Agadhalla

There are some days that make you think.

I am sitting at Agadhalla village, at the base of Gopalswamy betta, at the edge of Bandipur Tiger Reserve.  A couple of hundred metres away is the main road to the temple atop the hill, a temple that is as breath-taking to reach as it is to behold.  The winding road to the top has panoramic views of the valleys below and the hills beyond, and sighting the odd elephant herd is routine.  Vehicles – the best of them – wind their way up, for the diety at Gopalswamy betta is revered by many.

Agadhalla is a couple of hundred metres away from the main road, but in every other sense, it could be on another planet. 

Every household has a story of woe to tell; often, it is the untold story that is vivid, evident in the expression of its denizens, in the deprivation that surrounds them, in the unimaginative homes that have been constructed for them by an uncaring administration.  The hamlet has two tribes – the Soligas and the Jenu Kurubas – and the friction between them is evident.  As the men and women engage in high-volume banter, there is little joy that you might sense and lesser expectation.   Even as the entire village delves deeper into debt, alcohol is the staple diet of the men - and many women -  in the evenings (as we have learnt to expect).  The homes have nothing inside; a few clothes and utensils, the odd, broken trunk in the corner, all of which reveal an unwillingness to seek a better life.  For the hundredth time, I ask the question: why? 

And as we – a motley group of students and, well, older students (including me) -  install a few fuel-efficient stoves in some homes and then wind our way to the primary school to speak with Guruswamy, the assiduous teacher there, there are more stories that await.  Of a child abandoned, of single-parent homes, of an older child who threatened to emulate his father and kill himself if forced to go to middle school.  

The relationship the hamlet shares with the forest is beset with tension: the Forest Department asserts that there is illegal firewood harvesting and the odd poaching of wildlife and when a Forester was speaking to me, the denizens stayed away.  Far away.  This village, he grumbled, is spoilt and lazy and wants easy work and easy money.  The Government gives them cheap food - 28 kg of rice, 5 kg of wheat and a kilo of sugar for just Rs. 120 - so they don’t really need to work much and now, by giving them free fuel-efficient stoves, he implied, you are spoiling them even more.  They see the forest as an exploit-able resource, to be plundered, not protected, he asserted fiercely.  I had to admit that he had a point.  But then, everyone did, everyone had a point in this forgotten village, in this place no one would want to understand.

Agadhalla is, be assured, just another tribal village around a National Park (Bandipur has a hundred and twenty three of them).  Another tick on my growing list of the tribal villages that I have spent time in around forests, searching for meaningful solutions.  Another tick on the growing list of an ailing, empty micro-society that is unhappy.  Perhaps angry.

Sitting in the sun that day and watching two little children on a tricycle, the dried flem from their noses seeming like a scar above their lips, their brown hair indicating protein deficiency, all of us asked the questions that have taunted me this long: why?  Why are we different from them?  

Why has it turned out this way, when we all know that the tribals were the original sustained protectors of the forest?  Why do they see the Forest Department as their enemy, when at least half their annual earnings come (or could come) from labour work done with the Department?  Why are they, as one of my students asked, unwilling to improve themselves, to seek work, to aspire for a better life, to yearn for a better tomorrow? And, most importantly, how can we catalyse change?  Change that preserves what is left of their culture, yet provides them respect and purpose and elicits from them, in turn, respect for the forest. 

That day, I returned to the metropolis, just in time to be at a friend’s place for dinner.   He introduced me to a colleague of his saying that I was ‘a guy who has quit the rat race to trample around forests’.  The colleague, mulled wine in hand, looked askance and with a mock shiver of his hand asked me if I was ‘an activist’. 

I don’t mind saying that I felt like hitting him then.