Thematics- Marginalized Communities>> Tribal

Tribal People, Swaraj, Swadeshi and Ecology

Savyasaachi

Gandhi's 'experiments with truth' showed that 'swaraj' and 'swadeshi' are interdependent.

Swaraj literally means 'swa' i.e. one's own and emerging, while 'raj' implies regulation of some kind. 'Own' is that aspect of almost every human's identity which self-regulates itself, on its own. Together, swa and raj refer to one's regulation of self, which is the restraining aspect of human identity potentially present in every human being. In other words, it refers to the internal aspects of human nature, considering that 'own' has two aspects-that which is a gift of nature namely the ability of consciousness and thinking and secondly, work culture used to regulate it.

The sense of one's 'own' is context specific and that context is defined by swadeshi. Swadeshi literally means 'swa'-own and 'desh'-time and space. This refers to aspects of external environment which includes non-human nature and other human beings present in the wider social context. It is not a given as it is prepared by one's own efforts that is interdependent on elements of its wider social context. Swadeshi thus describes the experiential and existential time and space that contours wider social context emerging alongside the practice of swaraj. Its contrary is 'videshi' that describes anyone else's time and space-that which is not one's own.

Both swaraj and swadeshi have common elements of nature and culture. In fact, nature is an integral component of both.The ecology of swaraj is its symbiotic mode of interdependence on swadeshi. Restraint is the mode of interdependence. An identity which is one's own is emergent in its own social context and not in anyone else's. This contours and grounds justice and makes it the condition for social life and existence. This is the crucial dimension of swaraj. Justice from this perspective is not merely a legal system to punish. It is concerned with creating the 'right' that is, adequate and appropriate conditions for 'labour' in nature and culture-the right of nature to be its own and the right of every human identity (person and community) to access nature on its own. The expression 'own' refers to appropriate time and space for human labour and his labour within nature. In other words, that which is not 'own' is of everyone else's.

This essay is concerned with what we can learn regarding swaraj and swadeshi, from the historical experience of tribal communities. In this regard B K Roy Burman points out that duality in the conception of the tribe has an important implication. Analytically and historically, it is possible to show that the world-view of communion and reciprocity between man and man and between man and nature (rather than that of competition and coercion) can be dissociated from the dimension of primitiveness. A tribe can thus out grow its primitiveness and retain its boundary and the essential features of it identity.

From tribal living in forests, we learn the world view which articulates reciprocity and communion of man and nature, from social movements we learn historical processes that have been dissociating the notion of primitiveness and from mainstreaming relations we learn the possible ways a tribe can retain its boundaries.

These constitute swaraj.

Glimpse of the world view: reciprocity between man and nature

To know the world view of reciprocity and communion and man and nature, it is important to learn that living in a forest is a generational and a historical process of learning how to labour and share time, space, knowledge, skills and world views. This is a very multi-layered and multi-dimensional process. A glimpse of it is described here.

A principle of Koitors way of life in Shringar Bhum (for the district administration the Abujhmarias of Abujhmar in North Bastar, Chattisgarh) is that a "person's belongings need be as much as the person can carry". This is often implied as a code of conduct, that is, "a person should not have anything that he cannot maintain and look after".

A Koitor man and woman wear a loin cloth and a lugga (a wrap around), carry an axe on their shoulders and tuck a pouch of tobacco around their waist. Whatever more is needed can be attained from forests. The process of growing up equips a Koitor with adequate and appropriate knowledge and skills to make and reproduce a settlement anywhere in the forest.

To make a settlement, a Koitor needs to first select some space. In addition to water, soil, flora and fauna it is absolutely necessary to find out if the space is conducive and available for settlement. This requires the performance of a ritual and reading of signs. Un-husked rice grains are kept overnight with an invocation to nature in the names of mother earth and spirits of the space. The elders and the shaman read the pattern changes in the grains-there are no fixed rules- a disturbance can mean that the space is conducive in some instances and not conducive in others.

This ritual divination highlights a very important aspect of swaraj and swadeshi namely, the interdependence between Koitors and between them and the nature in the way both could be apprehended in the 'universe of the forest'. Embedded in the ritual is a perception of nature. It is everything that is not the product of one's own labour, this constitutes nature's labour or the work of nature and includes the entire natural world. Nature is emergent from its own labour-it is self-regenerative. This ritual is the labour of the Koitors, is a mode of relation to nature namely, self restraint-to not colonise into spaces where nature is on its own and in its own space. This ritual can be described as the 'labour of restraint', which ensures that Koitor's relation to nature is not colonising, that is not taking from it that which is not its own, in its time and space. Its boundaries are defined by the time cycles in nature. The labour of Koitors is interdependent on the labour of nature.

