THE OTHER WORLD

THE WILD EAST

Last year, some tribesmen, deep in the forests of eastern India, made a plan to eat their schoolteacher. She had been sent by the government and had a talent that the Bonda people thought they could acquire as a straightforward roast. “She could make good curries”, our guide told us.

Subrat was thrilled by the tribes of his native Orissa. Their territories began a little beyond Bhubaneshwar, where we had started out, and spread over an area twice the size of Scotland. There were 62 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”.

 

“What happened to the teacher?” insisted Jayne, my wife. We were sitting in Subrat’s Ambassador, winding through the Eastern Ghats, deeper and deeper into the forest. It was 90 degrees outside and, on the dashboard, between Subrat and the driver, Lord Jaganath’s plastic eyes were dilated with panic. He needn’t have worried; we had left the great crush of juggernauts on the coast road and the only hazards up here 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 had bumped into anything - we would have simply bounced around like a big, mushy ball.

Subrat tutted mischievously. Although faith in human sacrifice had persisted into the 1940s, there was no history of determined cannibalism in tribal Orissa. “She now teaches in Bhubaneshwar.”

Apart from the Bonda, Subrat assured us, the tribals welcomed outsiders. Most had even enjoyed uncomplicated relations with the British, although the Kondh had reacted badly to the restrictions on human sacrifice and female infanticide. During World War Two, many tribals had innocently 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 man is fierce. You’ll see.”

 

We visited ten tribes in all, the first being the Khutia Kondh, seven hours from Bhubaneshwar. They lived in a pretty, forest village of wattle houses, surrounded by a strong fence to keep out wild boars and elephants. Our very first tribesman scrambled into a tree to harvest a pot of frothy, palm liquor for our welcome. The second, a woman neatly segmented by tattoos, 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 tell the gods of the afterworld of her life’s accomplishments.

The oxen were not so easily reassured and refused to plough the turmeric. The ploughmen came over to investigate us. Their forebears used to feed the turmeric on human blood to make it grow 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…”

 

Subrat warned us that we might not like our first hotel in Baliguda but that things would get better after that. He was right. Baliguda itself had a rather forlorn air and, for want of anything better to do, people drifted off the street to study us in our little cement room. At dusk, with the town smothered in the greasy glow of oil-lamps, we spread the sheets out over an archipelago of mattress-stains and settled down to listen to the drama of a tropical night. At some stage, an enterprising rat entered our strange, acrylic-pink cell and refreshed himself with a few mouthfuls of each of our bananas. Things could only have got better.

As Subrat promised, they did. The hotels in Rayagada and Jeypore, although rather shapeless, could muster magnificent curries and were enthusiastically furnished. In Jeypore, we even had a thick ginger carpet and an enormous fridge that stood in the corner like a van. Air-conditioning and bloodless T.V 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. We all enjoyed these journeys. Subrat, who had been brought up on Wordsworth and Dickens, pressed us for the latest news from England (“Do you know Westminster Bridge? How is the smog?”). He pointed out the bats that could be eaten to cure asthma and 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, Gauginesque women who garlanded themselves with fresh flowers. Their arms and necks were armoured with aluminium hoops to protect them from tigers and they would wear them 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 - fleetingly solvent - went shopping. After buying salt and dried fish, there was not much change but there was 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 a peddlar hacked fresh sandals out of a rubber tyre. By noon, it was all over and, in scouring sun, the tribals filed back into the forest, exhilarated and occasionally a little tipsy.

 

Subrat took us to several more villages. It was impossible not to be charmed by these places if for no other reason than that the villagers themselves sparkled with pride. Their thatched houses were usually arranged around a large, open space facing a Banyan tree, a buffalo sacrifice-block 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 that they planned to sell.

“Last month it came into a house and attacked a man,” said Meduli, the naik (headman) “So we had to kill it with our arrows”.

 

Often, we found only men in the village, looking after the children whilst the women worked. However, the Ghadaba girls came in early from the fields to show us the dhemsha dance. These stunning, powerful girls well-knew their value to the tribe and boasted of bride-prices worth several years’ income; the youngest told Jayne she had cost her husband a fine cow, 2000 rupees (£30) and 5 pots of liquor.

In their dance, they clamped together, inward-looking and exclusionary. This was their ritual defence against bride-capture, which gave suitors an unfair advantage in marriage negotiations. Although their dance was violent and sporadically boiled up into fights, it was magnificently effective. By the end, they were drenched and we were engulfed in a firestorm of red dust.

 

         In Potasing, the women of the Langia Saora had sacrificed a buffalo. In the middle of the group, the priestess, deep in a trance, invoked ancestral spirits to help her cure an illness. 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. We must stay and share their meat, they insisted. Every morsel of the animal, except its hide and horns, simmered on the fire. Though touched by their generosity, we made our excuses.

        

         Finally, at the extreme limit of our adventure we came upon the Bonda. I will never forget our first encounter with these tiny tribals, as they streamed into the market at Onukudeli. Condemned by the goddess Sita to eternal nakedness, they had made few concessions to the developments of the last 10,000 years. 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.

         “If you photograph the men” warned Subrat with admirable economy “They will kill you”. He was quite serious. The 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. They will unflinchingly kill a photographer and won’t deny the crime; to the Bonda, deceit is worse than murder.

         The women were quite different from their impassive men. 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 creatures would not marry until they were thirty, when 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. “They’ve got bodies to die for”, said Jayne.

         “Well, they’ve got good food in their villages,” said Subrat absently. We were back where we started, contemplating food and the fragile, mysterious lives of the tribes. Subrat shrugged. “But they still eat the rats and insects”.

 

 

John Gimlette travelled as guest of Trans Indus Ltd (0208 566 2729). Tours of the tribal areas can be arranged from around £… (Excluding flights). Such a tour can be conveniently combined with other Indian tours such as Assam or Sikkim. Visit the Trans Indus website on transindus.co.uk for details. The best time to visit is from December to March. Recommended reading: “A Goddess in the Stones” by Norman Lewis.