IS ‘heritage’ a word that promises reverence for life or does it demarcate bloody battlefields of contentious memories and traditions? ‘Shringar Bhum’ and ‘Abujhmarh’ are words in the language of Koitors and the state respectively. These lay down different terms of reference for the social construction of the one and the same geographical space in North Bastar, Chhattisgarh.

This geographical space is Shringar Bhum for the Koitor. Here they live and belong. The Koitors hold that the creation of Shringar Bhum is the work of Talurmutte, mother earth, and her consort Kanga. The making of human settlements here is the work of their progeny, the ancestors who are addressed as parorpaditors in the origin epic. In this epic, in the beginning, Talurmutte was sitting on top of a hill, crying as she looked at the waters which submerged the earth. It goes on to describe how different living beings of the forest – the crow, the wild boar, the snails, the millipedes, the earthworms… – reclaimed the earth with all its flora and fauna and distributed the water in rivers and lakes. The story goes on to describe how Kanga learnt from Talurmutte a variety of skills to live in the forest: these ranged from making a home, celebrating festivals, cultivating food and performing rites’ for the dead.

The word Talurmutte designates the forest potential, its capacity for regeneration through self-activity. This self-activity is the basis of seamless Shringar Bhum. The Koitors experience this living space between the earth and the sky, adorned and ornamented by life processes unfolding in the light and shade of the sun and the moon.

This is known to the Koitors from their detailed knowledge of different life cycles from birth to dissolution – of human beings, their penu (spirits), the weeds, the flowers, the fruit, of bamboo and of animals. The knowledge of several such simultaneous cycles of time of varying durations is the basis for reverence for the variety and abundance of life and of all food gathering. It conjures up a ‘universe of the forest’ as a living space. This universe is internalized by the Koitors.

 

The Koitors of the Nuruttee clan say that they came down the hills of Jagdalpur to Neygameta and from there to Kokameta. They recollect that several generations ago men returned home from work with their bodies covered with sweet smelling pollen dust. On observing this, the women insisted on shifting their settlement to this land of flowers. To begin with the men refused, but the women persisted. The men were eventually persuaded and the settlement shifted to this land of flowers – Kokameta.

Kokameta they found to be a livable place – there was water, the soil was good and there were a variety of plants and animals. However, to make a settlement here, the Nurutte Koitor had to take permission from the non-human inhabitants of this space. For this they performed a ritual: un-husked rice grains were kept overnight with an invocation to the non-human living beings requesting them to express their views. In the morning, the elders and the leski (a ritual specialist) read a message in the pattern arrangement of grains – ‘the non-human beings had cleared the way for the settlement’.

The village elders point to a tree which had been planted by their ancestors on Neygameta hill to mark the settlement. The name of the tree is ‘poriovehkal’ (literally, say your name). Translated into everyday behaviour, the name of the tree is never to be uttered. Except for this tree, the Nuruttee elders point out that there is no trace or residue of the work of their ancestors who lived on this hill. Every other product of human work dissolved back into the forest. This is referred to as lesna, to lose track of.

This ritual divination highlights an important aspect of the forest civilization, namely mutual recognition of the presence of the Koitors and of the ‘universe of the forest’. Embedded in the ritual is a perception that human settlements are grounded in – ‘that which is not the product of human work’. This constitutes the work of nature. It includes the entire world of non-human nature. The ritual is the work of the Koitors; its teleology is not to encroach into spaces where nature is on its own and in its own space. Embedded in this ritual is the principle of self-regulation, that is, to not claim that which is not a product of one’s own work. Its boundaries are drawn by the diverse time cycles in nature.

The work of the Koitors is interdependent with the work of nature. A ritual describes the reciprocity and communion between the Koitors and the forest universe. This shapes the self-regulatory Koitor identity (poriovehkal) in nature’s own time and space in the forest (lesna). Reverence for that which is not a product of ones own work is the principle of creation. An expression of this principle is that a Koitor’s personal belongings are no more than what can be carried.

In Shringar Bhum, we see a social democracy at work with reverence for ‘all that is not the product of human work’, that is life.

 

Abujhmarh is spread across the districts of Bijapur, Narayanpur and Dantewada of Bastar division in Chhattisgarh and covers approximately 3900 sq km. It is part of the left wing extremism (LWE) affected states in India which include Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.

Abujhmarh literally means undefined hills (abujh – cannot be defined; marh – hill). This name describes the forest as a wasteland (in so far as it does not generate any revenue) and does not acknowledge the presence of the Koitor forest dwellers in this region. It is on the margins, underdeveloped and backward. The people living here have been labelled Hill Marias. They are wild, bound by tradition, childlike, poor.

 

The Government of India wants to bring the benefits of development programmes to the people and thereby ‘mainstream’ them. For instance, it is expected that PESA (Panchayats – Extension to Scheduled Areas – Act) 1996 and the Forest Rights Act 2006 will help mainstream these people. These legislations are designed to meet the requirements of a capital-intensive economy that extracts natural resources at a rate that is several times faster than the rate at which nature can regenerate.

Abujhmarh in the Narayanpur district is a classic example of poor governance. It is a 4000 square kilometre area comprising 260 villages inhabited by tribals, particularly of the Maria group. The terrain here is no doubt difficult. However, there can be no justification for the area not having been surveyed to date, and the absence of any regular revenue or police post in the region. No wonder the Maoists established a ‘liberated zone’ in Abujhmarh.¹ Very little is known about the Maoist agenda.

‘In the primitive economy of Abujhmarh, the left ultras have even designed small irrigational projects. Maoists are referred to as dadas by the tribes who carry out slash and burn cultivation. People’s courts or jan adalats are justice delivery systems and Mao Zedong’s Red Book is the sacred text.

