When I decided to start a blog my son talked about the danger of becoming very personal and how it was difficult to strike a balance. I felt this would not be a problem for me because I had no intention of sharing anything personal. I intended this to be a diary of thoughts – not feelings. But sometimes something happens that so dominates your life and the dividing line between thought and feeling becomes blurred.

My only brother died this July. He was just 61. Single and diabetic he did not take care of himself nor did he have someone to do that for him. This resulted in the inevitable – a massive heart attack. After 16 days in the ICU, he gave up.

I was completely unprepared for it. And it has taken these many months for me to slowly take control of my life and attempt to bring it back on even keel.

Restarting my blog is perhaps one of the signs that I am succeeding. Objective thought – critical and analytical – and the ability to articulate it is perhaps an indication of emotional healing.

There are so many thoughts that have been bottled up during these past months – all vying with each other for supremacy of expression – that I don’t know where to begin. Perhaps the best would be to start with some of the reflections that arose from coping with the loss of a brother.

A continuing of the catharsis I suppose….

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.

VELLUTHA

Reading my last post about poverty being a lived experience – Mari said I should explain what it meant. I was thinking of how to explain this when I bumped into Vellutha at our adivasi school, Vidyodaya. He was there to teach the children the “Koratti Nadagam” – a folk theatre of the Paniyas. His tiny frame of 4′ 11” hides a giant of a character. Among Vellutha’s many claims to fame is the fact that he has been the one of the main architects along with Chathi, another legendary character, to popularise and reserve the Koratti Nadagam.

But Vellutha occupies a different place in my memory and experience. Meeting Vellutha after nearly 15 years brought back those memories.

Vellutha…

It is 1985. Mari and I are barely a year into our work with a local NGO that runs the Paniya Rehabilitation Farm in Kayunni. It is supposedly a 100 acre farm which was given to this organisation to rehabilitate 25 Paniya families who were freed from bonded labour. I say supposedly – because even when the land was granted more than 15 acres had been encroached upon by non-tribals. Part of the encroachment included the “kaavu” (sacred grove) of the Paniyas. Originally it was over 3 acres but a non-tribal from Kerala had taken possession and every year had increased his possession inch by inch till only a small tiny bit – the core of the Kaavu was left. With a water spring, a huge tree and a white rock – the hallmark of all Paniya Kaavus. That year the Chettan – I’ll call him Varghese – had grabbed the last little bit of land and planted ginger on it. (The Paniyas call all the Kerala immigrants “Chettans” meaning older brother and supposed to denote respect but the Paniyas use the term in a more derogatory manner). For years the Paniyas had watched his greedy grabbing of their land in near silence – there were occasional but ineffective protests. Not having title and the land being classified in government records as waste land not a sacred grove, the Paniyas didn’t have a leg to stand on. But when Varghese planted ginger all around their “rock” which is symbolic representation of one of their spirit gods – it was the last straw.

Vellutha and a host of others Paniyas came to us and complained. We referred it to the District Collector who looked at the records and said there was not much he could do unless we took possession of the land. With no other recourse a group of Paniyas marched off to uproot the ginger and repossess the last bit of their sacred grove. Naturally their was an uproar. Varghese came bellowing.

Standing on a narrow bund he accosted me and shouted, “You are a trouble maker. For years we have lived with these Paniyas in peace. Now you are coming and inciting them”.

Before I could reply Velllutha pushed in between us two tall non-tribals and looking up at Varghese he said, “ We never ever lived in peace with you. You sat on our heads all these years and so you never knew our pain. Now for the first time we have taken you off our heads and put you on the ground and you are angry because of the discomfort”. Varghese had nothing to say.

Vellutha, sums up for me what “living in poverty means”. For most people – it is about hunger, poor health, lack of education etc. There is no doubt that these are all signs of poverty – extreme poverty. But this does not capture the daily and constant humiliation of “having someone sitting on your head”. The utter powerlessness of this experience, the inability to do anything about one’s situation. This is the pain that Vellutha described that day.

But to end this post on a happier note: the Paniyas did get their land back. But more this was what sparked off a whole lot of people from other villages coming to us and telling us about how they had lost their land. And this was what finally led us to setting up ACCORD. (www.adivasi.net)

And finally after so many years the AMS has just launched a campaign to revive their cultural identity and heritage – reviving and protecting their sacred groves lies at the heart of it. Just a couple of weeks ago I participated in ‘adyantharam’ at the Kundakeynni Kaavu which is Chathi and Vellutha’s main kaavu.

The “adayantharam” at the Kundakeynni Kaavu

But that’s another post…..

At a large Oxfam gathering a couple of years ago, one of the speakers raved and ranted about how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. During the dinner table discussion at the end of the day, a friend strongly disagreed with this statement. He argued that while poverty was still widespread, there was enough evidence to show that people’s income levels were rising. He even threw my own figures, about the progress in Gudalur, back at me. When we began work in 1986, we found that the average income of an adivasi family was around Rs.300-600 per month. 20 years later it was around 2500 – 3000 rupees per month. Even allowing for inflation this was a significant rise in incomes. Well above the $1 a day (debatable) benchmark of absolute poverty. So how can we claim that the poor are getting poorer?

