EP52: Indigenous Plant Practices in India
Hello and welcome, I'm Robin Harford and this is another episode of the Eat Weeds podcast.
I'm currently in India and at an art festival and by chance the gentleman and his partner who were filming the festival have an interesting reason as to why I'm asking them on the show.
So my name is Nirman Choudhury and I'm a film maker.
I also like to call myself a visual artist but I dabble in a lot of lens-based practices.
I make a lot of documentary films on various social issues.
It could be hunger, malnutrition, sanitation, also a lot of films on caste-based issues in India and I also do a lot of lens-based workshops and visual storytelling workshops with youth from many marginalized communities.
Dalit communities in India or tribal communities in central India wherein we go there for a few days a week, bring out cameras to the youth there who are usually in very small remote villages, tribal villages or rural villages and bring out the cameras and we use really the camera as a tool for social engagement, talk about them, their lives, their communities, the place where they live and use that mode of visual storytelling to be able to share stories with each other, let them share their stories and their perspectives through their own eyes and through their own hands to us and to the people.
So the website again is?
The website is part of one of my projects, it's called Shifting Narratives dot i n and the idea, the name Shifting Narratives comes from me trying to document and the project is an extremely collaborative project.
It's not me going in and documenting, taking something away but really is about me going there and collaborating with a lot of grassroots community leaders, a lot of the organizations there with the youth there and building and creating something that tells some kind of story plus them using the act of them using the camera which is in India using a camera something that big and sort of almost a sense of authority, a sense of coming out, a sense of responsibility that they do not get for many of these marginalized groups.
So that's what we try to do and that is the shift that we want to see, that the shift in narratives of seeing it from their perspective because for the longest time we have seen a lot of stories of indigenous people or the communities or always seen from a very exotic point of view, see it from an outsider's perspective always.
The idea is to see that shift happening with the cameras and with the storytelling tools to have them tell us their stories and then collaborate and do something together, that's why it's called Shifting Narratives.
How open are tribal people to your work because there seems to be a hesitancy often because they've been brutalized basically.
So how has that trust been developed?
It's a very slow process really because as you rightly said for hundreds of years since the time of the colonists and even after independence.
Basically the British to be honest.
Yeah the colonists and then after independence the British left but that mindset, colonial mindset still prevailed especially with the industrialists and everyone who has then come on and still discriminated them, still moved them, displaced them from their actual ancestral homelands, from their forests.
And these are Indian industrialists.
Indian industrialists and because they want to do large minings and stuff like that and move them away, very unsustainable ways of mining also even if that's needed and move them away from different places and their ancestral homelands.
So there is definitely an issue of trust as to me as an outsider going in and trying to do that.
We've seen that in a lot of places like in states like Odisha which is towards West Bengal, towards the other side.
You'll see a lot of those tribes are very hesitant to allow outsiders to come in and work with them even if it is for issues of nutrition or health.
They're very hesitant because they're not trusting because they know what outsiders have done to their communities.
But for the work that we do, we go into a lot of the marginalized communities, a lot of the indigenous tribal groups.
Many of them are very welcoming.
That's one of the reasons that we also use the camera because as soon as you bring that mode in and we make it almost like a bridge.
So you bring that camera in with the tripod or anything else.
So that becomes your conversation starter, the icebreaker per se and especially with the youth, they're really fascinated with things like this.
So they want to talk to you, they want to get to know, they want to see what the camera is and when they are just the act of giving them the camera in their hands and then exploring, that starts off the conversation.
So that it's definitely a trust building process and the idea is always to be at equal power with them.
You're never someone who is coming to teach.
You can't ever be someone who is coming there to, I'm going to teach you something.
I'm going to help you out.
You can't do that.
You're here to collaborate.
You're here to just have a talk.
Yeah.
You have to unlearn and learn both and just here to talk, to be with you, to learn from you as much as and share whatever I have with you.
The workshops that we do, each of the workshops, what I try to do is really to go there and while we do a lot of the students and the participants are there in the workshop, they document their stories and they do that.
And each of the workshops, I try to do and collaborate one visual art piece that I can do with them.
Each one of them.
Many of these workshops, we did a few during the COVID era as well.
So we did that on Zoom.
So the three main ones that are on the website right now, the first one is with Yadav Liyangi.
He's a very young student from the Ho tribe, extremely indigenous, beautiful culture of the tribe from Jharkhand and he lives in a very small remote hamlet inside Jharkhand and he's just starting his college life.
So he's a first generation learner to go to college or go to university.
So we started speaking together on Zoom, what we could do and him and his other group of friends from the village.
