was the oldest amongst his siblings who

included four sisters and three bothers. Ramchandra’s father, like most other Warli men was extremely fond of toddy. The Warli community as a whole, has developed sophisticated systems to distill local alcohol from various fruits and flowers like the Mahua, date palms, coconuts, figs, dates or even mangoes, as they would be found in abundance in the nearby forests. There would be a contraption made out of two earthen pots, joined by a hollow bamboo tube, one to put the fruit to be distilled into alcohol, and the other to collect the vapours of the alcohol. The toddy was an essential element within all Warli festivals. It was also used during birth and death ceremonies. There would be no social stigma attached to drinking. Both women and men would enjoy alcohol after their marriage from time to time during festivals and ceremonies. Ramchandra would watch carefully as his father would roll up a beedi from the leaves of a shid tree. He had once seen his father reject the proposal to sell his bullock because the buyer would not smoke any beedi. His father believed that if a person would not smoke or drink, they would load the animal to horrible exertion as they would not know

Devil’s fruit and movement

how to relax. Often in the season after the harvest, there would be very little work on the fields. This was the time to tap alcohol from the date palms. A common Warli saying goes: मार मासली न पी सूर , पानी आहे घना दूर ।

(Catch the fish and drink wine, rains are a long time from now)

Right from the collection of the Mahua flowers, to the final

alcohol, the whole process would be very time consuming. In times when there would be a marriage ceremony in the household, it would be expected to provide other invitees to the ceremony with alcohol. It would never be possible for a single household to distill so much alcohol all at once. They would therefore have to rely on other smaller wine shops set up by the Irani settlers in the vicinity of the village.

The Irani immigrants would start small shops selling bootlegged

liquor to the Warli. The Warli families hardly depended on any jobs to provide for any monetary gains. Most of their nutrient requirements would be fulfilled by the virtue of small farms and the forest. This would leave them with no cash at their disposal to buy alcohol from the Irani shopkeepers. This would mean, that the Irani shopkeepers would give out the alcohol on credit to the Warli families. The Warli, with no other asset, would have to mortgage their lands to the Irani shopkeepers.

With a failure to payback the money to the shopkeepers,

hoards of Warli households would lose their lands, making the Irani the landlords. In return, the families, having lost all the means of production, would have to rely on the new landlords to find work on the fields as bonded labourers. If a Warli household would work on the field, it would eventually end up paying back the loan to the landlords. This would mean that the landlords would have to set the Warli families

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free. The landlords would then have to pay much more to employ the same families back on the fields. This would necessitate the landlords to keep the families in continuous debts.

A Warli family was patriarchal in nature. The father, being the

oldest member of the household would wield the largest influence on any decisions regarding the household. The mother would be consulted sometimes, but the final decision would always rest with the father. The children within the household would have no control over any decision making. This would mean that the father would have access to all the money that would be brought home. The Warli men would be enticed into purchasing more alcohol at cheaper rates than the rate of production by the landlords. In return, they would ask the men to bring their families to the fields to work. As the men would get addicted to alcohol, the families would sink further in debt. Generations of Warli men have been subjected to alcohol addiction to lead their families into colossal indebtedness.

The Irani landlords, along with a few other Hindu Brahmin

and Muslim landlords formed a powerful lobby in this region. They realised that it would be much more profitable to cultivate and export chikoo instead of rice paddies. They started converting the rice paddies into chikoo1 orchards. According to one local, ”Chikoo came to Indian shores through an Irani foreman working in a thermal power plant in Guatemala, Central America, or through Cawasji Patel, an Irani seth2, from a nursery in the Hanging Gardens of Bombay, and planted it in his farm in Dahanu.” Irani migration to western India can be traced back to the century when Zoroastrian Iranis fled from Iran to seek refuge from Islamic rule. Parsi migration to India’s western shores during the 20th 1 2 92

chikoo or Sapatu/Sepota/Sapodilla - a small brown fruit. seth translates to a landowner Devil’s fruit and movement

century acted as a precedent for the Iranis, both of whom followed the same faith. Both these communities had come to amass huge wealth in colonial India albeit in different ways and different scales. Although the Iranis had not been able to accumulate as much wealth as the influential Parsis who were shipbuilders and middlemen for the East India Company, they had managed to become seths by amassing land for chikoo cultivation. Thus Irani landowners would employ Warli families such as Ramchandra Ghatal’s to work on their farms.

