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