And we met on Zoom regularly and I tried to teach them about photography, what cameras are, what to do.
And then we sent them mobile phones and I sent them tripods.
And that was the funniest because they don't have addresses per se.
So the postman had to turn up with the tripod, the courier guy had to turn up with the mobile box and the tripod and I tried to figure out where and who should he go deliver it to.
So it was again part of the process in that way.
And so they took those mobile phones and they made some very beautiful images.
And it's very raw, unfiltered.
There's no sense of, when I'm shooting outside, I'm always thinking, oh, will people like to see it this way?
Do I need to keep it aesthetically beautiful looking?
But for them to be able to just have that mobile phone and just tell them, okay, don't take selfies, don't take, which they usually do, there are mobile phones everywhere, but just shoot your villages, shoot your families.
And that turns into an extremely beautiful process of them capturing very authentic, beautiful perspectives that we don't usually get to see.
And with the other, then we decided to explore as our conversations went on.
He said he was also documenting for his own college purposes, different kinds of forest produce, Tindu leaves, leaves that are brought from the forest, the bark of the Arjun tree with which they paint the houses.
And he was collecting that and sticking it onto his book.
And he showed me that book during one of the Zoom calls.
And I said to him, okay, document your book.
Let's scan that.
I want to put that up on the website as a piece itself.
And I want you to then document everything that you think the forest is, that you take from the forest, how you take it.
And so we interviewed him on the Zoom.
He shot himself with the camera phone speaking.
He's shooting his family, his sisters, everyone cooking and doing different things, going to the forest, picking different things, wood fire or picking Tindu leaves, bringing it home, turning them into plates, turning them into bowls that can be used at festivals or for larger programs.
Then they use it for different medicinal purposes and stuff like that.
And the conversation that came into us with the other was the idea of how the forest that is outside their home is an extension of their home itself.
We and most of us in the urban world and everywhere are bound by the idea of four walls.
For a lot of the indigenous groups, that four walls, the idea of home extends far beyond that.
So that is the sort of the conversation that we came about.
And we explored the idea and the question of what is home, especially for indigenous people, what is really home.
It is extremely important to tell because the relationship is so intrinsic to the forest that they live in, the place that they live in.
So extremely respectful and mindful, taking only what is needed, something that we really need to admire, learn from in today's time.
And so that is what we did.
And he also documented the process of bringing the Arjun bark from the forest, cutting it down, just using sounds and images, bringing it to the house, his sister, then turning it into a dye, taking that dye, painting this home.
And there are two more that we did.
One was with children who mine mica.
Would you like to explain what mica is?
So mica is one of those minerals that is extremely shiny and it's used in electronics, in everything.
It's used in your phones, your cameras, your iPhones, and it's specially used in makeup, which is like a billion, billion, multi-billion dollar industry because it's really shiny in nature.
And the one that you find in India is also extremely shiny in nature.
The large mica mining was disbanded in India in the 90s as soon as the Soviet Union fell, because they were one of the largest exporters from India for mica.
After that, there were not too many large industries for mica, but we still do have a lot of reserves for mica.
So now a lot of those tribal people who were displaced in those regions, their forests were cut down, their homes were taken away, and before the, during the colonists and even after independence, now they are left with not having their source of income.
And now you have been thrust into sort of economic society where they now have to have money to buy things, to buy stuff, to buy rice, buy oil, buy this, buy that, stuff that they did not need while they were living their indigenous lifestyles.
So now for that, what they do is now they go back to these reserves and they dig for mica with their hands and small hammers and chisels.
And now because you can't build larger scale mines, you don't have money to make with wood and metal to make.
So there are things, these things called rat holes.
They're small holes dug up little in the earth.
And because they're small, the only people who can enter are children, five year, six year old children, tribal children, going down with small hammers with a small bucket bowl or whatever going down mining, I can bring it on.
How old are these children?
Five, six years old, because they're small, they have to be lean to slide down.
That's the reason they call them rat holes, because they're small.
And it's a derogatory term also.
Basically all of that mine, mica is then taken to some agent, then he collects it, because sold here, sold there, goes outside the country, is used in the makeup or wherever it needs to go.
And it's...
Is this toxic mining?
Yeah, it's very dangerous.
It's extremely dangerous because you're constantly inhaling the dust, debris, huge problem.
There's also a thing called scoliosis that happens in lungs.
So it's a very dangerous thing with the hands.
And also the extreme fragile hands that they have, constantly be around those sharp, and mica is sharp as well.
It'll be around the sharp objects and mining that with small hammers and stuff like that.
