I WENT TO INDIA four times in all, the first two of these journeys being at the beginning of the sixties when I wrote about India’s takeover of the French colonial enclave of Pondicherry, and that of the Portuguese in Goa.
Pondicherry provided by far the more interesting of these experiences. I stayed in the Ashram of Sri Aurobindo, which following the Indian philosopher’s death had passed into the firm control of his wife, known as the Mother. She was a little old French woman of extremely dominant personality who had come by a large number of Western disciples, most of them members of the English upper class, and of superior education. Their search for enlightenment in the ashram caused them almost to welcome physical discomfort and even to view the possession of wealth as a disadvantage. Many of them had placed all their worldly goods in the Mother’s care, and were happy that she could be persuaded to dole out small sums in cases when some rare emergency might have arisen. One disciple had been a fashion photographer and, believing that his skills might be utilised by the ashram, asked for permission to buy a camera. The Mother assured him that a camera would be found for him without going to the expense of buying one, and sure enough, within days a new disciple arrived with a camera which he was assured would no longer be of use, and this was handed over to the photographer.
The ashram raised funds through vegetables grown in a garden surrounded by a high wall and guarded by armed ghurkas inherited from the British Army, and in these the disciples worked joyously and without pay for twelve hours a day. In the evening they squatted in a refectory to recite mantras before tackling vegetable curry with their hands. As a visitor who might possibly be persuaded to stay on, I received indulgent treatment, eating at table and sleeping not on a straw palliasse but a bed. As a supplement, perhaps, to sparse rations, there was an evening ceremony for which the disciples were assembled in a row to be fed by the Mother with nuts. When introduced to her on one of these occasions I was told by an attendant that I might take her sari between thumb and forefinger and count to five, in the course of which a discharge of power would pass from her into me. This, I was warned, was so strong that I might faint, and when the moment came an ex-British army regimental sergeant-major in charge of the ceremony placed himself behind me to catch me if I fell. There was no noticeable transfer of power in my case.
In a single instance in my life have I felt myself a subject of hypnotism. This was on leaving the ashram at the end of my stay, when I checked out through a kind of guardhouse, in which were offered for sale the whole gamut of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophical works. Despite knowing full well I should never read a sentence of any one of them, I bought the whole collection, and lugged them with some difficulty and at substantial overweight cost back to England. I presented these books to Oliver Myers, whose eyes glistened with gratitude as he filled two suitcases with them.
After Pondicherry and the rapturous disciples, Goa was calm to the point, almost, of sluggishness. The predominant problem of the near-empty Central Hotel was the thievishness of invading crows with beautiful amber eyes that stole the guests’ sun-glasses. The manager warned me that the town offered little in the way of entertainment. Night-clubs were banned, the cinema showed Western films only when a minimum audience of fifty could be rounded up. Otherwise there was snake-charming. Jose Custodio Faria, who discovered the doctrine of hypnotic suggestion, had been born here, and a club of Goanese hypnotists held regular meetings and practised his techniques on each other. The principal industry was the smuggling of gold carried in the bodily orifices into India, and caravans of young girls were daily marshalled to cross the frontier. Otherwise, a small army of the not-quite-destitute searched the beach for slivers of mother-of-pearl cast up by every tide, from which the handsome windows of Goa were made.
Coming back to the subject of entertainment, the hotel’s manager said I should not fail to see the mummified body of St Francis Xavier in the church of the Bom Jesus. Until a few years before it had attracted pilgrims to Goa from all parts of the Catholic world. Lately there had been a falling-off as a result of the common trick by which persons pretending to kiss the saint gnawed off small portions of the remains and carried them away in their mouths, so that now not much was left.
By the time I returned to Goa in 1990 little remained that was recognisable of the old city. A laundromat replaced the Central Hotel with its jewel-eyed crows and the one-time white sheen of mother-of-pearl on the beach was no more. The iron statue of the most compelling of all hypnotists had gone for scrap, snake-charmers were banned as detrimental to the nation’s image, and although smuggling flourished as before, it no longer involved gold but dope. Of the Saint’s remains only an arm that had been severed and sent to Rome for application to the Pope’s piles was still on view. In the old days all the lights of Goa had gone out at 10 pm on the dot. Now five cinemas blasted the night with the broadcast music and outcry of violent Indian films.
