We need tribal people much more than they need us

Usually we have to travel long distances in search of roots but sometimes almost miraculously roots come and find us. That is what happened to us at the Forest Foods and Ecology Festival in New Delhi. 

Suddenly, on one fine Friday morning, I found myself surrounded by roots and roots…

“Hey Jagannath, do you remember the bearded farmer we had gone to meet in the forest? Has he come?”

“Ahahah yes, they both have come,” laughs Jagannath. “This one and that one.”

“They were two?? I never realized! They all look so similar!!”

                                                                                   

Our ancestors’ and up to today’s Adivasis’ staple food… intriguing roots... so many of them… in all shapes and sizes… 

And this one is the one that fascinates me most… to prepare it is a long process… It has to be boiled and cut in 4 pieces. Then it is put in a basket that is kept overnight in the river. Once again it has to be boiled, and then only after being peeled, it can be prepared as any other vegetable… 

Here, I can’t help but make a connection with the words of Anodea Judith in her chapter on Muladhara or Root Chakra...

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Back to our Roots

With Jagannath, activist at Living Farm, I travel to a village on the fringe of the Niyamgiri hills in Odisha…

I have one wish… to accompany the tribal women in one of their roots/ tubers harvesting expeditions in the forest. Somehow there is something in that experience of journeying to the forest to dig out roots that deeply fascinates me!! May be it is the unique opportunity of performing an act our ancestors did for million years, an act that takes us back to the beginning of times when we were hunter-gatherers .

The women of the village agree. 

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The bearded farmers

Article first published in Hindi by Eklavya for Chakmak magazine.

http://www.eklavya.in/chakmak/magazine/2014/July/#/36

As I was going through Eklavya’s recently published Rukhi-Sukhi, a very interesting collection of facts on famine compiled by the students of Adharshila, a residential school for Adivasi children in Badhwani district in MP, I got reminded of Jagannath, a young Kondh Adivasi grassroots activist whom I had recently met in Muniguda, Rayagada district of Odisha…

As we walked through the forest, on our way to a remote village inaccessible by road, Jagannath narrates his experience of famine… “I remember one summer…  I would have been 5-6 years old… nothing was left to eat in the village… every grain of the last harvest had been consumed… the grain stores were empty…  I remember then accompanying my parents to the forest… For a full season, we subsisted solely on forest produce… jungle fruits, tubers, greens, seeds, jungle millets, mushrooms…"

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