And it's also, it's illegal.
It's something that everyone has to do because...
It's illegal, but the cosmetic industry buys it.
They buy it in bulk.
And...
How much do these children get paid?
Oh, they're hardly getting paid.
They're not getting paid.
Their parents are getting paid.
So how much will their parents pay?
It depends on how much they're taking back.
They're taking back kilos or kilos by the weight.
Probably a few hundred bucks, not more than that.
But they're really just making ends meet because they do not have any farming places.
A few hundred bucks?
Yeah, bucks.
Rupees.
Okay.
Yeah.
Sorry, I thought you meant American bucks.
No, no, a few hundred rupees.
So let's just qualify what 200 rupees is in British money.
It's two pounds.
Literally exactly two pounds.
Yeah.
For a day's work.
For a day's work for a five and six year old child.
A few years ago, a lot of cosmetic industries came into come under heavy fire because they were doing this.
And a lot of people, a few journalists did a few stories and everything.
So now a lot of cosmetic companies sell their products.
The idea is that they have ethically mined mica, which is really doesn't...
Which is just the equivalent of greenwashing.
It's pure BS.
Yeah.
They're buying illegal mica.
Yeah, it's just, it goes somewhere in the chain.
Someone slaps a sticker.
Now it's ethical mica.
So it makes no sense really.
So the idea there was, even with those group of children I met, some of them were from also Dalit communities and some were tribal children.
And we met them over Zoom and I did again, I sent them off cell phone.
Dalit communities?
Yeah.
Okay.
Could you explain to people what Dalit is?
Dalit communities are in India has for thousands of years, I've had a caste system.
There are four castes, four main castes that are there.
It's like a pyramid almost.
It's a pyramid scheme really, to be honest.
And so you have the upper caste, you have the Brahmin, Kshatriyas, the Vinyas, and you have the Shudras.
It's a four Varna system.
And then below that are the untouchables or the Dalits.
They're not even considered humans and not fit enough to be in the caste system.
They're the untouchables who, even if they walk past you for thousands of years, they walk past you, the shadow can pollute you, or you do not drink from, or don't even give them water.
You cannot touch them.
You cannot touch them.
They cannot touch you.
If they touch you, you'll have to go to the temple, take a bath and just purify yourself.
Purify yourself.
You're living around a poor human being.
Yeah, from an untouchable.
So if you're born an untouchable and you're only doing those jobs which are the most inhumane, disgusting kind of jobs, picking up human excreta, picking up dead animals.
Gandhi got rid of the caste system.
He's not too successful, has he?
The caste system still pretty much exists.
There have definitely been reforms.
There's been huge change in the past 75 years, mainly due to the author of our constitution, Dr.
V.R.
Ambedkar, who fought and championed for the rights of the Dalits and women and everyone.
And he has been able to... there's still so much work to do.
We're in Madhya Pradesh right now, and a few months ago I was here doing a similar workshop, and the children said such horrific stories of... there's children, five, six year old, and they're telling stories of how, just because they're lower castes, how the teachers treat them in schools.
They don't get them to sit down.
They can't sit on the benches.
They have to sit down.
They have to sit at the back of the class.
They can't ask questions.
The funniest part was, in India, it's very okay for teachers to hit the students.
So, the funniest part is, one of the... it's funny and sad.
One of the kids told me, if the upper caste kid does some kind of mischief, the teacher will slap him or hit him with his hand.
But if I do, he'll not slap me, he'll use a stick, because he can't touch me.
So, the caste system pretty much exists.
So, the lowest rung outside the four varna system are the Dalits.
So, we do a lot of workshops with Dalit communities and tribal communities, and these myka people, these children who are working in the myka mines were mixed from both the communities, and it's highly illegal.
And so, we were really troubled as to, okay, what can we document?
Because you can't really take pictures of them doing that.
It's also a violation of their privacy.
It's something that they need to do.
They get caught.
That's literally their source of income.
So, what... how do you document?
How do you tell this story without actually showing something, without actually putting someone in trouble?
And one thing that we noticed and while our conversations was that the hands of the children become like full of calluses, very rough and hard.
So, we asked them, okay, so then just document hands.
So, the children then just took photos of each other's hands and compiled that into sort of visual art piece that you'll see on the website as well, which is an interactive piece where there are just pictures of hands and there are pictures of things made out of myka, phones and chips, and there's a way that you can interact on the website if you can really separate the hands from the things that are made with it.
So, these are different kind of visual art pieces that we do.
And the third one in that is the one of my most favorite ones that I did was with a tribal group called the Sauriya Pahadiyas.
