The Adivasi World: One With The Earth

If you sign this paper we will become brothers. We will no longer fight. We will give you this land and these waters “as long as the grass shall grow and the rivers run.”

The lands and waters they gave us did not belong to them to give. Under false pretenses we signed. After drugging by drink, we signed. With a mass of gunpower pointed at us, we signed. With a flotilla of war ships at our shores, we signed. We are still signing. We have found no peace in this act of signing.

***

If you sign this paper we will become brothers. We will no longer fight. We will give you this land and these waters in exchange “as long as the grass shall grow and the rivers run.”

Put your hand on this bible, this blade, this pen, this oil derrick, this gun and you will gain trust and respect with us. Now we can speak together as one.

We say, put down your papers, your tools of coercion, your false promises, your posture of superiority and sit with us before the fire. We will share food, songs, and stories. We will gather beneath starlight and dance, and rise together at sunrise.

from ‘Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings’
by Joy Harjo, a mem­ber of the Mvskoke Nation, belonging to Oce Vpofv (Hick­o­ry Ground)

In a scarlet landscape, we went looking for an Adivasi poet called Sushma Asur. We put our faith in the evidential value of poetry. To know what is out there, some journeys must be undertaken. Poet William Carlos Williams said a poem is a field of action. It is also a field of activism. Like Jacinta Kerketta’s poem ‘The responsibility for our self-preservation’ that she recited to me in Ranchi in September when we met.

***

In this redness, bauxite mines have left open pits that look like mirrors stitched on to a rag in these parts, where cell phones gasp for connection. They say the minerals are a curse in Jharkhand. There is digging and plundering. There are many deaths. There are songs and stories. There is another religion outside of the constructs of heaven and hell, good and evil. The striped red and white flags are everywhere. They call themselves Sarna. Theirs is a animistic religion. They worship the hills, the forests and the rivers. Displacement and ‘development’ are their conditions. The pits are evidence. Their poems bear witness.

People have fallen in these pits and died. Like this woman’s brother. She lives in Jobhipat, a village in Netarhat, and belongs to the Asur tribe, one of the eight particularly vulnerable tribal groups (PVTGs) in Jharkhand.  The UNESCO has listed the Asur language as ‘definitely endangered’ with only 7,000 speakers left.

ALSO READ: Adivasis In Jharkhand Want Their Own Religion, Will RSS Let Them Have It?

In the night, it was pitch dark. The wind groaned as it passed through the branches and tried to force itself through the thatched roofs of the few houses here. The old Adivasi man talked about the plight of being Adivasi and then broke into a dance. Their voices competed with the wind’s pitch. Their song drowned everything else in the end. Even the night. It was a song about the jungle, the death of ants, anguish, loss. They sing in Asuri. A Sarhul song of lament about the destruction by fire in a forest. It was about the betrayal suffered by the ants. It said the insects have all flown away. Sorrow sometimes doesn’t need a language. All it needs is an expression.

“We carry the stigma of being Asur. They say our ancestors were demons but our religion is Sarna. You have included us in those stories but we are outside of them. There is no heaven or hell in our belief system. When we die, we go nowhere,” the man said. “We are the first settlers. Why do you want to own us?”

On the way, there were churches and temples. There were also Vanvasi Kalyan Kendras and a scheme for Adivasis who have converted to Christianity to return to Hinduism. But you use return only in the context of a former place. The indigenous people are now asserting their own religious identity. They don’t want to classify themselves as ‘Other’ anymore.

Soon after Droupadi Murmu had been nominated as the President of India, the long-standing demand by Adivasi leaders and parties, including the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), to recognise Sarna as a separate religion of indigenous communities in the next Census gained more momentum. This is against the backdrop of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) ideological framework that seeks to subsume Adivasis within the larger Hindu identity by using the term ‘vanvasi’ for them. During his campaign for the Gujarat Assembly elections in Mahuva, a tribal-dominated reserve constituency, Congress leader, Rahul Gandhi, said the BJP doesn’t tell the Adivasis that they are the first owners of Hindustan. “They tell you that you live in the jungles, meaning they don’t wish that you live in cities, or that your children become engineers, doctors, fly planes, speak in English…” he said.

