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The placid face of tribal India

P. Devarajan

THE open front at Anandwan in Warora is green with neem, ashok and mango trees providing cover from a 40 to 42 degrees sun. Along the edges and the middle are potted plants with jasmine and bougainvillea easy to identify. Around the trees are cement plat forms dressed up with odd-shape stone fossils like vegetables at a grocery store.

Dr. Vikas Amte is a keen collector and the shapeless, black, stone fossils resemble the distorted but cured leprosy patients living at Anandwan. The place holds contented human fossils.

Twice a day, one old lady cleaned the floor of dry leaves, near the rooms we were put in, collected them in a bamboo basket for future use as fertilisers. She does a neat job at her own pace as her infected but remedied fingers find it hard to grip the b room for long.

None supervises any job at Anandwan. Every leper gets cured and earns his living. No leper is ever rejected. There are no gods, no prayers, no statues, only ``ruins of humanity'' as Baba Amte puts it. Yet, inmates can practise their convictions. As Paul and myself went round, one noticed prayer rooms in many houses and TV sets beaming the latest Hindi films. Somehow gods and TV sets mix well. Baba Amte has built a lone memorial for a nameless tree.

A black stone with a yellow inscription dated Feb. 4, 1979, says in Marathi, `Anam vrikshachi smaranshila' (In memory of an anonymous tree). When we ask Baba Amte whether he has any desires left, the old man says, ``Yes. I want to build a grave for the anonymous innocents of the world killed by mankind. The innocents could be a child, man or woman.''

It is slightly over two hours by jeep from Nagpur to Warora and another six hours via Somnath and Nagepalli to Hemalkasa, the land of the primitive Madias. The roads are neat and well-laid to carry the police force to shoot down naxals and for the Amtes to bring faster relief to the tribals swirling around in thinning teak forests.

The Alapalli teak forests are second to Burma teak, says Dr. Prakash Amte but in the summer they drop their big leaves. When the rains come, they get back their green. A worker at Nagepalli says farmers cut down tall teak trees as the government contends teak to be national property.

As one travels through Gadchiroli forests with 60 to 70-foot tall and bare teak trees standing guard on either side of the tarred road, one sees lorries loaded with wood moving towards Nagpur. At the current pace, tribals and their forests will never be in another 50 years.

Dr. Prakash Amte has built a small haven for the Madias of the surrounding hamlets. They come with their diseases sure of Dr. Prakash Amte and his wife Ms. Mandakini curing them. In Australia, they term the Aborigines the stolen generation as the whites ripped away the kids from their parents. In India, tribals are the dust and dirt of the land to be swept off anytime, anywhere. There is no way a city Indian can even talk with the Madias till he learns their dialect. Perhaps, the easiest way is not to b other of the injuries the Madias carry quietly and shunt them around like government files.

It is around 5 in the morning and Paul is shocked out of his bed as the lion roars for well over a minute. The beast lets out twice again a healthy, deep clap like the monsoon clouds over Mumbai.

One walks over to the cage (Paul tries to get back his sleep) to find the lion moving round testily with the two leopards, staying with him, watching the show. For the tribals the lion's roar is as routine as the clank of the electric trains for a Mumbai kar.

At about seven we get our tea and one stretches out in bed to watch the peepal tree lose its leaves. For an hour, one watches the wind and sun play the green crown of the old peepal and with every touch a brown leaf does break off the branch to float aro und before coming to rest at the foot of the peepal.

They do not come in a shower. They ease off the branch calmly one by one. Their time is over and they accept it beatifically. In Mumbai, one is denied a chance to stand and stare.

In the evening, we get a second chance to watch the ways of a forest and its rivers. Some 20 minutes away three rivers _ Indravati, Pamula Gautami and Perlkota _ meet before going their ways. Indravati starts from the east, flows west, meets the Godavari and flows back east.

In waist high, clean and cold water, Dr. Prakash Amte, Paul and myself go for a dip and with us come the moon and sun. Talk and thought get washed away by the flowing rivers as we lay on our backs watching the stars take up positions over the neighbourin g Bastar forests. An owl hoots and nature starts to meditate. For sure, modern man cannot match the Madias, his forests and rivers.