7. Homeless in the ‘Global Village’
Vandana Shiva
Global market integration and the creation of the ‘level playing field’ for transnational capital, creates conditions of homelessness in real and imaginary ways. The transnational corporation executive who finds a home in every Holiday Inn and Hilton, is homeless in terms of the deeper cultural sense of rootedness. But the culturally-rooted tribal is made physically homeless by being uprooted from the soil of her/his ancestors.
Two classes of the homeless seem to be emerging in this ‘global village’. One group is mobile on a world scale, with no country as home, but the whole world as its property; the other has lost even the mobility within rootedness, and lives in refugee camps, resettlement colonies and reserves. The cumulative displacement caused by colonialism, development and the global marketplace has made homelessness a cultural characteristic of the late twentieth century.
Development as uprooting
Dams, mines, energy plants, military bases — these are the temples of the new religion called ‘development’, a religion that provides the rationale for the modernizing state, its bureaucracies and technocracies. What is sacrificed at the altar of this religion is nature’s life and people’s life. The sacraments of development are made of the ruins and desecration of other sacreds, especially sacred soils. They are based on the dismantling of society and community, on the uprooting of people and cultures. Since soil is the sacred mother, the womb of life in nature and society, its inviolability has been the organizing principle for societies which ‘development’ has declared backward and primitive. But these people are our contemporaries. They differ from us not in belonging to a bygone age but in having a different concept of what is sacred, what must be preserved. The sacred is the bond that connects the part to the whole. The sanctity of the soil must be sustained, limits must be set on human action. From the point of view of the managers of development, the high priests of the new religion, sacred bonds with the soil are impediments and hindrances to be shifted and sacrificed. Because people who hold the soil as sacred will not voluntarily allow themselves to be uprooted, ‘development’ requires a police state and terrorist tactics to wrench them away from their homes and homelands, and consign them as ecological and cultural refugees into the wasteland of industrial society. Bullets, as well as bulldozers, are often necessary to execute the development project.
In India, the magnitude of this sacrifice is only now becoming evident. Victims of progress have, of course, experienced their own uprooting and have resisted it. But both the victims and the state perceived each sacrifice as a small one for the larger ‘national interest’. Over 40 years of planned development, the planned destruction of nature and society no longer appears negligible; and the larger ‘national interest’ turns out to be embodied in an elite minority without roots. Fifteen million people have been uprooted from their homelands in India during the past four development decades.1 They, and their links with the soil, have been sacrificed to accommodate mines, dams, factories, and wildlife parks.
One word echoes and reverberates in the songs and slogans of Indian people struggling against ‘development’: ‘mati’ — soil. For these people soil is not simply a resource, it provides the very essence of their being. For large segments of Indian society the soil is still a sacred mother.
‘Development’ has meant the ecological and cultural rupture of bonds with nature, and within society, it has meant the transformation of organic communities into groups of uprooted and alienated individuals searching for abstract identities. What today are called ecology movements in the South are actually movements for rootedess, movements to resist uprooting before it begins. And what are generally perceived as ethnic struggles are also, in their own way, movements of uprooted people seeking social and cultural rootedness. These are the struggles of people taking place in the ruins wrought by development to regain a sense of selfhood and control over their destinies.
Wherever development projects are introduced, they tear apart the soil and sever the bonds between people and the soil:
‘Mati Devata, Dharam Devata’ — The soil is our Goddess; it is our religion.’ These are the words of adivasi women of the ‘Save Gandmardhan’2 movement, as they embraced the earth while being dragged away by the police from the blockade sites in the Gandmardhan hills in Orissa. Dhanmati, a 70-year-old woman of the movement had said, ‘We will sacrifice our lives, but not Gandmardhan. We want to save this hill which gives us all we need.’
The forests of Gandmardhan are a source of rich plant diversity and water resources. They feed 22 perennial streams which in turn feed major rivers such as the Mahanadi. According to Indian mythology, Gandmardhan is the sacred hill where Hanuman gathered medicinal herbs to save Laxman’s life in the epic Ramayana; the saviour has now to be destroyed for ‘development’. It has to be desecrated by the Bharat Aluminium Company (B ALCO) to mine for bauxite. BALCO had come to Gandmardhan after having destroyed the sanctity and ecology of another important mountain, Amarkantak — the source of the rivers Narmada, Sone, and Mahanadi. The destruction of Amarkantak was a high cost to pay for reserves which, in any case, turned out to be much smaller than originally estimated. To feed its 100,000 tonne aluminium plant at Korba in Madhya Pradesh, BALCO has now moved to Orissa to begin the rape of the Gandmardhan hills.
