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Reflections of India

~ by facing my shadows

Reflections of India

Tag Archives: Adivasi

Empire was an idea, not a geography

21 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by opus125 in Indian History

≈ 1 Comment

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Adivasi, Alain de Botton, Aristotle, Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, Francesca Hughes, Georges Perec, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Hooke, Schrödinger

British India 1893

British India 1893

The power of an idea split the USA from a culture similar to its own. and Pakistan from India. Empire was also an idea of the Enlightenment and Christendom.

Experiments on James Cooks Endeavour voyage of 1769-70 demonstrated the life saving power of hygiene and the science of Enlightenment. At first there was grudging respect for Mughal power, but as British men “went native” to marry Hindu and Muslim girls, Britain fought back and hardened its attitude. Sati and child marriage had been campaigned against by the Hindu reformer Ram Mohan Roy as against true Hinduism.
Science and the Enlightenment also challenged religion and tradition.

Rousseau in The Social Contract contrasted civil society and natural existence: instinctual, amoral justice versus justice and morality; .appetite and natural liberty versus civil liberty and Possession based on personal power with secure proprietorship based on respect for the law; and individual strength versus general will.

Order and law defined civilized society. “The mere impulse to appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law, which we prescribe to ourselves, is liberty “wrote Rousseau whose ideas shaped how Europe viewed indigenous peoples: India’s Adivasi and Australia’s Aboriginee.

The British lost more men to disease in India than anywhere else in the Empire: order and science must defeat Indian Chaos.

Beardmore_Inflexible

But any idea taken to extremes becomes a dinosaur.

Ilya Prigogine demonstrated systems move toward entropy until they either break down or recreate a new system of order[1].

Lutyen’s architectural ambitions intended to surpass Versailles and outlast Rome. Britain’s imperial resolve mirrored a scientific idea that drove a civilisation, but entropy caught up with Britain, and Lutyen’s eternal symbol of empire was handed back to India.

Meanwhile, there was a simultaneous a scientific conquest that created order from chaos.

The first planes were wood, at times flying albatrosses, light and flyable, but wood has its vagaries, Wood was unpredictable and error prone. Wood may hide a treacherous knot, explains Francesa Hughes[2], who contrasts Imperial struggle of order against chaos with science.

Metal could be moulded and was predictable and true. Metal was a pure form and wood its anathema.

The rejection of the organic, remains. We look to predictions as symbols of truth, and not at the natural laws themselves. It is too easy to assume a theoretical cause that does not exist.

“The rejection of organic materials that marked the material tolerance crisis central to modernity didn’t just produce the steel and glass architecture we know so well, but also a generation of newly metalized aircraft that were so heavy they could not fly. These engineered dodos, which resulted directly from architecture’s ideological reconfigurations around predictability and precision, ask of us difficult questions about the role of inference and approximation in instrumental rationalism, and about the exemption from cultural and sociological explanation we reserve for the technological artefact: what if it doesn’t work?”
–          Franscesca Hughes

Until technology caught up, metal aircraft were stuck on the tarmac, uUnable, or when they could fly, so heavy with fuel there was little hope for passengers.

But technology caught up and metal planes now fly. Aircraft became the symbol of metallic rationality and utilitarianism.

Now, technological determinism and instrumentalism, like British need for authoritarian law over “chaotic” India, now controls our lives. We plug the data in the computer ‘black box’ and out comes a decision to guide our moral imperatives.

Like metal plans being better than wood, but cannot fly, being better than wood planes that could, and forced technology o grow.

That is the power of an idea.

roberthookes needle

Lets back track a few centuries

When 17th century Robert Hookes peered at a needle under his microscope he discovered sharp is not sharp at all. The precise edges he expected did not exist.

We now know that precision is not what it seems. The pursuit of the absolute has scientific, as well as artistic and ethical considerations. A small error can evolve into greater crimes say the theologians.

Now nano-science can pursue the microscopic, or Widen our perspective and a spot disappears from our view, but it remains. Return to the microscope and we discover a delirious void and an exaggerated gap between ideal and reality.

Modernity has a heightened fetishing of precision. Out television screens saturate our eyes with slippery resolution; our new metal sculptures are moulded to curves once not possible.

But precision is, as Hookes showed, imprecise.

Two millennia ago Aristotle[3] preached precision is subject to a pure form but matter is subject to error. A concept I find echoed in the archetypal forms taught in mysticism, and the debates of Hindu Vedanta.

Science requires precise specifications lest it slip into sloppiness and ‘bad science’. Its ideology colonised the vacuum of ignorance.

But as we learned more our logical assumptions were found not to be precise. Even scientific institutions like to hold onto models even if discoveries find their exactitude is redundant.

Who drives the need to be so precise? Why the masculine conquest of line, when nature curves in feminine curvaceousness? What we call precise now will be challenged by newly discovered errors.

In the early 20th century the liquid intelligence of concrete allowed us new forms. Before the concrete truck, saw concrete made on site, and without regulations and standards, easily became a hard messy mass.

There was need to control error: regulations and automation followed. The labour force disappeared but the concrete remained. The more we cornered error, the more we feared it.

When once we poured in the slurry and out came concrete forms, we now input data and our computer offers us new design. The linearity of mass production, and the illusion of precision has fear as it’s by product.

Scientific models can be blind. It is people who make cities work, and not mathematic models. Scientific precision need be more intelligent and interactive, democratic, to balance human behaviour versus law, the power of the privileged versus the people.