I was on holiday with my family and had chosen the north coast of Goa because I had been told it was relatively unspoiled. This might have been the case when my friends had visited it the year before, but it was no longer true because Indians are the fastest builders in the world, and holiday apartments were going up in a matter of weeks. What interested me about this upsurge of building activity was that most of it was carried out by young girls imported from Rajasthan. They worked a twelve-hour-day in the great heat, and were crammed at night into plastic shelters roughly four feet in height. These were bonded labourers who in theory did not exist because the Indian Act of Parliament known as the Bonded Labour System Abolition Act, 1976, had ensured their release. Nevertheless, in 1990, precisely at the time when we were in Goa, the Anti-Slavery Society published a statement that ‘the majority of bonded child labourers, 20 million, are in India’. These cheerful, smiling little girls were some of them.
How many Europeans buying a cheap holiday home in Goa realise that it has been built by slave labour?
Converted to Voltaire’s viewpoint by a personal experience of primitives, I had developed a near-obsession with the opportunity to study them in Central India. Here, although they had escaped the attention of the travel writers, I believed that I should discover remnants of those aboriginal peoples thrust into the background by the Aryan invasion and the invention of the caste system.
From preliminary enquiries I was to learn to my surprise that the Central Provinces still contained as many as 54 million tribal peoples, many of them at a bow-and-arrow level of development, and in possession of many of their ancient customs. The area of greatest interest was the unspoiled region of Madhya Pradesh, but on my arrival in India I was to learn that governmental problems with the tribals had led to Bastar being temporarily out of bounds. Orissa, I was told, would be the next best thing, sheltering in its mountains and forests tribes that had even remained nomadic and of which little was known.
In Bhubaneswar, the Orissa capital, I had the extraordinary good luck of meeting a young Brahmin, Ranjan, who had spent part of his childhood in tribal areas and spoke three of their languages. He was free to travel, he said, and mapped out an itinerary through 1,500 miles of territory seldom visited except by government officials, in the course of which we should see something of seventeen tribes. It turned out that an additional inducement in coming on this trip was a romantic involvement with a Paraja girl whom he was anxious to see once again before deciding whether or not to drop out of bourgeois Indian life by marrying her, renouncing his caste and settling in the Paraja village.
Ranjan found a car and a driver and we set out. ‘Every experience of this journey,’ I was to write, ‘contradicted the image of India as presented on the films.’ India has always been shown as overbrimming with people. Here it was lonely. Having left the main coastal road with its unceasing procession of lorries, there was no traffic at all except a single car in an occasional small town. There was in general nowhere to stay, nowhere to eat, and with Naxalite revolutionaries scattered through the hills it was not particularly safe.
The last car vanished and we saw the first of the Saora villages, cool places in a hot country, with the roof thatches sloping to within three feet of the ground, converting verandahs into deep havens of shade in which the Saoras, wearing sparkling white cottons, took their ease. These villages were dazzlingly clean. Some of the Saoras had decorated their walls with spirited naïve paintings on which magic symbols were scattered through scenes which might include a goddess, a plane piloted by an elephant, a man on a bicycle, a tiger, a village bus. There were no crops to be seen, instead a grove of pines dribbled their sap into bottles hung under incisions in the bark. This would become alcohol, and Ranjan said that the only form of crime in such tranquil villages was the theft of alcohol-making equipment or the alcohol itself. The equivalent of a policeman in a white toga leaned against the trunk of one of the palms, apparently asleep.
Such were the villages of the Saoras and after them the Kondhs, in the first of which a travelling medium was going from house to house offering to lay troublesome ghosts. In another house several jungle fowls sat on clutches of eggs in decorated baskets, soothed by a boy crouched nearby who played to them on a flute.
Ranjan, who was deeply attached to the Kondhs, described himself as particularly touched by their custom of building their villages so that the occupants of a house could stand at its entrance to greet their neighbours face to face across the street with the rising of the sun.
