The Research Region
The region where I conducted my research is located in the district of Koraput, in the southern part of the Indian state of Odisha (see map 1). Geographically, Koraput is part of the mountain range known as the Eastern Ghats, which - roughly parallel to the coastal strip running from southwest to northeast - stretches from the Godavari River in the south to the Mahanadi (the “Great River”) in the north. The largest part of the district is located on a high plateau that is part of this mountain range, about nine hundred meters above sea level and the site of the district capital of the same name. Hills and mountains, few of which are more than fifteen hundred meters high, are scattered across the high plateau. West of the city of Koraput, the road twists and turns down to the six-hundred-meter plateau on which Jeypore is located, the former royal capital and today the largest city in the region (cf. Senapati and Sahu 1966, 8ff).
South of Jeypore and Koraput, on the nine-hundred-meter plateau, is the Lamtaput block, the focus of this study. From Vishakhapatnam, in Andhra Pradesh on the Bay of Bengal, the area is about an eight-hour trip by bus. After an hour of travel through the plains, the Eastern Ghats rise steeply, and the bus struggles almost a thousand meters upward between sharp mountain peaks to reach the high plateau. The route continues through the broad valley of Araku to Lamtaput, a small town that is little more than a crossroads and in which the block development officer has his headquarters (see map 2). The railroad, which runs up from the coast more or less parallel to the road, is somewhat further east of Lamtaput, on the other side of the Goradi River, and is roughly identical to the eastern border of the Gutob Gadaba area. Continuing north on the road, the traveler reaches the city of Jeypore forty kilometers on (followed eventually by Jagdalpur in Chhattisgarh). On the way there, the road once again twists and turns steeply downward to the six-hundred-meter plateau, flanked by dense tropical forest for part of the descent, before crossing the Kolab River and stretching through a broad valley for the last ten kilometers to Jeypore.
Map 1: The Study Area in Southern Koraput District of Odisha. From Jena et al. (2002, 2), adapted by Peter Berger.
On the left for a traveler arriving in Lamtaput from the coast, a narrow asphalt road cuts diagonally across Gadaba territory and ends thirty kilometers farther southwest in Onukadilli (“Duduma” on map 2), a small town that has sprung up as a consequence of a hydropower plant. On this westward journey, the broad valleys that characterize the area around Lamtaput quickly narrow; the hills grow steeper and closer together. Beyond Machkund, where the area’s
Map 2: The Region around Lamtaput (Onakudilli indicated here as Duduma). Copyright Nelles Maps 1:1,5 Mio: Eastern India (Including Nepal; Special Map: Calcutta) (Munich: Nelles Verlag, s.a.), adapted by Peter Berger.
largest police station is located, the forest becomes notably denser; monkeys are often to be seen here. For the last ten kilometers before Onukadilli, the road bends and curves along the course of the Machkund River, which marks the border between Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. A few kilometers beyond the small administrative outpost of Machkund, the Machkund River (tamed by the hydropower project), plunges over one hundred meters in the Duduma Waterfall, and the river’s deep valley, stretching far to the southwest, is visible even from the road. A traveler who leaves the road and heads northwest through the hills will reach the end of the high plateau after a relatively short hike and be able to look down from the last foothills into the plains, where the towns of Gobindpalli and Boi-
pariguda lie along the road that runs southwest from Jeypore to cut diagonally through the neighboring district of Malkangiri. A few kilometers southwest of Onukadilli, the area inhabited by the Gutob Gadaba comes to an end; the first villages of the Bondo, whose territory begins there, are already in the Malkangiri district (see map 3).