It's a very small, very remote village in Jharkhand.
Jharkhand is home to many tribe, tribal groups.
It's a very rich culture.
State is full of rich culture and rich tribals is also extremely rich in minerals.
So, a lot of mining minerals happens there in Jharkhand.
And so, with this Pahadiyas, they don't have any internet network in the village and they wanted to meet me on Zoom.
So, they had to walk three kilometers outside the village to Jhelok where they'd get good connection and they'd sit there under a tree and speak to me.
They had even that connection was very bad.
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
And it got very frustrating.
For them also, I suppose it must have been because they can't hear me and we're trying to do something and we're not able to connect.
I'm not able to connect to their small village.
It was called Beach Pahad, which literally means in the middle of the hills.
And it was very frustrating as to what we can do.
So, they couldn't talk to me properly.
Their voice is not coming.
We made WhatsApp groups and just send me images.
They wrote down like an essay about them and themselves and they sent me images of that.
And I was like, okay, maybe we can build something here.
So, I took those scans of those and we cut them out, arranged them and thought, okay, if Beach Pahad, the small village cannot connect to us on the internet, we'll bring entirety of Beach Pahad to the internet.
So, I asked the children, you sit down and also their mentors with them who are community leaders from the village who organized the whole thing with me.
They got a few chart papers, taped them up into a large huge piece of paper.
I asked them to bring a lot of pens, felt pens, sketch pens and markers and everything, colors and make a map of your village.
So, they drew a huge map of their village and we took photos, scanned them up.
We took that, we turned it into one large photo.
We put that up on the website, the hand-drawn map of the village.
Then we took it a step further.
We told them, now take photos of different parts of your village, videos and photos of different parts of your village, of people speaking or you can speak.
The elders are shy to speak in front of the mobile or a camera and they told about the community's problems in different places, like their road leading up to their village, there is no road.
So, larger cars or ambulances can't come there.
So, there is a huge problem for them.
And plus a lot of the youth, because they don't have jobs, they have to go outside, to go to very large cities, very far away, 1000-2000 kilometers away to earn.
So, a lot of the young people are missing from the villages.
And I just asked them to document those parts and then what we did is, if you go to the website, you go to the map, so you can click on different parts of the village and a video pops up and you can watch different parts of the village.
So, in essence, bringing Beach Pahar entirely onto the webpage and we did that together.
So, these are few and there are few more that are in the pipeline to be added to hopefully turns it into like a online installation plus maybe someday in physical as well.
Sure.
Yeah.
Great.
So, going back to the concept of home, can you expand on that, on their worldview around that?
So, a lot of India's indigenous tribal groups, the first people, even the word that we use, the common word, term that we use for indigenous tribal groups in India, we call them Adivasi, as in the first citizens.
Okay.
Adi is first and Vasi is dweller or citizen.
Is that like first nations in America?
Yeah, almost like that.
So, Adivasi as in the first citizens in all books, papers and everything we do call them the first citizens, not treated as the first citizens, the land's taken over everything.
For thousands of years, they've lived like that.
Extremely rich culture, extremely rich tribal culture and plus staying in their forests and their villages, they've never had to interact and go outside that system.
Everything that they needed was always there, from food, clothing or whatever that was needed, medicines, going back to forest, finding medicinal plants or food that was needed or they were hunter-gatherers.
So, they're eating lots of meat and hunting, but in hunting in a way that it is sustainable, not just hunting for hunting sake or just killing animals for killing sake.
And a lot of tribals eat a lot of meat, which has now come down a bit, because hunting or going and eating meat now is considered a bit primitive.
And so, that has now come down a bit.
So, there's a stigma to it.
Yeah, there's a stigma to it now, going out and hunting and doing that.
But still, those cultures, traditions are still there.
They still do.
They're incredible hunters.
Some of the tribal groups that I've met can do bird calls with their most incredible things, that they can just call out to birds and patridges, I think it's the birds, teeters we call them here, and the sound that they can make and patridges just come around and fly and then they can just trap them.
And it's just beautiful to see that kind of relationship exists.
It's almost like circle of life because they take only what is needed.
So, for them, that because in a home, in our house, whenever we're living in our house, we take only what is needed from ourselves.
I think that for them extends towards their entire community, their entire vicinity of that jungle over there.
It appears they don't overexploit it.
So, therefore, there must be a different relationship in their mind on how they see the gifts of the forest, rather than in the West, my country, people use this word resource.
It generally is tied, often tied to economic compensation.
Yeah.
So, here for a lot of tribal groups, from the mountains to the rivers, to the rain, to the grain, anything that they have is connected to them extremely spiritually.