Indian tribal society is immediately observed as a tolerant and easy-going minority compared with the caste-dominated majority that encircles it. These primitive peoples have steadfastly rejected caste—the cruellest of burdens borne by the Hindu population. There are no crippling dowries to be provided for their daughters. As in all primitive societies, there is no drive to accumulate possessions, and therefore no rich and no poor. All students of the situation Ranjan and I were now observing at first hand have been impressed though often shocked by the relative freedom of tribal sex relationships, most strikingly exemplified in the areas where we now found ourselves. In 1947 Elwin Verrier wrote a book called The Muria and their Ghotul about the custom of a tribe in Bastar by which on reaching puberty the young of both sexes were expected to sleep together, praised for frequent changes of partners and criticised or even fined for over-exclusive relationships. Ranjan insisted that similar practices existed among the tribes in Orissa, in particular the Kondhs. ‘But do not question them about it,’ he warned me. ‘They will be embarrassed.’
Celebrated in Orissa for the peculiarity of their sex and marriage customs are the Koyas, a flourishing, handsome and intelligent people we visited in their principal village, Bhejaguda, wedged into the Malakangiri hills. Among their many gods is a divine earthworm, and their unique sexual arrangements involve a union in which the wife must always be substantially older than her husband. One such couple was pointed out to us: a boy of about thirteen was trotting at the heels of an imposing wife of thirty-odd. The wife is supposed to wait for her husband to be full-grown before intercourse takes place, in the meanwhile guarding her virginity. Of this, after we had been in conversation with some Koyas who seemed highly amused by the topic, Ranjan translated. ‘If a woman shows some impatience, her father-in-law may be called upon to do the necessary.’
The Koyas, like many tribal peoples living in circumstances in which civilised stresses are unknown, suffer from occasional attacks of boredom, and are delighted at the opportunity to fuss over strangers like us who drop in from time to time. They had grand manners, and were at pains to put their visitors at ease, and as soon as we came in sight a number of splendid matriarchs in crimson togas appeared at their doors and received us with expressions of excitement and enthusiasm. A large bed was carried into the street and covered with a clean mat and we were invited to make ourselves comfortable. More beds were then dragged out of neighbouring houses and upon these the women settled themselves to face us and unleash a barrage of smiling chatter, dealing, said Ranjan, with matters of general interest such as bovine sickness and the possession of a hen with four feet.
It was the women who mattered here. Someone had dashed off for the palm-toddy. We emptied the beakers pressed upon us, after which the women drank heartily, followed by a few patriarchs on the fringe of the gathering. What we took to be young husbands formed a meek background row, and were the last to be served. Ranjan pointed out that several had downy growths on their upper lips, achieved, he said, by the application of a kind of mud, to which were added the droppings of certain birds.
We happened to arrive when the Koyas were celebrating a ritual period of abstention from work, except for the making of alcoholic liquor. The principal activities at this time included the consumption of neat palm-toddy and the nightly staging of theatrical entertainments. To attempt to work—as a few sometimes did—was seen as anti-social and punished by severe public criticism.
A shortage of beds meant that a number of women were compelled to stand. To me they seemed to be swaying, and perhaps drunk. I mentioned this to Ranjan who put this to the headman who was also somewhat unsteady. He opened one eye with difficulty, and agreed that this was the case. ‘It makes a good impression with your friends,’ he told Ranjan, ‘if you let your hair down at a time like this.’
In this situation it was a matter of politeness to ask what god the headman worshipped, and he said, between hiccups, ‘the Divine Earthworm, creator of the world. There are many more, I am told twenty-three, although I cannot count myself. The Earthworm we borrowed from the Kondhs and are obliged to return it after this celebration. We have also two or three gods on loan from the Saoras, the most useful being a stone.’ Ranjan showed surprise and, reaching for another toddy, the headman said, ‘It is all a matter of belief. If you believe a stone is a god, then it is one.’
We had taken sweets for the children, and their mothers formed them into an orderly queue to receive them. They were a gaudily wrapped commercial product with a sharp synthetic flavour and the children sucked them reverently, frequently taking them out of their mouths to prolong the pleasure. Occasionally I noticed a child who appeared to stagger. I asked Ranjan if the boy could possibly be tipsy. The headman, blinking with difficulty, thought this over. He pointed out to us that the lined-up jugs of liquor were kept carefully out of their way, but explained that the Koya women breast-fed their children up to five years of age. ‘There is palm-toddy in these women’s milk,’ he said.