It requires an artists sensitivity to, as sculpture Barbara Hepworth suggests, hear through the chisel, the shape of stone.

Native Princes Arriving in Camp for the Imperial Assemblage at Delhi, 1877

Native Princes Arriving in Camp for the Imperial Assemblage at Delhi, 1877

Science is shaped by and shapes societies worldview.

Europe had undergone its own shift with nature: Darwin challenged mans aloofness from nature, Charles Lyell, whose book Darwin was reading on the Beagle, aged the rocks eons before Adam was said to walk the earth. On the one hand, Darwin was misused to exploit tribes, on the other people sought to help them.

Historically, how colonists constructed the primitive in reality mirrored their own social problems.

It is appropriate Francesca Hughes examined precision of the micro. Schrödinger’s “What is Life” as an example of life finding order from the error, she said. Schrödinger argued the chromosome was architect and builder of the craft in one: a code that can code itself.

A code unlike a physical form is not subject to matter, and the 2nd law of thermodynamics degeneration of order into chaos[4]. Before Francis Cricks discovery of DNA, the chromosome was a black box of an unexplained mechanism.

Crick went on to claim genetic determinism was the “dogma” of modern biology. We ignored the cytoplasmic evidence to follow a doctrine of causal linearity. We dismissed the ‘white noise’ of genetic error, when even i In the 1960’s the same DNA material could grow a different organ in a Petri dish.

The primacy of the genes shaped science as the primacy of metal shaped fight. We now have flight suits made of polymerised fabrics. We now know genes do change.

askforraise

“If yes then A. “If no then B” Are we doomed to live life like a flow chart?

Will the allegory of syntactic connections dodging syntactic secretaries leads us up to our Sisyphusian doom down the corridors of anxiety. The question is mapped out by Georges Perec, in his 1968 novel The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise. Written in a breathless, punctuation free monologue, is an “endlessly ludicrous IFTTT loop”” its precision is its undoing. It is an wherein the if-this-then-that logic has completely unravelled, as embodied in t[a] flowchart”.

Are we to be caught in a loop of repetition, or is our humanness found in the error of redundancy? Or are we headed to scientific conditioned control of Aldrous Huxley’s Brave New World, conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs to like our social place and dislike what the government decides is bad.

“Is counting safe?” Lichtenstein asks, answering “only if the pieces don’t change.” After all, scientific models are ingenious approximations. They are maps, and the map is not the territory.

Data is like money. Money offers you freedom and slavery, It offers the means of personal agenda and the fear it can be lost.

The symbolic DNA of Britain’s ethical claim to authority was the right to rule. A belief held right up to Churchills time, that Christendom was a political expression of the Kingdom of God on Earth. But politics is prone to the entropy of economics and populous opinion. Life – like prophecy – is not linear and Luyten’s eternal city would be handed back to India.

I am reminded of Alain de Botton’s words in The Architecture of Happiness

“A development which spoils ten square miles of countryside will be the work of a few people neither particularly sinful nor malevolent. They may be called Derek or Malcolm, Hubert or Shigeru, they may love golf and animals, and yet, in a few weeks, they can put in motion plans which will substantially ruin a landscape for 300 years or more.

The same kind of banal thinking which in literature produces nothing worse than incoherent books and tedious plays can, when applied to architecture, leave wounds which will be visible from outer space. Bad architecture is a frozen mistake writ large. But it is only a mistake, and, despite the impressive amounts of scaffolding, concrete, noise, money and bluster which tend to accompany its appearance, it is no more deserving of our deference than a blunder in any other area of life. We should be as unintimidated by architectural mediocrity as we are by unjust laws or nonsensical arguments.”

It is also true of Colonial architecture, even when grand and beautiful. Empire, like its architecture, was inspired by an idea. So is modernity. Will it inspiregreatness or mediocrity?

[1] Prigogine, Ilya (1997). The End of Certainty. New York: The Free Press.
[2] Francesca Hughes, The Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure, and the Misadventures of Precision, MIT Press, 2014
[3] Aristotle Metaphysics
[4] I question this assumption. It is behind the idea that mass less information could theoretically tracel faster than light and time- trave. But code requires energy and E=MC2 means energy is a form of matter.

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Adivasi and the fulfilment of life

05 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by opus125 in Tribal India

≈ Leave a comment

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Adivasi, Ho, Janau suku, Jaydas, Jharkhand, Joseph Marianus Kujur, Kharia, Martin Tapno, merkha, Mullick, Mundhu, Mundu, Parom disam, parum disumreka, Santhal, Sauros-Prbhu, Singbonga, Sirma Disum, Umbul Ader, Uraons, vanvasi

"Women in tribal village, Umaria district, India" by Yann (talk) - Own work. Licensed under GFDL via Wikimedia Commons

“Women in tribal village, Umaria district, India” by Yann (talk) – Own work. Licensed under GFDL via Wikimedia Commons

We all long for fulfilment, we all seek some promise in our life. To enjoy a spiritual transcend our selves.