Map 3: Gutob Gadaba Villages and the Surrounding Tribal Communities
The Koraput district, one of India’s largest districts before its 1995 division,[1] long had a reputation as inaccessible, backward, and malaria-ridden, an estimation still voiced by many inhabitants of the plains today and one that plausibly also reflects the judgment of the British conquerors.[2] When Ahuja (2007, 291) writes that “[e]arly colonial administrators were not so much interested in making a way into Orissa than in getting past it without hindrance,” this applies especially to the “remote” Koraput district. Before the district was established in 1936, along with the state of Odisha, the region, as the Jeypore Zamindari (i.e., kingdom or princedom), belonged to the southern Madras Presidency of the British colonial regime, which demanded collaboration and taxes from the petty rulers of the “princely states” but otherwise showed little interest in the mountainous hinterland. Since the king of Jeypore did not fulfill these obligations, East India Company troops occupied his capital in 1775, and twenty years later, his successor signed a treaty intended to provide the British with guarantees in this regard. It was only in the middle of the nineteenth century that British officials took over direct administration of the area and chose as their headquarters the previously entirely insignificant Koraput, perceived as having a more comfortable climate. Before Koraput and Jeypore, Nandapur was the political center, the original seat of the so-called “Sun Kings,” whose dynasty began in the fifteenth century and who moved their capital to Jeypore in the seventeenth century, at a time when they were under Mogul influence. The Mogul rulers began their conquest of power in the region in the sixteenth century, moving up from the south (the Golkonda empire), and lost their dominance to the East India Company only in 1766 (cf. Schnepel 2002,138ff; Senapati and Sahu 1966, 60ff; Thusu and Jha 1972,139ff).3
The indigenous inhabitants of the high plateau call themselves Desia, meaning “people of the land.” The Desia are not a homogenous unit, but rather are made up of numerous different groups that nonetheless have many cultural (morphological and ideological) traits in common, so that Pfeffer (1997a) characterizes the region as a “culture area” and speaks of a “Koraput Complex” (16). He aims in this way to counter the relatively arbitrary administrative classification of the Desia into Scheduled Tribes (ST), Scheduled Castes (SC), and Other Backward Classes (OBC) and clear the way for a differentiated anthropological examination of the highland social constellation. In particular, his approach runs contrary to the migration hypotheses that contrast the ST to the immigrant “castes” (SC, OBC) from the plains, in his view without convincing evidence. He does not doubt the immigration as such of various groups to the highlands, which were never entirely isolated and immigration to which is assumed by the Desia themselves; the commentaries of colonial officials and the few available ethnographic their needs and perspectives (70). The article also provides a great deal of information about the district’s infrastructure, economy, and ecology.
3 Kulke (1980, 27- 34) provides a brief survey of the history of Odisha.
studies, however, have limited themselves up to now to establishing the “otherness” of the immigrants, overlooking the complex forms of interaction, the overarching social institutions, and the ideology of Desia society, all of which differ in significant ways from those of the Hindu inhabitants of the plains. In an article, I have sketched the relationships between the Gadaba (ST) and other Desia in the Lamtaput area. In so doing, I distinguish a general hierarchy of the different Desia categories - one which is certainly similar to the tripartite administrative classification - from the specific local context of the village, in which the “earth people” (matia) outrank all other groups of “latecomers” (upria) (Berger 2002).