The theme encouraged the headman to philosophise. ‘There’s no sickness here,’ he told Ranjan. ‘The white people who come here offer us medicines, but we don’t take them. We listen to the Earthworm’s advice in these matters. He tells us to enjoy life, and that we do. Some of us expect to live for ever.’
Ranjan, toying with the romantic possibility of turning his back on the strain and stress of life in Bhubaneswar, marrying a Paraja girl and adopting the genial life-style of a Paraja village, had collected facts and figures that supported the divine advice. The average life-expectation of the non-tribal Indian of the capital of Orissa was fifty-seven years; that of a village tribesman was sixty-three years. The Koyas did even better than this, he had discovered, by another five years. Sometime during the next two weeks we should reach the Parajas; by then, Ranjan assured me, his decision would be made. How would he cope with the problem of ritual idleness, he wondered. It had been published in a government report that the Koyas only worked 1½ hours a day, and he suspected that the situation among the Parajas would be roughly the same.
Leisure, envied in the bustling cities of India, was in unlimited supply in these country places. Few people could have made better use of it than such tribals as the Saoras and the Kondhs who were enabled by it to fill their lives with the satisfactions of art. Almost all these primitives had developed some absorbing skill. The Saoras and Kondhs were by any standards great painters and wood-carvers. The Parajas and Godbas (who unaccountably occupy the same villages, although they are racially and temperamentally quite different) spent much of the time rebuilding and improving their houses—in one case rectangular and the other round. The Mirigans, living in extreme isolation on the frontiers of unexplored jungle, took young parakeets from their nests, so outrageously spoiling them that they could hardly be separated from their foster-parents who were to be seen with the birds fluttering round their heads wherever they went. The Mirigans carved, too, but in their case only tigers and elephants, explaining that this was no more than an act of homage, which they believed helped to protect themselves from attack. The elephants remained a problem, for they sniffed the Mirigans’ alcohol supplies at a great distance, continually raided the stores kept under the roofs, and were enraged and incited by the liquor into acts of vandalism such as tearing off thatches and butting down walls.
The Lanjia Saora village of Potasing was the undisputed capital of the naïve art of tribal India, producing anitals of the most complex kind, painted after locally famous artists sit alone in a dark place waiting for an image to form. There are special societies of women who are entrusted with the painting of certain patterns, and, as in many parts of tribal India, the women of Potasing cover the interior walls of their houses, and sometimes even the surface of the street, with exuberant and complicated designs. Until the recent past, it was the men who carved the doors, door-posts and lintels.
The Indian government is to be praised for its exclusion of American genocidal missionary sects from any part of its territories, but it is said that it has tolerated the assault by Lutherans and Catholics upon tribal customs and religious beliefs. We were a year too late in arriving in Potasing, the Athens of the Indian primitive world, for the Lutherans were already at work, with depressing effect. We were told that they had descended on the village in an epidemic of malaria and an absence of medicine. The missionaries had plenty of Nivaquine but the magic tablets were on offer only in exchange for conversion. Our informant complained of unfairness. ‘We have twenty-three gods. Most of them have been kind and useful to us. The missionary is asking us to exchange twenty-three for one, plus a month’s supply of Nivaquine. It is unreasonable.’
Inexplicably, as in this case, evangelists in the Third World see godliness as incompatible with the pursuit of art, so the art has to go, and the Lutherans in Potasing worked with zeal to destroy all the pictures that could be found, and defaced or ripped out innumerable carvings. The effect was all the more grim because areas of woodwork where the carving had been stripped away were often patched in with metal or concrete.
People had also been compelled or persuaded to part with their beloved anitals. A government-appointed postmaster—who also managed to be the Lutheran representative on the spot—took us to see the one remaining example of Sudha Saora art, now kept in a locked house. It was very large, painted in white upon a red background, recalling the paintings of palaeolithic hunters on the walls of caves. Soara manikins pranced and capered in ceremonial hats under ceremonial umbrellas, rode elephants and horses, pedalled bikes and were carried by fan-waving attendants in procession. They played musical instruments of the past but shouldered the guns of the present. Gourdfuls of wine awaited their pleasure, displayed like Christmas gifts on the branches of palms. The postmaster shook his head in disbelief at this relic of the wanton past. Before Potasing’s desecration there had been no locks on doors throughout tribal India, but the destroyers of art had insisted on locks, and four out of five houses in this strangely deserted village were locked up. I asked why this should be.
