Keskal, Orchha, Kanker, Gumma, Anukumba… a list that sounds almost like music. They are all places in the heart of Central India, hidden in the valleys of the Eastern Ghats, sheltered by the great forests of Chhattisgarh and watered by rivers like the Mahanadi and the Godavari. And they are home to a myriad tribes — the Baiga, the Agaria, the Maria and Muria, the Saora, the Juang, the Bondo, their names as musical as the places they inhabit.
It’s a world that famous anthropologist Verrier Elwin made his own and Das Gupta follows in his wake. Captivated by Elwin’s books that capture the lives of these tribes, Das Gupta spent more than three decades travelling to these villages, hoping to catch glimpses of the magic evoked by the books.
An enterprise like this cannot but be fascinating. Especially when you realise that it is not something that can be duplicated anymore. Das Gupta’s description of his last trip in 2003 is, in fact, a poignant acceptance of this. In search of the Baiga, Elwin’s first love, Das Gupta travels to the foot of the Amarkantak plateau only to find that the tribe has long diminished, driven out of the forests by new laws, forced towards cities and jobs, the faded tattoos on the faces of the elderly the last visible vestiges of their culture.
The process of loss is not so recent either. Travelling through Gumma in the 1970s in search of ittal, the ornate rice-paste drawings that the Saora make on the walls of their homes to propitiate ancestors, Das Gupta finds entire villages converted to Christianity, old customs abandoned and their precious ittals overlaid with a clay wash.
And yet, the descriptions of the ghotul (the adolescent dormitory system), the dances and the bazaars, make you sneakily long to also go plunging into deep forests to discover these lost tribes and their way of life for yourself. Das Gupta is best when he talks of his own encounters, describing the people he met, the traditional instruments like the kuranrajan that the shamans play before their divinations, or the plaintive songs he recorded copiously. In that sense, the book really takes off only from the fifth chapter or so. Some of his best passages are those that describe the Muria festival of marhai, life in Jaidev’s Dhokra-making family, and evenings at the ghotuls. He is also scrupulous in establishing the geography, with road and train routes.
It’s an evocative travelogue with an old-world charm, but where it loses out heavily is in the quality of the editing. The two sections on Verrier, for instance, are repetitive. Names are prefixed randomly with Mr or Shri or nothing at all. Awkward syntax (‘the conductor roughly handled one of the adivasi women’), stiff sentences and redundancies abound. Good, tight editing could have made this interesting book vastly more readable.