The last strand of Niyam Raja
The jungles of Dandakaranya spill across the heart of India like a great green inkblot, blanketing parts of five states. Within this verdant expanse lives a vast collection of animals and plants uniquely adapted to relentless heat and oceans of rain. Equally attuned to these environs are the Dongria Kondh, a tribal people who inhabit the Niyamgiri Hills of southeastern Orissa, along the vast forest’s eastern rim.
‘This mountain is our Lord,’ says Sundara Kadraka, the chief of Tebapada, a dust-speck Dongria village perched atop a foothill, miles from the nearest road. The fierce-eyed 40-year-old is standing amid bright-green sprouts of ragi (finger millet) and gazing up at the cloud-crowned peaks of Niyamgiri mountain. ‘It has given us vegetables, fruit, animals, shelter, water – everything we need – for all of time. We will never leave, especially now that our mountain is in danger.’
The danger comes in the form of a local subsidiary of London-based mining giant Vedanta Resources, which is set to begin extracting bauxite from the mountaintop later this year. Since the footprint of the mine doesn’t overlap with any of their villages, relocation of the 10,000 Dongria is unlikely. But Niyamgiri’s rich bauxite deposits act as a sponge, holding rain and then releasing it as the nutrient-enriched water that makes the surrounding area so fertile. Once the bauxite is gone, argues an Indian government study, the mountain’s dozens of perennial streams will dry up and its soil will become fallow.
To the Dongria, then, the mine represents both an act of deicide and a serious existential threat.
A symbiotic relationship
Some 80 million Indians are recognised by the government as ‘tribal’. The Dongria are among the 65 million tribals of the Indian heartland whose origins are unclear. Some anthropologists, such as Frenchman Marcel Mauss, see them as ‘Hindus lost in the forest’; others link them to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, distinct from the mainstream of Indic civilisation. The Dandakaranya’s 100,000 square kilometres shelter several Kondh tribes, including the Maria in Chattisgarh and the Bhutia in other parts of Orissa. All speak the same language and follow a similar lifestyle.
‘What makes the Dongria unique is that they keep to the old traditions much more than other tribes who are more acculturated,’ says Felix Padel, an Oxford-educated anthropologist who wrote his thesis on the Kondh and has been visiting the region regularly for 28 years. ‘In 2001, surveyors came and asked them: “What is your religion?” and they said: “Our religion is mountains.” This is the most profound answer you can have because the Dongria understand that their lives depend on the health of the mountains – that really answers the divinity aspect.’
Indeed, the Dongria culture and way of life are in near-perfect symbiosis with Niyamgiri. They are animists, attributing divinity to trees, animals and features of the natural landscape – Niyamgiri Mountain is Niyam Raja, or Lord of the Law, from which everything flows. With a botanist’s eye, the Dongria forage for fruits, nuts and medicinal herbs and spices in the mountain’s forests. They are also innovative subsistence farmers, growing beans and tubers beneath a thick layer of undergrowth and planting crops such as ragi, black pepper, corn and green leafy vegetables side by side in patches of farmland barely discernible from the surrounding forest.
‘It’s ingenious,’ says Padel. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’ The technique minimises human and animal pilfering and uses the dense flora to boost yields. ‘We have been farming like this for as long as I remember. It is very effective,’ 21-year-old Jitu Jikesika says over lunch in a canteen in Muniguda, a nearby lowland town. It’s so effective that during peak harvest months, some tribal families make the equivalent of up to £150 selling their produce at a weekly market next to the Muniguda railway station. The multi-crop fields also make for nutrient-rich soil – which may explain why the Indian government has co-opted their techniques for an agricultural support programme along the Orissa coast.
In Tebapada, chillies are set out to dry among cud-chewing cows, dirty-snouted pigs, excitable goats and wandering dogs. Huts are made with bamboo, straw and, in some villages, tin roofs provided by a government assistance agency.
