The Other World
JOHN GIMLETTE (born London, 1963) began his travels as a teen, setting out across the Soviet Union by train, but was distracted by studying law and became a barrister. He has been writing travel books since 1997, when he won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for a book on Paraguay, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig; it was followed by Theatre of Fish (about Newfoundland) and Panther Soup (on WWII battlefields). His latest book is Wild Coast (2011), which describes his travels in Guyana, Surinam and French Guiana. He lives in London. www.johngimlette.com
A few years ago, I set off west down the Ridgeway, through North Wessex. After Goring-on-Thames, the beechwoods thinned and fell away. A great, seared savannah unrolled itself ahead of me, and the path was fringed with scabious, yellow rattle, and wild thyme. Not only was the beauty of this countryside startling, but I also experienced the unsettling sensation of being an intruder from the present. Here were forts and funerary complexes that pre-dated the pyramids and shared views with nothing more modern than Roman temples. Further west still, the path becomes almost a ribbon-development of ancient defences; Segsbury, Uffington, Liddington, and Barbury. These places are now all so old that no one really knows who built them, or why.
And that intrigues me. What were the early Britons really like? History is tough on those who didn’t record themselves in stone, and assumes they were savages. My great-grandfather and my grandfather had dedicated their lives to excavating hill forts. But all they’d found was pottery and flints. This prehistoric trash only made its owners ever more obscure. Meanwhile, films and books have always made monkeys of Iron Age men. They’re improbably hairy and stooped, and their women are fabulously ugly. They have no pride or humour, and everyone seems to speak with a carnivorous belch. But is that right? Whoever built Uffington shifted thousands of tons of chalk. For that, they’d have needed an army, or at least a miniature economy. That suggests a society, made up in layers. But who would we find if we dug down into their lives? Who were we?
There were few clues amongst those still living on the ridge. Although their lives were often intriguing – and occasionally hard – they were, in the end, undeniably modern. I remember one family, living in a hollow of candytuft and hairy hawkbit, sharing their double-decker bus with a small herd of goats. Another lot were out hunting hares, apparently with dingoes. Down in Letcombe Regis (where the Riot Act was last read out), eleven tractors were parked outside ‘The Greyhound’, heaped with brawny children. Their fathers were hurling staves at a sort of skull (a game apparently) and then, suddenly, they all mounted their machines and roared away, leaving a heady tang of diesel. The village had inspired Jude the Obscure and, the previous week, was busted for 60kg of cannabis.
The Ridgeway, a long walk through the Iron Age world
Even Wantage, where Alfred the Great was born, felt only fleetingly ancient. It was attractive and cheerfully pagan: here, you could still dance your way back to the 1970s, and have your animals blessed at the church. I booked into a pub on the square. ‘I think it’s going to be one of those nights,’ said the barman solemnly.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘The farmer boys like to come heckling …’
Alfred’s kinsmen, I noticed, were already congregating around his statue.
‘At New Year, council covers it with scaffolding,’ continued the barman.
‘And does that work?’
‘Nope, every year, the boys tear it down.’
‘To free Alfred?’
‘Last year, they even brought spanners …’
Despite this threat of an Ancient Heckle, I still didn’t feel I’d found what I was after. That night, I hardly slept at all. Great, agricultural machines hurtled round the square till dawn, inches from my head.
Nor were the secrets of our forebears written in the landscape. The next morning, I clambered back onto the Downs. It was improbably tranquil except for a twister, moving along the horizon, sucking a tiny thread of straw, helter-skelter, into the clouds. I ambled on, through Betjeman country, into Neolithic Wiltshire. A light plane rose from a field of poppies, and a hobby snatched a linnet from the sky and cracked its neck. Then I passed Silbury Hill, which was created by men using antlers, and is the largest mound in Europe. With such outsized altars and the vast corrugations, it was now harder than ever to shrug off the feeling that I’d never understand the Iron Age world, and that – here – I was the alien. Even the boulders, abandoned by the glaciers, are still referred to as sarsens – or foreigners – and they’ve been here for millions of years.