The Warlis would work as daily wage labourers on these fields,

in conditions of immense turmoil. Warli women especially, were subjected to tremendous amounts of sexual abuse. At times, when a Warli family would fail to pay back the money taken for a marriage, the landlords would keep the newly married Warli woman as a concubine. They were called lagnagadi, literally meaning a marriage servant. The Warli people could find no voice to lay claim to the lands which belonged to them in the erstwhile times. They were weakened, both physically due to the alcohol abuse and morally due to the continuous subjugation. Every landlord would have a henchman on his farm, who would round up all the Warlis and pay them at the end of the day. 3

These henchmen at times were Pathans, tall and hefty people who

would incite fear in the Warli. If a Warli man or a woman was caught stealing money or fruits, they would be severely beaten or even killed. The small brown fruit, which led to this ordeal for the Warli would therefore be referred to as the devil’s fruit.

Tired of the hardships on the chikoo farms, Ramchandra

decided to escape the chikoo farms and migrate to an area, situated faraway in the mountains of Jawhar. Ramchandra Ghatal must have 3 Godavari Parulekar, Jevha Maanoos Jaaga Hoto (Awakening of man), 1970, Popular Prakashan, p. 88 Devil’s fruit and movement

been in his late teens or early twenties when he got married to Sumati, a Warli woman from Dabhlon, a small Warli village to the south of Talasari. How he came to know about this particular patch of land is a mystery. We can only assume that some village elder might have told him about this land. This land had a perennial river flowing around it and a forest in it’s backyard. It was less fertile in comparison to the coastal villages. But it could be worked upon to make paddy farms. Ramchandra was a strong young man. He decided to settle there. Although this region was far from being as developed as the coastal villages or the villages at the foothills of the Sahyadris, there was one remarkable feature. Warli people here suffered from much lesser debts as opposed to the coastal and central counterparts. This was owing to a lesser number of seths and savkars in this region as the region had very poor road connections due to the terrain of the hills. The landlords would hesitate to advance a loan to people from this region because the people here were much poorer. This meant that there would be little debt, but they would starve due to the smaller produce of crop.

The land belonged to a Muslim landlord, who had received

the land as a gift from the Mukne dynasty of Jawhar. The Jawhar or Jowar (now archaic) state was one of the few states to have a ruler who didn’t hail from a dominant Kshatriya caste. It is believed to have been founded by Dulbarrao Mukne, a Mahadeo Koli by caste, after having captured nearly 22 forts and expanding his patrimony. Sultan Mohammad bin Tughlaq recognised the Jawhar State on the fifth of June of 1343, and conferred the title of Raja Nimshah to him. His father being a Poligar,4 had taken the possession of the fort of Jawhar before 4 Poligar was the feudal title for a class of territorial administrative and military governors appointed by the Nayaka rulers of South India (notably Vijayanagara Empire, Madurai Nayakas and the Kakatiya dynasty) during the 16th–18th centuries.

Devil’s fruit and movement

him. The Mukne dynasty joined hands with the Marathas, but soon also separated from the Maratha rulers. This led to a lot of skirmishes over land leading to political instability. Some stability was resumed within the land after the British administration, as the state of Jawhar became a part of the Bombay Presidency under the British Raj as it was included in the Thana Agency. 5The British government recognised the non-forest lands given as gifts as private property. Ramchandra could cultivate the land as he wished over here without having to worry about the henchmen of the Irani landlords. He got into a contract with the Muslim landlord to cultivate rice on his land as a leaseholder.