The ritual describes the reciprocity and communion between Koitors and nature. The language of this ritual is also a language of swaraj and swadeshi. This ritual describes the restraining aspect of a Koitor identity (swaraj) in relation to the context specific experience of nature's own time and space in the forest (swadeshi).
This is the basis of the principle that "person's belongings need be as much as the person can carry".

The reciprocity expressed by the ritual divination is the basis of Koitor's language and learning from nature's ways to cultivate in the forest universe and heal aliments and afflictions. It's vocabulary of terms, categories and principles evolve with experiences with nature in the forest and for this reason it is possible to speak to nature and to listen to nature' language.

Dissociating the primitive: decolonisation and disarmament

Tribal social movements have for more than a hundred years struggled for swaraj and swadeshi-the right to their own way of determining the conditions for their life.
In mainstream history, there are process of decolonisation, recovering tribal peoples' own time and space from processes of 'taking away their own time and space through a combination of development programs, westernisation, social movements and conversion to Islam, Christianity and Hinduism. The most significant aspect of this process has been that tribal and non-tribal both have worked.

In the field of political structures, the formation of two new tribal states-Chattisgarh and Jharkhand and the legal regime of PESA (1996) and 2007 the Forest Bill have created a legal space for tribal people's traditions, cultural and languages. This was possible because of the long years of tribal protest, strong critiques of the development paradigm, an affirmation of the need for experiments in non-destructive development and the influences of all these on international politics and bodies that have created some space for indigenous rights to culture and language.
With regards to knowledge, that which was primitive until the 1960's is now constitutive of an extremely important frontier. Forest dwellers/tribal knowledge of flora and fauna, of healing has become valuable for the growth and development of agriculture, forestry, pharmacology and treatment of aliments (simple and complex), their life style has become meaning for those who are seekers of alternatives to modern consumerist society. This bears testimony to the very sophisticated methods of observing and experimenting that are integral to their way of life, that their living world and way of life is an available space from where it is possible to overcome vulnerabilities of modern consumerism and work towards building resilience in nature and culture; in the relation between man and man on the one hand and between man and nature on the other.

In social life, B K Roy Burman draws attention to the fact that the process of assimilation cannot be taken for granted. He points out that are there are communities who have duplicated the Hindu society not to be absorbed by it but to take Hinduism as a possible set of symbolic conditions for re-modeling their own society. This process has been described as 'Santhalisation'. This, he argues happens when a tribe after economic betterment does not feel it necessary to yield to pressures of dominant communities. This example points towards a process of decolonisation and decommissioning the notion of primitiveness amongst some tribal communities.

It now emerging that terms such as 'sanskritisation', westernization and progress are being decommissioned for they have described only State-friendly aspect of social change and have not been true to the processes of violence and oppression that have accompanied the adoption of Hindu cultural values. In fact, they have legitimised this notion for the primitive. This is a partial decolonisation of the primitive premise of 'excluded' and 'partially excluded' area created by the British and of the 5th and 6th Schedules formulated in 1949-50. Its impact has been to increase the non-tribal populations, create a political rift and dividing them into tribal and non-tribal and intensifying agenda for destructive development that has been prepared by the WTO-sponsored economic liberalisation.

There are several questions for with regard to decolonization. What benefits will this decolonization of the legal regime bring to different classes of people that come into existence on account of a variety of development interventions?

Between forest dwellers' end and tribal city dwellers, there is a wide social class differentiation. In villages outside forests, there are large numbers of landless laborers and cultivators with small unproductive landholdings. Some land owners are rich and some belong to the middle class. In towns and cities tribal are employed in a variety of sectors-industry, agriculture, livestock, forests, mining and quarrying, construction, trade and commerce, transport, storage, communications, white collar jobs, teachers in schools and colleges. Several people have been displaced on account of upcoming mega development projects such as mega dams, hydroelectric power plans, military establishments, nature reserves, mining and so on.