In the surrounding forests, wild mango, jackfruit and pineapple are abundant. Ribbons of white falling water score the hillsides; the Vansadhara River and a tributary of the Nagavali spring from Niyamgiri, providing water to hundreds of thousands of Indians. Brilliantly coloured butterflies the size of an adult hand share the jungle with tigers, leopards, sloth bears, pangolins and langur monkeys. The local forest division has proposed the area as a wildlife sanctuary and the state wildlife organisation has suggested that it be made an elephant reserve.
Out of respect for this abundance, the Dongria maintain a taboo on cutting trees near the top of the mountain. They’ve preserved primary forest covering 90 per cent of Niyamgiri, minimising run-off, maintaining biodiversity and providing a substantial carbon sink. ‘The Dongria are living sustainably in the true sense of the word,’ says Padel. ‘It seems ironic that in this era of environmental concern, they may not survive.’
Joining the fight?
The Dongrias’ predicament isn’t new. Parallels to the arrival of Europeans in the New World and a century of colonial exploitation in Africa are obvious. There are also subcontinental precedents: when the British East India Company invaded swaths of Indian forest during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they faced considerable resistance. In 1893, in the state of Jharkhand, and again in 1910 in Madhya Pradesh, tribals revolted against the loss of their land.
In recent years, the Indian government has commandeered vast tracts of rural farmland and tribal forest for mining, dam and commercial development projects, inciting violent protests across the country. ‘This is an acceleration of a long-term historical process in which forest-dwelling communities – because they live amid great-flowing rivers and huge reserves of bauxite and other ores – have had to make way as these things become commercially important,’ says Indian historian Ramachandra Guha.
Of late, the battle of tribal versus industrial economy has been linked to a long-running insurgency that stretches from Hyderabad to West Bengal. Maoist rebels called Naxals have been growing in number and ferocity in recent years, and Dandakaranya is their nexus.
Some of the most deadly attacks have taken place in the Dantewada region of Chhattisgarh, a few dozen kilometres from Niyamgiri, where Maoists have taken advantage of the ‘economic exploitation of tribal communities’ to bring them into the fold, according to a report released last year by Human Rights Watch. During national elections earlier this year, Maoists burned two Dantewada polling places.
The Naxals help tribals fight for rights to land, water, better wages and healthcare, before recruiting the men as foot soldiers, says the report. Their efforts have been particularly successful among the Maria Kondh.
The Dongria may be next. Orissa is one of India’s poorest states, and the tribals are among its least well-off. Yet the state is also rich in mineral resources. In the past few years, a handful of major commercial projects on forested lands have incited clashes and killings.
‘Despite a high percentage of tribals, Orissa had been essentially free of Maoist activity. But it’s clear that it’s on the rise,’ says Guha. ‘The Maoists are going to use this type of economic development policy as a kind of entry point.’
The Dongria are historically a peaceful people, but an attack on their mountain god and a threat to their way of life may force them to consider a more martial approach. ‘I don’t like to talk about that,’ says Jikesika. ‘But yes, some of my people have said they would like to do that, to fight with the Maoists.’
Storm clouds gather
Vedanta’s billionaire owner, Anil Agarwal, says the mine will bring jobs and improve healthcare and education, and that in about 20 years’ time, when the estimated 77 million tonnes of bauxite have been extracted, the mountain will be returned to its original state. The Dongria will also be provided with a court-ordered compensation package of about US$2.4million.
Others are more sceptical. ‘Because of their lifestyle, no amount of compensation or rehabilitation will do any good for the Dongria Kondhs,’ says Bratindi Jena, tribal rights leader for ActionAid India, one of a clutch of NGOs that have rallied around the Dongria. In a 2005 report, the Wildlife Institute of India agreed, finding that within a few years, the mine will dry up Niyamgiri’s perennial streams, seriously damaging the environment and imperilling the Dongria. ‘The culture will be des-troyed, religious rights are going to be violated, and their livelihoods will be taken away,’ Jena says.