So religions offer their own answers and paths, but liberation and accomplishment have both sacred and profane dimensions. Adivasi meaning is linked inextricably to the land. Whether racially proto-Austaloid (Munda, Uraon, Ho, Gond, Khond etc, Himalayan Mongoliod, Negroid of Karela or the Andamanese Islands, the Adivasi people long for the land that is both critical for their existence and their spiritual encounter with the supernatural. Without land the Adivasi do not exist. They are linked to the land, and for many tribes state of Jharkhand offered some hope and challenge to make sat-patt- raji a concrete manifestation for their people and the afterlife or parum disum or merkha (heaven). Jharkhand mean “forest tract” and was carved from Bihar, after 50 years of agitation across areas that included districts of Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal. The Adivasi value simplicity, truthfulness, contentment, hard work, hospitality, generosity, hard work, independence, egalitarianism love of peace and a care free attitude. The agricultural Adivasi see fulfilment in having plenty to eat, drink cattle, crops land and children. Sins is a violation of these priorities. When their connection to the land is threatened they can fight back!

Dongria Tribswoman

Dongria Tribswoman

For Adivasi existential longing is both personal and communal determined by a collective faith experience. Its two dimensions are this word and the other world: relationship with being on this earth and secondly a synthesis of human and divine relationship both personally and for the ethos of the group. Key to liberation is happiness. For happiness in this world is a criteria for the next world. Happiness is collective, and uts achievement gives direction to the individual. For the Oraon tribals, this is measured by Cattle, Crops and Children in the prosperity of the family. Heaven reflects his world. The afterlife has fields to plough, cattle in abundance, and a bumper crop. The more agricultural tribes, the Mundhu, Kharia, Ho and Santhal, long for land and a rich harvest and children to perpetuate the family. The Kharia have a great respect for cattle.

adivasidance52374

D.P.D.,A14bCOMMUNITY PROJECT CENTRE, RANCHI (BIHAR)Jitia dance by Oraon Adivasi young boys and girls.

“Without land they simply do not exist. In absence of land, there is no space for their social, cultural, economic and ecological life. Sanjay Bosu Mullick opines that “identity and indigenous peoples rests on two vital elements, space and speech”. Spatial habitat or the geographical territory of their ancestors is their birthright. That part of “Mother earth” has been passed on to them by their fore-parents. Therefore, the rationale for their struggle for a separate land can be justified in terms of three Js, namely, JAMIN (the land), JAL (the water) and JUNGLE (the forest) which belong to them from time immemorial[1].”

The call for Jhakhand was therefore an emotional call for life. “Land is their altar of sacrifice to god and to the spirits” adds Kujur, which is why they protect land and produce.

“A part of the virgin forest is preserved since the settlement of the village as the sacred grove, the abode of the Mother earth, to be propitiated regularly. The spirits of all the natural objects are also propitiated as benevolent ones. The spirits of the ancestors are believed to be residing in the household itself who protect the family from all kinds of evils.” –          Basu Mulllick[2]

In twined with the tribal system and religious life is the preservation of sizable sacred groves that include isolated forest specimens of peepal (ficus religiosa) often without reference to a god. Symbiotic is life’ relationship to nature and performing arts. Earth and water belong to Mother earth. We have their use, but they are not bought, sold or privatised. Adivasi stewardship of the land offered by each tribes respective gods is an open secret challenged by modernity. Since 1970 every major dam and wildlife sanctuary and 90% of National Park, are carved from Adivasi land. 50% of India’s mineral wealth of coal, bauxite and mica is mined from Adivasi land, yet 85% live below the poverty line, and while only 8% of the population they represent 50% of people evicted from their homeland for National Development Projects[3]. No government ever created land so how can they own what god has made? And is an intimate companion, a source of great knowledge to live with harmoniously. In both East and West, as W J T Mitchell reminds us, landscapes are part of a ‘process by which … identities are formed”[4] But Western thought defines landscape in terms of the Enlightenment: landscape controlled and commanded.

“The English word landscape comes from landscaef , an Anglo-German word that meant “a clearing in the forest with animals, huts, fields, fences. It was essentially a peasant landscape carved out of the original forest or weald, out of the wilderness[1]” . The English ‘land‘ means earth from the older Gothic for ‘a ploughed field’. Scape implies the shape of similar objects or shaeth , a buncle or sheath of similar plants.”

Landscapes change slowly to our minds, but they erode and shape. To those in the forest daily, their movement is like the breath of lungs. Do we command ecology through the science and technologies of architecture? Landscape is certainly sublimated or modified by mans interference. But now, the ideological imperative to remake the land is losing ground to environmental fears.

Adivaso girl by Scalerman

Adivaso girl by Scalerman

Personhood is rooted in the land. This experience is not only true of the Adivasi, but also the Australian Aboriginee, and other native people. The alienation of the Adivasi so often reminds me of the loss felt by my Aboriginal brothers and sisters. The late Australian naturalist writer Eva Palmwood notes “ in earlier puritan times, nature was pushed away and seen as an evil animal realm in which civilised rules and practices were abandoned in favour of wholesale licence” Nature was wild, feminine and threatening; to be domesticated by “this suspicious, civilizing and crusading culture” into a house garden. So we stay away from the uncomfortable, lock ourselves away from even a mosquito.

“The dualistic Christian/Western framework of alienation and material denial has erased our connecting narratives” she writes. We desperately lack stories that transparently link us to nature. Gaia stories: “the real meaning of ecological literacy, to have stories that speak of the culture/nature boundary and of where the two cultures meet.”

Palmwood touches on what I see in both Advasi India and Aboriginal Australia.