How can reciprocity and communion between man and nature be enriched?
Over these decades a majority of tribal people are not forest dwellers. There are some forests dwellers that have access to universe of the forest. The forest is their home and their place of work. There is second large group of communities proximate to the forest but have limited access to the forest universe-the forest is their place of work but not their home. There is a third group distant from the forest and have no access to it, for them the forest is neither their place of work nor their home.

How can the existential questions be made available to enrich language?

As regards linguistic capabilities the social contexts pose several challenges for use and enrichment of their language. For instance, in several schools, the use of mother-tongue is discouraged. In cities the language of work place is different from the language of culture and custom. Where there is interaction with other communities people know more than two languages-their mother tongue, the link language and another vernacular.

In what way can conditions be created for experiments concerning non-destructive development?

Over these fifty years the forces of production and the relations of production that constituted industrial development have undergone a paradigm shift. On account of reckless destruction of natural resources for sustaining high speed of economic growth and the consequent undermining of the life support systems in nature and culture, especially cultural and biological diversity, there is a search for a more wholesome reciprocal relation of man with nature.

Today in India, within a particular region and for India as a whole, dependence on shifting cultivation is an indication of the fact that people utilising this practice has strengthened because development programs have failed to provide an alternative, viable and sustainable means of earning a livelihood. It has been observed in several places that there is a tendency towards reverse migration from plains into forests. They adopt shifting cultivation.

These questions define the larger, more difficult struggles that suggest decolonization is meaningless without disarmament. One of the most difficult struggles has been against the special armed forces regulation act in north-east India and the Maoist confrontation with the states in Jharkhand and Charttisgrah. Violence of the State manifests through its agendas of economic development that displace people, destroy natural resources relentlessly that is reproduced as violence from political parties and people in these places. Development that is embedded in the notion of primitiveness produces and reproduces mass destruction more than benefits it brings to people. This is being demonstrated in manifold crisis that have been created by the State and economic development. The contradiction is that the knowledge, means and methods of development are not able to solve the problems it has created.

The armed confrontation in both places has proved to be disastrous for civil social life. The innocent are victims en mass. There is no mobility in these places; people are confined to the four walls of their homes. Public places are suffocated with terror. In these places there are some who speak of getting out this stagnation and fear. The voices of the people ask if there is a model of development available with armed political forces other than the one that is promoted by State, and if it will not reproduce militarism, violence and oppression. In this situation, disarmament creates conditions to decommission this model of development-its ideas, institutions and activities. Its intention is to break this cycle of production and reproduction of violence. It is the process of dis-arming both the colonised and the colonisers of the notion of primitiveness and of dis-associating this notion from languages, experience and experiments undertaken by tribal people to find their own paths.There is a relative and an absolute aspect of disarmament-the first refers to restricted and restrained decommissioning and the second refers to a condition of 'nothing to do with arms'.

Relative disarmament requires that the coloniser and colonised, the State and the armed political forces demilitarise relative to each other, simultaneously and progressively move towards 'nothing to do with arms' identity.

Today, there are at least two competing modes of access to nature, the dominant mainstream mode that seeks to conquer nature and the frontier mode seeks to learn from nature. The meaning, form and content of ecological swaraj cannot be understood and realised within the framework of the dominant mode. The meaning, form and content of ecological swaraj cannot be understood and realised so long as we continue to conquer and tame nature- internal and external, human and non-human and other men and women. This path has irrecoverably destroyed large amounts of natural landscape and resources found there, the efforts to learn from tribal people, who live in proximity with nature on ground that such learning is premised on keeping them isolated and primitive and backward. This 'path' is the mainstream path.

However, there is another path which could take us towards ecological swaraj. This path opens up learning from experiences of those who have mainstreamed into society that is premised on 'man's conquest of nature', from the experience of those who continue to live in proximity with nature and who have in past lived in proximity with nature. There is wide variety of people who could be included in this frame. This path is leads to the frontier far away from the mainstream into 'a rare' space, a quiet spring full of possibilities and potentialities. The politics of ecology and swaraj is defined by the struggle between these two 'paths'. This is paradigm wars according to Jerry Manders.

This war is about the right of retaining the boundaries of one's own effort to learn the language and world view of reciprocity and communion between nature and culture to define the pursuit of one's identity; the possibility for dismantling institutions and practices that reproduce of violence-wherein the oppressed internalise the oppressor, and both internalise the notion of 'primitive'; and the struggle decommissions terms, principles and theories that have been the 'arms and ammunition' for genocide of tribal communities.

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South Asian Dialogues on Ecological Democracy