Any mountain that you find has a name, is connected to something, has a name that the river, the mountain, or there's a water source to the river there.
There's a very large misconception that a large portion of India is Hindu, which is not.
A large portion of the Adivasi tribe will have their own different religions.
Many of them fall under Sarnaism.
Sarna is a religion that they follow.
Many of them follow.
That still is very Sarna, S-A-R-N-A.
And like animist religion?
Almost.
Okay.
Almost, almost.
It's an animist, but there's still mix.
Again, there is a different kinds of gradations as to who follows what, how it follows.
There's really no, you can't really fix it into one thing like a monogamous thing.
You cannot do that.
And so, a lot of people follow that.
So, they have their different cultures.
And most of these tribes, especially from Odisha, they have the Niyamgiri hills.
And that's also where the very famous Hollywood movies inspired by Avatar was inspired by that story of the Dungri Akhons protecting their big mountain.
Which is the Hollywood film?
Avatar.
Avatar?
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Of the indigenous people protecting their large tree, which they considered God, is directly inspired from many of the protests that a lot of the tribals in this, in Odisha did of protecting their forest and protecting that mountain that they had from other miners and industrialists.
So, for them, there's an extreme spiritual connection with the forest that they have.
In everything that they do, there's a prayer involved.
They have different rituals for different kinds of seasons that come in.
Let it be spring, to harvest, to anything.
There are different kinds of rituals that they do to welcome those different monsoons and festivals and everything that they do revolves around that.
And many of the tribal groups go into forests.
And I'll tell you a story about how they have been in the forest for so long.
They're so intrinsic to their forest.
They've been in their forest for so long.
There's one tribe called the Madhya Gond.
They're in central Maharashtra, Karnataka border, Chhattisgarh.
Extremely deep forest.
And so, we're doing one of these workshops.
And so, we sat down and we met one of the teachers over there from the same tribe.
And she had learned a bit of Marathi, which is the language of Maharashtra.
But they still have their own language as well.
They speak Madhya, which is unwritten and no script for over 3000 years.
Wow.
And has survived.
Wow.
And they are like incredible words for each and everything.
I've only met one other.
They were a band slash tribe and that was the Mokhan, who are the sea gypsies.
Sea gypsies in Thailand.
So, these are the Maharashtrians and they're for almost 3000 years.
Like at least what the researchers have figured out that it has been passed on for over 3000 years now.
That language, which has not been written.
They can write it from the Gond script.
But there are still some words that they cannot really write with the script as well.
The sounds that they're making from their throat.
It's just extremely beautiful people living in amazing villages and forests.
In the show notes of this episode, we're going to put links to all the tribes that have been talked about.
Yeah.
So, just give you an example of how far away, how remote.
So, we're in Bombay, which is a large city.
So, you can either take a train.
An overnight train should take you 15 hours to reach to Nagpur, which is another large city.
Then you get down at Nagpur and then you have to take a six hour drive to another city, small town.
Then you reach that small town.
And then once you reach the small town, you probably have to stay the night.
And then you walk a bit and then you have to cross the river on a boat.
Once you cross the huge river on a boat, on a dugout canoe actually, and then you walk for another three kilometers and then you reach the village.
It's really remote.
That's where the Madhya Gondas are staying.
Extremely beautiful.
The Madhya.
M-A-D-I-A-G-O-N-D.
The Madhya Gondas.
And beautiful.
One thing that really enamored me when I was there with them was also the fact that they erect large monolithic stones for their dead.
So, they don't burn their dead.
They bury their dead.
It's almost like the Stone Henge.
Yeah.
So, if you go there, you'll find almost like structures like the Stone Henge over there.
Large monolithic stones.
And that's how the researchers also figure out that they are a very ancient tribe through that custom itself also.
So, they place those large monolithic stones for their dead.
And so, we're speaking to this teacher who had learned a bit of Hindi and she had gone out from the tribe, first generation learners, for shifting narratives.
What I decided to do was to document her saying words from the Madhya Gond language, phrases and words.
I would tell her it in English or Hindi and she would translate it into Madhya Gond and just keep speaking that to the camera.
And this is probably the first time someone documented it like that.
At least, that's what she told me as well.
Nobody had come to the village and documented it like this ever.
So, I gave her different things.
Tree, neem tree, river, rock, soil, cloud, hill and she kept repeating those words in Gond.
And it really hits you.
And she's saying those different words and it's very beautiful and really hits you as to how ancient these people are in their connection to the forest that they've been in the forest for so long.