‘Revenue management is a serious part of the alternative establishment, which propagates planned development through land sharing, cooperative farming and banking food grains and seeds. Abujhmarh is Janatana Sarkar, the liberated place, which in Maoist parlance would be the model for replication across rural India.’²

 

Shringar Bhum is reverential to life; Abujhmarh is a contentious field irreverential to life. Shringar Bhum and Abujhmarh represent irreconcilable cosmologies and political economies. The collective conscience represented by Abujhmarh does not cognize the life processes of Shringar Bhum.

The performative of Abujhmarh is a spectacle of exchanges – of a bullet for a bullet and a life for a life between the Indian state and the LWE groups. Its shadow swallows up the Koitors. In this retributive violence there is irreverence for life. It has blurred the boundaries between ethical and unethical, fiction and fact, misdeed and crime, legitimate and illegitimate, truth and deception. For the people the sense of social order is replaced with a sense of insecurity. This place is not worthy of living; it is a no-man’s land, without a character and being of its own.

The social construction of Ahujhmarh as a bloody battlefield is the culmination of a history of contention and confrontation between the state and LWE groups beginning in the 1960s. In the 1960s, the conflict between them was over the ownership and use of land. The contention now is over how best to harness people’s capacities and labour power. The state view is that this can be best done by education and bringing them into the modern political and economic system governed by the market. The LWE groups view is that this agenda of the state in practice has only deprived them of their land and their livelihood.

Over the years from 1960 onwards, this social construction of Abujhmarh has drawn sustenance from the binaries of modern objective scientific knowledge. These binaries are objective-subjective; knowledge-ignorance; science-magic; truth-superstition; reason-passion; culture-nature; male-female; mind-body; advanced-backward; developed-underdeveloped; strong-weak. These people are backward and underdeveloped.

 

The state and the LWE groups accuse each other of pushing the people to the margins, into poverty. To any one side the other is not merely an opposition but the enemy. This language of retribution terminates life. It totally absorbs the people and renders social relations unproductive.

As the line between the binaries get more strongly defined, the exchange of a bullet for a bullet and a life for a life escalates. Equally, as the retributive exchanges escalate, the lines that separate the binaries get strongly defined. People are under pressure to be active either with the state or with the LWE. Here the relations of power between these people and the outside world are constructed by both, with the binaries modernity-tradition; civilization-savagery; us-them; centre-margin; civilized-wild; wealthy-poor; nurturing-dependent; nation states-non-state processes.

History has shown time and again that genocide is not just mass murder of people. Its more subtle and insidious form is the suffocation of the collective conscience by depriving people of language to articulate their life aspirations and culture.

The togetherness of language and life is important not just for representation of the collective conscience of a society at a particular juncture of history. Over and above this, togetherness is manifest in the making of a promise and in the commitment to uphold what is promised – to not lying, to not deceiving, to not betraying, to not committing perjury. These are interdependent, in so far as to include people’s voices and to abide by this promise is the basis of democracy as well of reverence for life.

 

Agamben in his work, The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath, which is concerned with the performative experience of language, shows the togetherness of… life and language, action and words... in which man, …put himself at stake in language, …can promise himself to the logos.³ He argues that, ‘Religion and law do not pre-exist the performative experience of language… but rather they were invented to guarantee the truth and trustworthiness of the logos…’⁴

When religion and law do not guarantee truth and trustworthiness and become instruments of a particular collective conscience, then social relations become unproductive and life is under threat.

The collective conscience represented by Abujhmarh demonstrates this. The retributive exchanges between the state and the LWE groups use religion and law to legitimize the collective conscience of their respective camps. This is not reasonabled for it is grounded in human beings as believers and not speaking subjects and, as political beings not commitment to the logos of reasonabled modes of being. There is no time and space for reverence of life represented by Shringar Bhum.

Justice regulates life. Justice is deeply embedded in the way social construction of words (the terms of reference) relates to life. Words that care for and enrich social relations are life giving and those that do not are life terminating. A sense of justice is manifest in the trustworthiness of the words exchanged between human beings. It draws out the performative of language that unveils the nature of human being as a speaking subject with a collective conscience and as a political being who is at stake in language.

Shringar Bhum, the ‘Universe of the Forest’, is aranya, its logos is conjured with reverence for life. This universe is home for all living beings; it enables altruism and exchange between species on the one hand and it inhibits transgression and encroachment of one species into the boundaries of other species. Embedded in this universe is a notion of democracy that ensures that the well-being of an individual need not undermine the well-being of the collective and vice versa.

This heritage is on the frontiers. It is beyond the grasp of worldviews that are grounded in the fetish of monuments, the historical dated time and the power of the written word. This fetish determines the substance of justice articulated by the collective conscience and consciousness of ‘a’ people alone. It has little reverence for life. It lays down terms of reference and procedures to terminate life.

Today this heritage is being destroyed by our current notion of modern state-democracy, which has no reverence for life, as its form and substance has been derived from a worldview that endeavours to conquer, tame and control nature.

 

* Some parts of this essay were published earlier in Leaf Litter (special edition), January 2017, for a souvenier dedicated to R.C.V.P. Noronha, ICS (1916-1982).

Footnotes:

1. Prakash Singh, Irregular Warfare: The Maoist Challenge to India’s Internal Security (JSOU Report 12.9). The JOSU Press, Florida, 2012, p. 82.

2. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/Red+ terror/1/4146.html

3. Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language (translsted by Adam Kotsko). Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2011, p. 69.

4. Ibid., p. 59.