“Our conviction that ‘we’ live in culture and ‘they’ live in nature is so strong that all that is left is a passionate story about consciousness, history and freedom—about us—and another story about fiercely uninvolved causation and clockwork—a story about them.”

To be separate from nature – to be distinct from the pain of animals other humans better In some ways India has grate sensitivity to animals – stray dogs are often de-sexed and not euthanized. However, I suggest Australia fares better in treating other humans. In each action there are exceptions. Australia had a social security system but hides from facing its obligations to refugees and forgets Aboriginals in the outback. A similar argument is made by environmental ethicist and seed saving campaigner Vandana Shiva. Shiva laments the scientific urge since Roger Bacon to conquer rather than coexist with nature. The nature divide is also expressed in our attitude to women. For nature is feminine. A point made by Marilyn Frye “argues that it is necessary to move beyond a concept of woman as ‘deficient male’ to the idea of woman as ‘positively-other-than’.” We see this in Colonial Britain’s criticism of Indians as feminized, over sexed, in reference to early marriage, and weak minded. Then Vivekananda masculinised the Nationalist agenda, and it seems that Hindi nationalist movements have since moved from feminine sensitivity to nature to a post colonial, almost colonization, raping of the land.

Tribal land is to the Adivasi what Mecca is to Muslims and Jerusalem is to Jews. It is sacred. Their cosm-centric worldview is nature-linked. There is no “I”/ “other” dichotomy; nature-human-spirit are an integrated whole.

Land gives dignity, pride and identity. Without land the Adivasi is “helpless, subservient and subjugated like a bonded laborer without any dignity[5].” Which is why peace loving Adivasi can dangerously resist some development projects. It is not my purpose to rehash history, suffice to remember many anti British struggles, mixed with the fire of the Bhakti movement, were agrarian and tribal. Threatened by being overwhelmed by outsiders, others or diku, there was the Santhal struggle of 1860’s and 1870’s, the 1895 Bhagat movement among the Oraons, Madhta Pradesh Gond movement in the 1930’s.

‘Mining happiness’ Vedanta is stripping all that the Dongria Kondh tribals hold sacred. (Photograph by Sandipan Chatterjee)

‘Mining happiness’ Vedanta is stripping all that the Dongria Kondh tribals hold sacred. (Photograph by Sandipan Chatterjee)

Without land Adivasi truthfulness and simplicity has been lost to indebtedness, alienation, drinking, displacement and migration. The loss of identity finds many apologetic for their race, dropping their clan names. Unlike their caste divided and status conscious contemporaries, economics is secondary in egalitarian villages. Within the Parha, the village confederations that resolved inter village disputes, all have equal standing. Accountability is to the tribe and family offer fulfilment, but Colonial structures still remaining have crushed their land and encourage the biggest obstacles to human fulfilment: greed, pride and disobedience. These vices according the Genesis myths of Oraon, Khartia and Munda cause Rain of Fire and Deluge. Ecological imbalance caused by smelter pollution by the Asur polluted the cosmos stopped by the merciful intervention of the Supreme being sending messages: a crow, crane and then the Supreme himself disguised as a boy.

Damage to the cosmic harmony is hoped to make human defaulters to become aware of life communitarian nature. The tribal dream is always harmony with the other.

In the Oraon Genesis tradition Dharmes made man “in a mold like tiles” and gave food to all creatures. Happiness is the realisation of Gods care for all “sinners, enemies in all” God walks with human beings, he is not aloof in heaven. Fulfilment is this God experience. But the continuation of the cosmos requires rectifying the corruption and injustice. Evil, such as an evil eye is neutralised by the bhakh khandna ceremony. For life is focused on communal prosperity” crops, cattle marriage and children.

Sorice: Bengal Adivasi Blog

Sorice: Bengal Adivasi Blog

Unless there is a radical social change, will they have to accept Singbonga’s will and find liberation with their ancestors in Purom Disum, the afterlife, imagined by the Uraons as ploughing fields?

“This parom disam is looked upon as a world separated from our world by some mighty barrier such as is formed by an impossible chain of mountains or an unfordable river or a boundless ocean “ writes Martin Topno. It is indescribable in terms of height, distance, or depth “for the parom disumreko (those of the world across) are not thought of as living in far away places, since they dwell in the huts of their nearest relatives, in streams, rivulets, field and mountains of their village and Singhonga, the Lord of all, is explicitly declared to be everywhere and to see everything. These two worlds are rather conceived as co-penetrating each other, and yet as not possessed of any means of direct communication.”

