The
Crisis in Metaphors:
Climate
Vocabularies in Adivasi Literatures
ANANYA MISHRA
Kuni Sikaka, Arjun Samad, Dodhi
Kadraka, Manisha Dinde
Adivasi Lives
Matter, a social media forum for young
Adivasi thinkers, shared these four names listed above, following recent arrests
of climate activists in India ("Young Adivasi").
The forum extended their solidarity and raised their voices against the detainment
of Disha Ravi. It remembered and recognised the contributions of young Adivasi
climate activists who have resisted industrial invasions and have been
similarly arrested or incarcerated for demanding protection of their ecologies.
Adivasi voices on climate action remain largely marginalised, while Adivasi
communities have steered and sustained "this battle" for climate justice "for
generations" ("Young Adivasi")
in the Indian context. The forum's timely reminder adds vigour to a global
Indigenous concern: that the current form of the climate crisis is largely
anthropogenic, and to comprehend and repair the interface between humans and
non-humans is paramount for a sustainable future, a point that has been
consistently articulated by Indigenous thinkers. Métis scholar Zoe Todd claims precisely that the
absence of Indigenous voices in framing the crisis, while being the most
vulnerable to its impact, "elide[s] decades of Indigenous articulations and
intellectual labour to render the climate a matter of common political concern"
(Todd 13). Indigenous knowledge systems of the non-human that are based on the
essential co-existence of humans and non-humans, with lived practices that
acknowledge "all our relations", are overlooked. Akash Poyam, a Koitur (Gond)
journalist and writer, articulates allied concerns for the absence of Adivasi
voices in the Indian context. In an online panel discussion organized by
Indigenous Studies Discussion Group (ISDG), he said, "Even though Adivasis are
said to be in the frontline of the crisis, their voices are not there in the
discourse. It is an upper-caste dominated environmentalist discourse" (Poyam,
Soreng, et al.).
Questions
raised by Poyam and Adivasi Lives Matter reveal the position of Adivasi
voice in climate discourse which, as I consider in this paper, mirrors the
precondition of Adivasi voice in the humanities. As the perpetual subaltern in postcolonial
literary studies, Adivasis "[embody] the limits of representation as the limit
horizon of modernity itself" (Varma "Representing" 103). Adivasi
voices are still accessed either through the "imperial copy"[1]
of ethnographical disciplines like folklore, or the subaltern in
representational narratives.[2] This is while
a thriving movement towards an Adivasi "self-governing literature" (Wright,
"The Ancient Library")[3] has been
ongoing since the early twentieth century. The archived speeches of Jaipal
Singh Munda and the poetry of Sushila Samad are testaments to this history. The
writings of Bandana Tete, Alice Ekka, Ramdayal Munda, and Hansda Sowvendra
Shekhar, the poetry and songs of Jacinta Kerketta, Bhagban Majhi, Dambu Praska
and Salu Majhi, among many others, and the thriving archives of adivaani,
Adivasi Resurgence and Adivasi Lives Matter, voicing ongoing land
dispossession and lived positions in contemporary India, command critical centring
in the climate discourse as well as in postcolonial literary studies. This
positioning cannot be limited to the area-specific context of South Asian studies
alone. Adivasi voices challenge the global industrial complex, and their
concerns echo those voiced by Indigenous communities in settler colonial
contexts (mining giant Adani, for instance, impacts Indigenous communities in
India and Australia). Indigenous critical theory from settler colonial contexts
that complicates or rejects the postcolonial (Corr, 187-202; Tuck and Yang,
1-40) critically positions the centrality of land for Indigenous communities.
Accordingly, it re-directs discourse to understand the Adivasi position within
the postcolonial nation. It revisits Adivasi demands for sovereignty as
separate from its appropriations within Indian nationalism and recognizes
settler practices replicated by the Hindu nationalist state. Besides,
foregrounding Adivasi voices in transnational Indigenous studies allows for a
reading of "literary sovereignty" or "sovereignty of the imagination" in
Adivasi literature alongside those ideas envisioned and theorized by Alexis
Wright, Simon Ortiz, and Robert Warrior.[4]
My use of the word "sovereignty" in this article is to evoke these essential
linkages.
By
method and readership, this paper addresses comparative literary studies. However,
given the composite forms of Indigenous thought that interweave the literary
and the historical, the paper is interdisciplinary, and hopes to present
relevant questions across disciplinary boundaries. Thus, it is divided into
three sections. First, I discuss the position of Adivasi voices in literary
studies in relation to the wider problematic of the absence of Indigenous voices
while framing the climate crisis and the Anthropocene.[5]
Further, this section explores a literary methodology to recover early
Indigenous response to the crisis. Rob Nixon echoes a call for a return to
metaphors, thus: "Sometimes [metaphors are] just hibernating, only to stagger
back to life, dazed and confused, blinking at the altered world that has roused
them from their slumber" ("The Swiftness"). I claim that Indigenous literatures
hold early warnings of the climate crisis in metaphors we do not yet centre in
climate discourse. The second section examines the climatic processes
(meteorological and anthropogenic) that have radically altered the climate of
eastern India. Although my focus is on the historical context of Odisha
(eastern India), I draw from a wider range of resources, given that these
processes, and their consequences, are not limited to the present-day borders
of Odisha alone. Accordingly, this paper claims that early warnings of a "crisis"
were registered in the recurrence of concerns around jal, jangal, jameen
(linguistically translated as water, forests, land) from the late nineteenth
century onwards. Jal, jangal, jameen is a ubiquitous refrain in diverse
Adivasi movements. These vocabularies work as a "common organizing concept" (Todd,
5-6) for Adivasi concerns because they evoke a common climatic history.
Moreover, they encompass specific non-humans in the ecologies of jal, jangal,
jameen interconnected with Adivasi knowledge systems. The third section
provides literary readings of Adivasi songs emerging from the particular
geography of southern Odisha. Focusing on particular ecologies of Kashipur and Niyamgiri,
I examine the songs of Kondh poet Bhagban Majhi (Kashipur), and late Dongria
Kondh poet Dambu Praska (Niyamgiri). The two singers pay attention to local
markers and traces in ecology to assess climate breakdown following industrial
invasions by Utkal Alumina International Limited (UAIL), Aditya Birla, and
Vedanta. I read how their literary metaphors serve as archives of
interpretations of the climate crisis as already confronted in these
geographies.
I.
The
Crisis in Metaphors
In The Great Derangement: Climate Change
and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh writes: "it was exactly the period in
which human activity was changing the earth's atmosphere that the literary
imagination became radically centred on the human" (66). There was a general "turning away" from the "presence
and proximity of non-human interlocutors" during the Industrial era, and in
recent decades the concern has found a rejuvenation with an "interest in the
nonhuman that has been burgeoning in the humanities", together with the rise of
"object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, the new animism" (31). On this
phenomenon in literary studies, Stephen Muecke writes in his review of Timothy
Morton's Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World,
that "postmodernism has returned with a vengeance, bolstered with all the moral
force of global ecological concerns" (Muecke, "Global Warming", np). While reading Ghosh, Todd, and Muecke's respective
works, I gleaned two corresponding strands of thought: as in the history of
philosophy that centred the human, this "renewal" of engagement with the
non-human too is yet again overpowered by the position of its production—one predominantly representative of the global North, and particularly the
Euro-American man. From this positionality, literary fascination with climate
crisis and the non-human, can claim postmodern newness to the extent of having
rationally discovered relevance of the concepts themselves, solely by the
virtue of occupying the discourse position of the Euro-American centre. For
communities, and their histories deemed "unthinkable" (referred to in the sense
of Trouilliot's "unthinkable history")[6],
literary studies has yet to centre Indigenous literary traditions as literary
beyond the reams of anthropological proof. That Indigenous communities may have
articulated early forms of the crisis still remains in the realm of the "unthinkable".