So, my ancient hunter-gatherer was more obscure than ever. I realised I knew almost nothing about him. He lived in ditches, hunted wild animals and threw his pottery in holes. But what did he and his friends think and do? Did they have laws and hairstyles and wandering hands? Did they dote on their wives, or hide them away? Were they frightened of laughter, or did they tell filthy jokes and light their farts? We’ll never know, of course. But, for me, far more dispiriting than ignorance was the easy assumption that man – stripped of his modern trappings – is without personality and character. Something needed to happen, or my Iron Age man would languish forever in caricature.
THAT ‘SOMETHING’ happened a few months later.
It began when I read a story in the papers about some tribesmen, deep in the forests of eastern India, who’d made a plan to eat their teacher. The tribe was called the Bonda, and was known for its ferocity, and for a way of life unchanged for thousands of years. Here, I decided, were people who could help me. Eight weeks later, Jayne – my wife – and I flew to Bhubaneshwar. There, we hired a guide and a driver, and headed for the hills.
Subrat was thrilled by the tribes of his native Orissa. Their territories began a day’s ride beyond the city, and spread over an area twice the size of Scotland. There were sixty-two tribes, mostly animists, mostly resilient to modern life and each isolated by dense teak forests and bewildering languages. Some might have shared a common ancestry with the northern Mongols and Aryans, some might have emerged from the southern Dravidians but the origins of others – like the Bonda – were tantalisingly obscure. ‘Perhaps they are Asio-Australoids,’ said Subrat. ‘Nobody knows how they got here.’
‘And what about the teacher?’ asked Jayne.
‘Ah yes, she was sent by the government …’
‘But why did they want to eat her?’
‘Because she had a talent they wanted to acquire …’
‘By eating her?’
‘Yes,’ said Subrat. ‘She was very good at cooking curry.’
‘And did they eat her?’
Subrat tutted mischievously. We were sitting in his Ambassador, winding upwards through the Eastern Ghats. Outside, it was ninety, and the forest had thickened all around us. On the dashboard, between Subrat and the driver, the plastic eyes of Lord Jaganath were dilated with panic. He needn’t have worried; we’d left the great crush of juggernauts on the coast road, and, up here, the only hazards were monkeys and road gangs of beautiful women. Besides, we were all so tightly packed in with a week’s supply of mineral water, bananas, sheets and loo paper that – if we’d bumped into anything – we’d have simply bounced around like a big, mushy ball.
‘Cannibalism was always rare in Orissa,’ said Subrat.
Human sacrifice, he explained, was different, and had persisted into the 1940s.
‘And the teacher?’ we prompted.
Subrat grinned. ‘She’s fine. Back in Bhubaneshwar.’
This was a relief. But what would the tribes make of us?
Subrat shrugged. ‘They’re friendly. Except the Bonda.’
Most tribes, he explained, had even enjoyed good relations with the British, during the Raj. Of course, there were exceptions. There’d been anger at the banning of infanticide, and the Kondh had reacted badly to the restrictions on human sacrifice. But, otherwise, all went well enough. During World War II, many tribals had even concluded that the passing warplanes were agents of Queen Victoria, flying over from The Other World to check that all was well in the Ganjam Hills.
‘Only the Bonda are fierce,’ said Subrat. ‘You’ll see.’
The deeper we got into the hills, the more it felt as if time was tumbling backwards. We passed through the territories of ten tribes in all. The first group we met were the Khutia Kondh. They lived high in the forest, in a pretty village of wattle houses, surrounded by a strong fence. This was to keep out the boars, said Subrat, and the wild elephants. Then we met our first tribesman. Immediately, he scrambled into a tree to get us a pot of frothy, palm liquor. Our second Kondh was a woman, neatly segmented by tattoos. She looked at our white skin, screamed and locked herself in her house. Subrat coaxed her out with a soothing language, and we became wary friends. Her tattoos, she explained, made her less attractive to slavers, and would also convey to the gods of the Afterworld the achievements of her life.