He had to pay the Muslim landlord in the form of

Khandvari. Khandvari was a form of tax collected by the landlord in the form of grain cultivated by the farmer on the field. Ramchandra would have to pay about 2 khands of rice and nagli each, and one khand of other grain he would cultivate on his field. This was roughly half of his entire year’s produce. This khandvari would continue till 1988, when the land titles were shifted in the name of the Ghatal family from the Muslim landlord because of the Tenancy Act of 1957.

This was a common trend. The Warlis would cultivate rice

corn on lands leased from the landlords. They would not know the area of land under tillage. The unit of measurement to calculate the area under cultivation was to count the number of times it would be ploughed. Agriculture was not a choice for the Warli. It was not even a profit making enterprise either. The Warli have primarily been agriculturists since times immemorial. It is believed however that the Warli folk weren’t the most skilled agriculturists in comparison to the Dhodia and the Kukna tribes living in the same region, who were 5 Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency. Thana District. Parts I and II. Superintendent of Government Printing, Bombay, 1882 Devil’s fruit and movement

supposedly much more industrious and prudent. Being agriculturists, the Warli would hold the soil and the crop in great spiritual reverence. Money wouldn’t exist as we know it. The form of currency would be rice corn. They would exchange rice corn for purchasing salt, dried fish and some such things; things that would not be produced in their lands. The Warli would end up paying much more in proportion to the goods received in return. It was never a cash rich community anyway. The cattle that the Warli would require would be hired from the landlords. Even that would be paid for in terms of rice corn. The bullocks would be hired from the landlords every year in monsoon. Monsoons were times for the tillage. The landlords would impose conditions on the use of the bullocks. The Warli would have to take proper care of the animals. They would have to be well fed and healthy when they would be returned to the landlords. The Warli would also have to give some sundry produce like the vaaluk, a type of locally produced cucumber. They would have to pay upto two maunds6 rice corn to get a single bullock. On the hillier terrains of Jawhar, the soil wouldn’t be so fertile as the soil near the coastal areas. As a result, the produce would be lesser than that on the coastal areas. The water table would be much deeper as well. There was no system for tanks to store water during the harsh summers. This would result in the Warli using varieties of rice that were coarse and rough. They wouldn’t be able to afford using a finer variety of rice gain like the Kolam, which requires more water for its production. They would plant only the ninety day rice varieties.7 A small produce would lead to an exhaustion in the supply for rice seeds 6 1 maund = approximately 37kg 7 Rice is grown in many different ways. The different varieties of rice are based on the number of days it takes for rice corn to mature. So, a variety of rice which takes only ninety days (three months of the peak monsoon-June, July and August) would only be possible to cultivate within this landscape. 96

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for the next year. This would mean that they would have to depend on the landlords for lending them rice seeds. A borrower would have to pay double the rice seeds as interest on the capital borrowed. All this was about to change by the 1940’s with the political mobilisation that would take place against the savkars and the seths to free them from the clutches of the landlords.

As the harvest season would come to a closure, the threshing

process would begin almost immediately. Each member of the family would be involved in this whole cultivation process. The harvest season would culminate into Dussera, the last day of the nine day festival of the Goddess Himai. It would end in some rituals comprising of music and dances. The Warli would thank the gods for a good yield. The rice would be stored in a cool and dark space in the hearth of the house, in massive barrels made out of cane and bamboo fibres called the kanagi. Generally it would be sealed from top with dried Saagwan leaves for a period of about two years before being used for consumption. By the time it would be around November, as the Warli would finish the threshing, new work opportunities to earn some cash would emerge. Grass growing on the varkas lands8, would mean that it could be used as fodder for the cattle. It was converted to being a commodity by the landlords. They would employ cheap labour to get this grass cut and stack them into bundles. This would be sold to the dairies in Mumbai.9 8 Fallow lands generally found outside villages, on mountain slopes where cultivation is not possible. It is considered as a waste land in the Forest Act of 1878 and is claimed as a property of the Imperial crown. 9 There was a strike organised by the Maharashtra Rajya Kisan Sabha (affiliated to the Communist Party of India-Marxist) in 1945 to demand for higher rates from the landlords (about Rs. 2.5/day). The strike led to a shortage of fodder in the dairy. As a result, the Milk commissioner of Bombay had to enter into negotiations with the Grass traders association. The strike was eventually called off with the traders raising the wages.