It is precisely a "crisis of the
imagination" (Ghosh, 9) that has foreclosed a literary reading of Indigenous
philosophies of the non-human and of Indigenous articulations (oral and
written) that intimated the crisis. When Indigenous land, people, or artistic
practises are referred, if at all, they create the "hypersubject" (Muecke, "Global Warming", np). Peripheral geographies and the oppressed
on the peripheries of the enquiry are called upon to be reinstated as the
representation of outerwordly crisis (reproducing visual constructions similar
to colonial encounters of "contact"), but never to qualify their own concerns. In
this context, Zoe Todd and Jen Rose Smith discuss the hypervisibility of the
Arctic (Todd, 6; J.R. Smith, 158-162). Similarly, among distinct (and numerous)
Adivasi land rights movements against mining ongoing in eastern India, it is
chiefly the images of Dongria Kondh communities that are used to exoticise
ecological margins. Moreover, for philosophies built on the metaphysics of a
centre, a metropole or a symbolic universal space of human crisis, the crisis
is often read as events, as the experience of the "uncanny" (Ghosh, 30)[7] or
as marked instances defined by a state of significant visibility such as the melting
of polar icescapes. This
practise may unconsciously displace the seemingly insignificant particularities
of "localised markers" in peripheral geographies as adequate evidence of the
climate crisis.
Besides, marginalisation of Indigenous
responses to the crisis depoliticises the fact that the climate crisis in the
peripheries is the result of excesses of the Euro-American centre, not just
historically but in contemporary global industrialism (Agarwal and Narain, "Global
Warming",np). The way the Kondh songs that I discuss in this paper are linked
to the United Kingdom, for instance, is that they sing against mineral
extraction by Vedanta, a bauxite mining giant with its headquarters in London.
The capital flow from the company's profits is felt predominantly in centres of
capital and culture in the Global North, rather than outside the company walls
in southern Odisha, where the Adivasi communities are displaced. Therefore, positioning
these songs in literary studies is not simply to answer the question of why
Indigenous literatures continue to occupy particular corridors in literary
studies, a subject of continued engagement in decolonising syllabuses recently.
Attending to the voices of resident communities in these geographies in our
literary readings of the Anthropocene is to render the crisis in these
geographies visible and disrupt the inequalities and centre-peripheral binary
which global capital does not follow but insidiously maintains. Historicising
the "locality in the Anthropocene", Vineeta Damodaran writes, "challenges
planetary debates by earth scientists through a historical and political
engagement with capitalism, democracy and resource extraction and to focus on
communities in particular periods and places and specific places in the Global
South" (96).[8]
Her work in environmental history foregrounds the local and Indigenous in
eastern India, specifically Jharkhand and Odisha. I emphasise Indigenous
literary articulations as fundamental evidence of this history, given that an
account of climate vocabularies cannot be assembled outside the realm of
Indigenous literary traditions that serve as historical archives.
Literary methodology serves to
uncover metaphors and other literary devices used to describe the crisis in regional
languages and, more importantly, to help recover and restore Indigenous voices.[9] The
absence of Indigenous imaginations of the crisis in contemporary discourse is
rooted in the problem of the absence of Indigenous literary voices. Here, I will
briefly discuss the particular absence of Adivasi literary voices. An access to
imaginations and representations of Indigeneity or "Adivasihood" of the Global
South in transnational discourse has been aided largely by subaltern studies
and postcolonial theory. However, these methods have been dominated by
caste-privileged scholars. Here, I similarly acknowledge my positionality as
one, and hence I am cautious of my voice operating within this structure. While
engaging with Adivasi voices from an institutional position in the United
Kingdom, a first introduction to understand the position of subaltern voice is
Gayatri Chakrabarti Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?". Similarly, the
first primer to "Adivasi literatures" are the representational narratives of
Gopinath Mohanty and Mahashweta Devi. These texts are representative of the
textual decolonisation of the dominant canon and decolonised syllabuses. In
postcolonial studies, they occupy the positions of canonical literary and
theoretical treatises. Both accounts are crucial to challenge the continued
Eurocentrism of institutional discourse that I discussed earlier and do not in
themselves form the primary problematic. The concern, however, is that Adivasi literatures
are accessed, but from sources twice-removed from the original source. In transnational
literary studies, these texts become exemplary to situating Adivasi concerns.
In the process, they have marginalised Adivasi voices and positionalities. It
further shifts focus from Adivasi agency for the (now) indispensable necessity
to complicate the postcolonial Indian nation state, and its virulent Hindu
nationalism, where the idea of the "Adivasi" is
employed in maintaining the myth of the Hindu nation at the same time as
Adivasi sovereignty is deemed as a threat to Hindu nationalism.
Subaltern Adivasi histories have
been recovered to challenge the mainstream nationalist narrative. Still,
literary history and criticism has often failed to read into the disquiet within
Adivasi literary tradition and the complexities they voice through
self-definitions not only in the "self-governing literatures" (Wright "The
Ancient Library", np), but also in the interface of folklore collections and
colonial archives. Though literary studies (global and national) can claim the
sheer diversity of literatures across several Adivasi languages and literary
forms, and scarcity of translations to access these literatures, it is in fact
the continued marginalisation of Adivasi literatures as literary that
precludes impetus to translation, transmission, and publication. Santhali
writer and activist Bandana Tete critiques the Brahminical Hindi literary tradition
that has dominated vernacular literary culture. She claims that not only has this
literary tradition acted as the central voice in Indian "national" literatures
but also exercised control on publications and publishing houses. She writes
that "their" incompetence in finding Adivasi women's writing should not be an
excuse (here, I translate and summarise) "to elide the very essential existence
of women in the history of poetry writing" (Tete 7). Recovering Adivasi
voices in literary reading, therefore, centres the "self-governing" Adivasi
literary landscape where the subaltern no longer remains the subaltern
but embodies sovereignty.
Recovering
voice recovers vital evidence. Here, I return to my previous point about
Indigenous voices on the crisis. Literary
methodology can serve to unravel overlooked markers of crisis already felt
in peripheral geographies.
These imaginations present "localised markers" and the local impact on
non-humans. They do not necessarily intimate an apocalyptic imagination of
sudden colossal change, but rather direct attention to long-term changes in
ecology which frequently go unarchived in dominant cultures of documentation. It
directs us to question what is considered as legitimate evidence of the
crisis? Heather Davis and Zoe Todd discuss the language of evidence in
documenting anthropogenic impact. They discuss that evidence, especially the
one measured and conceptualized in scientific disciplines, does not necessarily
accommodate the possibilities of imagining evidence from material and embodied
community histories. In order to theorise the Anthropocene from land-based
philosophies, the writers provide methods to understand the particular place
that the non-human occupies in Indigenous knowledge systems (Davis and Todd,
767). [10]
On discussing personal narratives of seeing "a flash of a school of minnows"
and memories of growing up beside the prairie lakes as "tracers" to the way
they see ecological change, Todd argues that these "fleshy philosophies and
fleshy bodies are precisely the stakes of the Anthropocene" (767). Documenting
the "school of minnows" as the "tracer", here, serves to connect the material
and the epistemological. The writers communicate that not only has the
Anthropocene aggravated "existing social inequalities and power structures",
but it has separated people from the land/material (here, minnows in the
prairie lake) "with which they and their language, laws and knowledge systems
are entwined". The argument made here is not to pit the scientific and the social
to serve as evidentiary for the climate crisis; making binaries of these
categories is not a productive endeavour in either discipline. Rather, the
argument is to reveal that the crisis has profound political and social
repercussions within communities. The crisis is not impersonal and distant but
is keenly felt and interpreted by different species—human and non-human.