‘They are working in the fields,’ the postmaster said. ‘They are very active in employment.’
‘But this is an in-between season, with nothing to do.’
‘If there is willingness to work it is always to be found. In the old times people were lazy. They were drinking much alcohol. That was bad. We have cut down those palm trees that were giving that wine. For those who were carving wood, we are making enquiries. Soon they may be making toys for shops.’
This, then, was the struggle faced by the tribals in India. The world of art for art’s sake, of amateur dramatics, self-entertainment and the long, lazy summer was slipping away, and the world of regular work in the employment of others, of money and buying and selling, was about to reach them by the roads to be built and the airfields to be opened. It was a bleaker prospect than they realised, for India was hard on the poor and those of lowly birth, and all the more if they were women. The year of my visit, 1990, was the Indian Year of the Young Girl, and the newspapers, including the respected Times of India, unhesitatingly reminded their readers how atrocious their fate could be. Young Indian wives, they informed us, whose families had failed to produce promised dowries, died by the hundred, even the thousand, by ‘kitchen accidents’, i.e. by incineration on kitchen stoves. Shocking things, too, happened to under-privileged males. The newspaper that day recorded the case of an untouchable who had married a high-caste woman and was beheaded by her brothers—the girl herself being locked up in an asylum for fallen women. The same page recorded the fate of a bonded labourer who made a dash for freedom: he was punished by the amputation of a limb—a penalty commonly inflicted in such cases, said the paper.
The postmaster would have been the last person to question in such matters. He radiated optimism. ‘Everything is different in Potasing now,’ he said. ‘We cannot say it is all work. On Sunday we are attending church. Practising to sing hymns. They are telling us that soon a bus will be coming on Fridays for the cinema at Gunupur, for which we are all very glad. But if we do not sell, how can we have money to buy?’
Down the road at Rayagada a kiosk had opened to sell such country medicines as dried bats, curative snakeskin, and above all hornbill beaks, administered in a ground-up form for every known illness. There was a trickle of cash here in circulation, but most of the customers, unable to cope with it, still arrived with vegetables and bags of rice with which to negotiate a deal.
We were at the very end of scenes of this kind. Until now, what I had seen of the tribal heartland was the India of Calcutta as it had been 2,000 years ago, and there was no affinity, no point of contact between the people who had remained unchanged in these mountains, and the brand of human society that was slowly dosing in on them, and into which they would shortly be absorbed.
Ranjan was clearly a romantic whose romanticism was the product of the stresses of mundane life in Bhubaneswar and the vision of an attainable Eden over the horizon. He was a Brahmin wearing the sacred thread, and in theory firmly sustained by his religion, but he was doomed to work in an office among colleagues of lower caste although often with more money in their pockets. His common-enough tragedy was that of so many Indians: the cost of finding dowries to marry off his three sisters had ruined his family. He longed to have been born in the free air of the tribal land in which he had spent part of his childhood.
The next leg of our journey together would reach Kangrapada, which he would be revisiting after a year’s absence. There—although nothing had so far been decided—he might take the plunge, marry the Paraja girl and exchange the heavy responsibilities of civilisation for the calm satisfaction of tribal life.
The encounter with the Parajas which had led to Ranjan’s inner confusion had happened almost exactly a year before. Quite by chance, the travel agency he worked for had employed him to explore this remote corner of south Orissa bordering with Andhra Pradesh, where a few villages tucked away in the jungle were marked only on the largest-scale map. The majority of such villages were to be reached with difficulty, and on foot, but a minor road took him by car to Koraput. Here he learned of Kangrapada, a village at the end of an unfinished jungle track. It had only been visited by a government official and the occasional itinerant trader.