I had and continue to have issues with this argument. First, which many people have argued, income poverty is a very narrow understanding of poverty. Increase in income need not necessarily mean an increase in power, and most certainly we cannot assume that income increase results in social change, freedom from exploitation, or the end of discrimination. Caste, gender, and other forms of social discrimination and exploitation invariably override class distinctions. So middle class dalits may continue to be discriminated against even though they have moved up the income ladder. Poverty is not a number – it is a lived experience. And to talk of poverty lines – people living below the poverty line, people living on less than $1 a day or $2 a day – has no meaning for the person who experiences, on a daily basis, the humiliation and gross injustice of being poor.

Taking our Gudalur experience, I would like to raise another issue. Indeed our peoples’ incomes have risen. Indeed their standard of living has improved and they are better off than they were 20 years ago. And indeed we can tick the boxes that indicate they have “developed”.

• Infant mortality down, maternal mortality down,
• All children enrolled in schools, staying in school
• Indebtedness down, savings up

….the list goes on.

The problem with this measurement is that we are comparing their current status against their own status of 20 years ago. This does not give us a true picture of what is happening, of what is wrong with our society. A more correct picture would emerge if we were to look at it from the perspective of their share of the available wealth of the area. While their income ( or wealth if you want to define it so) has increased ten fold, the wealth of society around them has increased even more. I am no researcher, but I am willing to stick my neck out and bet that if somebody were to study the adivasis’ share of wealth as a percentage of the total wealth available, you will find that their share has actually decreased. And what has happened in Gudalur is not the norm. The norm is that even compared to themselves the poor have become poorer. I am told by people who know more about these things that

• between 1965 and 1980 200 million people saw a drop in their incomes
• between 1980 and 1993 more than 1 billion saw a drop in their income

….this list too goes on.

This is what is unjust. Unacceptable. This is why I would support the claim that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. What makes it even more unacceptable is the fact we are seeing a concentration of wealth that we have never seen before in human history. According to UNDP statistics (1998) the combined wealth of 225 of the richest individuals (not companies, corporations or firms) equals the combined annual income of 2.5 billion of the worlds poorest. Or if you want to cut it another way – the wealth of the 3 richest individuals exceeds the combined GDP of 48 least developed countries.

But this gap – this widening gap is well hidden. We need to dig much deeper to find it. And more importantly we need to do something about it if we are to call ourselves civilised.

when you dance around the jasmine

that i planted for you

in the centre of the garden

spare a thought for the earth below your feet

and the roots she nourished and mothered

- roots below the ground that you do not see

from which your jasmine flower

drew its fragrance

drew its life.

I was travelling on the underground in London on my way to speak at a gathering of international aid and development professionals. I was not yet fully prepared. Too many thoughts kept clamouring to be expressed  – thoughts about the ever increasing poverty across the globe even though governments have signed up to the millenium development goal of halving poverty by 2015, about the free market economy and how it contributes to wealth generation on the one hand but drives farmers to commit suicide on the other. About glitzy apartment blocks and state of the art offices and shops mushrooming in Bangalore but creating slums in its shadows, slums inhabited by the very people who built the opulent homes and offices. About the entire development and aid industry and how its jargon ridden lexicon blunts and hides the reality of experiencing poverty and injustice on a daily basis.

There was much I wanted to talk about but I could not find a peg to hang it all on. At that point the tube pulled into a station – Hammersmith I think it was – and I experienced a Saul like moment – as a voice kept repeating over and over again till it registered in my thought muddled brain. “Please mind the gap. Please mind the gap”.

And that was what I talked about that day – the ever increasing gap between a minority who inhabit centre stage and the majority who are consigned to the fringes or even left out of the theatre altogether and our unmindfulness of it. But I am more of a doer – not so much a thinker and even less of a writer. Thought must lead to action and back to thought again. For the last 20 odd years we have been working with the adivasis (indigenous people) in the Nilgiri Hills of South India. (you can read more about it on www.adivasi.net).During the last decade I have had the privilege of travelling to different parts of the world and sharing the experience of working on issues of injustice and the resultant poverty at the grassroots. With climate change and other things it seems best to travel less. But the opportunity to share our thoughts based on our experience of working on the ground to a very diverse audience and to learn from their experiences, has helped us tremendously. It has opened many doors – for further thought, further reflection and further action. How then to continue to benefit from this sharing of ideas, thoughts and experiences without jumping onto areoplanes all the time to attend conferences and talks?

I decided to learn from my children and catch up on my now rusty IT knowledge and skills to start a blog like they have done.

So here it is: A blog to remind everyone of the increasing gap – repeating it over and over again like the tube station in London. A blog of thoughts that spring not from erudition or wisdom – but from the ground. From underground actually – from rubbing shoulders with people who are so out of sight in our society that many – even their well wishers – think that they are incapable of intellectual thought.

I promise not to post all gloom and and doom – we would not have survived 30 years if remarkable stories did not emerge to gladden our hearts and strengthen our resolve. I assure you there will be lots of this. Humour too… one thing that I learnt from the adivasis is that if you can laugh at life it will never get the better of you.

I do not seek ownership of this blog and hope it will develop into some kind of a guerilla think tank. Where people will all contribute and maybe one day these thoughts from underground will surface and occupy the minds and hearts of many more people around the world.