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The grass cutting industry was only developing in areas which were accessible by roads. This would mean that the Warli from Jawhar and Mokhada would have to travel to the coastal areas, which were fairly well connected by roads, to seek out for work during this time of the year.

From December onwards, right upto the outset of monsoons

in June, there would hardly be any work. The farmlands would not be tilled or cultivated upon in this time because the cattle would be left to graze on land. People would not keep the cattle in sheds, the bulls and the cows were supposed to move around finding their own food. This would mean that any inter cropping done during this time of the year would be susceptible for the cattle to graze. It has been a customary practice in the tribal communities. Even today, the people refrain from any intercropping because of this reason. Some people would set their bullocks free for weeks. The bullocks would return to their sheds after a while on their own. This time would be the time to level the soil for the cultivation to happen in the subsequent year. The small brushwood would be burnt on the fields along with small branches of timber found from the forests called phaanti. The father would keep himself busy with this work on the field. As the cattle would keep loitering around the landscapes, the mother and the children would go around in the vicinity of the village, collecting cow dung and other materials to mend the house. In rare cases, some families would find work with the landlords as domestic help. But this was extremely rare in the hilly regions of Jawhar. It would only happen in the coastal areas near Dahanu.

Today, the conditions of life in this region have changed

substantially. Road connections have been developed in most of the remote areas. The men find work as construction labour in Rabale, a 98

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town near Mumbai. They travel to Rabale each year to work on massive construction projects to earn a living. Every year in Diwali, as everyone gathers in Jawhar for the yearly jatra, the men move around the town in groups. Here they get scouted by the contractors who come from Rabale. They approach these contractors who employ them and take them to Rabale in buses on the same day. Some men also find work as wood fellers. The Warli are considered to be excellent wood fellers in the Konkan region. Some contractors take these men (mostly young) with them to areas near Ratnagiri. These areas have been planted with teak forests by the Forest Department. The private contractors work as independent agents having obtained permission to transport the timber extracted from these forests. The women stay back in the villages as they are expected to look after the children within the Warli community. ***

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Epilogue

As I began working on this project, I was confronted by a

plethora of questions that emerged from the many stories I encountered. Why is it that the systems of organisation I was taught were rendered useless in a context such as this? Why is it that I don’t imagine my home in the same way a Warli imagines? Why do I imagine caste and other social categories so differently as opposed to the people in this region? Why do I find an opaque curtain between me and the other people over here? At the first glance, one might find these questions quite irrelevant. But they are important questions, for they are the probes that we use to study the difference in the different schools of thought. The point of this intervention was to examine if these sociocultural practices formed a symbiotic relationship with the lived environment or not. The stories that were mentioned earlier aim at establishing this exact relationship. One realises that it is not always merely blind faith that makes up such stories, but rather a sense of deep rooted purpose that exists within the realm of the people that share this relationship with the forest, the form of which will always remain an area of contention for naturalist modes.

100

I have chosen to probe into four different areas in order to better Epilogue

understand these relationships: the collective, the home, the faith, and migrations. This list can be extended further to many more things and the work remains to be done in those aspects for mapping the difference. So what did we learn from the rigmarole of investigations?

Despite the many physiological discontinuities that are evident

between the human and the non human organisms, there exists a constant communication of the souls which don’t exist as independent entities, but rather as a continuum. This forms the basis for the animist thought as it encompasses all living creatures under its network of sociability. Another aspect which I found peculiar to this territory was the fact that there were no exclusive streams. The differences that existed, only existed linguistically. As far as the study goes, there seemed to be no exclusive professionals, no impositions of linear time, no compulsion for a hereditary lineage, no deliberation to create and maintain social assemblies, hardly any taste for a materialistic life. It almost comes across as though there is a lack of necessity felt by the people to care for or protect the forests they live within.