Since 1985 the tribals of the region have obstructed the work of the company and refused to be tempted by its offers of employment. Even police help has failed to stop the determined protest.
The conflict and destruction were unnecessary because India does not need so much aluminium, it already has a surplus. The mining activity however, is dictated not by the needs of the Indian people but by the demands of industrialized countries which are closing their own aluminium plants and encouraging imports from countries like India. Japan has reduced its aluminium smelting capacity from 1,200,000 tonnes to 140,000 tonnes and now imports 90 per cent of its aluminium requirements. The same Japanese companies have proposed setting up joint ventures in Indian export processing zones to manufacture aluminium products with buy-back arrangements.3 The survival of the tribals of Gandmardhan is thus under threat because the rich countries want to preserve their environment, their economies and their luxurious lifestyle.
In Bihar, the homelands of tribals in the Chotanagpur plateau are being destroyed to mine coal and iron ore and to build dams on its rivers. The World Bank-financed Suvarnarekha dam is being built, with a US$127 million loan, primarily to provide industrial water for the expanding steel city of Jamshedpur. These dams will displace 80,000 tribals. In 1982, Ganga Ram Kalundia, the leader of the tribal anti-dam movement was shot dead by the police. Seven years later, his fellow tribals continue to resist the building of the dam because it will tear them away from the soil of their birth, the soil which has provided them sustenance and which links them to their ancestors. As Surendra Biruli of the movement against Suvarnarekha dam says:
Our links with our ancestors are the basis of our society and of the reproduction of our society. Our children grow up playing around the stones which mark the burial sites of our ancestors. They learn the ways of our ancestors. Without relating to our ancestors, our lives lose all meaning. They talk of compensation. How can they compensate us for the loss of the very meaning of our lives if they bury these burial stones under the dam? They talk of rehabilitation. Can they ever rehabilitate the sacred sites they have violated?4
In coastal Orissa, the people of Balliapal are resisting the setting up of the national rocket test range which will displace 70,000 people from their fertile homeland. The protesters repeatedly assert their bonds with the soil as the basis of their resistance to the test range. The land and the sea is ours. We shall sacrifice our lives but not our mother earth.’ They have rejected compensation offers because cash cannot compensate for the broken links with the soil which has nurtured and sustained generations of Balliapal farmers. As the Oriya poet Brajnath Rai writes:
Miles of cocoa
and cashew plantation,
countless, luxuriant
betel-vines
draw green artistic designs
on the carpet of brown sand.
Sweet-potato, ground-nut
musk-melon vines
have adorned your dusty soil
ever green.
They have given the people
a high hope for
a long, prosperous life,
infused into hearts
of working people
an eternal hope to live.
But, today, suddenly,
covetous eyes of a power-mad hunter
has fallen on your green body
To cut it to pieces,
to drink to heart’s content
fresh red blood.
A damned hunter
has indiscreetly taken aim
at your heart
To launch a fiery missile.
For communities who derive their sustenance from the soil it is not merely a physical property situated in Cartesian space; for them, the soil is the source of all meaning. As an Australian aborigine said, ‘My land is my backbone. My land is my foundation.’ Soil and society, the earth and its people are intimately interconnected. In tribal and peasant societies, cultural and religious identity derive from the soil, which is perceived not as a mere ‘factor of production’ but as the very soul of society. Soil has embodied the ecological and spiritual home for most cultures. It is the womb not only for the reproduction of biological life but also of cultural and spiritual life; it epitomizes all the sources of sustenance and is ‘home’ in the deepest sense.
The Hill Maris tribe in Bastar see bhum, or soil, as their home. Shringar Bhum is the universe of plants, animals, trees, and human beings. It is the cultural spiritual space which constitutes memory, myths, stories and songs that make the daily life of the community. Jagha Bhum is the name for the concrete location of social activities in a village. Savyasaachi reports a village elder as saying:
The sun, the moon, the air, the trees are signs of my continuity. Social life will continue as long as these continue to live. I was born as a part of the bhum. I will die when this bhum dies… I was born with all others in this bhum; I go with them. He who has created us all will give us food. If there is so much variety and abundance in bhum, there is not reason for me to worry about food and continuity.5
The soil is thus the condition for the regeneration of nature’s and society’s life. The renewal of society therefore involves preserving the soil’s integrity; it involves treating the soil as sacred.