And these localised markers and personal memories of climate change likewise
need documentation.
As Ghosh notes briefly in
relation to people of the Sunderbans and Yukon, some communities in fact "never
lost this awareness" of "non-human interlocuters" (63-64). How, then, to
recuperate these imaginations which would serve as evidence to the crisis? An
emerging glossary in contemporary English language has served to accommodate
the climate breakdown, the "realization" of living in the epoch of the "Anthropocene",
and ways to comprehend the dissimilar magnitudes of historical and geological
timescales. Likewise, Indigenous languages have imprinted in them the distinct
registers of historical processes markedly felt as a "crisis", in vocabularies
that we do not yet centre in climate studies. Apart from the meteorological terms
of analysis that are required to write climate history, it is imperative to
foreground recurring terms and popular vocabularies that have served as means
to communicate similar phenomena. Given that these vocabularies might not
necessarily be historically archived, literary studies need to trace the
occurrence of terms that have echoed increasing anthropogenic impact. Although it
needs acknowledging that these connections may not occur as direct lines of
causation, of exact historical co-relation between events and literary
responses (in songs, oral narratives, or written literature). Historicising
climate resistance vocabulary necessitates literary criticism to ponder on and imagine
a potential map of literary traces from significant historical junctures to ascertain
a consciousness that is often absent or erased given that these have been
minority histories and voices. As has already been reasoned in the context of
South Asia, Native American oral history, and Australian Indigenous
literatures, among others, Indigenous ways of historiography and archiving
memory span across literary genres (Skaria; Rao et al; Womack; Benterrak et al;
Wright). While a significant scale of resources is available for
history-writing and literary studies for dominant communities (given they have
dominated ownership and access to knowledge as settler colonisers or caste
hierarchies in India), Adivasi histories and vocabularies from the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries exist between the crevices of anthropological
constructions, and erasures. This makes it all the more important for literary
studies to create interpretative spaces. In these spaces, metaphors and
repetitions of particular words can be imbued with meaning, to assemble a
repository that restores gaps in the deliberations around the crisis.
Language, additionally, is crucial
to comprehend the loss of the material that has occupied an other-than-human temporality.
Cultivation of attention to perceive deep time in the minute details of the
local is facilitated by the metaphorical function of language. Robin Wall
Kimmerer, the Potawatomi plant scientist and writer, calls such a function a "grammar
of animacy" (Braiding 48). She writes that, along with being a plant
scientist, she is a poet: "the world speaks to me in metaphor" (29). She
theorises that a "profound error in grammar" in scientific conceptions of the
natural world (and consequentially of the climate crisis) is because of "a
grave loss in translation from [N]ative languages" (48). To understand a bay,
a non-human element of the landscape, she retrieves the word from its
containment as a noun form in English. She explains that the Potawatomi word
for a bay, wiikwegamaa, is a verb that assigns agency to the
non-human feature of landscape: "To be a bay" is the bay making its
presence known (55). The other elements around it, the water or "cedar roots
and a flock of baby mergansers" (55) variously interact with the bay as animate
entities striking alignment through their specific channels of communication.[11]
In the final section of this paper, I discuss the poetry of Bhagban Majhi and
Dambu Praska, remembering this "grammar of animacy" (48). Together with
providing a linguistic pathway to understand the deep time of non-human
elements, [12]
this "grammar" is committed to an
understanding of political inequality.[13]
Indigenous poetry provides rich sites that amalgamate a political critique of
colonialism alongside cognitive tools to situate the non-human.
Through a literary reading,
therefore, I frame jal, jangal, jameen as climate vocabularies, in the
next section. The plural form of "vocabularies" used in this paper is to
encompass the translations and transmutations of jal, jangal, jameen in
several Adivasi and other vernaculars. Here, I will briefly raise the question
about the choice of using "climate" in climate vocabularies and climate
consciousness, as opposed to an ecological or environmental consciousness. Wider
awareness about changing earth systems over geological time-scales and their impact
on humans globally, is arguably recent. The global day-to-day acceptance of
climate as a planetary system as opposed to regional weather regimes is also
contemporary. The Anthropocene, similarly, is a recently coined (English) term
to define an epoch where humans have influence at a geological scale. More than
a definitive stance on when a climate consciousness of the current form of the
crisis begins, I would like to maintain an open-ended one. This might allow a
space for rethinking and robust gathering of vocabularies from a longer time-period
that informs current understanding. As I discuss in the next section, work on
climate history and extreme weather events was ongoing in research and
scholarship much before it grew into common parlance. Indigenous populations
were not just affected by local ecological phenomena, but by these events which
we currently study as global climatic occurrences (ENSO). Moreover, while the
use of "climate" in the humanities, more than ecological or environmental, refers
to a recent and specific conglomeration of ideas on planetary phenomena, it
remains one which is bound to an understanding in scholarship within the
dominant English language.
To use the word climate is thus
to acknowledge the many other iterations and interpretations of the term in
Indigenous languages that are similar and may contribute to a broader social and
historical understanding of the term and phenomenon as we use and know it today.
Consider, for instance, Rachel Qitsualik's (Inuk, Scottish, Cree) and Keavy
Martin's definition of Sila. In its varied use in Inuit languages, Sila
encompasses a material understanding of climate as tangible phenomena.
Here, climate is a combined influence of land, air, and sky and a
community-held belief in its separate presence and animacy (Todd 5; Martin
4-5). Of a similar iteration, Inupiaq anthropologist Herbert Anungazuk called
some of the "old ways of weather and ice predictions" as "ilisimiksaavut—'what
we must know'" (Anungazuk, 101). In the context of Australian country, Nyigina
elder Paddy Roe evokes the word liyan which approximates as an "intuition"
or "life force of a place" that "enables people to feel their environment" (Roe,
qtd. in Morissey and Healy 229). It is in this glossary, I choose to examine
the occurrence of jal, jangal, jameen. Finally, the focus on the local
is to question continued Eurocentrism in climate studies and to centre
marginalised histories. However, an either/or between the local and the
planetary is limiting to a deeper reflection on the crisis. It tends to streamline
the complex understanding of both which Indigenous thinkers and artists have
sought to express in their literatures. Thus, it is with care that these
vocabularies need to be read and situated. A simplified leaning to unearth the "precolonial"
as the site for "alternative" knowledge as an isolated framework to
study the crisis can do more harm to decolonial endeavours. Such a method often
tends to exoticize rather than historicise key Indigenous understanding on the
crisis. It frames it as a "return" to a past of Indigenous knowledge systems,
rendering them stagnant as opposed to an evolving, continuous process of
interacting intellectual histories. Climate vocabularies, therefore, are an
invitation to seek the fine print of the crisis registered in literary
metaphors; this reading can enrich our knowledge of the crisis as it unfolds
today.
I
re-iterate, here, the need to access Indigenous voices in archived literatures.
