Tribal Heritage in a Changing World

my thesis is

that ever since

the british came in and the

indian government only depend the

colonial strategies

of the government with you know 1990

new economic policy and it

depend the exploitation of the

communities by the state

state as it identifies itself with the

people

which is absolutely a fiction

but i am speaking in english and i am

talking about tribals

so one is uh one recalls uh saath

when he said that the othello

in order to make himself understood has

to speak in french

but then his voice is no longer his own

so i have worked for

several decades you see

heading national institutions as well as

provincial government

and

when i left kolkata for sarguja

which is a tribal territory

and for madhya pradesh which is a tribal

frequented state i

uh didn’t know much about tribal all

these categories

cognitive categories cognitive divides

between

included and excluded scheduled and

non-scheduled

notified criminal and non-notified

criminal

these are categories which didn’t make

any sense to me

and when i actually dealt with their

tribal

and i found that i knew even less

about what they stood for it’s like a

faceless mass

to an ice officer administering from the

top

you deliver programs i mean for family

planning

for food for security and etc etc i

don’t really know them but very soon

despite my education in which i

had gathered that westernization is

equivalent to modernization

i found that there were many other

alternative models of development

which had been abdicated by the state

and with that abdication came the divide

between the rural and the oven the hills

and the plains

and the cognitive divide

between the so-called tribal and the

so-called modern

it was accorded to be all of us who were

tribal

once upon a time we lived on a shared

continent of ideas

in is there was a balance between

ecology and technology

in which the organic and the inorganic

communities human and organ communities

were living in interdependence

now we have been talking about progress

the teleology of progress from a

primitive civilization to a agricultural

civilization to a

an advanced technological civilization

at the same

time we should talk also about

the growing pollution which has been

discussed

and the

continuous deceleration towards

violence and homicide

and a growing monoculture

not only of the organisms

substitution of commodity diversity for

seed diversity

but also monoculture the mind

and so

we hear about digital india

smart india startup india stand-up india

but only swachh bharath

and when i go into chhattisgarh or my

departation the remote resources of the

country

i see that none of the toilets are

functioning

because of the lack of management and

governance

the basic

knowledge that a toilet can operate only

when

there is a proper sump and the water

point is closed

water point is about two kilometers away

in all the places

except in the urban situation they were

not functioning

so what

i’m trying to point out is that right at

this point of time

there is also a kind of a

biocide an ecocide there is not only

an end of birth but there is also a

death of death

and the so-called tribal

who was like you and me but now we are

banished as i said from his association

um he is domesticated

into a society of spectacle

driven by a consciousness industry so he

is part of the

jamboree the show 26 january 15th

august he’s there dancing singing

all he is good for is dancing and

singing he doesn’t have

any notion of development because the

unesco

encyclopedia of life support system says

so

that it is difficult for an aboriginal

to conceive of sustainability

as it is difficult for aristotle to

think of the notion of value

and when i look at

you see the conversation of barcelona

johnson

boswell is speaking on behalf of the

south sea islanders

johnson says don’t can’t in defense of

savages

they have the art of navigation or even

a cat can

you say swim oh they have

they can carve very beautifully even a

cat a child

can scratch with nails so that is more

or less the perception

we have of tribal art and kiroskuro

and you know it’s a kind of a empty

shard

can you see the visuals now but when i

came

into the service i had passed this side

by

without knowing that this is one of the

most unparalleled sculptures in the

world

next please the 50 years later

i have a sculpture which is analogous in

don

dunham cave in china in which there is a

description

the mountain has been chased to his

sabbath

has been chased to its source next place

this is a 16th century celtic warrior

but the meaning is lost the shape

remains next

is a polish demon

again the meaning is lost the shape

remains

next ah this is a sixteenth century

sculpture

akimondo now it’s again again a

concatenation of floral

and faunal elements but the sculpture

which you

saw next please this is a contemporary

uh

tribal art form with similar

you see congregation of forms

but what i was trying to show is that

there was a unique harmony

of form and function necessity and

embellishment

in the sculpture we excavated i mean

most of the western scholars again

looked at it and dismissed it as a

tribal sculpture

since it is tribal it would have no