So, we kept saying, okay, valley, hill, tree, this and then said, okay, what else is left?
Ocean and she just stopped.
So, we don't have a word for the ocean.
Yeah.
Because the ancestors never seen the ocean.
They don't know that the ocean exists.
Yeah.
There's no ocean that exists for them.
It's just a forest that is all encompassing.
For us, our land stops at where the ocean starts.
For us, our country stops where the ocean starts.
For them, that forest, that home never stops for them.
Forest has always been.
And for me, at that moment, it was really extremely humbling also.
Deeply admire and respect indigenous groups have been that intrinsically involved with their place, with their homes, with their forests.
So, before my partner and I came here and met you, we were in a park.
I was very uncomfortable.
I was in two minds whether I wanted to stay there because the Gond had been removed from the forest.
And okay, the relocation of tribal peoples is a little bit more forward thinking than it was 10, 20 years ago.
So, they got given land as compensation, so-called, and a house, etc.
That's theirs.
They're not tenants.
A guy got bitten by Russell's viper.
And you're dead, aren't you?
Yeah.
If you don't go to the hospital.
Yeah.
Someone observed that only one fang went in.
And the only person in the village who could possibly help.
And the hospital is 47 kilometers away.
I mean, the guy's dead, really.
But this old person got some plants, mashed them up, put it all over the leg.
When he was asked what the effect was, he said it was cooling.
And that actually gave him enough time to get him to the hospital for the antivenom.
Now, there's a lot of reasons why he survived.
He could have just had a really strong immune system, one fang, maybe only a smaller amount of poison.
And the plant medicine cooling the body, slowing the poison moving around the body.
Who knows?
What I realized was that she was really old.
And the young people who are no longer in the forest, they've been given jobs.
It's in the constitution.
They're chucked out of the forest, but they have the first opportunity to take jobs.
So they're all guides and rangers.
It still doesn't sit right.
Because Survival International produced this paper called Why Parks Need People.
So rather than chucking them out, we need to be consultants.
Because they know sustainability at a big level.
Is this something that has happened with the tribals you've met?
They've been displaced.
There's a community called the Parthis.
I'm not sure if that's the community that you also met over there.
The Parthis have a very deep connection with the jungles, especially with wild animals.
And they've been forever, we could call them guardians of the forest in some sense.
The Parthi community, but today is extremely discriminated against.
And they've been displaced, removed out of the forest again for to call it a nature reserve.
I'd call it still a very colonial mindset as to just bring them out.
Now this is a national park.
Okay, now this is a sanctuary.
Private people build lodges.
Lodges, and they're expensive lodges.
And even going to a safari is not available to a common man in India.
You can't, it's very expensive to go.
It's expensive.
It's a hundred and it cost me £60 each person to do a five hour jeep safari to find Bengal tiger.
And I don't deny it was really beautiful to see a tiger in the forest.
But where were the people?
There are no people in this forest.
It's really important that we keep our tribal groups or indigenous people very much involved and be a part of the process.
If you're very serious about conservation, if you're very serious about conserving the forests, if you're serious about protecting the wildlife, you need to learn from their practices, see how the ancestors lived with the animals very much in peace for thousands of years.
Nothing happened.
And now suddenly you have attacks all over, animals attacking.
It's only happening because you've been encroaching that space.
You've not been respecting the true trust boundaries that have been built over thousands of years.
I like that word trust boundaries and it is boundaries.
Yeah, it is.
The animals know which is their space.
This is their space.
It's only us who have been imposing constantly as to this is mine.
Everything is mine.
I think as I said, they're very beautiful people.
I documented a few ago with my mentor.
His name is Sudharak Olwai.
He's a photographer and he did a very expansive photo documentation about their lives and struggles of the Pardi people and how they're discriminated today.
I also went along with him and met a few of them and I just entered into the house and it's just almost like a shanty where they're living outside the village, just near the edge of the forest really.
And I just walk in and there's just like a small baby deer just sitting outside the house.
It's like what?
Why is there a baby deer?
And she's just around them, just moving around, being with them.
Yeah, just feel safe.
There's nothing.
They're not harming her or anything.
Just feel safe.
And then they went out hunting.
They caught a few birds.
Only what was needed for them for their meal for the next one day or two days.
That was it.
In England, we have what are called commercial forages.
So people are going to land and see it as a resource, not as a gift.
Okay.
And so they take it, not necessarily they don't take it all, but they take a lot of it and they put it into a national food distribution and it gets sent to different parts of the country.
Do tribal people gather food from the forest or medicines from the forest and take them to a market to sell?