This is emblematic of a larger problem while reading oral traditions, origin
myths, and archived Indigenous literatures, which come to the researcher
removed from their context and burdened with the constructions created in
colonial/upper-caste translation or ethnographic work. However, this does not
discourage readings of these texts. Adivasi literary archives open to a
significant world of possibilities when read in conversation with other
Indigenous writers and when studied with the methodologies formulated by
Indigenous theorists. Creek historian Craig S. Womack critiques the ongoing "problem"
of Native American texts (oral, performative, and written) characterized as "lost
in translation" (64) as opposed to translations from other dominant cultures; this,
he argues, postpones contextual and political analysis. Therefore, rather than a rejection of
early twentieth-century archives of Adivasi songs and myths, transcribed and
translated by colonial anthropologists and ethnographers, I read them as texts
operating within the milieus of their historical encounters and responding to
colonial methods of collections and archives. Being supported by methodologies
of literary reading provided by Womack and Muecke among others helps recover
Indigenous voice from the aporias around oral texts and translations built by
structural categories in colonial ethnography. This allows for the text's
reinstatement as political and presents possibilities for a "literary repatriation"
(Unaipon xliii).
II.
Jal, Jangal,
Jameen as Climate Vocabularies
The climate history of
Odisha is largely anthropogenic. Mineral extraction of the last few decades has
exacerbated the crisis on ecologies already fragile from a history of
exploitation of jal, jangal, jameen.[14]
Odisha—which in recent years is known as a cyclone-prone region—was infamously called marudi anchala or Land of Droughts. El Niño and
the Southern Oscillation (ENSO) occurrences caused meteorological dry periods
in the region. In addition, hydrological droughts[15]
significantly increased from radical changes in land use during the nineteenth
century, especially with the growth of commercialized agriculture and
deforestation. The time-period in Odisha's history that is primarily remembered
for its scarcity is also, ironically, a time when land use became largely
agrarian to increase revenue. Prior to 1850, upper-caste communities from the
plains of Sambalpur and Raipur started migrating for settled agriculture in the
districts of Kalahandi, Bolangir, and Koraput (KBK) (Pati Situating 101-102),
areas with the highest population of resident Adivasi communities in eastern
India. Grain shortages, due to changes in the crop cycles (ibid), also began during
this period, leading to resistance by Adivasi communities. The scarcities
become acute in the 1860s. J. P Das, in his historical narrative A Time Elsewhere
(2009), translated by Jatin Nayak, earlier published in Oriya as Desa
Kala Patra (1992), describes the years leading up to
1866, the year of the deadly Odisha famine. This was a decade of paradoxes for
the region. The reigning leaders and litterateurs like Madhusudan Das, Fakir
Mohan Senapati, and Radhanath Ray eagerly awaited Odisha's first printing press.
An independent press would establish the eminence of Oriya literature and, in
turn, Oriya nationalism, rescuing it from the colonial impact of Bengal. At the
same time, houses were steadily declaring grain scarcity. The famine ravaged. Market
prices soared, grain was exported to the empire, stocked rice controlled by
zamindars and colonial officers along with imported relief was stranded in
ports and delayed reaching the famished (Das ch.2) The drought and the Great
Famine of Odisha in 1866 killed a million people, nearly a third of the
population of Odisha (Odisha division of Kolkatta presidency) at the time,
leading to vast demographic and geographical change (Mohanty, 608).
Following this year, the famines of 1876-79
severely impacted east-Indian geographies, with a total of 50 million deaths
across India (Grove, 144). This was a severity similar to the 48-55 million
deaths between 1492 and 1610 because of disease and enslavement (Lewis and
Maslin, 75) that is commonly considered as the beginning of the crisis for
American Indigenous communities. The Odisha Famine of 1866 served as a warning
to the famines that followed. Henry Blanford was appointed as imperial
meteorological officer to the government of India on the recommendation of the
1866 Orissa Famine Commission to study the failure of monsoons and the
persistence of droughts (Davis, 217). Climate studies on east-Indian geography were
supported since agricultural failure directly impacted the empire. Richard
Grove discusses this history: severe droughts and shortage of rainfall of the
1870s and 1890s have been determined to be a result of ENSO, extreme warm
events that have a global climatic impact leading to similar drought conditions
in South Asia, Australia, Southern Africa, the Caribbean, and Mexico (124).
However, as he mentions, climate studies had already been conducted since the
1700s to record the periodicity of droughts and study the reason for long-term
weather conditions. Colonial researchers like William Roxbourgh, who had been
collecting data on tropical meteorology, had identified the relationship
between climate change and recurrent famines as relating to colonial impact
(even leading to afforestation efforts in the nineteenth century).
Global meteorological surveys and
climate studies were, yet again, within a limited realm of knowledge controlled
by the empire and dominant communities. It could be argued that the scientific
conception of a world climate system and its effect to generate conditions of
crisis did not yet exist as community knowledge (or it requires further search).
However, the severity of drought and famine conditions as a result of these
climatic events—and the exploitation of jal, jangal, jameen to
facilitate revenue-generation for the British empire—framed the climate
vocabulary of eastern India. Anthropogenic impacts on these geographies (the jal,
jangal, jameen of Adivasi communities) had rendered them incapable to
cushion the force of periodically occurring calamities. More than a singular "event",
the year of 1866 and the following famines have been read as part of a "process"
that was a direct continuation of land-loss to zamindars (landlords) and
commercialized grain trade without adequate returns to the farmers (Mohanty
609).[16]
The easy accumulation of jameen
(land) was aided by the Land Acquisition Act of 1894. Changes in the use of jameen
meant that Adivasi communities were assimilated into the caste system, serving
under highly oppressive forms of bonded labour like bethi and gothi,
systems in which existence was defined by a perpetual state of debt and
enslavement to the landlord. A significant number of Adivasi communities
migrated to forest tracts, given the increase in agricultural settlers on their
land. However, the India Forest Act 1865, designed specifically to clear
forests for railways, and later the Forest Act of 1878, heralded the "reserved"
forests to increase timber production and to grow more cash crops such as jute
and indigo. This act prohibited use of the jangal and curbed Adivasi
agricultural practices such as bewar, jhum, or podu chasa,
various forms of shifting cultivation practiced on forest slopes. The jameen
and jangal (and jal), the non-humans that sustained Adivasi
communities, were appropriated as resources. Furthermore, they were regimented
to disallow interconnected living. The onset of fragility of east-Indian
geographies was brought about by an accretion of control on jal, jangal,
jameen. This lent itself to a lived sense of "crisis", owing to fractured
ecologies and growing inequalities felt in the apocalyptic proportions of the
century's famines which Mike Davis describes as "late Victorian Holocausts"
that formed the "Third World" (see Davis). Having lost jal, jangal, jameen,
the once-princely communities became destitute within half a century. When the
colonial government imported "poorhouses", Davis quotes a missionary document
as saying, "Confinement was especially unbearable to the tribal people, like Gonds
and Baigas, whom one missionary claimed, "would sooner die in their homes or
their native jungle, than submit to the restraint of a government Poor House'" (Davis,
147). He claims that such antipathy was less about confinement and more
revealing of the diet the poor houses served: flour and salt. For Adivasi
communities, these decades prefigured a dire future. Their essential organizing
ecologies were not only colonized, unresponsive, and crumbling, but they had to
depend on the apocalyptic measures of the colonizer for survival.
