At this haat, the brightest item on display is the gender equality
2 Nov 2014 11:25 PM GMT
This is perfectly natural, for the haat here, while allowing tribal village folk to buy and sell weekly provisions – vegetables for the kitchen, desi chickens for Rs 100 each and fish – is also where one comes to drink mahua, the alcoholic drink distilled from the flowers of the mahua tree. But what is pleasantly surprising about the ritual – in the sense that you won’t see it happening in caste Hindu villages –is that the communal drinking exercise is partaken in by both men and women.
Lakshman Kashyap for example is here with his daughter, his bhabhi and his aunt. They’d bought their mahua flowers from the same haat the week before, taken their purchase home, distilled and turned it into alcohol, and are now selling their finished produce for Rs 20 a bottle. The alcohol is sold in old beer bottles, it is pleasant, but has the odd quality of tasting more pungent should you add water to it.
The womenfolk from Kashyap’s home, in between hawking their produce, take large sups of the mahua they have carted along with them from leaf cups. ‘No,’ they say, ‘there’s nothing odd about men and women sitting together in public and having a drink. It’s always been like this.’
There is then nothing furtive about what is going on here. All that these men and women are doing is sitting around, catching up with the neighbours and having a drink. In that sense, this village haat resembles an English pub – a place where you go after work, to have a drink and catch up with friends. But on a slightly deeper level, the fact that men and women can sit together in public in rural India and have a drink, without any shame being attached to the act, is also indicative of higher levels of gender equality found in tribal societies.
It is something Felix Padel, the great-great grandson of Charles Darwin, talks about in his book Sacrificing People, Invasions of a Tribal Landscape about the Kond tribals of Orissa. Padel writes in his book: ‘Equality is a powerful ideal in tribal culture. Land is usually divided equally among households, unlike Hindu villages which tend to have large divisions between landlords and landless labourers... On the whole women are much freer than in Hindu villages. They speak out openly, and are not bound by double standards of sexual morality, as free as men to have love affairs. Divorce is relatively easy and widows as well as divorcees can marry again without any stigma.’ Professor Virginius Xaxa, who is often referred to as an expert on tribal affairs and who is also deputy director of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati, says the same thing.
That ‘it is a fairly well accepted point of view that tribal societies tend to be more equal. And because tribal women are freer of societal constraints and norms, there tends to be greater levels of gender equality in them.’ Other examples of equality, he says, would include the common ownership of resources, like land and water, preventing the accumulation of wealth in a few hands.
This does not mean the tribals have been able to build a completely equal society. For example, somebody wandering around here will soon realise that tribal village councils tend to be all-male affairs, and that it is the men who make most of the decisions.
Both Xaxa and Padel agree, although Padel does say that while women do not take part in village councils, ‘they may have a decisive influence from the sidelines. And that the custom of brideprice rather than dowry gives women a positive rather than a negative value, and gives higher status to the wife’s rather than the groom’s family.’
‘But still,’ says Xaxa, ‘the fact is tribal women do not sit on village councils. And they will not inherit land and property,’ just like women in caste Hindu society. There is also the worry that the tribals themselves quite often seem willing to regress to more feudal modes. At Ransargipal itself, Jagannath, the contractor responsible for the haat, was astounded to see the one woman in our group of four also happy to partake of mahua. ‘It’s not really right,’ he said, ‘the idea that a woman should drink in public.’
‘That,’ says Nandini Sundar, professor of sociology at Delhi University and author of the book Subalterns and Sovereigns, An Anthropological Histor of Bastar (1854-2006), ‘will happen as the tribals continue to be colonised by outsiders.’ By colonised, she means as we continue to foist our cultural norms and notions, and what we believe is right and wrong, on them.
In her book she mentions something similar happening in Kukanar village in Bastar, where she spent time doing field research. The tribals there tended to pity the women of the Thakur families who lived among them, and who tended to spend most of their time inside of the house and had little freedom outside of it. But as the tribals began to aspire to the Thakur way of life, they also began to emulate the Thakurs more and more.
Xaxa says that as tribal societies continue to be mainstreamed – or as the dominant viewpoint filters down to them – they begin to look upon these ideas found within caste Hindu society – hierarchies, division of labour – as ‘values’, rather than things that are better left behind. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘that could be thought of as cultural colonisation.’
The best way to stop that backward slide, he says, would be education, of the liberal kind. And that it is possible for tribal societies to move from where they are to ‘true modernity’ rather than letting themselves slip into the quagmire of feudalism.
That would certainly be desirable. One only has to drive the 25-odd km back from Ransargipal to Jagdalpur, the district headquarters of Bastar, and which a lot of people refer to as the ‘civilised’ areas.