In what follows, I will briefly discuss the tribal groups that neighbor on the Gutob Gadaba and subsequently note the most important other Desia categories. The Bondo have already been mentioned as the Gadaba’s western neighbors and are probably the best-known tribal group of Koraput district, thanks to Elwin’s (1950) monograph. Despite the well-known weaknesses of Elwin’s works, resulting especially from his “common-sense” interpretations and psychologizing analyses, Bondo Highlander is an important ethnographic reference point for this study and a background against which the Gadaba data can be viewed, since very large cultural (and linguistic) similarities exist between the two tribal groups. In the language spoken by the Bondo, called Remo like the group’s own term for itself (“human being”), the expression used for the east means “in the direction of the Gutob,”[3] that is, in the direction of their “younger brothers” (sano bai), the Gadaba. Elwin (1950, 6f) also mentions a section of the Bondo who are referred to - apparently by the other Bondo groups - as “Gutob Remo” or “Gadaba Bondo” (7). These are the villages located closest to the Gadaba area and, according to Elwin, under Gadaba influence. From the Gadaba perspective, interestingly, the picture is reversed. The Gadaba of the Lamtaput region call the Gadaba of the Onukadilli area “Bondo Gadaba” and consider them - because they are under Bondo influence - “uncivilized,” as seen, for example, according to their account, in the fact that they drink their beer from gourds. I have not encountered any Bondo further east than Onukadilli, and the Gadaba of the Lamtaput area have almost no contact with them, but they are nonetheless convinced of their unpredictability and hot tempers. This reputation, like the Dombo’s alleged craftiness, is also reflected in the literature on these groups.[4]
Almost nothing is known about the Gutob Gadaba’s other neighbors. To the north and east live the Ollar Gadaba, their “younger” (sano) brothers, who speak a Dravidian language (Ollari) but are otherwise scarcely distinguishable from the Gutob Gadaba. Also east of the Gutob Gadaba is the home of the Joria, almost unmentioned in the literature up to now but among whom my French colleague Raphael Rousseleau (cf. Rousseleau and Behera 2003) has recently worked and on whom he expects to publish in the near future. In the area around Nandapur, there are also villages of the Kuvi Kond, who are otherwise found only scattered here and there in the Lamtaput block (cf. Otten 2000a). South of Lamtaput begin the villages of the Parenga (or Gorum), about whom there are likewise almost no ethnographic reports and who, like the Joria, are considered junior to the Gadaba. Finally, we should mention the Didayi (Gata’ or Gitare), who live in the Kon- dakamberu Mountains along the Machkund River and are neighbors of the Bondo. The Anthropological Survey of India undertook research in their area in the 1960s (Guha et al. 1970).[5]
All the mentioned Desia groups are classified as ST by the administration and also refer to themselves as Adivasi (original inhabitants) or Roit (landholders). Alongside the Oriya dialect, also known as Desia, spoken by all the inhabitants of the highlands, these tribal groups each have their own language, classified as belonging to the Austroasiatic Munda language family or to the Dravidian language family (cf. Mahapatra 2002; Parkin 1992, 19). The Gadaba (Gutob), Didayi (Gta, Gata’), Parenga (Gorum), and Bondo (Remo) speak Munda languages, and the Kond (Kuvi) and Ollar Gadaba (Ollari) speak Dravidi- an languages. While Remo and Gutob - despite multifarious and presumably reciprocal influence from Desia - continue to flourish as living languages, Gorum and Ollari are scarcely spoken any more, at least in the villages known to me.[6]
The remaining Desia groups of the Lamtaput block, most of them classified as OBC or SC, speak only Desia, save for a basic knowledge of the language of a given village’s dominant Adivasi group. Most of these groups specialize in particular activities, engage in agriculture only on the margins, and as a rule do not inhabit villages of their own, but rather live in Adivasi villages, although often in separate hamlets and certainly in large numbers. Multiple houses of the Dombo (musicians, traders, and weavers), a few houses of the herders (Goudo), and usually one house of the blacksmiths (Kamar) are to be found in almost all large villages. Gardeners (Mali), potters (Kumar), and liquor distillers (Sundi) are not to be met with in every village, and the individual households consequently offer their services to various villages. The Rona, who were classified as ST from 1931 to 1950 (cf. Behuria 1965, 25) and today are considered OBC, deserve special mention. Like the potters and herders, they possess a higher status in the local hierarchy and wear the sacred thread of the Hindus. They hold land on a greater scale than the other “non-ST” Desia, however, pursue no other vocation, and are the dominant group in some villages. Before Indian independence, they had a special relationship with the kings of Jeypore, as soldiers (rono means “war” or “battle”) but also as local representatives of the king (mutadar); the land was presumably assigned to them as recompense for their service (cf. Berger 2002; Guzy 2002; Otten 2008).
