Jhadol Block, Pt. 2

We range far from Jhadol on my second day in the field, into the most distant reaches of the block. The motorbike plies a steep road of swiftly alternating elevation—the hills are bunched tightly here. The road is also heavily eroded, as is often the case after monsoon. At occasional intervals we are forced to dodge villagers repairing its most washed out stretches. Today’s village is absent many adults—mostly men—of working age: they have gone to prepare for a ceremony in celebration of Gawari, a Hindu holiday of minor significance in most of India, but one which is stringently observed here. Try as I might, I never receive a satisfactory explanation of its origin; however, I can tell you that it involves the veneration of Lord Rama, who is the seventh incarnation of Vishnu, and his consort Sita, goddess of agriculture. I also learn that it is believed that its observation here forestalls natural disaster and pestilence.

After conducting a couple of interviews, Anuj and I speed off into the countryside, soon turning from the main road so that our path parallels a stream. We travel for a short distance, until a fence of thorny branches bars further progress—we’ve reached a homestead. We dismount and begin to walk along the bank of the stream, which doubles back close to the house (the house sits at the tip of a sort of peninsula). We cross the stream on foot (it is shallow and will be dry within months) and after following its rightward bend, we pass some boys splashing happily alongside a wallowing buffalo and cross again. Here, in a clearing above the stream, the ceremony/celebration/intrigue will initiate.

Existing alongside the caste-bound Hindus (82%), the remaining Muslims (12%), the Christians of the south (2.3%), the Sikhs of Punjab (1.9%), and a smattering of Buddhists and Jains (both constituting less than 1% of the population), are the indigenous tribal peoples of India, whose presence here predates the Dravidians, who came from the south, and the arriviste Aryans, who swept in from the north. Overall, tribal peoples represent about 6% of the Indian population; in Seva Mandir’s purview, they constitute 68%. Until 1952, they were officially known as the Criminal Tribes; now they are designated the Scheduled Tribes—along with the Scheduled Castes (the Dalits, or Untouchables), the Other Scheduled Castes (OSCs),and the unfortunately named Other Backwards Classes (OBCs), they are part of an extensive government quota system that puts American affirmative action to shame. Tribals exist outside of the caste system, but their native religions were long ago swallowed up by Hinduism and other major Indian faiths. I am in a tribal village, although to my eyes it is indistinguishable from a village of poor Hindus of muddled and indeterminate ethnic heritage.

I have never taken an anthropology class. I have never consciously compared distinct cultures within an anthropological framework or examined them on an anthropological basis. I am a stranger to the methods, jargon, theories, presuppositions, and hermeneutics of anthropologists. This is all a caveat for what comes next: On some fundamental level, my experience of this Indian tribal people’s observance of the Hindu holiday Gawari bears an uncanny resemblance to my experience of some tribal rituals in Africa. As embarrassing as I find the idea, it strikes me almost immediately. Though the similarities must be superficial, I cannot ignore them.

Music here is supplied by a single, two-sided drum and a metal pan clanged with a small and crude hammer. Is the beat the same? I cannot say; I can only say that it sounds similar, and that it drives the same sort of skipping, stopping-starting dance. The singing has a monotonous, chanting quality, an incantatory power that transports me to Cote d’Ivoire, where I would shake a rattling percussion piece and mimic a droning indigenous song for the amusement of my peers. There is a mask! Faces are painted. Bunches of weeds are shaken and twirled about. Perhaps it doesn’t add up to much, particularly in the retelling, but the sense of commonality impresses itself upon me. On Sunday, I will serendipitously stumble into a performance of Gujarati tribal dances, none of which will ever be confused for African.

Here in the village, differences are also illuminating. As in Shakespeare’s time, even the female roles in this ritual are played by men, and even the men not in drag wear enough jewelry—necklaces, bracelets, and dangling earrings—to rival Mr. T. Some have painted their fingernails. There are swordsmen and peacock feathers, umbrellas and spears. Much of the drama seems to revolve around spanking, pretend and otherwise. Anuj, a Hindu, is at a loss to interpret the proceedings. There is a bride and a groom, each of whom sings and dances in turn. “It is done,” Anuj tells me finally. “They are singing movie songs now.” We leave.

Development, like most forms of change, is incremental, although not unassailable, at least in the short-term. Gains can be lost; progress can be subverted by any number of variables. In the long-term, however, the world seems to be pushing toward well-being for all of its inhabitants (although the case of Africa makes me stare hard at this sentence). “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice,” Martin Luther King Jr. said. The arc of development may very well parallel the arc of history and bend towards health and safety and dignity and fulfillment for all peoples—and what is justice if not that? It is best to measure progress in generations, for this is the most realistic timeframe for change and the surest way to avoid frustration. It may take a generation to convince people to value the education of their children above narrow economic considerations, and another generation for them to realize the insufficiency of their children’s education, to mobilize, and to press the government for redress. And how long for the government to provide a quality education to all of its far-flung peoples, to provide redress? When was Brown vs. Board of Education? 1954? Patience may be both virtue and excuse. After all, King, in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” also rebuked those who asked him to wait for justice: "There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience."

On my first day in Jhadol Block, I inspect an anicut that stands at the mouth of a small, stream-fed lake. It is a high and impressive structure, with a slightly sunken and crenellated center that allows water easy passage should monsoon overflow the artificial lake. The excess water rolls over a nearly sheer stone wall six meters high (about twenty feet) into two cement retaining pools at the dam’s base, which in turn spill into a rocky streambed. At this remove from monsoon, water trickles solidly over only a couple of narrow swaths of the wall.

In the retaining pools, hundreds of fingerlings swim. I watch as a few fling themselves onto the ledge which surrounds the pools, then further to the base of the wall, where the water runs. They move in frantic hops spaced around long intervals of rest. Not one is as big as my thumb. After crossing the ledge, they begin to surmount the wall. By some miracle of physiology these fish are not only able to cling to the face of the wall—which must be inclined at eighty degrees, at least—but to fling themselves up it (for it really is flinging) in fits and starts, all the while drawing enough oxygen from the meager current of water that opposes them to perform this incredible feat (a rough calculation suggests that I would have to scale the side of an eighty-story building, without using hands or feet mind you, to approximate their journey). Bit by bit, fling by fling, they make it to the lake above. It must take an entire day, at least. Some fall, but I suspect that this doesn’t deter future climbing, because the lake affords space for growth, and offers the promise of freedom and abundance that the retaining ponds cannot. Somehow the fish understand this, and however long and difficult the journey, they make their way up.