He went there and found it extraordinary. The village had been splendidly built in a jungle clearance in such a way that every house was shaded by the trees. Stranger though he was, he was received everywhere with smiles. Kangrapada was saturated with a kind of drowsy calm. People gave in to pleasant impulses. A man would pick up a musical instrument, strum on its strings, and those within hearing often started to dance. All the Paraja girls were pretty and returned an admiring glance with an encouraging smile. An old man who spoke enough Oriya to be understood explained the workings of the community to him. Except for the money-lenders, everyone was welcomed in Kangrapada with open arms, the old man said. The jungle was full of edible berries and fruits so no-one went hungry. There were no disputes or quarrels, little sickness and people lived to a reasonable old age. He ascribed this pleasant state of affairs to the full-time presence in the village of the goddess Hundi, represented as a pile of stones round which benches had been built where the elders sat to discuss local affairs in loud, clear voices the goddess could easily overhear. Any problems arising from their discussions could be instantly settled by Hundi on the spot. Nothing could be easier in Kangrapada than to strike up a warm and instant friendship, as he did, with a member of the opposite sex. This, Ranjan decided, was Eden.
He slept that night in the village and was about to leave next morning when he found himself encircled by elders who gently restrained him. Once again an Oriya speaker was found who warned him that he had succeeded in offending Hundi by not formally presenting himself to her and requesting her permission to be in the village. It would be necessary to sacrifice a buffalo to her before removing his car. His admiration for the people of Kangrapada grew when he was assured by them that the goddess was very easily moved by a hard-luck tale, and that the villagers would set to work to persuade her to change her mind. This they were able to do and the demand for the sacrificial buffalo was reduced to one for a white cock costing ten rupees.
Ranjan spent another pleasant night in the village and at leave-taking in the morning the Paraja girl brought her father to say goodbye. He had obviously made a good impression on the family, for the father said that if Ranjan wished to marry his daughter he could do so without payment of the usual bride-price. He also assured Ranjan that the villagers would build a house for them in a matter of days. Taken by surprise, Ranjan asked to be given time to consider the proposition, and the Parajas, reasonable as ever, smilingly agreed. Back in Bhubaneswar, he discussed the situation with his friends, most of whom seemed alarmed. The marriage of a Brahmin to a tribal was unheard of and there was some uncertainty as to whether or not there was a law against it. There followed several months full of setbacks to his suit of one kind or another, but now he was on his way to resolve his future.
The nearest place to Kangrapada in which we could stay the night was Koraput, and the made-up road passing through it had tipped all the refuse of any small provincial town into its narrow streets, and urban noise filtered from it far into the silence and peace of the tribal backlands. An Indian television crew filled the meagre spaces of the hotel: they were friendly men with loud, confident voices and a command of American slang. Ranjan found it hard to explain what they could be doing in a town full of buffaloes going through the rubbish, and unemployed rickshaw-pullers, and in the end he plucked up courage to ask them. They replied that they were down from Hyderabad to make a film about a village where round houses were made. ‘Kangrapada?’ Ranjan said.
‘Yes, I guess that’s the name. Kangrapada,’ the man said. ‘You guys know the place?’ he asked, and Ranjan told him he did. It was an encounter that filled him with gloom.
‘They can put one of their houses up in five days,’ the man said, ‘and we already filmed the different stages. Tomorrow we’ll be filming a fiesta. Let’s say we hope we will. You never know with the tribals. Anyway, we’ve paid for it. Why don’t you guys come along?’
There was some trouble with the car in the morning and we made a late start. It was two hours to Kangrapada, most of it through lush, bird-filled jungle. There, just as Ranjan had described it, was the abandoned road-making machinery on the unfinished track, and within minutes we drove into Ranjan’s Eden. At this moment he had become silent, and I understood that something was wrong. What I saw here was so wholly different from the picture of this place he had so repeatedly painted, I began to suspect that he had been the victim of self-delusion brought on by pressures suffered prior to his visit, and that his Kangrapada was part of the delirium of hope. None of those elegant Parajas I had heard so much of were to be seen making silk on their balconies, and the men who should have been relaxed in the tribal manner appeared to be hurrying on urgent errands. Only an itinerant trader with a tray of cheap watches was to be seen. Ranjan asked him sternly, ‘With what will they buy these things?’ and the man returned an impudent smile. ‘They will buy them with money,’ he said.