cognitive cost boundary

behind it and it would

be a meaningless you see group of forms

which had been assembled in a higgledy

piggledy fashion

i went back to the inscriptions went

back to the texts

and there was a complete continuity from

vedic texts including the brahmanas

shattered

brahmana and you know the uh shatasha

parishad and the local inscriptions

which talked about the vedic

inspiration behind sculptures like these

and then i found similar sculptures uh

not exactly similar but analogous ones

in vidarva

next place so

we go back to the uh

third fourth century we see pashupati

sculpture which people know

because it belongs to the india’s valley

civilization it’s familiar

but what is not familiar that even these

uh you see forms were anticipated next

please

now this is a museum which i set up in

about 300 acres in

raipur and a similar museum is set up in

about

200 acres in bhopal which was

a movement for de-museumization to move

from mere collection of objects to

recollection of ideas

to move from xc to display in situ

revitalization

of knowledge systems wars and norms

and to move from

communities visiting the museums to

museums visiting the communities

next please now this is a

museum of man in bhopal which i headed

this is a 5000 year old painting older

than

you see indus valley civilization it’s

the

it’s a man walking and this entire area

nanvada valley has prehistoric

sculptures

including the narmada man the remains of

the namada man

which is uh it is controversial but i

mean it is a

if it is not homo habilis if it is not

homo erectus it is at least homo sapiens

next please this is a uh

what uh uh carving petroglyph from

ladakh

this entire ladakh connects with a

central asian steppy route

along which we have rock painting

and sculptures now this route is not

diverse

it has been traversed by what are called

lotsawas

intercultural translators of your who

wrote texts

who built temples i had been to

china the white horse monastery and

one village in which the entire village

turned out to honor us

because they thought that this is the

man from the wasteland next

and then then this uh excavation

which i contacted eighth century uh

temples

in a hundred percent auro area

now did the brahmins and the shatias

come

and construct these temples the entire

hillscope

2900 feet above the sea level are

full of drawing and sketches and there

are

studio formations i mean on the floor

they had done and these are the

biocultural diversity you see

forms all over the country which are

dying

which are dying because as soon as i got

into

the government i had to deal with

forestry and forestry i had to reverse

the uh colonial

uh movement of uh forestry which was

tied to

temperate zones so you had to

reinvent the cognitive category for

tropical forestry

to move from look alike conscripts

of similar species

to a diversity of species i mean

which are not variety by do

biodiversity is not bio variety next

please

so i move into the field and work with

the people

so all over the country there are these

groups

who are considered to be ignorant

now they only thing that they are priced

for

is medicine because folklore medicine is

supposed to be

have some value but

they do not know that they have

knowledge about

medicine food chain about soil

classification

about river management about

water management about uh ancient uh

forest management styles you know sacred

groves etc

all over the country countries replete

with them

but we believe in latin classifications

our knowledge is borrowed

it is uh written on in latin only then

it is

subject to

to protection in the international

property right regime

but so you have to create a digital

database

for prior art disclosure

how do you do that with you know tribal

languages

which is a various universe and which

has a

tremendous variety of nuances it’s not

uniform

in the annamanika the great alderman is

had

50 terms for a wave how the wave would

dance

in the sunlight how would it look in the

side how it would uh differ

from uh minute

and in the himalayas again this is a sea

charred

area entire area is full of

see mountains of fossils and those

fossils are situated along with tribal

villages which are thousand-year-old

and those villages not certain

traditions just because they are old

their traditions are not obsolete what i

am talking about is a

ecological civilization which is uh

balance is a technological civilization

you do don’t give up the life enhancing

advances in technology

in medicine in food in you say

transport etcetera this is baba hampte

who was fighting for

the nanda valley you see iraqis

so we discussed not only uh

physical rehabilitation but also culture

there are two philosophies i have got

trusting one is

you see uh matthew arnold talks about we

human beings like

island surrounded by veils of tears

because he already feels banished

and then john dunn again i am worrying

western categories

uh talks about we human beings are not

island

but part of the main every

person’s death diminishes me even if a

clod is washed away from africa

even if a koala is burnt in australia we

are less

therefore do not call to find out for

whom

the bell tolls the bell tolls for thee