ALSO READ: Why Adivasis Are Claiming Sarna As Their Religion

“Calling them Adivasi would mean an acknowledgment that they are outside any organised religion like Christianity, Hindusim and Islam,” said Meghnath, a filmmaker and activist who has spent more than 40 years in Jharkhand. It was in the early 1950s that the Akhil Bharatiya Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (ABVKA) was set up in Jashpur in Chhattisgarh by Ramakant Keshav Deshpande and M S Golwalkar for the ‘Hinduisation’ of Adivasis for national integration and to address the distancing of the Adivasis from the Hindu religion.  In an interview with The Indian Express, RSS leader, Ram Madhav, said they call them ‘vanvasis’ “because Adivasi means original inhabitants or aboriginal, which implies all others are from outside. But the Sangh believes that we all are original inhabitants of this continent.”

A special Assembly session was convened in Jharkhand in November 2020 to pass a resolution to recognise the Sarna religion and include it as a separate code in the 2021 Census. But the BJP-led central government is yet to come to a decision. Meanwhile, the assertion is evident. In poetry and in optics like the flags. In their songs and in their resistance.

***

Stories connect. Memories intersect. Ours, theirs. Long ago, in New York State’s Onondage reservation, they told me a story about the origins of the earth. Before Earth, there was only Water. And there was Skyland where a great tree had been uprooted, which left a deep pit. A woman fell into it. Two swans rescued her. A turtle offered to bear the Earth on its back and the woman was placed on Earth. That’s how we came to this Earth. In Hindu mythology, the Hindu deity Vishnu was reincarnated as the turtle Kachhapa that carried the weight of the world on its back.

ALSO READ: The Colonialism Within: Adivasi Lands Being Colonised In Cahoots With Corporates

There are numerous creation myths. Stories also overlap and follow their own paths. Like memories. Like losses.

Many years later, in a small hamlet in Jharkhand’s Netarhat, an Adivasi poet told me there is no ‘other world’ for the soul to go. When people die, they just die, she said. There is no reincarnation. They reunite with their ancestors, become spirits and roam on earth. Like the Onondaga tribe believed. That made loss seem more bearable. The histories of their dispossession were also similar. They had been forced off their land in the name of ‘development.’ Their religious identity was also being co-opted.Conversions and coercions have become part of the politics of homogeneity. From the windows at the Syracuse University, you could see the hills and the lake. ‘The Syracuse University College of Arts and Sciences would like to acknowledge with respect the Onondaga Nation, firekeepers of the Haudenosaunee, the indigenous peoples on whose ancestral lands Syracuse University now stands,’ read the land acknowledgment at Syracuse University where I studied. The People of the Hills, as they were called, are a tribe of Iroquoian-speaking North American Indians who lost around 95 percent of their land to the State of New York over the years. Stories of such oppression are out there. But we remain insulated. The ‘Other’ is always a threat. We have almost always oscillated between the binaries of hell and heaven. That’s the politics of control.

In Jharkhand, there were no such land acknowledgments. Only memories and stories. Evidences and witnesses. Poems and songs.

***

We found Sushma Asur in Sakhuapani in Netarhat. She read out her poem. To the ancestors.

How do we preserve our memories of you?
O ancestors of the earth! O ancestors of the skies
O our parents! O the elders!
Providing you with food was our forest’s responsibility
The fields were your means of livelihood
This vast plateau was your school
The hills and waterfalls were your guides
O ancestors of the earth! O ancestors of the skies
O our parents! O the elders!
We will learn to sing and dance like you
We will definitely learn to live our lives like you
We will learn to dance like you.

And we danced like her. In solidarity.

(This appeared in the print edition as "One With The Earth")