The oxen were not so easily reassured, and refused to plough the turmeric. The ploughmen dropped the reins and came over to us. It was said that their forebears had fed the turmeric on human blood to make it strong and red. They themselves were brawny men with high cheekbones and wide, scaly feet. One had an old British Army musket.
‘What do they want?’ I asked Subrat.
‘Nothing really. Unless you’ve got any chocolate biscuits …’
We spent our first night in Baliguda. Subrat warned that we might not like our first hotel but that things would get better after that. He was right. Baliguda itself had a forlorn air and, for want of anything better to do, people drifted in off the street, to study us as we sat in our cell. It had baby-pink walls, and a cement floor. At dusk, the spectators disappeared into a greasy glow of oil-lamps. We spread out our sheets over an archipelago of mattress-stains, and settled down to listen to the drama of a tropical night. At some stage, an enterprising rat got in, and pillaged our bananas. Things could only get better.
As Subrat promised, they did. The hotels in Rayagada and Jeypore, although rather shapeless, could muster magnificent curries and were enthusiastically furnished. One place even had a thick ginger carpet and an enormous fridge that stood in the corner like a van. Air-conditioning and bloodless TV thrillers were also pumped into these rooms but, if we used everything at once, the main fusebox would explode and plunge the hotel deeper into darkness. This happened every night. It was ritually followed by the reassuring sound of waiters, scattered through the building, restoring order and light.
We drove on, deeper into tribal territory. By now, life was thrillingly medieval. Subrat described a remarkable existence. Here, he said, bats could be boiled up, and used as a cure for asthma. He also taught us how to recognise the different tribal women. The Dongria Khond wore clumps of nose-rings and carried tiny sickles in their hair. The Paraja kept their hair bundled up with silvery daggers, and the Langia Saora sliced their ears into long hoops. We agreed that the most beautiful of all were the Dedeye, statuesque women, garlanded in fresh flowers. Their arms and necks were protected from tigers by thick aluminium hoops, and these they’d wear until they died.
Sometimes we visited the tribals in their markets, like Chatikona and Kudili. It was here that we found them at their happiest – sociable, excited and brilliantly jewelled. At dawn, they poured out of the hills, traded their jackfruit and liquor for a few rupees and then – fleetingly solvent – went shopping. After buying salt and dried fish, there was not much change but still plenty to see. Here were druggists and magicians, trap-makers, drummers, barbers and the secretive potters of the Kumbehra tribe. A nursery of acrobats performed around their crippled mother, and – from a rubber tyre – a pedlar hacked out a fresh pair of sandals. By noon, it was all over and, under a scouring sun, the tribals filed back into the forest. They were chattery and exhilarated, and a few a little tipsy. Already, I could feel my hunter-gatherer coming back to life.
More centuries fell away as we got deeper into the hills. The tribes’ villages were usually arranged around a large, open space facing a Banyan tree, a block for sacrificing buffalo, or the stones of the earth goddess, Jhankar or Hundi. Inside, the houses were cool, and smelt pleasantly of sandalwood, smoke and herbs. Some of the tribes, like the Khond and the Saora, enjoyed beautifully carved doors but there were few possessions. The Gadhaba showed us the carcass of a bear they’d just killed.
I asked the naik, or headman, where they’d found it.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Here in the village.’
‘Had it attacked someone?’
‘Yes, so we had to kill it with our arrows.’
‘And so now what will you do with it?’
‘Sell it. The meat is good.’
Women had a curious place in this ancient world, somewhere between victim and goddess. Often, they were out working in the fields, and only the men remained, looking after the children. Once, however, some Ghadaba girls came in early from the fields to show us their dhemsha dance. These stunning, powerful girls well knew their value to the tribe, and boasted of bride-prices worth several years’ income. The youngest, aged about thirteen, told Jayne she’d cost her husband a fine cow, and 2,000 rupees (about £30).