While these early instances of a
seismic shift in eastern India may have found utterance archived in Adivasi
oral traditions of the nineteenth century, we may have lost access to them in
transmission. Moreover, apart from the climatic constants of famines and
droughts, the micro-climates of eastern India were heavily altered with the
beginning of mineral extraction that exacerbated ongoing concerns of land
dispossession. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were increased
invasions on eastern Indian landscape through mining for mica, slate, and
chromite (Mishra "From Tribal to", 30). We see articulations of mining activity
in myths transcribed by Verrier Elwin in Tribal Myths of Orissa
collected in the 1940s-50s, and we can assume that these songs had already been
in circulation in popular memory before these decades.[17]
One of the Bonda myths from Koraput reads:
There
was no money in the old days. But after Mahaprabhu gave the kingdom of
Simapatna to Sima Raja and Sima Rani, a government office was made to deal with
everything [...] One day Mahaprabhu took Sima Rani to the Silver Mountain and
showed her great heaps of silver. "That is silver", he said [...] Then he took
her to the Gold Mountain and showed her great heaps of gold [...] Then he took
her to the Copper Mountain and showed her great heaps of copper. (Elwin Tribal
Myths, 561)
The myth not only
demonstrates land transactions, as Sima Raja and Sima Rani are "given" the
kingdom, but also the entry of a third entity that carried out these
transactions, "the government office". That a scanning of the landscape to
determine sites for mining minerals was on-going is reflected in how Sima Rani
is "shown" these riches of the land. She subsequently mints them into coins,
signifying a transition from seeing mountains as living entities to seeing them
as capital.[18]
Such occurrences in mythical narratives coincide with increased mining in the
region. Coal and iron ore exports steadily increased with the expansion of
railways and industries in the 1880s. Tata and Sons
and the Bengal Iron and Steel Manufacturing Company started sustained mineral
extraction in 1905 (Pati Adivasis, 257). Samarendra Das and Felix
Padel explore the history of bauxite in Odisha, a sedimentary rock that has
become a site for struggle in recent movements, which I explore in the next
section. They write about how the bauxite-rich hills of Kalahandi were
documented as a resource by geological surveys carried out by T. L. Walker in
early 1900, who named the rock Khondalite, after the resident Kondh community
(Das and Padel, 58). Subsequent surveys continued through the twentieth century
until the last decade, when liberalization of the economic policies of the
1990s allowed multinational companies access to mine the hills. The mining
excesses of the last three decades further impaired an already fragile ecology,
and form a significant period in the climate history of Odisha after the decade
of 1866. Therefore, Bhagban Majhi and Dambu Praska's poetry, which I discuss in
the next section, situate the present crisis as one with a longer history.
The
radical impact on jal, jangal, jameen had been noted as a significant
climatic concern albeit in a language and scale that was localized. Jal, jangal,
jameen, apart from evoking this common climatic history for diverse Adivasi
communities, unify a common understanding of material ecology and provide a
holistic basis to "sacred"[19]
philosophies present in Adivasi knowledge systems. A recent resolution was
passed for Sarna to be accepted as a religious code which would include Adivasi
religions similar to Sarna under its fold. It was claimed that the acceptance
of Sarna as a separate religious group by the Indian government would also regulate
"resource politics" (perhaps, in favour of the Adivasis). This rested on the
claim that religious identity of Adivasis is founded on the natural resources
of jal, jangal, jameen (Alam "Why the Sarna Code", np). These intricate
systems that combine a philosophy of ecological interdependence, religion, and
literary tradition[20] have often
evaded colonial classifications,[21] those
classifications that presupposed Adivasi "primitivity" and intellectual
inferiority. Perhaps for this reason, the archival transcriptions of
anthropologists like Verrier Elwin and Shamrao Hilvale, among others, carry the
warnings of crisis, without further consideration of the predicament
articulated by Adivasi communities. The loss of the jangal was
registered as a "calamity" in a song transcribed by Elwin and Hilvale in the
1930s and 1940s:
Such
a calamity had never been before!
Some
he beats, some he catches by the ear,
Some
he drives out of the village.
He
robs us of our axes, he robs us of our jungle.
He
beats the Gond; he drives the Baiga and Baigin from their jungle. (Elwin The
Baiga, 130)
Here, the "calamity" is described as
unforeseen and of a form not encountered previously. The song proclaims that
the hand of colonial power and human intrusion on the jangal practiced
excesses that even surpassed the accustomed bearings and regularity of a
natural "calamity". Localised resistances to counter the increased control on jal,
jangal, jameen were ongoing since the early nineteenth century. It was
Birsa Munda's movement, or ulgulan in Chottanagpur province in the 1890s,
that provided an impetus for jal, jangal, jameen to become a "common
organizing force" for Adivasi communities. Birsa specifically demanded the
re-instatement of Khuntkatti system, which was based on collective
ownership of land and forests by Adivasi communities. In his reading of Gond
history, Akash Poyam claims that the slogan "jal, jangal, jameen"
as a unified call for protection was later coined by a forgotten Gond Adivasi
leader from Telangana, Komaram Bheem ("Gondwana", 131). Sharing "common cause" with Birsa Munda to resist against
exacting taxes and oppression by landlords, Bheem used the call during the
Gondwana movement against the Nizam government of Hyderabad to demand complete
land and forest rights. Poyam contends that the vocabulary of jal, jangal,
jameen was specific in its concern to establish Gond sovereignty and
autonomy over jal, jangal, jameen ("Komaram Bheem"). Contemporary discourse on climate change and environmental
conservation, therefore, cannot be studied separately from the long history of
Adivasi movements for land rights and sovereignty. These contexts reveal
Adivasi vocabularies that signal structural inequalities which makes them more
vulnerable to the current crisis.
The crisis of the human, especially
after the theorization of the Anthropocene in geology in 2000 in dominant
Euro-American centres, has critical precursors in the peripheries. For Adivasi
communities, the crisis of human and non-human existence was anticipated in the
calls to protect jal, jangal, jameen. Jal, jangal, jameen rhymed
and echoed to sustain material and epistemological continuity after the
calamitous impact of resource exploitation during the nineteenth century.
Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to access further literary
readings of archives and transcribed myths and songs, my intention is to
revisit the recurrence of jal, jangal, jameen and read them as climate
vocabularies. These vocabularies are recurrent because they archive a
generational memory of lived crisis during climatic occurrences (such as
droughts and famines) and anthropogenic impact on non-humans around which
Adivasi philosophies are organized. The political consciousness of Adivasi
movements on land rights that is deeply committed to the indispensability of
protective measures for jal, jangal, jameen is indeed contemporary
climate discourse prefigured. To this climate history and genealogy of
resistance, the songs of Bhagban Majhi and Dambu Praska bear allegiance. Their
invocations of the mountain, earthworm, and seeds present vital evidence of the
enmeshed ecology of jal, jangal, jameen particular to their contexts in
south Odisha.
III.
Of Mountains and Earthworms
Bhagban Majhi, a Kondh
singer and leader from Kucheipadar village (Rayagada district in southern
Odisha), was one of the leading voices of Kashipur resistance against bauxite
mining by Utkal Alumina International Limited (UAIL), and later, Aditya Birla.[22]
The movement began in the early 1990s and continued for over two decades, a momentum
of resistance that was later carried forward by the Dongria Kondh community to
oppose Vedanta in Niyamgiri. Despite a sustained struggle by the Kondh-Paraja
community in villages around Kashipur, Aditya Birla acquired land and, in
present day, the displaced Adivasi communities live in the peripheries of the
factory walls.[23] Bhagban, as
a teenager, along with Lima Majhi, composed a number of songs (in kui and
desia, which was later adapted in Oriya and Hindi), that were widely transmitted
to unite the communities. From those specifically composed for the movement, Gaan
Chadiba Nahin (We Will Not Forsake This Land), was identified as a common
anthem in several movements against mining and forced evictions in India. Having
found utterance in a dominant language such as Hindi, with a popular video Gaon
Chodab Nahin subsequently produced by K. P. Sasi, the song acquired
pan-cultural presence. Apart from its rhyme that was predisposed to
transmission across linguistic and regional borders, Gaan Chadiba Nahin
remains one of the most subversive songs to be formulated as part of Adivasi
literary song traditions in recent decades. Bhagban's political critique is
embedded in Kondh-Paraja epistemology particular to south Odisha. His
interpretation of jal, jangal, jameen which, in this song, is articulated
as dongar-jharan-jangal-paban (mountains-waterfalls-forests-winds),
connects it to the long history of Adivasi climate consciousness.
