On living with and learning from marginalized communities

Randhir Khare with a Nari Kuravar gypsy and his family in Tamil Nadu.

Once, in a time of grief after his first wife passed away in an accident, he carried David Thoreau's Walden to the wilderness of the Upper Bhavani of the Nilgiris, and, perched high on a rock overlooking a shallow valley and a stream, read the words: "I went to the woods, because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived...

It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under the roof ..."

Randhir knew the wilderness would never let him down. One evening, when he felt the need to make peace with himself and be still, he packed a haversack, took a bus to Nashik on the border of Gujarat, slept at the bus station and caught the first bus to the Dangs jungle. Though he had bought a ticket for Ahwa, he decided to step off at any place that seemed special --rugged, densely forested, or something that simply appealed to his senses. He found it when the driver pulled over to pay his respects to a roadside deity --a wooded hillock beyond which the land seemed to fall away. Randhir got off and did not look back. He simply traveled, by intuition, sleeping on rock with no food or water, until, a few days later, while he was scooping the ground in a desperate attempt to quench his thirst, a bare-chested Bhil, from a community known for violence, found him and asked if he wanted water. The Bhil then not only helped him find some water underground, but also took him home and shared his meal of the game that he had hunted --palm civet.

Describing the experience in his book The Dangs: Journeys Into the Heartland (HarperCollins, Year 2000), Randhir tells of a policeman who warns him about how one should never trust a Bhil or a Bhilala, because they are "criminal to the core". The policeman says sarcastically: "You have been around in those places. I wonder why you weren't robbed."

The reason is not far to seek. As the author of 13 books of poetry, short fiction and travel explained during a talk in Mumbai this April on the factors that had influenced his writing: "I have always had a feeling of empathy and connection with tribals and marginalized communities. We tend to blank out small communities which have rich traditions."

These connections have enriched his writing in subterranean and special ways. The back cover of his recent book of poems River Day (Grasswork Books, 2004 says: "The poet's continued relationship, over the years, with people from the Indian sub-continent's marginal, forest-dwelling and nomadic communities and their living folkloric traditions has had a quiet but deep impact on his work, bringing to it mythic dimensions."

From them he learned that every yard of land had its deep significance; that nature in all its forms had a purpose and a meaning; he learned the value of celebrating the community spirit from people who "lived on the edge but were holding on to what they believed in"; he gained perceptions and insights that are being lost in a "nation on the move", which rejects or appropriates everything that lies on the margins.

In the introduction to his book, Randhir says that River Day has three poems that grew out of his experiences traveling through Gujarat. 'These were intense and breath-taking times when I was exposed to people, experiences and feelings that had never occurred to me before," he says. "They tried me, tested me and almost succeeded in breaking me with the sheer power of their absurdity. Finally, I think they taught me how to be a more effective 'survivor' and get on with my life". He also learned the value of trusting his instincts: as Janubhai, the exorcist and healer, told him, "I don't think, sahib. I do. If I start to think then I wouldn't know how to react to each moment. I would be useless. All your power and energy comes when you don't use your head".

River Day contains Buddhiya's Song, Randhir's translation from a version in the original Bhilali, composed and sung by Buddhiya, the blind bard with whom he stayed in Madhya Pradesh's Jhabua district --a song sung to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument consisting of a bowl made of a coconut shell with iguana skin stretched over it. Then there is the section Longwood Shola, poems written in and around an ancient forest in Kotagiri, Tamil Nadu --the last remaining forest of its kind in the area. There is also Amunore, A Spirit Journey, a poem that emerged after Randhir trekked with Toda elders across "physical, spiritual and metaphoric spaces in their land of the dead". A little natural skepticism, he says, almost got him beaten up, because the Todas believe that land is sacred and Amunore is their land of the dead.

What makes Randhir's writing unique is that his is a lived and shared experience, unlike say, a book like Uma Singh's Between Worlds: Travels among Mediums, Shamans and Healers", based on the Chamba region of Himachal Pradesh, which comes across more as a journalistic documentation, an observer's point of view.

There have been several awards for Randhir along the way --the Sanskriti Award for Creative Writing and Pegasus, the gold medal for poetry given by the Union of Bulgarian Writers, among others --but his greatest rewards have been the riches gleaned from his warm, deep and sometimes painful experience with marginalized communities and their land, which have enriched his life and his writing.

As he says in the title poem River Day, walking down the bone-dry stone of the baked Khali Nadi in Kutch:

Kutch, you frighten me
With your unrelenting heat
And stone and dust --
Footprinted by an ancient sea;

You frighten me --and yet
You teach me ways
I never knew
How to withstand and outlive death.

At another venue, in a completely different context, the Malayalam poet and secretary of the Sahitya Akademi Prof K Satchidanandan also made a similar point about marginalized communities. "I was with the Bhils of Gujarat," he said on Friday, May 13. "They have a way of apologizing to cows before milking them and to trees before plucking the fruits. They are so supportive of nature; this is something we, the 'civilised mainstream' should learn from them."

Satchidanandan was speaking at a function organized by the Asiatic Society of Mumbai for the release of its bicentenary volume, Culture and the Making of Identity in Contemporary India', a collection of 17 essays edited by Kamala Ganesh and Usha Thakkar and published by Sage. The book, priced at Rs 320 in its paperback version, has experts reviewing the developments in their fields over five decades and meditating on the dialogue between the indigenous and the contemporary.

Prof K Satchidanandan, who has authored 20 books of poetry starting with Anchusooryan (Five Suns) in 1970, is acclaimed as a pioneer of the New Poetry in Malayalam. In his speech titled 'Signing in Many Scripts: Literature in Contemporary India', he spoke of changing trends in Indian literature, and its two key strands --modernization and democratization.

Tracing its development from Partition literature and the "maelstrom of perpetual disintegration", Satchidanandan referred to the anti-Tagore syndrome that swept through a whole generation of modernist writers, who were concerned with the complexities of life and alternate modes of thought and expression. "Tagore stood for faith in God, faith in Nature and faith in Man", Satchidanandan said, "and modernism was an expression of skepticism and despair, with writers rejecting vague ideas of hope and freedom and linear progress." By 1965, he said, there was a body of fiction and poetry that had tried to capture a multi-layered life, the real and the spiritual, the mixing of time and space, re-mappings of Indian mythology... "Modern literature was polyphonic," he explained, "it had many voices".

Another trend, under which many movements were subsumed, he said, was the democratization of Indian literature, beginning with tribal oral literature and the Ramayana and Mahabharata traditions. Then there was the Bhakti movement, a "people's attempt to create alternative religion" --it encompassed the lower castes, the marginalized, the women --those who rejected Sanskrit in favour of a people's language instead. Satchidanandan also spoke of the new post-modernist literature, the intrusion of the market in everyday life, a forced standardization of culture and the subtle authoritarianism of the state, among other things.

In the last 20 to 30 years, he pointed out, there have been three main strands --the progressive modernist strain with its literature of "broad commitment" and different ideologies (U R Ananthamurthy and Mahasweta Devi, for instance); Dalit writing, which began with Marathi but soon spread to other languages; and literature by women who were rewriting the patriarchal norms.

"When we speak about Indian culture," Satchidanandan concluded, "we leave out a lot of people; we look at culture only as Hindu culture. But we need to re-look at the marginalized, the subaltern minorities." It is these minorities, more often than not, who enrich the vast canvas of Indian literature.

Menka Shivdasani is an Indian English poet based in Mumbai. Her two books of poems are Nirvana at Ten Rupees (1990), and Stet (2003).