Your best bets for food in this town are the Kishan and Anand dhabas just across the highway from the town. The food here, the fish and the chicken curry, like the mahua at Ransargipal, is lipsmackingly good. But you will never ever, at any time of the day or night, see a woman at either of the dhabas.
Lakshman Kashyap for example is here with his daughter, his bhabhi and his aunt. They’d bought their mahua flowers from the same haat the week before, taken their purchase home, distilled and turned it into alcohol, and are now selling their finished produce for Rs 20 a bottle. The alcohol is sold in old beer bottles, it is pleasant, but has the odd quality of tasting more pungent should you add water to it.
The womenfolk from Kashyap’s home, in between hawking their produce, take large sups of the mahua they have carted along with them from leaf cups. ‘No,’ they say, ‘there’s nothing odd about men and women sitting together in public and having a drink. It’s always been like this.’
There is then nothing furtive about what is going on here. All that these men and women are doing is sitting around, catching up with the neighbours and having a drink. In that sense, this village haat resembles an English pub – a place where you go after work, to have a drink and catch up with friends. But on a slightly deeper level, the fact that men and women can sit together in public in rural India and have a drink, without any shame being attached to the act, is also indicative of higher levels of gender equality found in tribal societies.
It is something Felix Padel, the great-great grandson of Charles Darwin, talks about in his book Sacrificing People, Invasions of a Tribal Landscape about the Kond tribals of Orissa. Padel writes in his book: ‘Equality is a powerful ideal in tribal culture. Land is usually divided equally among households, unlike Hindu villages which tend to have large divisions between landlords and landless labourers... On the whole women are much freer than in Hindu villages. They speak out openly, and are not bound by double standards of sexual morality, as free as men to have love affairs. Divorce is relatively easy and widows as well as divorcees can marry again without any stigma.’ Professor Virginius Xaxa, who is often referred to as an expert on tribal affairs and who is also deputy director of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati, says the same thing.
That ‘it is a fairly well accepted point of view that tribal societies tend to be more equal. And because tribal women are freer of societal constraints and norms, there tends to be greater levels of gender equality in them.’ Other examples of equality, he says, would include the common ownership of resources, like land and water, preventing the accumulation of wealth in a few hands.
This does not mean the tribals have been able to build a completely equal society. For example, somebody wandering around here will soon realise that tribal village councils tend to be all-male affairs, and that it is the men who make most of the decisions.
Both Xaxa and Padel agree, although Padel does say that while women do not take part in village councils, ‘they may have a decisive influence from the sidelines. And that the custom of brideprice rather than dowry gives women a positive rather than a negative value, and gives higher status to the wife’s rather than the groom’s family.’
‘But still,’ says Xaxa, ‘the fact is tribal women do not sit on village councils. And they will not inherit land and property,’ just like women in caste Hindu society. There is also the worry that the tribals themselves quite often seem willing to regress to more feudal modes. At Ransargipal itself, Jagannath, the contractor responsible for the haat, was astounded to see the one woman in our group of four also happy to partake of mahua. ‘It’s not really right,’ he said, ‘the idea that a woman should drink in public.’
‘That,’ says Nandini Sundar, professor of sociology at Delhi University and author of the book Subalterns and Sovereigns, An Anthropological Histor of Bastar (1854-2006), ‘will happen as the tribals continue to be colonised by outsiders.’ By colonised, she means as we continue to foist our cultural norms and notions, and what we believe is right and wrong, on them.
In her book she mentions something similar happening in Kukanar village in Bastar, where she spent time doing field research. The tribals there tended to pity the women of the Thakur families who lived among them, and who tended to spend most of their time inside of the house and had little freedom outside of it. But as the tribals began to aspire to the Thakur way of life, they also began to emulate the Thakurs more and more.
Xaxa says that as tribal societies continue to be mainstreamed – or as the dominant viewpoint filters down to them – they begin to look upon these ideas found within caste Hindu society – hierarchies, division of labour – as ‘values’, rather than things that are better left behind. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘that could be thought of as cultural colonisation.’
The best way to stop that backward slide, he says, would be education, of the liberal kind. And that it is possible for tribal societies to move from where they are to ‘true modernity’ rather than letting themselves slip into the quagmire of feudalism.
That would certainly be desirable. One only has to drive the 25-odd km back from Ransargipal to Jagdalpur, the district headquarters of Bastar, and which a lot of people refer to as the ‘civilised’ areas.
Your best bets for food in this town are the Kishan and Anand dhabas just across the highway from the town. The food here, the fish and the chicken curry, like the mahua at Ransargipal, is lipsmackingly good. But you will never ever, at any time of the day or night, see a woman at either of the dhabas.
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