‘And,’ she grinned, ‘five pots of liquor.’
In their dance, the girls clamped together, inward-looking and exclusionary. This was their ritual defence against kidnap. Bride-capture, they said, gave suitors an unfair advantage in marriage negotiations. Although their dance was violent and sporadically erupted in fights, it was magnificently effective. By the end, they were drenched, and we were engulfed in a firestorm of dust.
Ghabada girls, dancing away the risk of kidnap
Oddly, it wasn’t hard to imagine all this up on the Wessex Downs. The chants, the ash, and the interlocking women. Stripped of technology’s trappings, human life can suddenly seem stunningly familiar. I remember thinking how odd it was that, if I’d stopped the clock at any stage in the last ten thousand years, I could still be here, watching the same women and the same dance.
Only possessions changed, and rotted away. In Orissa, these rituals will leave nothing for the archaeologists. Once, we watched some women sacrifice a buffalo. They were Langia Saoras, and, in the middle of the group, the priestess, deep in a trance, called down the ancestral spirits. Despite the intensity of her communication with the Afterlife, a picnic atmosphere prevailed. The older ladies threw off their tunics and lay in the grass, smoking massive teak-leaf cigars. Every morsel of the animal, except its hide and horns, simmered on the fire. Of this extraordinary day, I thought, there will be nothing for future generations, except pottery and bones.
EVENTUALLY, AT THE EXTREME limit of our adventure, we came upon the Bonda themselves. I’ll never forget this encounter. The tribe were filing out of the forest, on their way to the market at Onukudeli. I was immediately struck by how small they were, and by their nakedness. This indignity, explained Subrat, was forced upon them by the goddess Sita as a punishment for some long-lost indiscretion. But, as curses go, the Bonda bore it magnificently. The women, barefoot and shaven-headed, were sculpted taut and lean by work. They wore only ringas, skimpy kilts of forest fibres, but their bodies rippled with beads and snakes of silver and alloys. The men were more drab but viciously armed with drawn swords and iron-tipped arrows.
‘Don’t photograph the men,’ warned Subrat.
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but why?’
‘Because, if you do, they’ll kill you.’
He was quite serious. This reputation of the Bonda men for casual homicide has always intrigued anthropologists. Although entirely indifferent to possessions and devoid of sexual jealousy, they have the capacity for sudden and deadly fury. What they fear most of all is sorcery – and photography is sorcery. Without hesitation, they will kill a photographer and won’t deny the crime; to the Bonda man, deceit is worse than murder.
The women were quite different. While the men were impassive, they were confident and coquettish and adored being photographed. They teased Subrat in impenetrable Remo but I could tell from their laughter that their jokes were worldly and wicked. These wonderful girls wouldn’t marry until they were thirty, by which time the tribe had had the best of their work. Each would then take a husband of about twelve, who, with his brothers, would love her into old age.
‘Well, they’ve got bodies to die for,’ said Jayne.
‘Sure,’ said Subrat absently, ‘they’ve got good food in their villages.’
Ah, yes, food, I thought, and remembered the teacher.
‘But food,’ said Subrat, ‘is a strange subject with the Bonda.’
‘Why?’ we asked.
‘Because they’ve got whatever they want, yet they still eat rats and insects.’
Soon, it was time for the Bonda to move on. One of the women gave Jayne a heavy metal bangle, not unlike the ones that turn up in Wessex. Meanwhile, one of the men sold me an arrow – for the equivalent of 25p. It’s now one of my most prized possessions. The hunter who sold it to me was no higher than my chest but he had the massive forearms of an archer, and regarded me with admirable contempt.
As he padded away, I suddenly thought, There goes Wantage Man. It was, of course, a ridiculous idea. I hadn’t found my Iron Age hero at all. Although I had perhaps glimpsed something of his spirit.