Vedanta’s alumina refinery in nearby Lanjigarh, completed last year, is apparently already endangering livelihoods. Dongria in the surrounding villages claim the refinery has poisoned their water, devastating crop yields and reducing drinking water supply. In March, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) acknowledged that complaints about the mine from Survival International, a tribal advocacy group, merited further consideration. What’s more, the Indian police have initiated investigations into fraud allegations against Agarwal.
In the meantime, Jikesika, the first Dongria to attend college, has taken on an activist role to organise and lead his people. ‘If I don’t fight for my mountain, who will?’ he asks. ‘We will fight to stop the mining, but practise non-violence, with strikes and road blockades. This is my burden, this is my responsibility, I have to take the lead.’
He isn’t alone. ‘We cannot even think of leaving,’ says 51-year-old Soma Mandika, chief of Tamaka village. Standing among two dozen women and children in front of his hut, he continues, nostrils flaring: ‘We will fight, there is no other way. If we go other places, who will give us land? Who will give us food? No. If we die, we die with this mountain. The forest is our father, the mountain is our mother – how can we leave our family?’
Lachi Manjika, a ruggedly handsome 21-year-old from Paramali village, toes the same line. ‘We will organise all the surrounding villages and we will fight, because if we leave, we will die anyway,’ he says, sitting ramrod straight on a charpoy, or raised cot. ‘We do not want jobs, we are illiterate and don’t have the necessary skills. We have to live here or nowhere else.’
The name Dongria comes from the root donger, which means ‘hill’ in Oriya. Thus, in leaving Niyamgiri to settle in the lowlands, the tribe would cease to be who they are. Even Jikesika, who is studying in town, plans to return to the hills to marry and start a family.
Rupuli Mandika, the wife of the Tebapada chief, stands in front of her hut holding their one-year-old daughter in her arms while another peeks from behind her legs and two more keep watch nearby. She thinks about what she would do if the mountain streams began to dry up and her children were hungry. ‘Even one glass of Niyamgiri water will fill us up,’ she says. ‘The mountain is our lord and it will provide.’
August 2009
‘This mountain is our Lord,’ says Sundara Kadraka, the chief of Tebapada, a dust-speck Dongria village perched atop a foothill, miles from the nearest road. The fierce-eyed 40-year-old is standing amid bright-green sprouts of ragi (finger millet) and gazing up at the cloud-crowned peaks of Niyamgiri mountain. ‘It has given us vegetables, fruit, animals, shelter, water – everything we need – for all of time. We will never leave, especially now that our mountain is in danger.’
The danger comes in the form of a local subsidiary of London-based mining giant Vedanta Resources, which is set to begin extracting bauxite from the mountaintop later this year. Since the footprint of the mine doesn’t overlap with any of their villages, relocation of the 10,000 Dongria is unlikely. But Niyamgiri’s rich bauxite deposits act as a sponge, holding rain and then releasing it as the nutrient-enriched water that makes the surrounding area so fertile. Once the bauxite is gone, argues an Indian government study, the mountain’s dozens of perennial streams will dry up and its soil will become fallow.
To the Dongria, then, the mine represents both an act of deicide and a serious existential threat.
A symbiotic relationship
Some 80 million Indians are recognised by the government as ‘tribal’. The Dongria are among the 65 million tribals of the Indian heartland whose origins are unclear. Some anthropologists, such as Frenchman Marcel Mauss, see them as ‘Hindus lost in the forest’; others link them to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, distinct from the mainstream of Indic civilisation. The Dandakaranya’s 100,000 square kilometres shelter several Kondh tribes, including the Maria in Chattisgarh and the Bhutia in other parts of Orissa. All speak the same language and follow a similar lifestyle.