The afterlife, and the rituals of death, will be discussed elsewhere, along with the influence of Christian conversion. However, benevolent spirits are guardians of those on earth, but they are not worshipped, unlike Singbonga. In the Mundu region the Christian concept of ‘salvation’ is understood as communion with Singbonga in the afterlife. Singbonga is the centre of life now and in the future and Janau suku, eternal happiness is possible only through Sigbonga and the ancestors, Communion is achieved through sacrificial ritual of Umbul Ader, lirerally entering into spirit, achieved in the abode of Singbonga in Sirma Disum, or heaven. nagesiya-household-kerang-village-in-lohardagga-district-jharkhand-photo-anumeha-yadav1 Meanwhile tribal hopes and frustrations inspired in Jharkhand include liberation from jagirdars, jaminders, money lenders and other exploiters. The reality of poetical life is less promising. While India’s Constitution protects the Adivasi, they continue to be harassed. Adivasi are still looked down on as inferior, pre-literate and vanvasi, or forest dwellers. Perhaps India could learn from them. I agree with Sauros-Prabhu[6] that tribal solidarity with nature and egalitarianism should be an example to modern competitiveness and individualism. [1] Joseph Marianus Kujur, Human longing and fulfilment: An Adivasi perspective, Disputatio Philisophica, and referencing Mullick 1993:13 [2] Mullick S. E. Ed 1993:14 Indigenous Identity: Crisis and its Re-awakening, Nanin Prakashan Kendra. [3] Jaydas, E., 1993, 34 The Adivasis and the Land, in Indigenous Identity: Crisis and its Re-awakening, Nanin Prakashan Kendra. [4] Mitchell WJT, (1994) ‘Landscape and Power’, Chicago University Press, Chicago. [5] Joseph Marianus Kujur: 19 [6] Sauros-Prabhu, G., 1994 85ff Tribal values in India, in Ijeevadhara, 24 (March)85-88

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Who am I with the tribe?

23 Tuesday Sep 2014

Posted by opus125 in Indian Art, Tribal India

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Adivasi, Mashe, Tribal

Jivya Soma Mashe detail

Jivya Soma Mashe, acrylic and cowdung on canvas, detail [jivya-soma-mashe.blogspot.in]

I have always wanted to know who I truly am.With individuality so prised in the West, it may seem this is a self evident but hard to define reality.

But moving to India forced me to see myself a new n a different situation. Then moving to Bhopal I soon began to experience the tribal life of Madhya Pradesh. I also began to reflect on the Aboriginal people of Australia.  My assumptions of identity – and how that played out in todays world – simply did not match.

Consider the Warli artist. In every tribal village, the artist is known as savashini, the woman whose husband is alive.

Her painting is a fertility act. Trained by observing others from childhood she knows the riti or conventions of the art and the cosmic laws they symbolise.

warli painting

warli-art-india.blogspot.in

They have hatachi kesab, innate skill with the hands, and perform wedding ceremonies accompanying the groom on the circumambulation of the rice -hole in the ground where rice is pounded.

The actual ceremony is performed by a wedding priestesses or dhavleries who animate the paintings through song. The dhavleries are chosen because dreams have given them songs.

So few are chosen.

“The dream came – I had fever – Ganga Gauri, Mahadeva’s wife (Mahadeva is the universal father) – she told me – like that it came suddenly. Therefore I can sing the whole song.” ((Jivya Soma Mashe: A sense of self in other masters: Five contemporary folk and tribal artists of India’ edi by Jyotindra Jain.p35).

In the past urbanised India  art was of completed by a guild an the stages – a rough sketch, filled in in one colour, later another, each in stages. This may have included collective apprentices and a master in the process.Then around the city of Mathura individual artists (Gomitaka, Dasa, Shivarakshita, Dharma, Rama, Sanghadeva) were named  beginning in the Christian era.

It took until the 1970’s that the Tribal tradition was transformed by a need for individual artistiic expression.

The catalyst was brown paper and white paint. Soon artists like Jivya Soma Mashe began to paint lively field work, digging ploughing sowing .

Mashe was also the first male Wari painter which in Itself was an isolating experience. It asks of a culture what does it mean to be a Wari man.

“For a man to begin practicing what for centuries has been a woman’s art form is surprisingly unorthodox. No ordinary man could have attempted this, without fearing the loss of status among his fellow men. But then Jivya Soma Mashe is not an ordinary man. The history of his life is as unusual as his bold decision.  ”

Three years old when his mother died, his father remarried but because new wife did not want hs children.  So they were given to a farmer far from home to look after his cows. Too young to work he was poorly fed his older siblings ran away but he was to young to follow them.

Shocked he could not speak until after his 4th year. He retreated and drew signs in the and. Although he later married accepted in the community he remained an outsider.

So he began seeking something new and began to examine the field to see each stalk in the paddy field as distinct with an undulating rhythm interspersed with animals like ants drawn with great precision. A fishing net that swells and fills a fishing net while a minute human holds the other end.

His community awareness of the wholeness of unity is amtched with an awareness that difference makes the whole.Mashe’s art suggests he sees himself as different and yet part of larger unified reality.

slide0001

“A Walking and Running Circle”, Richard Long, work in progress [http://long-mashe.blogspot.in]

In the west a master is unique but primitive art somehow seems assumed to be anonymous.

We imagine a singular elitist versus a collective art form.  Perhaps we imagine a clown figure, playing bison horn or cobra hood headgear.

Jyotindra Jain reports how MP artist Jangarh Singh Shyam a Pradhan Gond  asked if he she should strip to his loin cloth for a photo – it was so expected by media that to be tribal you must be a stereotype.

Similar story is said of Aboriginal playwright who realised she was always photographed with stereotype images of poverty or struggle.

“In such a set-up the tribal artist is not an identifiable individual but a part of an amorphous passive collective. He is expected to permanently dwell in timeless tradition. When he does not even have an individual status as artist, independent of his community identity, how can he ever be a ‘master’.”

We imagine Tribals as a  timeless people  possessing an innate urge for magi. Do we imagine their women as bare breasted beauties  in mud homes and faces exuding  religiosity?

A Tribal artist may be expected to retain his ‘primitive’ tradition but is usually forced to move to an industrial environment to pursue his art.

Yet, if he develops his art in response to the world it is accused of artistic degeneration.

