By Ruma Chakraborty
The connecting flight had been delayed. The airport lounge abounded with irate travellers, some openly griping, others grumbling under their breath. Salomi Kerketta did neither. She looked around with a neutral gaze, soaking in the vibes. It helped her as a researcher to study human behaviour. As her eyes sweeped through the crowd, she chanced to glance at the large monitor of the television overhead. Some story about the development project to build a dam raising hackles of the locals was being aired. On the verge of turning away from the screen, Salomi’s eyes rivetted back to see an image that seemed vaguely familiar. A tribal painting of a woman astride a horse, holding aloft a sword stirred vague memories in her mind. “Where on earth have I seen this image before?” She mused. The image was strangely captivating.
In a flash, it came back to her. In their Ohio home, there was a small alcove in her mother’s room, hidden from common view where her mother kept her precious possessions. They were remnants of her youth spent near Hazaribagh. Her father had done everything to anglicise the family. They were Oraons from Jharkhand, India. They were Kurukhs according to her mother but to her father they were marginalised Indians making it big, abroad, the ultimate success story. Her mother painted beautiful pictures of birds, plants, circled lotus and geometric forms which she hid in the alcove. From time to time, she brought them out when she thought no one was watching and gazed with rapt attention at them. Salomi usually hid and watched her mother, perplexed by her intense attachment to these paintings and rituals that she carried out on the sly, without her father’s knowledge. “Strange how much I remember,” thought Salomi.
She was enroute to attending Samvaad in Jamshedpur for the tribal conclave. The waves of recollections, her companion at the Mumbai airport. She had taken up an assignment to study the harmonious balance between preservation of tribal art and commercialisation; strategies to learn from tribal art to survive the Anthropocene.
The anchor of the programme on the telly was getting all hyper about the growing public dissent regarding the building of the dam. The people around the project would face the inevitable displacement. The uprooting from their ancestral lands where they had laid roots for eons. It seemed that nothing had changed in the lives of the tribals in India or elsewhere in the world. The more regimes changed, the more they remained the same. The pre-independence wretched condition of the tribals seemed to have morphed into a kind of quasi-feudal agrarian exploitation, post-independence. Salomi ruefully shook her head and tried to snap her attention back to the railing reporter’s diatribe on the television.
The tribals of the area had found a strange manner of protest, the reporter claimed. There were alleged sighting of the lady on a horse with a sword. Salomi sat up straighter. This was the picture she had seen earlier that had taken her back to her childhood and her mother’s forbidden cache of paintings. The reporter droned on how the lady in the painting represented the courage of three tribal ladies – Singi Dai, Kaili Dai and Champa Dai who had protected the Oraon villagers from enemy attack thrice. The reporter stated that the tribals of Shylla village in Jashpur district of Chhatisgarh had allegedly seen the woman in the painting in a mortal form in the vicinity of the dam cite. The Janishikar festival was around the corner which was celebrated once every twelve years to honour these women. Things were coming to a boil it seemed as the lines between myth, lore and reality were blurring. Protest marches, ecology lobbies and tribal cliques were warming up in a run up reminiscent of the Pahariya revolts.
Salomi’s mind pondered over the possibilities of myth and lore intruding into reality. She made up her mind to go to Chhatisgarh immediately after the conclave at Jamshedpur. It was too good an opportunity to miss this confluence of events engineered to bring about some, any social change.
“Hello Debu, Johar. This is Salomi. Yes, I am on my way to Jamshedpur. Hey, can you tell me a little more about this painting I am sending you? I have already got some info about it on Google Lens but not enough. Do find out some more about it for me, na? I owe you one, pal.” Salomi knew that her friend and fellow Kurukh, Debu Lakra, was extremely resourceful and would surely find her a wealth of information in no time. She was tad surprised how she had become so intrigued by the painting and the subsequent chaos regarding the dam. She found herself inextricably drawn into the vortex of the issue.
Salomi called up her Aayo, her mother. She knew that though her father was a Christian, her mother practiced Sarnaism, praying to Dharmesh. She had been an angsty youngster and never truly bothered about either religion too much. Back in India, her curiosity piqued by the rumour of the return of the warrior lady as a saviour, once again, for the people under the threat of displacement due to the dam. She talked with her mother about this occurrence who did not seem surprised at all. Aayo treated it almost as if it was the natural outcome. Her belief in Animism making her believe that a mythical saviour would step in to save the fate of her people. Salomi disconnected the call with a conviction strengthening to find out more. She knew any conversation with her father would have him warning her not to poke her nose into business that was not her own or one that would prove unproductive in her growth as a scholar. Aayo, on the other hand, asked her to find out more not only to slake her curiosity but to get a clearer understanding of her roots. Her mother, Salomi realised, had always secretly hoped that she would renew her ties with her history, her roots, her blood.
“Salomi, Johar, this is Debu. I found out more information for you. Come to Chhattisgarh. A momentous dissent is hatching and as a researcher, I am sure, you wouldn’t want to miss it.”
“Why do you say so, Debu?” Salomi asked. “I really need to find out about more about my research topic, can’t go chasing windmills, quixotically, you know!”
“I know that something big is brewing. The villages facing displacement have all vouched that the mythical lady has been seen around their villages. The villagers are all freshly painting the image on their walls. The media is warming up to a blitz of coverage on this blurring line between story and reality. The administration is on the backfoot as they had not bargained for this magnitude of protest. If you come, you will be part of a historic protest. One that might tip the scales in favour of the tribals,” Debu uttered in one breathless statement.
“Whoa! I have never heard you being so impassioned, my friend. You have convinced me all right. I am on my way in a day’s time. First stop Samvaad then Jashpur. I too, can feel something big is on the way, Debu.”
‘The international media has descended in droves in Chhattisgarh, India, probably to witness a strange protest by a beleaguered fringe people in a fight for their right to their ancestral lands with the administration’s decision to take it away in the name of development. Never before have the tribals been so united. The battle lines are drawn and folklore is the weapon of choice. The imagination of the people has been fired with recent sightings of a mythical character around the dam site. The homes of the villagers are all freshly painted with tribal art celebrating their saviour,’ the news on televisions relentlessly beamed. News media had smelled the heady brew of unrest, dissent and perhaps the rewriting of the tribal narrative in India. They were descending in vulturine clusters to pick the bones of the story, raising their TRPs and public awareness as a byproduct.
Salomi knew in her bones that she had walked right into the stage set to make history. In all her years of existence, now was when she felt most alive. She belonged here. She had finally come home.
By Ruma Chakraborty
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