We will not yield,
we will not give up,
no, we will not forsake this mountain.
[...]
Our hills, our companions,
our growth, our progress.
We are the children of this earth.
With folded hands,
we bow down to our earth mother.
[...]
We are the people of this earth—
we are earthworms—
mountains—streams—forests—winds—
if we forsake this earth
how shall we endure?
Worlds shall collapse,
lives will crumble, when
the pathways drown,
how will we endure?
We will be nowhere
we will be no more—
there is no hereafter—
no, we will not forsake this land. (Prakrutika,
19)
My translation is from a desia
(a pidgin variety of Oriya and Kui) transcription of the song archived in the
Kashipur movement pamphlet, Kashipur Ghosanapatra, published by Prakrutika
Sampad Surakhya Parishad (a local environmental protection committee
founded during the Kashipur movement). Here, Bhagban presents two fundamental
ideas, unnati (progress/development) and matrubhakti (love for
the mother). Matrubhakti for the mountain or dongar as the mother,
as invoked in Bhagban's song, departs from invocations of the motherland/mother-earth
in the context of Indian nationalism. Additionally, matrubhakti
linguistically may have its roots in songs composed during the Gandhamardhan
movement against Bharat Aluminum Company Limited (BALCO). In its philosophy,
however, Matrubhakti digresses from the Hindu mythical motifs that
became the driving force in Gandhamardhan. Here,
the salutation of deference bows to non-human elements. Matrubhakti is
ethical kinship with "all our relations".[24]
Matrubhakti is for the earth mother, Dharni penu. Notably,
because of this conception of mountains forming essential basis to all human–non-human
life forms, they occur invariably as gods, or kings, as entities who are
agential, in the religious beliefs prevalent in Kashipur as well as Niyamgiri.
Through a general use of dongar, Bhagban alludes to Baplamali, Kutrumali,
and Sijimali, the bauxite-rich ranges of south Odisha, which have formed "through
the alternating rhythm of rain and sun continuing every year for about 40
million years, eroding layers of feldspar and other rocks" (Das and Padel, 32).
Bhagban presents evidence of this elemental bind that sustains the ecology of
eastern India: "dongar-jharan-jangal-paban" or "mountains-waterfalls-forests-winds"
exist because of the mineral-rich mountains. The Kondh community is intricately
bound to this ecology.
His
song, consequently, offers the Kondh understanding of humans as matira poka,
or biripidika – earthworms.[25]
As part of the movement against mining, he demanded, "We ask one fundamental
question: How can we survive if our lands are taken away from us? [...] We are
earthworms. [...] What we need is stable development. We won't allow our billions
of years old water and land to go to ruin just to pander to the greed of some
officers" (qtd. in Das and Padel, 394-395). For Bhagban, notions of unnati
or development are embedded in a cosmology that has decentred the human. For dikus
(outsiders) of such a conception, his poetry conveys a radical understanding of
progress that necessitates discerning the temporalities of the earthworm and
the mountain. The "fleshy philosophy" of the earthworm opens a "pathway" to
grasp the dissimilar magnitudes of temporal perceptions that the Anthropocene
commands: the dongar of deep geological time, and the dongar as
capital in the history of mineral extraction. Kondh conceptions of the human as
biripidka or earthworm, the human as part of the elemental cosmology of
the Kucheipadar landscape, enables a comprehension of mountains as autonomous
annals of knowledge beyond their reductive quantification as "resource" for a
nation's progress. To understand the extent of irredeemable loss of the dongar
would require understanding its existence as separate from human history, with
its own annals of millennia of slow formation and evolution.
Unnati
and matrubhakti have essentially formed the ideological basis of the
Hindu nationalist state's divisive enterprise and the nation state's invasion
of Adivasi land for industrial progress. Bhagban's interpretation of these
words thus becomes crucial. He frames climate action as the political
responsibility of the present to resist complicit governments whilst having a
deep-time consciousness of the mountains, a dual task that delineates human
positionality in the Anthropocene. In his speeches and testimonies, unnati
as imagined by the Indian state and mining companies for short-term profit that
would deplete this "resource" within thirty to forty years, is juxtaposed with unnati
rooted in a comprehension of the mountain that has a profound dimension. He
asks, "Sir, what do you mean by development? Is it development to destroy these
billions of years old mountains for the profit of a few officials?" (qtd. in Das
and Padel, 10). He represents and communicates a Kondh humanism in his songs
through his interpretation of development as one that honors the human's
ethical relationship to land. "Humans as earthworms" in kinship with the
mountains orients human perception and equally counsels on the fragility of
these enmeshed interfaces. During our conversation in 2017, he presented this
thought as a "fairly basic" idea which he had attempted to convince people of
during the movement. Human impact on land is fueled by industries, and to
oppose destruction of ecologies is a universal responsibility. He said, "People
think this is for Adivasi's self-interest. This resistance is against 'loot'.
The riches of the land that is being destroyed is not of the Adivasi's alone.
The environment, sky, this is not of the Adivasi's alone. It belongs to the
living, and the living suffer. The profits are for the company" (Majhi).
Bhagban's
political thought, beside a consciousness of "humans as earthworms", poses
further questions to our belated understanding. Is the binary by which we
understand the Anthropocene in literary imagination, of geological and
historical time, adequate to comprehend the lived temporalities of non-humans?
For are not our metaphors for understanding the non-human again dependent on
the scales of human measurements and the grammar of theory? What is the
language in which to imagine scale and inhabit temporal dimensions as
earthworms and living mountains? As in several Adivasi creation stories, the
earthworms collected earth until it sufficed living beings. The dongar
is a law-making entity as much as its creation and sustenance depends on the
enterprise of the earthworms. And yet again, given the mutuality in their
relationship, can the temporality of the mountain alongside the earthworm be
imagined at all through progression or variations in scale? The dongar
and biripidka claim sovereignty on temporality, equally on the forms of
the annals they maintain. As a conduit to their claims, Bhagban Majhi's
political activism becomes critical. For young Kondh leaders of the movement,
understanding the metrics used by the company was equally important to predict
the "calamity" that mining would ensue. To thoroughly investigate the statistics
proposed by the state and the company, the "tonnes of bauxite" as opposed to a
living dongar was vital, so that Kondh ideas of progress could be
proposed and reasoned. To examine the measures of employment and education that
was promised by unnati was to ascertain whether the villages would be
direct beneficiaries or marginalised again. The annals of the earthworms and
the mountains had to be juxtaposed with metrics that stem from and accommodate
human centrality and that are estimated to have higher "pragmatic" value. As we
shall come across in the next section, the translation of Dambu Praska's song
carries a similar duality: "a measuring has begun of Leka houru" (Praska,
qtd. in Dash 2013). Praska, similarly, juxtaposes temporal scales of his origin
epic and company metrics. The elders of the village, and singers like Bhagban
Majhi, were consequently part of a philosophical struggle to grapple with the
modes of adopted languages to convey Kondh epistemologies connected to the dongar
and biripidka. This leads me to explore yet another "fleshy philosophy"
of the earthworm in Dambu Praska's epic rendition.
IV.
Of Mountains and Seeds
Listen, O elder, O brother,
the story I tell you:
this mountain is our ancestor, our Darmuraja.
