The Kattunayakans of Mudumalai

THE KATTUNAYAKANS

When I started this blog, I did not intend it to be all about adivasis or our work here. I still do not intend it to be. It is just coincidental that thoughts about the adivasi have been occupying my mind a lot these days. It could be because after many years I am now interacting more directly at the village level – thanks to all the work that’s happening around the implementation of the newly enacted Forests Rights Act and the fact that the AMS is going all out to kickstart a cultural revival process.

It could also be because this is the season when all over the place “Kaavu” festivals (see my earlier blog on Vellutha) are being celebrated and the spirits of the adivasi are working on me!!

Anyway, this post was triggered by a conversation at a meeting with the Kattunayakans living around the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve.

I am often accused of over romanticising tribals – especially when I talk of their sharing ways and egalitarian values. My view is based quite a bit on my experience of Bihar and to some extent from our early days in Gudalur. Sadly, over the last few years in Gudalur we are seeing many of these values being eroded by the dominance of non-tribal culture. But the other day, I was with some of the Kattunayakans of Srimadurai area to discuss honey collection this year. The Kattunayakans are a honey gathering tribe. (Mari wrote about them in the New Internationalist recently. (http://www.newint.org/features/2009/09/01/tribal-peoples/). For the last couple of years we have been trying to set up a collective honey selling business.

During the course of the discussion while we were trying to assess how much honey might be available they said there was very little this year. There was almost nothing in Kerala and Kattunayakans from there were coming to Mudumalai to collect honey. I asked whether this was not a problem for them – was there no concept of territory and they all said, “ayye! adhe onnum parshnam alla”. (Shucks! That’s not a problem at all). It seemed like I had asked a stupid question. “The forest is for everybody and they too are our people and they too are dependant on what the bees give them”.

I asked what happens if two of you come upon the same hives. Doesn’t that happen? They said of course it does because we all know the trees on which there are bee hives. So sometimes when we get to a tree somebody is already there taking the honey.

So what do you do? “If there is only hive we will move on but if there are four or five we will all take the honey together and then share it. We’ll take two and they’ll take two”.

Learning young

They then went on to say that sometimes when they are coming from the forest with a lot of honey they may come across another team who has not had much success. “In that case we will give them some ten litres so that they can sell it and get money to buy rice for their family”.

“Do they return it”?

“Well maybe. If they get a lot of honey and they see us they may give it back to us. But we don’t keep accounts like that. Sometimes someone else may give us when we do not have. So this way and that way we all help each other”.

Appukuttan from Chembakolly said, “Sometimes when we are in the forest collecting honey and we have no rice someone else may give us some. When our team was in the forest last week we were searching for hives for two days. Finally we found a tree with many hives but we had already finished our rice and did not have enough rice to stay overnight and harvest the honey. Another group coming out of the forest saw us and gave us the rice they had. So we stayed and collected the honey from all the hives”.

For the umpteenth time in my life I felt once again humbled by the adivasi way of life. It was really heart warming to see when everything around is changing and changing so fast, there are still people like this who hang on to their core values.

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~ by Stan on May 26, 2010.