Where were the women parading in their tribal finery, the spontaneous outbursts of music that set them dancing while the mild, white cows looked on? The shrine, coming into sight, was hardly more than a pile of stones tipped from a lorry, but what had become of the village elders gathered here on the surrounding benches to discuss village politics within earshot of their reasonable goddess? Instead, a makeshift fence had been put up round it, decorated with coloured ribbons. There were wide gaps in the row of circular Godba houses which overlooked the shrine, and which had featured in Ranjan’s repeated accounts of this place.
Leaving the car to go off and make enquiries, Ranjan returned with a depressing story. He had already mentioned that the Godbas had been persuaded to send a copy of one of their unique houses to a Bhubaneswar exhibition, where much excitement and admiration had been aroused among visitors who until then had believed that most tribals lived in conditions of primitive savagery. Now he had been assured that Godba houses were in demand and were being snapped up. Paraja ‘square’ houses that were easier to build were to fill the gaps.
‘The beginning’, Ranjan said, ‘of the end.’
We walked on, turned a corner and came immediately on the TV group from the Koraput hotel busy with their filming. A line of Godba girls were performing a dance in which a girl at the end of the line who carried a long-handled broom suddenly broke off to sweep vigorously at the ground. In the usual way, the action stopped for frequent repeats and the cameraman dashed about, climbed a step-ladder to film from above, then squatted to get a low-angle shot as close as possible to the ground. In the course of these repeated manoeuvres the Godbas maintained the habitual stolidity of expression imposed by their culture, which ruled out smiling except in private.
The director held up the action and strutted across to us. ‘Could I shift you guys a few yards out of the picture?’ he asked. He was friendly and polite. We backed away and he followed us. The dancers had fallen into listless postures, except the one with the broom who had continued to scrape at the earth. ‘Excuse,’ Ranjan said, ‘but what is this dance? No-one in this village will dance in this way.’
‘Or anywhere else, I guess,’ the director said. ‘This is a standard routine. You can change it around like you want, like we did with the broom. It’s easy for them to dance and easy for us to film.’
‘Do they take money for this?’ Ranjan asked him.
‘Not really money. Maybe a little inducement. I guess we put them to some trouble. This is supposed to be a fiesta and the dresses had to be made up specially.’
‘What happens next?’
‘We’ll film them dancing round the shrine,’ the director said. ‘After that it’s back to Koraput. Maybe we’ll see you there?’
So far as I was concerned, there was no point in prolonging our stay, but I waited for Ranjan to make some reference to his quest. Inconclusive minutes drifted by and I asked him what he was doing about the girl.
He seemed embarrassed. ‘She will be told that I am here. She will take friends to wait outside the village. That is custom.’
‘In that case, let’s go.’
We set off, driving slowly, and hardly had we passed the last village house when we saw the Paraja girls in a group on a slope by the road. There were eight of them of the same height, in identical scarlet dresses, and otherwise remarkably similar in appearance. The one Ranjan had come to see detached herself from the rest and came down to the car. She bent down to talk to Ranjan through the window. None of the tribals, Ranjan had told me, knew their ages, but I would have put her as seventeen. Her eyes were extremely wide, and she was smiling, as were all her friends, and there was something about her face that reminded me of the goddesses that had stared out at us from the many wall-paintings we had seen on this trip. Ranjan showed no signs of emotion and looked straight ahead. Five minutes passed, the low-voiced conversation tailed off. ‘Now we may go,’ Ranjan said. They nodded to each other and we moved away. ‘A disappointment?’ I asked him, and he said, ‘I am relieved.’
Nothing more was said of the episode until we reached Srikakulam, where the meagre trickle of traffic was snatched up in the roaring cataract of lorries on the National Highway NH5. Night was suddenly upon us, with open exhausts, a fog of dust and blazing headlights that identified the many wrecks by the side of the road. We were back in the old world we knew so well, but the full realisation of this only struck us when we ran into a police check. A smiling policeman told us we could expect a long wait while the cars ahead were being searched. He then held out his hand for a fifty-rupee bribe, and we were sent on our way.
The Film-Star hotel in this town had no rooms, but Ranjan, nodding at the reception clerk, said, ‘You may give him one hundred rupees and he will find one.’ Instead we went to the General Lodgings, and settled over drinks to discuss the events of the day.
‘I don’t understand why you should feel relieved,’ I said.