Tribals are not isolated and their contemporary art merges new technologies into their world view. Traditional art has never been static, but as always adapted with new technologies and materials.

But that is not what we expect.

Mashe’s art reminds me that history is complex always making the present, myths, stories give us a perspective altering the linearity and insularity.

The new idiom of the money lender blends with the charcoal maker neighbouring tribe.  To us they appear modern because they have a do not have a naturalistic feel. A bird is suggested by fleeting lines of motion, the sun as a series of revolving lines he called chakma chak  flashing light.

He symbolises somethings essence rather than its form.

Cowdung and mud on paper. Train station - Jivya Soma Mashe

Cowdung and mud on paper. Train station – Jivya Soma Mashe

A wall of smeared geru or  red clay over which paint reeds in white paste. A mountain gives way to forests from which a river flows under a bridge with a train that reveals a polyphony of  activities of the people within it and gun toting police on the platform.

Jugen Habermass suggests his art is forward moving like life becoming new, much as modernism glorifies in the present or ‘nostalgia of true presence’ ( ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project’ The Post Modern Reader, edited by Charles Jencks (London, 1992) .

His art inspires me since I have never quiet felt I neither fit in either India”s collective family  (yet) or Australia’s individualism.

Mashe’s art heroically merges the individual and the collective.  Multiple events occur simultaneously both part of community but also alienated from it.

When brown paper released Warli art from its religious foundations “human beings were no longer miniscule against the large celestial deity” instead they “engaged in forms of activity they were predominate on the canvas.” (35, 36).

“There are human beings, birds, animals, insects, and so on. Everything moves, day and night. Life is movement” he said (Tribals Art magazine, September 2001).

Mashes art seems to me a dialogue between community and self. The very struggle I have continued in my life on two continents.

To quote Hervé Perdriolle “The Warli, adivasi, or the first people, speak to us of ancient times and evoke an ancestral culture. An in-depth study of this culture may give further insight into the cultural and religious foundations of modern India.”

I see sights as far more personal. As a natural isolationist – a lover of Australian spacious outback – India forces me to be confronted by its community of contradictions , traditions and meaning.

india forces me to discover the essence within the flux of the moment.

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Shantaram Tumbada, acryliques sur papier, 1997, 28x25cm [shantaram-tumbada-warli.blogspot.in]

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Reflections on Adivasi and New India

22 Thursday May 2014

Posted by opus125 in India, Tribal India

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Tags

Adivasi, India, Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya, Madhya Pradesh Tribal Museum. Bhopal Tribal Museum, Tribal India, tribals

Source: Indiatogether.org

Source: Indiatogether.org <http://indiatogether.org/johar-reviews&gt;

The word Adivasi literally means “original inhabitants” a people who risk being forgotten in the shadows of Indias rising economy. Now classified as scheduled tribes under India’ constitution, the term Adivasi is difficult since centuries of cultural exchange make it difficult to define them surrounding castes.

To this we can add the ill effect of the colonial pseudo science of anthropmetry. Racist Colonialists  was used spread ideas of a shared Indo-Aryan share racial origin. Whether Aryans were a distinct race or group of tribes I will let the historians decide. However, the idea was grabbed  by upper caste to emphasize distance from original peoples.  Buttressed by ideas of caste pollution or purity, Tribal’s are often seen as anachronistic fringe dwellers,  called savage or backward  by Hindu, Muslims or Christians if unconverted.

Even today, poor Adivasi in western India discouraged from sitting in front of bus if upper caste Hindus travelling. Their women typified as promiscuous  and subject to sexual harassment. I find this ironic since my experience has seen  many promiscuous upper caste  making a public appearance of being moral examples.

While the term Adivasi may be difficult and imprecise, international law has given a legitimacy hard to ignore. India is a signatory to the  1957 International Labour Organisation sought to protect “indigenous and other tribal and semi-tribal populations” that protects Adivasi under provisions five and six.

Since then India added the Panchayati Raj Act for Scheduled Areas (PESA)  inspiring some Adivasi to lay claim to their traditional resources both material and symbolic.

Adivasi lag behind income, literacy, life expectancy, and infant mortality. The welfare state has failed them.  The post colonial society has deprive them of their land based, forest economy.  Resources such as minerals are mined and rivers dammed.

Many are now seasonal labourers.

There is a stark difference of bazaarias (towns people, upper caste Hindus, Muslims) but for some educate Tribals the difference is less defined.  Wealthier Adivasi families may send a son (rarely a daughter) to school.

He hangs out in chai or coffee shops, or cigarette and paan kiosks, looking  ‘cool’ in bazaaia life. It appears more egalitarian. More probably it is subsidised from a home proud of their white colour child who feels the contempt of other city dwellers.

Lacking the connections or academic qualifications for hard to get government t jobs he scrounges for work driving jeeps, and running petty trades while trying to strenuously avoid manual work. .

Bazaaria life may appear cool, but the unending promise of urban comforts are an illusory drain on the wallet.

Their are also inter tribal distances in the village. Bhil, Bhilala and Tadvi keep a strict distance in marriage and food . The Bhilalas, who have greater economic and political resources  will not accept water from Bhils whom they derogatorily call padkhadya (beef eaters).

Also there are differences among the powerful Chaudhiris in Gujurat and the Meenas in Rajasthan.

