Viewers of privilege were free to look elsewhere—to see a Russian aristocrat, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, posing posthunt with a blindfolded cheetah; to see the Prince of Wales, who would become King George V, carried across a stream by an Indian servant during a hunt; to see the photo of a children’s dressing-up party in Hyderabad, the pretty British youth decked in lace and elaborate hats, the girls bearing scepters topped with flowers and stars.
Still, there are some striking outliers in Dayal’s work. Among them is a tantalizing photograph, from 1879, in which a group of Bhil tribals of all ages are set against a hilly landscape, loosely arranged. Some stand, some crouch. Some look boldly toward the camera. Some gaze into the distance. Others seem to want to shrink away. Nothing is known about why he took this photo. A practice shot? Relief from his usual work? All that’s clear is that he sees the tribal men as individuals, and with respect. In later years, when occasionally photographing nonelite Indians (circus performers, fakirs), the result was fairground stuff, charged with exoticism, and without the open, humane sensibility of that early Bhil work.
* * *
What Dayal made of this world and his subjects—whether he had an explicit politics, or sensed himself living and working at a twilight moment, or sensed the danger of flaunting wealth in a democratizing age—we’ll never know. He left detailed records of his photographs and his studio finances, but the only “life story” we have in his own voice is from a rather wooden account.
Although Dayal’s work was honored in international competitions, including the exhibitions in London of 1886 and 1891, and sold well, his sons were spendthrifts, and his Mumbai studio was mismanaged. So, shortly before he died, he wrote letters in a shaky hand, telling clients about being besieged by creditors, and begging them to pay him what they owed. It’s one of the few intimate glimpses we have of the emotional life of the man, and it’s a painful one.
Dayal was master of a medium that would entirely transform how we see and represent the world, and he seems to have sensed that new technologies might not just serve hierarchy, but subvert it. Among his work are photographs of typewriters and phonographs—machines that, like the camera, would become heralds of the modern democratic age.
Those little girls in his photos bearing scepters topped with flowers and stars? Before their lives were over, the Raj they had belonged to would be dismantled, princely states abolished, and India would achieve independence. The wealthy would no longer have the means to keep the masses from entering the frame. Dayal’s body of work matters for history as much as for art. Without him, we wouldn’t understand so powerfully the moment when India was the world’s exotic, wondrous playground for the wealthy—before the modern world got in the way.
26
BIRSA MUNDA
“Have You Been to Chalkad?”
1875–1900
Who owns India? Who owns the forests and rivers, the farmlands eyed by industry, the slums coveted by real estate developers and airport authorities, the hills and plateaus desired by mining barons?
In roughly a third of the country, this is no idle question. Citizens, governments, and corporations are negotiating, sometimes violently, over the answer. The country’s tribal belt, which stretches across the eastern and central parts of the country, is where many of these conflicts are unfolding. The people who live in these areas are poor, but the natural resources are rich—tempting to corporations and the government.
The nationalists of the twentieth century had a simple answer to who owned the land: Indians did. The British did not. Yet when the nationalists assembled the jigsaw puzzle of diversities to define the Indian nation, some pieces got left out of consideration. Among those were the original tribal inhabitants of the country, who are now called Adivasis. The Adivasis, taken together, match in size the population of Germany or Vietnam, but they are so various and widely dispersed across the subcontinent that it is nonsensical to speak of them as a single group. One experience many Adivasis do share, however, is the overriding of their rights in the name of development and in the interests of other Indians, especially those with more money. “It’s as if middle and upper classes and castes have seceded into outer space,” the writer and political activist Arundhati Roy says. “They look down and say, ‘What’s our bauxite doing in their mountains, what’s our water doing in their rivers?’”
