Speech emerges in silence, and into silence it vanishes, just as bodies come out of dust and eventually return to dust.
In my childhood and early youth, I spent long spells trying to understand silence, the one that holds within it some profound enigma, as well as silence that marks the breakdown of dialogue.
As a young man, having gone through my quota of cynicism, Marxism, modernity and recklessness, I came close to mysticism — much of which I lost long ago — and embarked on a study of Sri Aurobindo, the sage of Pondicherry (now Puducherry). My 20-something mind was trying to understand how a firebrand revolutionary could plunge into the mysteries of the Vedas and observe long years of silence. He had spent 24 years (1926-1950) in seclusion in a single room. I avidly read his poems to see if his words could bring to me the shades of silence that he had experienced. That was like an interminable outer-space voyage, where one even forgets the grammar of one’s own speech. His was a language of colours, not words, and the colours were not the sort that the human eye
could see.
The idea of this all-enveloping silence as the high-street in cosmic journey, of which the human journey along the path of evolution is but a fragment, has made a deep mark on my mind.
Baroda sojourn
My move from the rural Kolhapur in Maharashtra to the mercilessly beautiful city of Baroda (now Vadodara) was prompted by a desire to go to work in the university where, nine decades before my time, Sri Aurobindo had taught. But he slipped out of my mind as soon as I arrived in Baroda, and as I started frequenting the tribal villages in eastern Gujarat. They were filled with a different kind of silence — a tangible silence. I noticed questioning, and scared glances taking in every movement I made and everything I said — wordlessly. It is as if they became ‘all eyes’ and ‘no tongues at all’. Besides, it spoke of a history that made one sad and angry at the same time. I then decided that creating a space for the voice of the Adivasis would be a way to unravel this other silence, imposed by the state, society and the history of the modern world.
Adivasi voice
For much of the three decades and a half that I spent in Baroda, I became an active advocate for the voice of Adivasis and marginalised communities, a kind of activist for the oral. My life in Baroda as a university teacher was marked by a generous quota of conferences and fellowships in various continents.
During the mid-90s, working on a fellowship, I devoted myself to the study of violence, conversing with undertrial prisoners and analysing philosophers who had reflected on violence. I did not look at ‘criminals’ as criminals but as humans who had committed big mistakes and were still capable of moral reform. As I kept visiting them in their jail cells, discussing the murders they had committed, one thing that became clear to me was that all serious conversations had a habit of breaking down. When the breakdown becomes too severe, dialogue becomes impossible, and an undesirable silence dominates the scene and thought acquires colours of violence.
Terracotta works from tribal area Chhota Udepur in the collection of the Adivasi Academy museum in Tejgadh, Gujarat. Pics: Vikesh Rathwa
Mahatma Gandhi, whom I adore, was known for placing in circulation a pair of words: ‘truth’ and ‘non-violence’. I could understand what violence was, but I had considerable difficulty with the idea of truth. It was not easy for me to decide on the objective conditions of truth, for one man’s truth can be another’s nightmare. It was during my conversation with jail inmates that one day I chanced upon a more manageable meaning of the term. I thought ‘one’s work to create a society free of violence’ is truth. So, non-violence is the goal, and truth the path to it. One must do one’s bit to pave that path.
I do not like to imitate, and I detest being enslaved by ideas, even when they are charming and promise liberty, salvation and power. Gandhi is good, I thought, but he was not for me to imitate. I adore Charlie Chaplin, but I don’t dress like him. So I resolved that my search for truth lies in reducing the potential for violence by trying to foster dialogue. This took me to the Adivasis to unravel their silence, and fight their aphasia. The landed Adivasis as well as the dispossessed nomadic communities started captivating me.
Sleeman’s list
During the 1830s, the colonial government appointed William Henry Sleeman (1788–1856) to prepare a list of assaults on wayfarers in central India. He took to this task with amazing devotion and produced a voluminous list of violent episodes. The list would not have amounted to much had it not been for what happened in 1857 in central India. In the wake of the battles fought and lost by the Indian states, isolated and potential groups of soldiers and even those likely to join them, came to be seen as candidates for the Sleeman list. Later, it was this list that became the basis of the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act (CTA).
Once the traditional occupations of the nomadic and semi-nomadic communities were brought under the scanner, the colonial government provided for their being officially declared ‘criminal tribes’. The government’s powers to declare a community ‘criminal’ were arbitrary. After this, even an attempt by any member of the community to move out of the district without informing the local authorities became a punishable offence.
The onus of proving that they were not criminals fell on them, but they were left with no rational argument since their being born in a certain community was itself seen as a crime. Thus, life became a trial with no let up. The communities ‘notified’ under the Act acquired the form of ‘social raw material’ for use in empire building. Members of these communities came to be used in colonial construction projects of railways and factories.
Branding tribes
The infamous CTA asked for forced ‘isolation’ and ‘reform’ of the communities listed. These included coin makers, entertainers, migratory peasants, nomadic communities, long-distance traders and such others. The CTA required creation of ‘settlements’ as reformatories with ‘strict procedures’. These procedures kept
becoming increasingly inhuman. Forced labour became the daily fate of the inmates. The CTA of 1871 went through several revisions, every revision bringing in new forms of ‘punishment’ for being born within the listed communities. The last of the CTA was passed in 1924. By then a total of 191 communities had been brought under its purview.