Source: Odoshan.com

Source: Odoshan.com <http://odishan.com/2279/adivasi-mela-re-tribal-dance-navarangpur-4&gt;

Will Adivasi’s fit in the new India?

As Adivasis attempt to move forward, some urban commercial upper caste Hindu question whether those Adivavasi converted to Islam or Christianity can be considered indigenous.

I have no personal view on the rise of Indian nationalism. I live in the BJP controlled state of Madhya Pradesh and while their has been some issue by some suspicious of me as a foriegner, my experience has been remarkably positive.

Madhya Pradesh (MP) capital Bhopal proudly show cases the India’s Tribal diversity with the Tribal Museum ad the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya (IGRMS).

Still, it is easy to be romantic of the past. It is easy to blame British or Muslim invaders “corrupting” a tribal purity.  For example, nationalist Sangh Pariwar consider Hinduism India”s original religion and Christianity and Islam colonial intrusions.  Although mainstream historians suggest masculinised Aryans were themselves foreigners who conquered earlier   Dravidians and, according to Vardana Shiva, destroying the more inclusive Matrisitc feminine Tribal culture.

What of the question of national and tribal identity with the change of India’s new BJP government?  Philosophically attached to the  Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), teaching  dedication to ‘Selfless service of the motherland’. During the anti colonial period, M S Golwakar advocated that the boundaries of nation (rashtrabhoomi) coincide with Motherland (matribhoom) and Sacred Land (punyabhoomi)could only be applied to Hindu’s. Muslims look to Mecca and Christians to the Vatican, as if their primordial loyalties will always subordinate loyalty to India. In the past there have been reports of RSS cadres attempting to turn Hindu Adiivasi  on their non Hindu brothers.

The suspicions of non Hindu Adivasi remind me of how in 1962 people feared US president JFK would be controlled by the Pope.  Now Americans  laugh at it.  The word wide rise of nationalism, accompanied by economic downturn,  is increasingly polarising the world.

Travelling between India and Australia,  I find Indian peoples that include Modi supporters whether the new RSS government of Nahendra Modi will undermine India’s tradition of inclusion.  Frustrated by the perceived failures of a corrupt Congress, they still hope political realities will tone down any claims of  combined nationalism, religion and Fascism.

It is my prayer that Tribal harmony will be stronger than short term spasms of nationalism.

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Bhopal Tribal Museum Renewed

25 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by opus125 in India, Madhya Pradesh

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Tags

Adivasi, India, Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya, Madhya Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh Tribal Museum. Bhopal Tribal Museum

Tribal Museum

I have returned to the Tribal Museum with renewed appreciation. Now completed, with ongoing touch us, I am delighted by the ongoing transformation.

I fist observed the gallery as it grew during past visits to the nearby State Museum. Then although officially opened last June, the impressive gallery was still incomplete but perhaps waiting a few finishing touches had left me feeling the main gallery was a little to much like a Tribal Disneyland. (For my earlier review Click Here).

Six months later  my reservations are overturned.

tribalIMG_0062

To again see the Tribal Museum again; its living green roof, the C-shaped arching circumference and once again I see excited students  reminded me why I return to Bhopal , With a group of mostly senior girls with matching kurti –dupatta, their hair hanging  (1 – 11 standard ware obligatory pigtails), we entered past Gond reminiscences of the Namada’s tribal history.

The aesthetic approach of the gallery recognises archetypal unconscious expressions of a people still in touch with nature and with each other. In contrast to the static sculpture  of the next door  State Museum ,in the Tribal Museum you are immured  in an ongoing  collective recreation by the Advaisic community.   A return to nature devoid of corporation.

tribalmuseumIMG_0076

In the first gallery a massive  banyan tree sprouting from a map of Madhya Pradesh. The Lit by large earthen pots, ramps take you through roots reaching  unbounded  to the vast ceiling, welcoming  you to the states tribal landscape .

The second  you feel of geographic space as traditional open courtyard adjoins the house fronts  of different communities. Life has changes from thatched leaf to tiled roofs in the last 50 to 70 years, yet the  walls with clay and colours depict Gond women’s kitchen work by a  huge grain storage container of a type used by Gonds used to partition rooms in a home.

The woodcut smell of the vihar mandap (marriage canopy) of the aesthetics gallery there is  no art distinct from tribal life, both human body and tools of life are a canvass of expression. Even a broom is a piece of art.  Music is intimately connected to nature. The intricate rhythms of the ‘Bana”, a percussion instrument, are told in the Gonds story of Badadev residing in Saja tree and making a Bana from  it.

I felt more at home in this display on this visit. As women were touching up the paint work nearby, I realized the gallery felt more complete and harmonious, lI had earlier felt the room was a cartoonish mishmash of Tribal symbols. Is it the room or myself that has changed?

Tribal Repairs

 Under four trees for each of four tribes, the marriage canopy symbolizes the marriage of earth and sky> Humans and animals were created by deities like Mata Ashtangi or Badadevv but it is earth and sky hat sustains them.

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We are invited to experience the phases of tribal life with its festive songs , cosmetics and agriculture.  Under four trees for each of four tribes, the marriage canopy symbolizes the marriage of earth and sky. Humans and animals were created by deities like Mata Ashtangi or Badadev but it is earth and sky hat sustains them.

Man is linked to nature by tattooed terracotta mannequin. A lattice is made of jewelry and cosmetic hues.

