Imagined HOMELAND

Brutalised by official terror, their land ravaged for private greed, the pristine beauty of the dense forests in the Dangs is an epic narrative of lost hopes and devastated lives

Prabhat Sharan Dangs (Gujarat)

"The history which has emerged has, more often than not, provided a traffic chronicle of uncompensated expropriation of common resources, of arrogant and unsympathetic administration by the colonial State, of loss of livelihood, cultural trauma and great suffering for the forest people. The process often led to resistance and revolt, invariably quelled with harshness." David Hardiman, Powers in the Forest: The Dangs 1820-1940 Fifty years later.

Dang, Kosimda, November 21, 1991:  In the weak autumn light of the setting orange orb in this hamlet, casting shadows through the dry leaves, an anxious adivasi woman walks on the sloping pebble strewn path towards her home. A shot ricochets through the burnished fields, hills and forests. The woman collapses. The foggy, flickering hurricane lantern glistens on the blood spray snaking into rivulets on the dung caked grassy soil, with trigger-happy,  stone- faced forest guards weaving the spell of terror on the children of the forests. They watch Tarabai Pawar in pain as shards of silence die.

That was 17 years ago. The scenario in the Dangs, the dense forest district in Gujarat, continues to be a grim jungle of lost hopes and devastated lives. On paper, in January 2008, after much reluctance, the Indian government accepted the legitimate existence of the adivasis (tribals) and issued a notification of the Forest Rights Act.

Dang, Motidaba, October 2008: Scores of forest guards storm into a 10 acre field. At dusk, the field cultivated by 60-year-old Ramubhai wore a forlorn, mangled look. Ramubhai, on returning next day, found his sister sobbing in front of his demolished house with his little possessions floating in a nearby stream. Tarabai was not the first victim of State repression and terror. Nor will she be the last. Like Bram Stoker's insatiable Dracula, the forest department (read Indian State) often in collusion
with big business houses, continue to haunt, plague and terrorise the poverty-stricken tribals.

Here, the political economy did not change in post-1947 India. The Indian State did not deem it necessary to ask the Dangi people whether they wanted to be a part of India. Probably, this was because big business profiteers and the State, like colonial rulers, were eyeing the rich forest produce and the mineral treasures which comprise 97 per cent of the region. Prior to circa 1812, the forests were freely cultivated by the adivasi folks and the concept of private holdings or landed property was absent. Post-1842, the Britishers, in order to plunder the forest wealth, started demarcating the jungles into reserved and protected forests. This was the first time that the Dangis -- the original inhabitants of the forests -- who had been cultivating and hunting since centuries, faced the onslaught of exploitation and repression by outsiders and the State. The forest produce collectors, food-gatherers and tribal farmers were forcibly turned into wage labourers. In 1948, the Dangs, which was treated as an independent territory under the Foreign Jurisdiction Act, was brought under the Indian Union. Tribal acquiescence was taken for granted.