Desacralization of the soil takes place through changes in the meaning of space. Sacred space, the universe of all meaning and living, the ecological source of all sustenance, is transformed into a mere site, a location in Cartesian space. When that site is identified for a development project, it is destroyed as a spiritual and ecological home. There is a story that elders tell to their children in central India to illustrate that the life of the tribe is deeply and intimately linked to the life of the soil and the forest.
The forest was ablaze. Pushed by the wind, the flames began to close in on a beautiful tree on which sat a bird. An old man escaping the fire, himself, saw the bird and said to it, ‘Little bird, why don’t you fly away? Have you forgotten you have wings?’ And the bird answered, Old man, do you see this empty nest above? This is where I was born. And this small nest from which you hear the chirping is where I am bringing up my small child. I feed him with nectar from the flowers of this tree and I live by eating its ripe fruit. And do you see the dropping below on the forest floor? Many seedlings will emerge from them and thus do I help to spread greenery, as my parents before me did, as my children after me will. My life is linked to this tree. If it dies I will surely die with it. No, I have not forgotten my wings.’6
The fact that people did not move from their ancestral homelands, that they continued to reproduce life in nature and society in sustainable ways was not seen as the conservation of the earth and of the soil ethic. Instead, it was seen as evidence of stagnation, of an inability to move on — to ‘progress’. The stimulation to move on and progress was provided by the development project, and the uprooting and destruction it involved was sanitized under the neo-Cartesian category of ‘displacement’.
Peter Berger has described development as the ‘spreading condition of homelessness’.7 The creation of homelessness takes place both through the ecological destruction of the ‘home’ and the cultural and spiritual uprooting of peoples from their homes. The word ‘ecology’ was derived from oikos, the household — and ecological destruction in its essence is the destruction of the bhum as the spiritual and ecological household. By allocating a Cartesian category to space in substitution for the sacred category it becomes possible for development technocrats and agencies to expand their activities into the management of ‘Involuntary Resettlement in Development Projects’. An irreversible process of genocide and ecocide is neutralized by the terms ‘displacement’ and ‘resettlement’. It becomes possible for agencies such as the World Bank to speak of reconciling the ‘positive’ long-term ‘national’ interests served by development projects and the ‘negative’ impacts of displacement borne by ‘local’ communities through resettlement and rehabilitation projects.
For those who hold the soil as sacred, relocation is inconceivable. At the public hearing of the World Commission of Environmental Development, an elder of the Krenak tribe spoke of the impossibility of resettlement:
When the government took our land in the valley of the Rio Doce, they wanted to give us another place somewhere else. But the state, the government, will never understand that we do not have another place to go.
The only possible place for the Krenak people to live and to re-establish our existence, to speak to our Gods, to speak to our nature, to weave our lives is where God created us. It is useless for the government to put us in a very beautiful place, in a very good place with a lot of hunting and a lot of fish. The Krenak people, we continue dying and we die insisting that there is only one place for us to live.
My heart does not become happy to see humanity’s incapacity. I have no pleasure at all to come here and make these statements. We can no longer see the planet that we live upon as if it were a chess board where people just move things around. We cannot consider the planet as something isolated from the cosmic.8 [Emphasis added.]
This approach to nature which sees the soil as the mother and people as her offspring, not her master, was and is universally shared even though it has everywhere been sacrificed as representing only a narrow, parochial viewpoint and approach. In its place has been introduced the culture of the white man, universalized first through colonialism and then development, which sees the soil only in terms of territory to be conquered and owned.
Colonialism and capitalism transformed land and soil from being a source of life and a commons from which people draw sustenance, into private property to be bought and sold and conquered; development continued colonialism’s unfinished task. It transformed man from the role of guest to predator. In a sacred space, one can only be a guest, one cannot own it. This attitude to the soil and earth as a sacralized home, not private property, is characteristic of most Third World societies. Chief Seattle’s letter has become an ecological testament, telling us that
The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.9
In the indigenous world-views in Africa, the world in its entirety appears as consisting of a single tissue. Man cannot exercise domination over it by virtue of his spirit. What is more, this world is sacralized, and man must be prudent in the use he makes of it. Man must act in this world as a guest and not as an exploiting proprietor.10
When the rhythms and patterns of the universe are displaced the commons is displaced by private property. In indigenous communities, individuals have no private property rights, instead, the entire tribe is the trustee of the land it occupies, and the community or tribe includes not only the currently living members but also the ancestors and future generations. The absence of private property rights and of a territorial concept of space make for easy dispossession of indigenous communities’ land.