Although Adivasi efforts to defend their lands date back centuries, accounts of many of those struggles are lost to history. The life of one nineteenth-century rebel, Birsa Munda, is an exception. Born in 1875 in Chotanagpur, in what is now the eastern state of Jharkhand, and raised in a bamboo hut, the young Birsa herded sheep, played the flute, and learned the medicinal power of local plants. In adulthood, he was known as a healer, and ultimately as a defender of his people against the British, their Indian middlemen, and Christian missionaries. His was a firework of a life—he was dead by the age of twenty-five—but the embers of his struggle still burn.
* * *
When the oppressor wants a horse, the Kol must pay; when he desires a palki, the Kols have to pay and afterwards to bear him therein … Does someone die in his house? He taxes them. Is a child born? Again a tax. Is there a marriage or Puja? A tax. Does a death occur in the house of the Kol? The poor man must pay a fine. Is a child born? Is a son or daughter married? The poor Kol is still taxed. And this plundering, punishing, robbing system goes on till the Kols run away.
The Kols are a family of tribes, including Birsa Munda’s, that have occupied their land for more than two thousand years. Yet the nineteenth-century account just given evokes a continuity under threat. The Kols’ sense of being exploited and driven away was in part caused by a fundamental change in the British relationship to Indian land.
Until the arrival of the Marquess of Wellesley as governor-general in 1798, the British had considered India a profitable trading post, and had used local zamindars to collect revenues from the peasants. From then on, however, India was a territory to be possessed. Wellesley’s land grabs included Mysore, the Maratha Deccan, and many densely forested areas that were often amorphously controlled. By the early 1800s, the East India Company had seized pretty much two-thirds of India, and over the course of the nineteenth century it pocketed further chunks, including bits of princely India through such dubious legal tools as the Doctrine of Lapse, which was used to dispossess Lakshmi Bai (23).
Birsa Munda’s region, Chotanagpur, was seized under the auspices of a series of laws called the Forest Acts, introduced in the 1860s. Birsa Munda came into the world at a time when tribes could no longer freely forage, collect firewood, or graze their livestock in their forests. Meanwhile, the British encouraged Indian outsiders, middlemen, and merchants—Dikus, the Kol Mundas called them—to settle on the edges of the forests, assigning them rights to land that Kols considered common property. For a young boy exploring the forest, it was a tricky, confusing time.
In his village of Chalkad, Birsa Munda stood out for his fair skin, his height—he grew to five feet four inches, tall by Munda standards—and his liveliness. German missionaries described his features as “laughing and restless, which told you the moment you looked at him that he was brimful of mischief and nonsense.” They selected him for a Christian education at a mission school in another village, a decision they’d have cause to regret.
Missionaries had been in the region since around 1845, converting more than one hundred thousand residents, opening schools, and adding another layer of psychological complication to growing up Kol. The missionaries sought to suppress native customs such as drinking rice wine and dancing, not to mention the worship of the traditional deity, Sing Bonga. Some churches, expanding, also sought to relieve Kol families of their land, a common occurrence in colonial territories around the world. “Obviously this is not related only to India,” Roy points out. “They say in Africa, when the colonizers—the white colonizers—came, ‘We had the land and they had the Bibles. Now we have the Bibles and they hav
e the land.’”
Still, many Kols valued the practical aspects of missionary education. Literacy and numeracy made tribes less vulnerable to being swindled out of their land. Birsa was duly educated, though he viewed the Christians with far more suspicion than Jyotirao Phule (24) did. Soon after his Christian confirmation ceremony, Birsa argued with the priests and was expelled from school. “Saheb, Saheb, ek topi hai,” he now said—all whites, whether British colonialists or European missionaries, wore the same cap.
Returning home to Chalkad, he lived with a family from a Hindu weaver caste, coming under the wing of a Vaishnav monk. He began practicing as a healer, and his reputation as a young man with magic in his hands began to grow. His popularity was probably a reflection not just of skill and charisma, but also of the severity of the health ills he was called on to treat. Life was often short in Kol communities, and the 1890s were marked across northern and central India by drought, famine, and ensuing epidemics. In those circumstances, a healer might seem almost divine. In the words of a later folk song:
Deep in the wild forest,
who is clapping?