‘What makes the Dongria unique is that they keep to the old traditions much more than other tribes who are more acculturated,’ says Felix Padel, an Oxford-educated anthropologist who wrote his thesis on the Kondh and has been visiting the region regularly for 28 years. ‘In 2001, surveyors came and asked them: “What is your religion?” and they said: “Our religion is mountains.” This is the most profound answer you can have because the Dongria understand that their lives depend on the health of the mountains – that really answers the divinity aspect.’
Indeed, the Dongria culture and way of life are in near-perfect symbiosis with Niyamgiri. They are animists, attributing divinity to trees, animals and features of the natural landscape – Niyamgiri Mountain is Niyam Raja, or Lord of the Law, from which everything flows. With a botanist’s eye, the Dongria forage for fruits, nuts and medicinal herbs and spices in the mountain’s forests. They are also innovative subsistence farmers, growing beans and tubers beneath a thick layer of undergrowth and planting crops such as ragi, black pepper, corn and green leafy vegetables side by side in patches of farmland barely discernible from the surrounding forest.
‘It’s ingenious,’ says Padel. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’ The technique minimises human and animal pilfering and uses the dense flora to boost yields. ‘We have been farming like this for as long as I remember. It is very effective,’ 21-year-old Jitu Jikesika says over lunch in a canteen in Muniguda, a nearby lowland town. It’s so effective that during peak harvest months, some tribal families make the equivalent of up to £150 selling their produce at a weekly market next to the Muniguda railway station. The multi-crop fields also make for nutrient-rich soil – which may explain why the Indian government has co-opted their techniques for an agricultural support programme along the Orissa coast.
In Tebapada, chillies are set out to dry among cud-chewing cows, dirty-snouted pigs, excitable goats and wandering dogs. Huts are made with bamboo, straw and, in some villages, tin roofs provided by a government assistance agency.
In the surrounding forests, wild mango, jackfruit and pineapple are abundant. Ribbons of white falling water score the hillsides; the Vansadhara River and a tributary of the Nagavali spring from Niyamgiri, providing water to hundreds of thousands of Indians. Brilliantly coloured butterflies the size of an adult hand share the jungle with tigers, leopards, sloth bears, pangolins and langur monkeys. The local forest division has proposed the area as a wildlife sanctuary and the state wildlife organisation has suggested that it be made an elephant reserve.
Out of respect for this abundance, the Dongria maintain a taboo on cutting trees near the top of the mountain. They’ve preserved primary forest covering 90 per cent of Niyamgiri, minimising run-off, maintaining biodiversity and providing a substantial carbon sink. ‘The Dongria are living sustainably in the true sense of the word,’ says Padel. ‘It seems ironic that in this era of environmental concern, they may not survive.’
Joining the fight?
The Dongrias’ predicament isn’t new. Parallels to the arrival of Europeans in the New World and a century of colonial exploitation in Africa are obvious. There are also subcontinental precedents: when the British East India Company invaded swaths of Indian forest during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they faced considerable resistance. In 1893, in the state of Jharkhand, and again in 1910 in Madhya Pradesh, tribals revolted against the loss of their land.
In recent years, the Indian government has commandeered vast tracts of rural farmland and tribal forest for mining, dam and commercial development projects, inciting violent protests across the country. ‘This is an acceleration of a long-term historical process in which forest-dwelling communities – because they live amid great-flowing rivers and huge reserves of bauxite and other ores – have had to make way as these things become commercially important,’ says Indian historian Ramachandra Guha.
Of late, the battle of tribal versus industrial economy has been linked to a long-running insurgency that stretches from Hyderabad to West Bengal. Maoist rebels called Naxals have been growing in number and ferocity in recent years, and Dandakaranya is their nexus.
Some of the most deadly attacks have taken place in the Dantewada region of Chhattisgarh, a few dozen kilometres from Niyamgiri, where Maoists have taken advantage of the ‘economic exploitation of tribal communities’ to bring them into the fold, according to a report released last year by Human Rights Watch. During national elections earlier this year, Maoists burned two Dantewada polling places.