This position is in stark contrast to the naturalist mode of

imagination, where the concepts of exchange (free market mechanisms) and protection of the environmental resources form the ethos of modern day democracies. They are built on the ideals and values of providing for freer markets and protection to the people that populate the countries. But can we say the same for the non human aspects of society? Such aspects generally find themselves pushed to the margins by the virtue of their lack of developed faculty of a moral conscience. The areas within which the non human aspects of nature find protection happen to be the environment policies. This protection that gets afforded to these elements roots from the interests that humans derive from them by the conversion into goods and services and their Epilogue

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consumption. This when seen from an animistic perspective cannot be said to be truly inclusive. Capitalism, disguised as naturalism therefore finds a way to see nature through the lens of subordination of the non human species for their exchange values and benefit to the humans. In a world where inequality thrives in enormous proportions within different collectives of people, it seems highly unlikely that non human species will find any autonomy greater than what is currently granted to them by the people in power. The naturalist machine also in part manages to demonise the animist mode, and extending beyond just the mode, the communities that thrive within the immediate context of the forest regions citing a lack of scientific thought by using propaganda as a tool to sway public opinion in its favour.

This difference between the two imaginations has been a source

of continuous conflict not only in this region, but in most other regions in the country. The other form that this conflict takes up can also be seen as the dialogue between the urban and the rural, wherein the urban cores import human resources, land, and water from the rural peripheries and export their brand of urbanisation. This is evident from the many stories that we encountered that the life of people is changing quite fast as the urban life entices the lives of quite a few people who intend to move themselves to the city. When the people move to the city, they take their rural experience with them. And as they return, they bring the city back with them. The region thus finds itself stuck in this conundrum where on one hand, the all pervasive urban force finds its way into the rural life, and the rural practices adhere themselves tightly to the everyday lives of people.

The study of the weave between nature and culture gives us a

much more nuanced picture of the way society functions. It can provide us with a fresh perspective to redraw our maps and reimagine our 102

Epilogue

position with respect to the natural resources by radically altering our point of view of how we as a collective species shape and are shaped by our non human context. This mode of operation is and probably always stay as a topic which will create some degree of polarisation within the society we thrive within. The task that lays ahead is to find ways of negotiating through our differences and finding methods that we could deploy as a collective. How can we draw from this difference to build a framework to maintain this delicate balance between nature and culture? Can this difference lead us to think in ways that can radically change our landscapes? ***

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Bibliography

• Bombay Gazetteer, Thana, Volume XIII, Part I • Enthoven, R.E., 1922, Tribes and Castes of Bombay Presidency, Vol. I, Cosmo Publications, New Delhi • Descola, Phillipe, 2013 , Beyond Nature and Culture, Janet Lloyd, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press • Gadgil, Madhav, and Guha, Ramchandra, 1992, This Fissured land, Oxford University Press • Parulekar, Godavari, 1970, Awakening of man, Nikhil Gavankar, trans. Popular Prakashan • Rajwade, V.K., 1924, Mahikavatichi Bakhar (Marathi), Chitrashala Press, Pune • Save K.J., 1945, The Warlis, Padma Publications Ltd. Bombay • Vadu, Madhukar, 2018, The Mystical World of Warlis, Notion Press, Chennai • Wilson, John, 1876, Aboriginal tribes of the Bombay presidency, Vol. II, Government Central Press

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Bibliography

SEA Studio

Research Fellowship Programme 2018-2019

Thinking Forest: Decoding the Warli Ontology

Articles inside

Epilogue

3. Of creatures and crosses

Bibliography

4. Devil’s fruit and movement

Preface

1. An ecology of collectives