Deep in the wild forest,
Birsa is clapping.
Birsa claps:
bears, wild buffaloes, deer, elephants and horses understand.
But not men.
Other songs told of how “Deep amidst forest in the village of Chalkad, the Father of the Earth was born.” Soon, “Have you been to Chalkad?” became a greeting among locals. It was said that in addition to healing illness, Birsa could predict crop failures and other disasters. He could make himself invisible at will. He could turn guns into wood, bullets into water. He could be the Mundas’ savior.
The beloved son of Sugana Munda, you grazed goats;
when you were twenty-five years of age, you shepherded the Mundas.
* * *
Throughout the nineteenth century, the Kols had periodically tried to expel the British and the zamindars from their lands, most famously in a revolt that began in 1831, known as the Great Kol Rising. Kol territory was a region, in other words, that the government had to work to control. By his early twenties, widely known as a miracle worker, Birsa was involved in agitations against the British, Dikus, and missionaries.
Alpa Shah, an anthropologist who has worked among Adivasi communities in Jharkhand, says that Birsa would have acted as a leader across many areas of Munda life. “On the one hand, he was mobilizing for what we’d see as political causes. But, on the other hand, spirituality was a huge part of how he operated. Spirituality was absolutely central for Adivasis then, as it is today. Religion was not necessarily as we see it now; religion, economics, politics were all part and parcel of the same forces.”
The missionaries in the area were alarmed by Birsa’s heathen ways, and resentful of his success at gathering followers. Their fears came to influence the government of Bengal’s understanding of what transpired next.
One government informant was Father Hoffmann, a German who ran a Catholic mission. He’d come to the region, he wrote, “with the one object of working for [the Mundas] to my dying day.” But the vast majority of residents who had earlier converted to Christianity were turning to Birsa Munda, as Hoffmann noted in a letter. Many extant details about Birsa’s activities and the support he commanded come from the missionaries’ partial accounts, in letters preserved in colonial archives. By 1895, Birsa’s teachings had taken on a millenarian tone. He declared that a fire from heaven would destroy the outsiders, and that those Mundas who did not gather around him would perish. Six thousand people collected homemade weapons and began to climb toward a hilltop camp Birsa had established in Chalkad. The missionaries, unnerved by the human arsenal moving up the hill, reported it to the colonial administrators, who retained memories of the events of 1857.
To Father Hoffmann, this mustering wasn’t just a “mere act of semi-savage foolishness.” “Under the garb of religion,” Hoffmann later wrote to the government, Birsa Munda was assuming “a purely political role of high ambition.” Rumors swirled around that a seditious “Munda Raj” was beginning, and that Birsa’s armed followers would refuse to pay rents or submit to British authority. “The colonial government thought it was a gathering against them,” says Shah. “Actually, it seems that people were gathered because they believed that everybody who wasn’t gathered on that hill was going to die.”
The British arrested Birsa and sentenced him to two years in jail, a term that served to heighten the leader’s popular mystique and his antipathy to the government. Soon after his release, he ordered the burning of effigies, made of plantain trees and leaf plates, representing the British Empire as the demon Ravana and the Empress Victoria as Ravana’s consort, the demon-queen Mandodari. The following year, in December 1899, he did exactly what the British had feared: he led his people to rebellion.
Father Hoffmann, one of the targets of the uprising, wrote to the government:
At about 9 p.m. gangs of from 4 to 6 men appeared in all Christian villages, put fire to a hut or two and shot some arrows into gatherings of Christians who were singing their Christian hymns. My companion Father Carbery and myself were lured out by the setting on fire of a shed in front of the Mission house, and as soon as we appeared in the verandah, three arrows were discharged at us. One of these hit Father Carbery in the chest but remained stuck in the lower part of the chest bone, whereas the two aimed at me just missed me by a couple of inches and went into the wall.