Tribal Museum

In tribal marriages a tree branch is witness of the power of earth and an invocation to fertility.  A wedding pillar of sathe wood made without joints like a spire. A drum scene awakens the earth. .

Each level of the canopy reveals a different angle to life: The lower floor highlights traditional customs, the first the seasonal festival cycle in grained in trees and the sky myth of earth and sun on the top level

Also terra cotta images are dedicated to souls of the dead reveal Bhil ritual as if grounded to the earth.

A prominent bracelet, reminds us that a small unworn bracelet or ring offered a new daughter in law .It is  In grained with important symbols of productivity such as a well, stairwell, a farmer, field or a ploughing pair of bullocks.

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As we entered the Tribal Devlok is entered through a hall called the Story of Tool Making.

Romano, a Swiss organic farmer volunteering in Bhopal was impressed.

“So a lot of things you can see here” speaking in an English translated from German thought. “It is so nice. I think some museum something her. One thing there. But everywhere is tribal. So much detail.”

He is right, since the Tribal Museum is an experience and not just a gallery.  The Devlock twinkles as if under a starry sky with the deities of MP and of Bastar.  Its corridor of thorns  are a reminder to bear life’s pains  unmoved.

Pithora  bapdi ancestor god

Tribal’s would avoid a concrete place of worship so symbolic shorthand attempts to suggest unlimited possibilities of time and space evoking   good and bad spirits of jungles, ponds, rivers, and hills.. It is as if  inanimate stone breathes of wandering ancestors. It remind’s us of roadside terracotta offerings, amidst jungles, on the bank of a small pond or n invisible boundary of village. A raw stone, a fluttering flag, a stick, a pillar, trident, earthen lamp as if the earth comes from another plane chained to the deities power.

They beseech a saviour god to protect seed, return strayed cattle or cure disease.

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For example, passing the white Chattisbargh State display (formerly part of Madhya Pradesh), alongside a a potters street with tools, blacksmiths and goldsmiths, we see the place of  Shitala Mata.  The  principle deity of the Bastar region , she  known by different names depending in how she is invoked.  A patient with chickenpox may worship her offering a pockmarked terracotta elephant figure.  On day 3 or 5 a paste of turmeric is applied.

For other diseases and troubles the god is invoked as Jimidarin.

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Also aborbing was the Place of Babdev , a dedicated mound of symbolic animals, tools and pots. There is no idols but a stone in the midde in the name of Babdev and Nahar {lion).  Twice each year, at Diwali and Divasa, the whole village is arrives with cocks, goats, vermillion and horse figurines built up over the years.

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Aftewards, check out the the fun and innocence of children’s Rakku Tribal Games display.

Games include Chaupad,  a checkers like board game requiring mathematic skills and that should be  played in schools.

Kil.lo, played by Baiga children, a cross between snooker or pool with a stick to hit crescent lil.lo’s with a Damaha , or strike, 12 to 15 feet away. First you must hit the straight only, then the crescent, targets, after they are layered like a fort. When the target is truck a collective cry of lil.lo is raised.

Girls may like Ghar Gahr. During the festival of Diwali houses are whitewashed so children play house, making their own, much as a western child may make a dolls house.

Downstairs

 However, I need to suggest a few improvements:

Down stairs chai wallah was closed. So, unlike my earlier visits last year, resting to enjoy a longer stay was therefore discouraged. We had to leave the gallery for restaurant beside the outside courtyard. Here, Chai was serve from a thermos and a sign states food requires tickets bought from the Media Centre .

What or where the Media Centre is remains unsigned.

The book store, of books hung in wall baskets quiet artistically has only Hindi books. I understand this is entirely appropriate in the Museums endeavour to encourage Hindustani’s to appreciate tribal life. However, Bhopal is also marketed to International tourists. A Gallery guide, also in English, would be gratefully received by tourists. However, when leaving we were offered a tourist fold out brochure. It would have been useful for tourists before visiting the displays.

Also, there is no specific catalogue of the display, so you must write furiously if you want to remember any of the quality information available with each gallery.

For that matter even postcards would be a good way to promote the gallery and allow visitors to remember their experience. Tribal nick-nacks, should be available for purchase. I believe there is a market as demonstrated by a recent trip to Brisbane, Australia, where a travelling display of Meena tribal art from Rajasthan promoted art designs on raw cloth.  I imagine this could similarly be sold in Bhopal.

I am also surprised that even at the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya, or (IGRMS,  (200 hectares of Tribal recreated villages, and indigenous technology) tribal crafts are not marketed more enthusiastically. The best supplier of genuine  tribal craft is Tribes India. There are three stores in Bhopal and one in Indore. I recently bought some superb  yak wool vests at a remarkably good price. Tribal goods could also be sold at the Tribal Museum.

23.235654 77.385787

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To sing the language of birds and waterfalls

04 Wednesday Dec 2013

Posted by opus125 in India, Madhya Pradesh, Poetry, Tribal India

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Adivasi, India, Kathotiya Jungle Camp, Madhya Pradesh, tribals

KathotiyaJungle 049res

Chai at Kathotiya Jungle camp outside Bhopal

I pray the Adivasi will never forget to sing
the language of birds and waterfalls
To you they are birds
to me they are voices in the forest
the land grammar of my soul
Pragmatic, poetic
house of my being
a carrier of meaning
loud with voices of place and villagers 

Kathotiya Jungle Camp

23.259933 77.412615

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