1. An ecology of collectives

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

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 Dr. Wilson, Aboriginal Tribes II 3 V. K. Rajwade, Mahikavatichi Bakhar, 1924, p. 82

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

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

Fig. 1.1: The Kanagi/Kanaba

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

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

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

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