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What Memories Are Made Of

For me, the most curious moment -- in some ways the saddest -- was when that woman thrust a piece of paper in my hand. It was a letter, some kind of appeal for help, addressed to the chief minister in a nearly illegible brand of Marathi, with her thumbprint at the bottom. I identified a few words here and there, but that's all. The rest was opaque. I couldn't see how the CM, assuming he got the letter, would feel otherwise.

But what was baffling about the sheet of paper was that it had a Rs 2 "court fee" stamp stuck on it. Why was it there? Her letter certainly did not need one: it was not an official court document. I could only surmise that the poor woman had been told, or had assumed, that the stamp was required for letters as weighty as this one, a letter that was going to a man as exalted as the CM.

I looked up at the woman, asked her why she had put the stamp there. To my surprise, she was beaming at me. She did not answer, just took back the letter and vanished into the crowd.

And I was surprised at how sad I felt. Here was this woman with some complaint or the other that she felt strongly enough about to write to the CM. Ignorant about these matters, she thought a court fee stamp would make the letter look serious, be taken more seriously. Showing it to me, she didn't care that I could not read it, that I was puzzled by the stamp. She was just thrilled that I had looked at her letter. That someone had paid some attention to it. This man all the way from the big city has seen my letter! And the stamp!

I still don't know just what it was, but something about the little episode was truly pathetic.

That morning, we were gathered on the platform of a temple in Phaltan, the town I wrote about in an earlier column. We were surrounded by a noisy, colourful, argumentative, even smelly gathering of tribals: Phase Pardhis. As I talked to one family for a while, I looked around at the scene. A man waved a letter he had written, wanting me to look at it. A woman opened a large plastic bag, out of which tumbled a collection of broken bits of plastic and metal. Another woman jostled my elbow and wanted to know when I was going to finish with the family and listen to her woes. The woman with the court fee stamp sat a few feet away, waiting her turn more patiently. A man got up and shouted for some quiet, only to be shouted down by a nearby woman. My journalist colleagues were scattered here and there, scribbling furiously as Pardhis related their tales.

It was a seething, quivering sight. Everyone was clamouring to tell their story; in the telling alone, they seemed to find a catharsis. Some hope. And despite the uproar, despite the family in front of me, my thoughts went off on their own for a few moments.

Phase Pardhis are one of India's so-called denotified tribes. That is, "denotified communities" ("vimuktajatis") should be the way these tribes are referred to. Except that they are more usually -- call it always -- termed criminal tribes. This is a legacy traceable to the British. In 1871, they designated dozens of tribes across the country as such in that year's Notification of Criminal Tribes & Castes Act. As T V Stephens, a condescending official of the time, said while introducing the Bill that became the Act: "... people from time immemorial have been pursuing the caste system defined job-positions: weaving, carpentry and such were hereditary jobs. So there must have been hereditary criminals also who pursued their forefathers' profession."

In 1952, Independent India repealed the British Act, so denotifying these tribes. Unfortunately, Act or repealed Act, Stephens' patronising legacy endures. Both the administration and society continue to think of them as criminal. They are accused of petty crimes, rounded up and beaten by the police, assaulted by fellow villagers, driven from their homes.

Mahasweta Devi, the Bengali writer and winner of the Jnanpith and Magsaysay Awards, has been working in West Bengal with two such tribes, the Lodhas and the Kheria Sabars. Taking a year-long sabbatical from writing, she is spending 1998 travelling, meeting denotified tribal communities around the country. With Laxman Gaikwad, himself a Pardhi and a 1988 Sahitya Akademi Award winner for his autobiography Utslya ("He who picks up"), and others, she recently started a national movement to fight for the rights of Denotified & Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

The movement's newsletter is called Budhan, named for a Sabar man who "died under mysterious circumstances." In the first issue, Mahasweta Devi writes: "I found that the wandering minstrels of Jodhpur and likewise other professional singers and musicians, snake charmers, fishermen, village acrobats, nomadic cattle grazers, grass cutters, forest tribes all were branded as criminals. In fact, he who did not cultivate and serve the upper castes was a criminal." That simple.

In late April, Mahasweta Devi and her colleagues were in Phaltan to meet Pardhis. That was why we were there.

I turned back to the family I was with. The grandmother, Limbu Jayaram Bhosle, had tears in her eyes and was bending over to touch my wife's feet with her forehead, begging us to help her get some kind of justice. Some years ago, she said, her husband had had his head crushed by a boulder dropped by the police in an attack on Pardhi homes. On April 13 this year, the villagers of Vitthalwadi, where they lived, accused them of stealing potatoes and eating meat even though they lived near a temple. For these crimes, they had attacked and burned the Bhosle's house down, flailing about them with swords as they did so.

The wounds of the flailing were scattered across the Bhosle family like so many bits of perverse jewellery. Limbu's son, Salya Bhosle, carried a deep gash on his head. His wife Chhaya had a scar over her eyebrow. Their son, Dhanaji, had his thumb nearly sliced off. Pooja, the daughter, had a gash on her head; on April 13, we saw in a photograph she had, the blood from it flooded down her cheek like some overflowing riverine delta.

The police took a full 10 days to file a complaint against the Bhosles' attackers; that, only after Gaikwad himself intervened and appealed to Home Minister Gopinath Munde. As one of my colleagues wrote in her report on our trip, the police claimed that with "some exceptions, most Pardhis [are] lazy, shiftless people." Which, even if true, is no reason to deny them justice, but we'll let that pass.

At the temple, I spoke to some more of these "lazy, shiftless people." One mother is fighting a false case slapped on her by a local advocate because she resisted his advances. Sulochana Ashok Shinde told us sadly that policemen often grab the women's breasts, especially in front of their husbands. More than one person told us that the police watch for marriages in the community. They arrest the young men; to release them, they demand sex from the brides.

Apparently, Pardhis are all disgusting criminals, but their women can be fondled, molested, raped -- that's OK.

I remembered a passionate Pardhi activist who had spoken to us at some length that morning. "We are all Hindus," he had begun. "We think of ourselves as Hindus. But if we can't get justice here in India, where will we get it, in Pakistan? We don't want this kind of Hinduism, where we are treated as criminals. If this goes on, we will have no choice but to convert."

Involuntarily, I thought: how utterly wrong our Hindutva champions have managed to get things!

But there was, despite his words, a heartfelt concern for the religion. "And if we do convert, if everybody like us feels forced to convert to get justice, what will be left of Hinduism? It will exist only in name, only in our memories."

Much later, I found myself wondering: what memories?

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Dilip D'Souza