One of the insights provided is that Bastar was a peaceful, harmonious
region, before the independence of India and the tribals live happily
there. As I had said earlier this is how various India communities
lived ... all over India. Each followed their own cultures without
being dominated or having any desire to dominate.

It all shows how this talk of brahmin, Hindutva, supressing tribals
for thousands of years is totally garbage and the work of divisive
forces.

The problem that have arisen today, more than anything else has to do
with the impact of modernization which realy makes it possible of
exploitation of greed which was not possible in the past. (eg in the
past a woodcutter can cut only one tree a day, but today with electric
saws we can fall many trees in a few hours. The "enabling" of greed
led to the exploitation of the weak which is the source of the
conflict in Bastar today.

Bastar: then and now
http://www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2006/10/bastar_then_and.html

The Bastar that Verrier Elwin knew and wrote about was a very
different place...

RAMACHANDRA GUHA

AT about the time of the Battle of Britain, an Englishman of combatant
age made a new home with his new wife in a then very remote, and very
forested, princely State named Bastar. The man was Verrier Elwin, a
brilliant Oxford scholar who had joined the Church and then left it,
apprenticed himself to Gandhi and then left him, finally settling on
the wandering life of a freelance anthropologist. His wife was a Raj
Gond named Kosi; much younger than Elwin and without his academic
distinction, she yet matched him in strength and independence of
character.

Between 1932 and 1940, Elwin was based in the Mandla district of the
Central Provinces. In those years, he wrote fine books on the Baigas,
the Agarias, and the Gonds, as well as two novels with tribal themes
and characters. He moved to Bastar in the autumn of 1940 in search of
new tribes to write about. Kosi and he built themselves a home
overlooking the spectacular Chitrakot Falls on the Indravati river.
Over the next three years, they spent the winter months roaming around
Bastar, talking to Gonds, Murias, Marias, Koyas, Kalhars and other
communities of the State. In the hot weather and monsoon, they mostly
stayed at home, where Elvin wrote on a desk that faced the Chitrakot
falls themselves.

Beautiful countryside
Recently, while in the British Library in London, I came across a copy
of Elwin's Journal of a Tour in Southern Maria Country, November 1941
to March 1942. Several entries speak of the beauty of the countryside,
with villages "surrounded by hills with yellow fields of sirson
[mustard] in the foreground and forest everywhere". The anthropologist
found the humans no less enchanting. In a village named Kaklur, he
attended a tribal dance held in a "most romantic spot". The boys were
attractively dressed, with "tassels of red woollen cowries" on their
topis, while the girls were "especially beautiful and graceful in
their movements". Afterwards, the Elwins and their hosts drank leaf
cups of landa, "one of the most potent drinks known to mankind", which
tasted "like liquid dynamite", yet filled one "with a spirit of
universal benevolence".

Elwin found the tribals of Bastar "gentle, friendly, with no desire
for property or power". They were, he wrote to his mother in London,
in striking contrast to the warring Europeans. The life led by the
Bastar adivasis was "a great lesson to the world at this time. So long
as men cling to the desire of empire and wealth such catastrophes as
the present one [i.e., World War Two] are certain to occur".

This past May, I visited Bastar 65 years after Elwin had been there.
The old princely State has now been divided into three districts —
Bastar, Dantewara, and Kanker. It was in the Dantewara region that
Elwin made his tour of 1941-42. I passed through some of the same
villages as he had — such as Gidam, Kotru, Bijapur and Bhairamgarh.
The countryside was still exquisitely beautiful, the fields
interspersed with trees of sal and jackfruit and wild mango, and
densely forested hills in the background. Even in mid-summer, the
Indravati is a very beautiful river. And the bird life was very rich
indeed — the Brain Fever Bird calling overhead, orioles in the trees,
larks and warblers on the ground.

The new sarkar
What had changed was the fate and the state of the tribals. In 50
years of being part of the Union of India, the Bastar adivasi had seen
the new sarkar mostly in the role of an exploiter — as forest
officials who denied them entry to the forest, police officials who
demanded bribes, and State-supported contractors who paid less than
the minimum wage. Nor had the "fruits of development" reached them —
like other tribal districts, these too had far less than their fair
share of functioning schools and properly staffed hospitals.

The misdeeds of the Government of India had created an opening for
Maoist revolutionaries to move into. For the past decade they have
been very active in Dantewara district, mobilising villagers to demand
higher wages and freer access to forests. However, such mobilisation
was invariably accompanied by armed action. Policemen, forest
officials, and contractors were attacked and killed, sometimes
brutally. So were village leaders deemed to be unsympathetic to the
revolutionaries.

Divided villages
Unable or unwilling to meet the Maoist challenge by conventional
means, the politicians of Chattisgarh — in which State Bastar now
falls — instead set up a vigilante group to combat them. Young tribals
were induced by the offer of a gun and a monthly stipend to fight the
Maoists. Other villagers were forced to leave their homes and fields
and shift to camps by the roadside. The Maoists, meanwhile, responded
with retaliatory attacks of their own. In the past year alone, several
hundred tribals have been killed in the conflict. And as many as
40,000 have been displaced.

Verrier Elwin found the Bastar tribals at peace, but now they are at
war — with one another. He wrote of the Maria of Dantewara that they
were "communistic people", who "still have a great deal of village
solidarity". Now each village is split down the middle, clan pitted
against clan, family against family. Had Elwin seen Bastar today, he
would have wept. I know I did.

------------------------------------

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