In defining a sacred space, soil does not define cartographic space on a map, or a territorial unit. As Benedict Anderson11 has shown, the creation of territorial space in large areas of the world was an instrument of colonization. Tracing the shift from cultural space to territorial space in Thailand, he shows how, between 1900 and 1915, the traditional words brung and muang largely disappeared because they imaged ‘sovereignty’ in terms of sacred sites and discrete population centres. In their place came prathet, ‘country’ which imaged it in the invisible terms of bounded territori al space. Sovereignty thus shifted from the soil and soil-linked communities to sovereignty of the nation state. Laws of nature and their universality were replaced by the laws of a police state which dispossessed peoples of their original homelands, to clear the way for the logic of the world market.
In this way organic communities give way to slum dwellers or urban and industrial jungles. Development builds new ‘temples’ by robbing nature and society of their integrity, and their soul. Development has converted soil from sacred mother into disposable object — to be ravaged for minerals that lie below, or drowned beneath gigantic reservoirs. The soil’s children, too, have been made disposable: mines and dams leave behind wastelands and uprooted people. The desacralization of the soil as sacred space was an essential part of colonialism then and of development now. As Rifkin12 has so aptly stated, ‘Desacralization serves as a kind of psychic ritual by which human beings deaden their prey, preparing it for consumption.’
The irony involved in the desacralization of space and uprooting of local communities is that the secular categories of space as used in development, transform the original inhabitants into strangers while intruders take over their homes as private property A political redefinition of people and society is taking place with shifts in the meaning of space. New sources of power and control are being created in relationship to nature and to society. As relationships between nature and society and between different communities are changed and replaced by abstract and rigid boundaries between nature and people and between peoples, power and meaning shift from roots in the soil to links with the nation state and with global capital. These one-dimensional, homogenizing concepts of power create new dualities and new exclusions.
The new borders, evidently, are created for the people who belong to that land. There are no borders for those who come in to colonize and destroy the land. In the words of financial consultant Kenichi Ohmae:
On a political map, the boundaries between countries are as clear as ever. But on a competitive map, a map showing the real flows of financial activity, these boundaries have largely disappeared … Borderless economy … offers enormous opportunities to those who can criss-cross the boundaries in search of better profits. We are finally living in a world where money, securities, services, options, futures, information and patents, software and hardware, companies and know-how, assets and memberships, paintings and brands are all traded without national sentiments across traditional borders.13
Notes
1. Fernandes, Walter and Enakshi Ganguly Thukral, Development, Displacement and Rehabilitation. Indian Social Institute, 1989, p. 80.
2. Bahuguna, Sunderlal in Chipko News. Mimeo, Navjeevan Ashram, Silyara, 1986.
3. Bandyopadhyay, J. ‘Havoc.’ Illustrated Weekly of India, 13 December 1987.
4. As told to the author during a field trip to Suvarnarekha submergence area in September 1989.
5. Savyasaachi, in Frederique Marglin and Tariq Banuri, Dominating Knowledge. Zed Books, forthcoming.
6. Rane, Ulhas ‘The Zudpi Factor’, Sanctuary, Vol. VII, No. 4,1987.
7. Berger, Peter et. al. The Homeless Mind. London, Pelican Books, 1981.
8. Krenak, Ailton. Co-ordinator of Indian Nation’s Union, WCED Public Hearing, Sao Paulo, 28-29th October, 1985. Quoted in Our Common Future, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 115.
9. Chief Seattle, Letter to the President of the USA, reproduced in ‘If all the beasts were gone’, London, Royal College of Art, 1977.
10. Mbiti, John S. The Prayers of African Religion. London, SPCK, 1975.
11. Benedict Anderson, ‘Nationalism’, Paper presented at WIDER Seminar on Systems of Knowledge as Systems of Power, Karachi, 1989.
12. Rifkin, Jeremy and Nicanor Peelas, Algeny. New York, The Viking Press, 1983.
13. Ohmae, Kenichi, The Borderless World. London, Collins, 1990, p. 18.