‘Because I am one year trying to make a decision. Now that decision is made for me. I am happy because if that place is staying as it was I will never get away from it. Now it is ugly and I am free.’
‘So it’s to be one of those arranged marriages for you after all?’
‘There is no alternative. To marry a tribal person is easy. The father says, I give you my daughter. You go to get drunk together and it is finished. For me an arranged marriage is difficult. My father must find me a wife but he is poor. It must be a Brahmin lady but only an elderly one will marry a poor man. Or maybe some marriage-broker will be telling my father frankly we can offer a young girl but she is a little short, or suffering from one slight limp that can easily be put right, or there is small discoloration of the face not to be seen beneath the hair.’
‘The Parajas were very pretty,’ I said.
‘Please don’t tell me that. They are all looking the same. When I first went to that place I did not see this, but now I am realising it is so.’
‘It’s to be expected with inbreeding, I imagine.’
‘Yes, it’s to be expected. I was wishing to conceal this from myself, but now I must admit. I am happy that you also are telling me this is the case.’
There was an influx of affluent-looking guests who had clearly been unlucky at the Film-Star. The tribal environment was a land of lean men, but in returning to Srikakulam we seemed to have crossed an invisible frontier. Here, where success counted, it was advertised—as in this case—by bodily fat. Three of the newcomers wore blazers with brass buttons and all spoke in loud, confident English enlivened by slang from the days of the Beatles. All these men ordered whisky and Ranjan, whose caste obligations ruled out spiritous liquors, decided that for once it was in order to break the rule. Our neighbours exchanged slightly off-colour jokes, laughed loudly and slapped each others’ backs. The strains of a quavering Indianised version of Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’ squeezed through the cracks in the partition separating us from the next room. Down in the street the lights changed and the outer wall palpitated like a trapped bird’s heart as the lorries roared into action. A single whisky had restored the normal composure of Ranjan’s patrician features. ‘So we are arriving at the conclusion of our adventure,’ he said. ‘I have settled my problem, and for your purpose may we be calling it a success?’
‘Immeasurably so,’ I assured him. ‘It confirmed opinions already held, and that is generally satisfying.’
Ranjan had become more talkative than usual, to the point of letting fall odd facts relating to an unsatisfactory childhood. This, I understood, was to be put down to the whisky. I risked a question which, in his present mood, I felt he would be happy to answer. ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘What are you looking for in life?’
‘Freedom I am looking for,’ he said. ‘Of that there is no doubt.’
‘I guessed that would be the case. And where and how do you find it?’
‘From what my father is telling me, life is game to be played by the rules. Namely I must worship the gods, give alms, and if they are taking a prisoner away for his crimes I must bring food for that man. Things not to do are kill or rob, also sleeping in my neighbour’s absence with his wife. Meat not for consumption at any time. Pity this was not spoken of before drinking the whisky.’
I agreed that it was a pity. ‘But does it affect your freedom?’
‘Accomplish all these things, my father is telling me, and freedom is there.’
‘It’s a simpler business with our tribal friends,’ I said. ‘Naturally you were tempted to take the short cut.’
‘You have explained the fact of this matter.’
‘Although we’re both agreed now, it would never have worked.’
‘That, too, is the case. At the back of my mind there was always this feeling.’
‘Still, it was good while it lasted. Is there any chance you might be available for another trip of the kind we’ve done? I mean in a different area?’
‘The wishing to do this would be very strong for me. Now I am wanting to ask a question. Why are you travelling so much? Is someone telling you you must do this?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s just a compulsion I’ve always felt. It’s the pull of the world. I spent most of my childhood on my own, and some of it was in the mountains of Wales. I would go exploring with the idea in my head that the farther I was from home the better it would be. The next valley would always be wilder. The lake would be bottomless, and I would find a mysterious ruin, and there would be ravens instead of crows in all the trees. Now it’s not just the Black Mountains of Dyfed, but the world.’
He seemed in part to have understood what I had been struggling to explain. ‘Could you call this freedom for you?’
‘No, not quite. It’s never quite that.’
‘And you are not looking to find people in your mountains?’
‘Nowadays, yes. I’m looking for the people who have always been there, and belong to the places where they live. The others I do not wish to see.’