This mountain is cucumbers, pumpkins, and all that was
created.
Listen, O brother, our only story.
.................
The king summons the elder brother to the feast,
the middle ones with tattered clothes,
are asked to leave—
crossing mighty rivers, the middle ones are scattered
.................
A call resounds from village to village—
assemble on the mountain—
But we shall not leave.
There, lives Darmuraja... (Praska, qtd. in Dash 2013)[26]
The late Dongria Kondh poet's song "The
Lament of Niyamraja" is rooted in the Dongria Kondh oral epical tradition. As
the jani (priest) of the community, he sings in a literary form of Kui.
The singular long-form of this rendition is archived in the video documentary
by Bhubaneswar-based filmmaker Surya Shankar Dash titled "Lament of Niyamraja".[27]
Here, my English translation is based on a recent full-text translation by Arna
Majhi (from Kui to Oriya) that has clarified the complex text of Praska and
helped bring previously unconsidered aspects of the song to light.[28]
The song was collected in the years leading up to the village council hearings
held in Niyamgiri by the Supreme Court of India in 2013. India's apex court
demanded legitimate reasons why the Dongria Kondh community opposed Vedanta's
proposal to mine bauxite on their hills. One afternoon during the movement,
Dash asked Dambu Praska that, if Praska was called by the state to a hearing,
what would he render as a reply on behalf of his community? In reply to Dash's
question, Dambu Praska sang "The Lament of Niyamraja", presenting evidence of
legal ownership of the hills: the intimate knowledge of penka (seeds)
which for him are "the stakes of the Anthropocene" (Davis and Todd, 767).
Through metaphors in his poetry, he communicates legal conceptions embedded in penka
or seeds of the pumpkin (kumda penka) and cucumber (mundra penka).
In his song, the Dongria Kondh cosmology is represented as having its origins
from non-human elements like the earth and its earthworms (biripidka), as
well as the sky, who is called Darmuraja, the god who transmits this law and
knowledge.
Darmuraja, also known as Dharmaraja or
Niyamraja (King of Law), is believed to be an ancestor, an animate entity who
holds a religious position and is resident on the hills of Niyamgiri. The name "Niyamgiri"
itself suggests why it is essential to read this song through the philosophies
of the non-human articulated in Dongria Kondh mythology. "Niyamgiri", as the
name of the hill of Darmuraja, might have been a Sankritised import: giri
means hill, niyam means law in Oriya and some other Indo-Aryan
languages. It is unclear when the words may have entered Dongria Kondh
vocabulary. It is worth pondering with some skepticism whether it is a recent
import or a result of interactions with dominant traditions like Oriya, Telugu,
and Hindi, among others, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries or even
earlier. Therefore, contrary to what is widely believed in non-Indigenous
readings of Niyamgiri, that Niyamgiri is the "Mountain of Law", with "Niyamraja"
or "Dharmaraja" presiding as the "King of Law", might be our error in
translation or an idea in Dongria Kondh mythology that has grown out of linguistic
adaptation. Dharma is a Sanskrit term for "just action" or "duty", whereas
Darmuraja refers to the Dongria Kondh "ancestor", who decides the law of
the community. The law that Dambu Praska sings about is distinctive and not
related to "dharma" in Hindu traditions. In other words, Dambu Praska is
potentially singing about the law embedded in the seeds of the pumpkin and the
cucumber.
Praska
braids the origin myth of the Dongria Kondhs with the narration of present-day
call to a court hearing. He speaks through numerous voices in a tense
arrangement that alternatively straddles the temporalities of the origin myth
and the present day, where the mythical elder brother of Darmuraja, called to
the king's court to decide on the proposed settlements of their community,
overlaps with the Dongria Kondh villager called to a state hearing. Both, the
brother and the villager, are asked the same riddle:
How many seeds in a pumpkin?
How many seeds in a cucumber?
How many shall sprout and how many are hollow? (Praska, qtd.
in Dash 2013).
Dambu Praska's song
performs a struggle to answer the riddle of seeds, an answer that would form
communal evidence of belonging to their hills. At one point, Darmuraja sits
beside him to offer answers through a secret understanding, an answer Dambu
Praska does not reveal to us, the listeners. Praska's metaphorical use of the
riddle of seeds forms the basis of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)[29]
to judge those seeds (nida penka) which would yield a healthy crop, a
local knowledge passed down through generations in the form of a riddle. Traditional
knowledge of ownership is often guarded and closed to non-members of the community—Darmuraja, the King of Law, offers the knowledge to Praska and not the
listener. That is why Dambu Praska sings that both acts, of sharing and denial
of this "sacred" knowledge, threaten him. On the one hand, he cannot break his
community's rules of intellectual property. On the other, withholding this
proof of ownership would displace his community. At one point, the narrator in
the song denies seeds that are offered to him in order to protect their hills.
Here, the penka or the seeds become an allusion to non-Indigenous seed
varieties that were introduced on Adivasi land promising a high yield, but
which were essentially seed varieties that yield monocrops and are not suitable
for cyclical sustainable production.
Robin
Wall Kimmerer, similarly, writes of corn and essential Indigenous epistemology
and history associated with varieties of the crop that has been deemed as "primitive"
by colonial settlers. The industrial production of corn is "waste producing",
she writes, far removed from the relationship between maize and human as
planted and consumed within an "honor system": "[The]
human and the plant are linked as co-creators; humans are midwives to this
creation, not masters. The plant innovates and the people nurture and direct
that creativity." ("Corn tastes better", np). When Dambu
Praska similarly rejects the seeds that are offered to him in a "pouch", a non-Indigenous
variety for a high yield, it is his way of maintaining the Dongria Kondh "honor
system" for seeds indigenous to the hills. The hollow seeds (hatun) also
suggest the history of settlements by colonial and upper-caste communities in
southern Odisha since the nineteenth century, that I discussed earlier in this
paper. It is Dongria Kondh women who are the "guardians of seeds" (Jena "Tribal
Priestesses", np). Dongria Kondh
priestesses conduct a ritual for the collection and protection of indigenous
millet seed varieties that are in decline on the slopes of the hills.
Travelling by foot to other villages, the women request seeds to be accumulated
and sown for harvest. As reported on Vikalp Sangam, these travels reveal
not only vanishing millet seed varieties but also the sheer diversity of
indigenous seeds sown as opposed to monocropping: Dasara Kadraka, a bejuni
(priestess) from Kadaraguma village, cites the existence of thirty millet seed
varieties from the hill alone that are endangered ("Tribal Priestesses").
The
poetic repetition of seeds, the apparently simplistic and straightforward
listing of vegetables and grain, are evidentiary of sustainable practices
embedded in complex knowledge systems. The question of the number of seeds in a
cucumber, the materials of pumpkins, fruits, and grains that Darmuraja
provides, is the vital materiality that determines Dongria Kondh law and
survival. This relationship that binds Niyamgiri's ecology to the Dongria Kondh
community stands threatened in the Anthropocene. Consequently, invocations of
vegetal produce of Niyamgiri were a recurrence in the oral testimonies of
Dongria Kondh villagers presented to the Supreme Court of India to protect Niyamgiri
from bauxite mining. Dambu Praska, similarly, comments on the incoming
dispossession by the mining industry. He laments that the answer to the riddle
of the seeds is ultimately irrelevant if the land is threatened:
Seven days in the sun,
the
seeds of the pumpkin and cucumber dry up.
Listen,
O brother,
with
the sunrise, the earth warms, the mounds crumble—
the mountains grow muddy,
flow murky in the streams—
know
this, O brother,
a
measuring has begun of Leka houru.