The Naxals help tribals fight for rights to land, water, better wages and healthcare, before recruiting the men as foot soldiers, says the report. Their efforts have been particularly successful among the Maria Kondh.
The Dongria may be next. Orissa is one of India’s poorest states, and the tribals are among its least well-off. Yet the state is also rich in mineral resources. In the past few years, a handful of major commercial projects on forested lands have incited clashes and killings.
‘Despite a high percentage of tribals, Orissa had been essentially free of Maoist activity. But it’s clear that it’s on the rise,’ says Guha. ‘The Maoists are going to use this type of economic development policy as a kind of entry point.’
The Dongria are historically a peaceful people, but an attack on their mountain god and a threat to their way of life may force them to consider a more martial approach. ‘I don’t like to talk about that,’ says Jikesika. ‘But yes, some of my people have said they would like to do that, to fight with the Maoists.’
Storm clouds gather
Vedanta’s billionaire owner, Anil Agarwal, says the mine will bring jobs and improve healthcare and education, and that in about 20 years’ time, when the estimated 77 million tonnes of bauxite have been extracted, the mountain will be returned to its original state. The Dongria will also be provided with a court-ordered compensation package of about US$2.4million.
Others are more sceptical. ‘Because of their lifestyle, no amount of compensation or rehabilitation will do any good for the Dongria Kondhs,’ says Bratindi Jena, tribal rights leader for ActionAid India, one of a clutch of NGOs that have rallied around the Dongria. In a 2005 report, the Wildlife Institute of India agreed, finding that within a few years, the mine will dry up Niyamgiri’s perennial streams, seriously damaging the environment and imperilling the Dongria. ‘The culture will be des-troyed, religious rights are going to be violated, and their livelihoods will be taken away,’ Jena says.
Vedanta’s alumina refinery in nearby Lanjigarh, completed last year, is apparently already endangering livelihoods. Dongria in the surrounding villages claim the refinery has poisoned their water, devastating crop yields and reducing drinking water supply. In March, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) acknowledged that complaints about the mine from Survival International, a tribal advocacy group, merited further consideration. What’s more, the Indian police have initiated investigations into fraud allegations against Agarwal.
In the meantime, Jikesika, the first Dongria to attend college, has taken on an activist role to organise and lead his people. ‘If I don’t fight for my mountain, who will?’ he asks. ‘We will fight to stop the mining, but practise non-violence, with strikes and road blockades. This is my burden, this is my responsibility, I have to take the lead.’
He isn’t alone. ‘We cannot even think of leaving,’ says 51-year-old Soma Mandika, chief of Tamaka village. Standing among two dozen women and children in front of his hut, he continues, nostrils flaring: ‘We will fight, there is no other way. If we go other places, who will give us land? Who will give us food? No. If we die, we die with this mountain. The forest is our father, the mountain is our mother – how can we leave our family?’
Lachi Manjika, a ruggedly handsome 21-year-old from Paramali village, toes the same line. ‘We will organise all the surrounding villages and we will fight, because if we leave, we will die anyway,’ he says, sitting ramrod straight on a charpoy, or raised cot. ‘We do not want jobs, we are illiterate and don’t have the necessary skills. We have to live here or nowhere else.’
The name Dongria comes from the root donger, which means ‘hill’ in Oriya. Thus, in leaving Niyamgiri to settle in the lowlands, the tribe would cease to be who they are. Even Jikesika, who is studying in town, plans to return to the hills to marry and start a family.
Rupuli Mandika, the wife of the Tebapada chief, stands in front of her hut holding their one-year-old daughter in her arms while another peeks from behind her legs and two more keep watch nearby. She thinks about what she would do if the mountain streams began to dry up and her children were hungry. ‘Even one glass of Niyamgiri water will fill us up,’ she says. ‘The mountain is our lord and it will provide.’
August 2009
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