Armed with axes and slingshots in addition to bows and arrows, Birsa’s followers attacked the British, Dikus, and Christians over the course of the next few weeks. A police squad was confronted; a constable was cut to pieces. By January, the British were firing on mobs, catching innocent people in the crossfire. The uprising, which the Mundas called the Ulgulan, or Great Tumult, did not last long: colonial power crushed a people who had believed their leader’s prophecy that British bullets would turn to water. Birsa Munda fled to the jungle, but was captured in March 1900. Three months later, possibly suffering from cholera, he died in his jail cell.
* * *
Popular accounts claim that Birsa Munda was insulted by the British even in death, his body cremated by the jail sweeper not with wood, but with cow dung. But he has gained new life in independent India, as a posthumously honored citizen. Birsa Munda’s name now adorns both the airport and the central jail in Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand. His portrait even hangs in India’s Parliament House. Weirdly, the painting is based on a colonial prison mugshot. Birsa’s rope handcuffs have been edited out. Official recognition, however, doesn’t mean that what Birsa stood for is now respected by the modern Indian state, or by corporations. The battle is still very much on.
In rural Maharashtra, for example, there are nine million Adivasis. In the Karjat area, they are known, like the Kols, for a will to fight. In 2009 they joined with local farmers to stop Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Group (see 50, Dhirubhai Ambani) from acquiring twenty thousand acres of land—a David-and-Goliath story that inspired community organizers countrywide.
Yet Karjat is also a desirable location for affluent residents of Mumbai and Pune who wish to build holiday homes and villas. What Reliance couldn’t do is being achieved by local agents, who buy land from Karjat’s Katkari Adivasis and sell it to developers. “Relax in natural waterfalls flowing from inside the project,” reads an ad for a large luxury complex called Elegant. “Indulge in farming activities.” It’s striking, from the perspective of the Karjat Adivasi, to consider agriculture as an indulgence. In a bitter irony, many Adivasis (Katkaris and others) are now working the numerous brick kilns in the area, firing bricks for the luxury developments being built on their land.
On the roads in and out of the Katkari village of Tamnath, the undulating landscape looks like a body shaved before surgery. Call it development, or call it encroachment, the new construction is the main reason forest cover in the state dropped from 20 percent to 16 percent in a decade. Residents of Tamnath n
ow have to travel farther and farther to find the wood they need. Sitting outside her house in the village, Sita Pawar tells me about the importance of the forest for village families as a source of fuel, food, and building materials. “If we lose the forest,” she says, “we lose everything.”
Arundhati Roy says, “If you look at a map of India now, the mineral wealth, the Adivasi population, and the forests are all stacked up on top of each other. And the fact that Adivasis still exist is because people such as Birsa Munda did stage the beginnings of a battle against the takeover of the homeland.” But for Tamnath’s Katkaris and the eighty million other Adivasis, creating opportunitities to participate in India’s economic growth, and heroes or heroines whose stories don’t end in early death in captivity, is essential work for this and the next generations.
27
JAMSETJI TATA
Making India
1839–1904
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, India’s first industrial manufacturing boom turned the city of Bombay into a Cottonopolis. Bombay’s mills, mostly Indian-owned, supplied cotton goods to the world, and created huge cohorts of skilled workers who, over generations, gave Bombay a middle class. Today, though, the city’s famous mills are history. Visiting the stone-block ruins of one of them, near the financial hub of the Bandra Kurla Complex, is like burrowing into a hollow of the contemporary Indian economy. Just across a waterway from this rat-ridden carcass you can make out international banks and five-star hotels, a condominium designed for what its marketers call “the ultra-rich,” and a private school started by India’s wealthiest family, the Ambanis (see 50, Dhirubhai Ambani), to serve the city’s most privileged children. No manufacturing as far as the eye can see—unless cold-pressed juice and pumpkin frappés count.
Incarnations Page 22