Tell
me, O brother,
how
many seeds of the pumpkin are hollow?
how
many will sprout?
Here are nine pouches of pumpkin seeds,
here are nine pouches of cucumber seeds—
if
the land is lost, how would seeds matter? (Praska, qtd. in Dash 2013).
Praska
conveys a disillusionment with the government hearing. The Supreme Court
hearing was limited to only a few villages in Niyamgiri. By then, continued
industrial mining (more regularly since the 1990s) had already displaced
several Adivasi communities and destroyed the ecology of the neighboring hills
and villages in south Odisha. His image of muddy mountain streams evokes the
image of the toxic industrial mud ponds constructed by the company. Vedanta
alumina refinery not only consumed water that forms perennial streams of the Niyamgiri
hills, but also constructed an ash pond at the mouth of Vamsadhara River. The
river and streams on the mountains were polluted, rendering them unusable for
human consumption. Praska is aware of the ongoing devastation to their hills
and performs a series of denials towards the end of the song. He denies the
offer of seeds, buffaloes, and mangoes, metaphorical suggestions to the
material gains that the company and state offered in the name of "development"
and progress. The narrative voice in the song realizes and communicates the
indispensability of the dongar. Similar to Bhagban Majhi, Praska
communicates that mining their dongar would herald a breakdown,
destroying the slow and prolonged elemental bind of the mineral that has formed
the ecology of eastern India. The continuity of seeds, and consequently of his
community depends on the continuity of the mountain.
Conclusion:
They cannot tolerate the existence of
trees
for the roots demand land. (Kerketta,
168)
In a visionary couplet written
in Hindi, in her second anthology Jadon Ki Jameen (Land of the Roots),
Oraon poet Jacinta Kerketta engraves the existential "stakes of the
Anthropocene" (David and Todd, 767). As the titular poem to this anthology, a
two-line afterword that appears on the last page, she says that the reason they
cannot tolerate the presence of trees is because the roots demand jameen
(land). This form of non-human need is unimaginable and therefore
unaccommodated within human systems of legality and ethical practice. In this
couplet, she effectively articulates that to comprehend our present crisis
necessitates re-formulating the question of land rights, evoked here as the
rights of the land.
Through
a literary reading, I situated the recurrence of jal, jangal, jameen as
climate vocabularies to explore the Adivasi literary tradition's response to the
climate crisis. The paper was limited to the context of east-Indian
geographies. What are the other possibilities of imagining climate
vocabularies, and how will these literary readings support work on
micro-histories of particular geographies and documentation of specific Adivasi
philosophies? Similar to the "fleshy philosophies" of earthworms and seeds,
present in the songs of Dambu Praska and Bhagban Majhi, what are the ways to
archive and read similar connections to the material and vegetal? This further
raises the question of what are the various forms that climate vocabularies can
take in different Indigenous traditions and languages? In a paper titled "Inventing Climate Consciousness in Igbo Oral
Repertoire: An Analysis of mmanu eji eri okwu and Selected
Eco-Proverbs" by Dr. Chinonye C. Ekwueme-Ugwu and Anya Ude Egwu, the two Nigerian writers
present a climate consciousness embedded in Igbo proverbs. Similarly, Nicole
Furtado's evocation of "Ea", a concept stemming from Native Hawaiian
epistemology, informs the climate vocabularies framework.[30]
In the panel discussion titled "Climate Change,
Infrastructure and Adivasi Knowledge", panelists Akash Poyam, M. Yuvan, Archana
Soreng, and Raile R. Ziipao shared some of their ongoing documentation of
Indigenous knowledge traditions, ecological vocabularies, and sustainable
practices (Poyam, Soreng, et al.). These methods—for instance, M.
Yuvan's Instagram handle titled "A Naturalist's Column"—are innovative
archives and a necessary glossary for ecological education. Similar work can help uncover literary recurrences
that have served as a "common organising concept" (Todd, 5-6) in diverse
contexts and languages.
I
hope a transnational glossary on climate vocabularies can channel further
comparative work that connects the climate histories of India with settler
colonial nations, and Indigenous literary responses in the respective contexts.
Similar to India, ENSO occurrences have impacted Australian geographies
resulting in severe drought conditions in the nineteenth century. Settler
colonialism's lasting impact on North American and Australian land through
forced removals, disease, and genocide radically altered ecologies. The global
industrial complex further impacts Indigenous communities in all three
contexts. The raging bushfires of Australia in 2019, the wildfires of
California in 2020, and the recent forest fires on the Similipal reserve,
eastern India, in 2021 are some of the many symptoms of insurgent eco-systems.
Here, Indigenous communities are affected by climate change and ironically held
responsible. In India, the conservation narrative excludes Indigenous
participation and sustainable practices and penalises Indigenous communities
for environmental encroachments on their own land. Adivasi peoples are
displaced to "protect" wildlife and habitats. Kharia climate activist Archana Soreng,
therefore, demands that Adivasi communities lead the narrative and efforts on
conservation, rather than be made "victims" (Poyam, Soreng, et al.). Forthcoming
discourse on climate, conservation, and the pandemic may need to reflect on the
role of authoritarian nationalism and racism in abetting already fragile
conditions. Indigeneity and land rights of Adivasi communities are oppositional
to the Hindu nation and aligned corporate and industrial interests. Here,
Adivasi and other minority communities become dispensable bodies in their lands
as well as in urban centres where they work as migrant labourers. The exodus of
migrants from urban metropoles following the Indian state's overnight lockdown
during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 was an authoritarian measure. In so far as
the pandemic is indicative of the climate emergency, the exodus was also a
climate-induced displacement.[31]
How to rethink and safeguard Indigenous climate justice in authoritarian
nation-states? This concern is not limited to the Hindu nationalist state. Appropriations
of Indigeneity in Europe and Britain has led a rise in xenophobia claiming
indigeneity of the "original white" population. Claiming such indigeneity, the
Far Right draws a dangerous analogy between immigration of minority populations
to UK and colonialism in settler nations.[32]
This ideology can influence conservative anti-immigration policies. At a time
when climate-induced displacements and violence within authoritarian regimes of
the Global South render Indigenous and minority populations homeless, these
policies, if realized, will deprive alternatives of safety to climate refugees.
Acknowledgements:
I acknowledge the contemporary Adivasi writers and
communities from Odisha and India, and those who have generously informed ideas
and inspired this work: Arna Majhi, Salu Majhi, Bhagban Majhi, Anchala, and Rajkumar
Sunani, to name a few. Some invaluable online presences that have informed this
paper: Adivasi Resurgence, Adivasi Lives Matter, Video
Republic, People's Archive of Rural India (PARI), and Vikalp
Sangam. This research was made possible by discussions with Saroj Mohanty,
Rabi Pradhan, Sudhir Pattnaik, Sudhir Sahu, Surya Shankar Dash, Nigamananda
Sarangi, Ranjana Padhi, Ruby Hembrom, Devidas Mishra, Kedar Mishra, and many
others. The paper is significantly informed by presentations, discussions, and
ideas emerging from the Climate Fictions/Indigenous Studies Conference
(2020). I thank the presenters and my co-convenors. Equally, it is informed by
an online panel discussion on "Climate Change, Infrastructure and
Adivasi Knowledge: Perspectives from India" (2020). I am grateful to the convenors,
and speakers Archana Soreng, Akash Poyam, M.Yuvan, and Raile Rocky Ziipao. I
thank my supervisor, Priyamvada Gopal, and my doctoral examiners, Chadwick
Allen and Robert Macfarlane, for their invaluable feedback and encouragement.