The demographic data from the Indian census make clear the numerical importance of the part of the population classified as ST. According to the 1991 census, 7,032,214 members of a total of sixty-two tribal groups lived in Odisha, making up 22.21% of the state’s overall population (31,659,736). In the divided Koraput district (i. e., after 1995), over 50% of the more than one million inhabitants (1,029,986), namely 521,849 individuals, were considered ST. Together with the individuals classified as SC (138,169), most of whom can be assumed to be members of the indigenous Desia population, they amounted to over 63% of the district inhabitants. In the 1981 census, the Gadaba figured with 56,913 members, almost all of them (56,413) living in what was then the undivided Koraput district (Dash and Pradhan 2002, 43ff).s This data does not distinguish between Ollar Gadaba and Gutob Gadaba. The Ollar Gadaba are more widely spread, [7]
while the Gutob Gadaba, except for immigrant enclaves in Andhra Pradesh[8] and Chhattisghar,[9] [10] are limited to the area mentioned (cf. Thusu and Jha 1972). I consider the figure of 15,000 to 20,000 Gutob speakers given by Rajan and Rajan (2001a, 9) realistic.
- [1] Into the four districts of Rayagada, Nabrangpur, Malkangiri, and Koraput.
- [2] In an article with the title “Underdeveloping Koraput,” Vyasulu puts forward the thesis thatKoraput is an example of “internal colonialism” (1985, 67). According to this author, the development measures implemented since independence have so far primarily resulted in the exploitation of the district’s resources and have bypassed the majority of the district’s tribalinhabitants. In his view, this is the primary reason that Koraput is a “backward district” (67). Hecalls for a development policy that incorporates the indigenous groups and is oriented toward
- [3] The term gutoben gari literally means “towards the Gadba villages,” that is, east (Bhattacharya1968, 44).
- [4] Elwin (1964, 187) has a lively description of the incursion of Bondo youth into a Gadabavillage, where they steal palm wine and no one dares to intervene.
- [5] The few ethnographic studies of the Parenga and other tribal groups speaking Munda languages are listed in Parkin’s (1992) bibliography.
- [6] Desia has been the subject of in-depth work by Gustafsson (1987,1989) and Mahapatra (1985),and a further project is currently underway under the supervision of Dr. Thomas Malten fromCologne. In contrast, work on Gutob is rarer. The Academy of Tribal Dialects and Culture (Goud1991) has published a book, largely in Oriya, that contains a grammar, songs, stories, and aGutob wordlist. More recently, several contributions by Rajan and Rajan have appeared: a Gutob-Gadaba Phonemic Summary (2001a) with a basic vocabulary, a Language Learner’s Guide(2001b), and a presentation of the grammar (2001c). Another linguistic study, by Subba Rao(Subba Rao and Patnaik 1992), deals with a Gadaba village near Bobbili in Andhra Pradesh, thatis, in an area dominated by Telugu. Due to the high degree of similarity between Remo andGutob, the extensive Bonda Dictionary by Bhattacharya (1968) is also worth mentioning. Finally,a more recent contribution by Bhaskararao (1998) should be noted for Ollari.
- [7] All the information in this paragraph is taken from the article by Dash and Pradhan (2002).The new census from 2001 was evidently no more available to the authors than to me, and theyuse data from three different surveys. Table 4.2 of their article, which breaks down the numbersfor SC/ST inhabitants by district, does not indicate a year, but since Koraput, Rayagada, Na-brangpur, and Malkangiri are listed separately, the figures must derive from the period after1995.
- [8] For the northeastern districts of Andhra Pradesh (Srikakulam, Vizianagaram, and Vishakha-patnam), Patnaik (Subba Rao and Patnaik 1992, 7) gives an overall figure of 10,679 for theGadaba-speaking (i.e., Gutob-speaking) inhabitants.
- [9] In 1916, Russell gave a figure of “some 700 persons” (1969, 9) for what was then Bastar.
- [10] In the course of a punitive action in the hinterlands against the king of Gumsur, who soughtto evade his tribute obligations, British officers discovered that the Kond offered human sacrifices as meria to the earth goddess. Decades of bloody suppression of this ritual practicefollowed, with a high level of military and administrative effort expended on the British side.Two officers charged with combatting the “meria sacrifice,” Campbell and Macpherson, drew upthe first fully detailed descriptions of the religion and society of the Kuttia Kond (cf. Niggemeyer1964, 7f; Padel 1994).