About the same time as the CTA was getting formulated, the colonial government produced another list of communities titled ‘The Tribes of India’. These were communities that had come in conflict with the British rule over the imposition of the government’s sovereign authority over forest areas. During the 1860s, the British had created a forest department, primarily to provide quality timber for building railways and ships. The forest-dwelling communities in India opposed the colonial takeover of their forests. They neither cared for the colonial government nor did they understand the idiom of the British law. Communities located in such areas of conflict were bundled together by the colonial government under the term ‘tribe’.
Soon after the need to conceptualise ‘tribes’ became clearer. A sophisticated machinery of scholarship was put in place to enumerate, describe and define the Indian tribes.
The historical, linguistic and cultural differences among these communities were so vast and complex that it would have been impossible for any rational scheme of sociological classification to place them in a single conceptual category.
No resistance
By the end of the 19th century, the concept of ‘tribe’ and the notion of ‘criminal tribes’ had received acceptance even among educated Indians. As a result, when the 1891 version of the CTA was enacted, or when in the following year the register of forest codes was prepared, there was no evident protest from any quarter. By the turn of the century, the tribe had come to stay as an unchallenged category constitutive of the primitive in Indian society.
When I started noticing during the 1980s the alarming disparity between the Adivasis and the Denotified Tribes (DNTs) and the other communities, I was drawn to exploring the link between denial of access to the means of development and the ‘structural aphasia’ imposed on marginalised languages. Towards this end, I founded in 1996 the Bhasha Research and Publication Centre for documentation and study of literature in the Adivasi languages, and, in 1999, the Adivasi Academy at Tejgadh. ‘Bhasha’ means ‘language’ or ‘voice’. The ultimate horizon of obligations for Bhasha at the moment of its inception was to document and publish 50 bilingual volumes of Adivasi literature. Little did I know then that beyond the horizon many new worlds were waiting for it!
Sound of ‘Dhol’
Within months of commencing the work on the 50-volume series, many Adivasi writers and scholars approached me with the idea of starting a magazine in their own languages to be read out rather than for individual reading. Bhasha accepted the idea. The magazine was called ‘Dhol’ (the drums), a term that has a totemic cultural significance for the Adivasis. We started using the state scripts, combined with a moderate use of diacritic marks to represent these languages. The response to the magazine was tremendous. More Adivasis approached Bhasha, and asked for versions of ‘Dhol’ in their own languages. In two years, ‘Dhol’ started appearing in 10 Adivasi languages: Kunkna, Ahirani, Gor-Banjara, Bhantu, Dehwali, Pawari, Rathwi, Chaudhari, Panchamahali-Bhilli, and Dungra-Bhilli. When the first issue of the Chaudhari language ‘Dhol’ was released at Padam-Dungri village in south Gujarat, it sold 700 copies in less than an hour. This was a record of sorts for a little magazine.
Inspired by its success, our Adivasi collaborators started bringing manuscripts of their autobiographies, poems, essays and anthropological studies of their communities that they wanted us to publish. Subsequently, in order to highlight the oral nature of Adivasi culture, we launched a weekly radio magazine relayed throughout the Adivasi areas of Gujarat and Maharashtra. All these initiatives together gave birth to a small but focused publishing house called ‘Purva-Prakash’.
Oral literature, unlike written literature, is not an exclusive verbal or lexical art. It is inevitably intermixed with song, music, dance, ritual and craft. So Bhasha was drawn to the craft of Adivasi communities, initially in western India, and subsequently from all over India. This resulted in Bhasha’s craft collection and training initiative ‘Tribals First’.
The objects one identifies as craft are not produced in Adivasi communities for aesthetic pleasure alone. They are an integral part of their daily life. Often, such objects carry an imprint of the supernatural as conceived in their myth and imagination. The shapes, colours and forms of these objects reflect the transactions in the Adivasi collective unconscious. Often, one overlooks the fact that the metaphysical matrix of the Adivasi thought process differs markedly from the philosophic assumptions of the dominant cultural traditions in India. Therefore, sometimes simple concepts, which look natural and secular, can provoke Adivasis into reacting negatively, and even violently.
Meeting Mahasweta
Along my journey, I met countless great personalities, each one illuminating my life in a different way. But one of them made her mark the most. This was the Bangla writer Mahasweta Devi. With her, I worked, travelled, sang old movie songs, but most of all discussed for hours how she understood the everlasting silence, the one that Shakespeare had in his mind when he said, “The rest is silence”. She too was a writer of the order to which Shakespeare belongs.
She was indomitable. So very often, she would say, “Don’t ask me questions. I don’t know all the answers. All that I know is that I would like to find my eternal rest under a tree at the Adivasi Academy.” In August 2016, a week after she passed away in Kolkata, my wife Surekha and I brought her mortal remains to Tejgadh and placed them in an urn at the place she had chosen for herself. The memorial created for Mahasweta Devi silently provides inspiration and courage to me to encourage the voice of the oppressed.
I have spent all my time these last three decades espousing a republic of threatened voices. The People’s Linguistic Survey of India that I undertook in 2010 was but a small step in that direction. The 780 languages covered in it, with the help of nearly 3,000 colleagues, has not been a trophy for me. Rather, it has been an unsettling reminder of the silence that is beginning to surround us, citizens, on all sides, through intimidation and pervasive surveillance by the state. The world and our country too have entered an ‘aphasia-era’. Speaking up and questioning are seen as crimes against the state. Warm, affable conversations have become a thing of the past. Love-words are in short supply. I often think, ruefully, that my quest for the oral, for voice, for speech, was the path that I shall tread if I ever were to live the same life again, with a greater conviction. After all, in speech alone is a human being a little more than a beast.
(The author is founder of Adivasi Academy and chairman of People’s Linguistic Survey of India)