Yeah.
And how long have they been doing that?
After independence, when a lot of tribal people needed a lot of upliftment in terms of economic sense, because suddenly now they were introduced to a completely new economic system.
Before this, they had no idea or they did not need any kind of cash, money, currency, but now they did.
A lot of programs came up as to how to help and promote forest produce and how to do that.
So a lot of good programs came in that way from different successive governments to help the Adivasis or help the indigenous groups do that.
So what they usually do, a lot of forest people then do, there are bazaars and markets that have come up in one main center place and where a lot of the people come in and then just give in their wares.
Mainly it is tendu leaves, which is then dried and then used in many different things.
They make plates as well, a very biodegradable place, very beautiful that way.
There are also many other different kinds of produces.
There is also wild honey, a lot of the tribals also collect, which is like extremely great quality of honey that you would not get from normal honey, adulterated honey in that way.
A lot of the wild honey, the medicinal stuffs, wood and all those produces come towards now a lot of small Adivasi groups or indigenous groups bring it to one main center where it is then distributed through government schemes and they get paid for that.
But still very less and far and few in between really for that to happen.
With those kind of economic factors of tribal folks going to the forest, taking resources, for want of a better word, the gifts of the forest and then selling them at market, is there any kind of problem with over harvesting or unsustainable practices?
Because suddenly they are forced into an economic system they are not used to and the economic system we are all a part of is competitive.
Does that cause problems within the tribal groups themselves?
What has been done is, because it has been done only in specific areas, only people with certain kind of identity cards or them can go in and do that.
So it is regulated to an extent.
So that is good in that way.
It is not gone up to a scale where now we could consider it as over harvesting or doing that.
It is still India's huge place for them that way.
Over harvesting as such has not, I don't think has yet come up, at least not to my knowledge has come up as an issue.
That definitely is a problem with a lot of the corporate mining and corporate wood and those people do come in and they just absolutely ruin the place.
This is probably a much better way to do it if indigenous groups are being empowered and are able to fend for themselves now finally instead of large corporate coming in and doing that.
It is probably much a better solution.
In England there is this argument, should we commercially forage?
Should we go in, harvest plants that are basically for free and then come back and sell them and make money from them?
And some commercial forages in Britain are, like I say, shipping them all over the place.
Some have got unethical gathering practices, so they are strip mining certain plant communities, not everything.
But when I have travelled and met tribal cultures, what I have observed is that it is not on such a big economic scale.
Often it is the older women who will come down and they have got a few bunches of something, they will put a rug on the ground, sit and they will just sell that.
But it is very small scale.
That is very different to having an industrial food system, using the forest as a free resource where you profit from it.
In Britain we don't have enough lineage of tribal knowledge, of past knowledge, on what is considered sustainable gathering from the wild.
Often my colleagues who are commercial foragers will look to Native American cultures.
I have spoken to some activists, Native American activists, and they get quite angry when Europeans put all the Native tribes into the slums, or the Native Americans.
That is like saying Europeans.
There is so much diversity there.
And often it is so different.
You can't say Native American practices do this, you have got to be really specific.
I don't know where I am going with that question really, I suppose it is really voicing a frustration I have of Europeans and our approach to the forest.
We think we are all becoming indigenous, this is awful, trend of 'oh I am being indigenous'.
Come on, our indigenous culture in Britain died out about a thousand years ago when the Romans turned up.
I find it quite uncomfortable because I have been around tribal people and I meet people like you who work with tribal people.
In Europe it is a fantasy it feels, and somehow it feels really disrespectful.
It feels like a colonising approach.
Let's look at other tribal cultures and let's then take those practices and try and make a new form of British indigenous practices.
Do you know what I mean?
I think that has always been done though.
One very famous case from India is the idea of turmeric.
I think, I don't know, was it the US or someone who tried to patent turmeric?
Oh yes, they did, didn't they?
Yeah, which is really such an Indian thing.
We have been writing and it has been written about turmeric and its medicinal properties and so much for thousands of years around this area with the indigenous people in Ayurveda and all of those places.
Wild turmeric as well, which is being eaten by a lot of groups and people use it in their food.
It has been for thousands of years being part of the food system.
So yeah, that's always been the case.
Someone is going to come and do something, they find something that is profitable and people throw around the word 'sustainable indigenous' and very often put it on a label or put a packaging and it's been sure to sell.
It's a bit like the mica label, isn't it?
Yeah, it really is.
Responsibly sourced.
Responsibly sourced, ethically sourced, yeah.
Same thing.
So, where do you see your work going?
What do you hope your work to do with tribal people?
So, mainly with Shifting Narratives and the workshops that I do, my hope really is to keep creating and keep sparking as much dialogue as possible in different areas.
Recently, somebody asked me to write about Shifting Narratives, what it is.
I figured out it's a repository of resilience.
It's a word that I wanted to come out because just the act of many of these marginalized communities bringing and telling their stories is a form of resilience that I feel.
After finally, after hundreds of years, telling their own stories, to be telling from their perspectives is that repository of resilience.
That is what I want to create for everyone to be able to come there, listen, see, feel, interact.
That's the reason it's also very interactive in that way.
So, I want people to come and see that dialogue that the people from this indigenous background, from these groups.
So, when you say people, you mean non-tribal people?
Non-tribal people, people especially from urban areas, especially from people who are extremely privileged.
So, India lives in very many different bubbles.
India's privileged class, India's rich class does not have really the true sense of what really normal average Indians or indigenous or the first citizens of our country go through.
The kind of discrimination, the harsh life that many are leading.
And I wish that some of those people are able to at least break away from that bubble to be able to see the stories of resilience and to acknowledge them and see that what people are saying.
We need to see those and hear more those perspectives, I feel.
You're an outsider.
I'm obviously an outsider.
So, in Central and South America, there's a lot of tribal activism of their own people being activists, being the leaders, etc.
Is that happening in India?
There are incredible tribal activists, young people really, to be honest.
And they're doing some really amazing work, especially a lot of young tribal activists that are there in Jharkhand, Odisha, who are voicing their concerns about climate change in their areas, through the forests that they live in, their indigenous communities that affects climate change, that affects them.
Also, a lot of the mining and other practices that leads to them.
So, there's a very good culture of activists and from the tribal communities, from the Dalit communities that have been there and they're very much a part of voicing their concerns.
And again, it comes from that I'm a very privileged person to come.
I'm half Dalit, I'm half upper caste in that way, but I come from a privileged background.
So, I do have the space and the platform to tell the stories.
Many of my Dalit friends, many of my Dalit journalists, activists, do not have the space to be able to tell their stories, to be able to tell that.
And I think that's far more important.
Giving that space, creating that space is far more important.
There are definitely a lot of activists that are doing great work all around India.
So, that would be great in the show notes to have all that because, okay, this sounds like an episode where Robin's sharing his frustrations with my own culture.
And my biggest frustration is that I love India.
I've been coming here for 40 years.
And the Western Ghats is an extraordinary biodiversity hot spot.
And everyone focuses on the Amazon, South America.
And you'd think that there weren't any other tribal people around the world.
Really?
It really feels like that.
All the practices everyone's trying to copy come from South and North America.
This is why it's been so lovely meeting you both because you're telling the story of the tribals, but it's I'm telling your story of the tribals to my audience, who often will not even have acknowledged that there were tribals in India.
I mean, it's so rich here.
It's just so crazy because there are over 650 different tribes.
All I have to say to anyone who's listening is just look at all the other tribal diversity and look at India and follow some of the links in the show notes.
I really urge you to because this is such a rich landscape, culturally, tribally.
And we have so much to learn from how Indian tribal cultures interact and engage with the forest.
And of course, there's going to be similarities with North and South America, but there's also going to be uniqueness as well.
And those unique stories are really important.
Yeah, it is.
And I don't know, have you heard of an anthropologist/ethnobotanist called Wade Davis?
No, I've not.
He was the resident explorer for National Geographic.
He went to the Amazon, lived in the Amazon, and he's done this wonderful TED Talk on why it's so important to preserve indigenous language, because all language makes up a human story.
So the tribal stories, my stories, your stories, everyone's stories makes up human culture, the totality of human culture.
And we cannot have a rich, healthy human culture if we only have one story and one voice, which seems to be, by the way, the political situation.
We won't go too far into that.
In your country, in my country, in America, in Israel, in Russia, etc., etc., etc., is trying to make it a monoculture.
Not this multicultural diversity.
That is what the ecosystem is.
You don't just get one species of tree.
You get a diversity.
Otherwise the forest dies.
Yeah, everyone lives in harmony with each other.
There's a circle.
Everything connects to each other, like mycelium almost, and you cannot just have one thing.
You cannot define one place, one people, one region, with just one thing, one name, one whatever you call it.
Yeah, exactly.
So really blessed to have met you.
No, you too.
It's such a nice time speaking with you as well, Robin.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And the website again, it'll be in the show notes.
Shiftingnarratives.in.
Shiftingnarratives.in.
Many thanks.
Thank you so much, Robin.
