Where Santhal Wisdom Shelters

Suddenly in the forest there are faces...

A sal tree in Nawabganj National Park.

Perhaps it’s generally true that shade follows sunshine. Beyond Sitakot in Dinajpur’s Nawabganj the sal trees gather. Though geographically unlikely locals believe Nawabganj National Park might be the last remnants of the forest where Sita of the Hindu epic Ramayana lived in exile.

From field and farmhouse, the cycle van winds along the track into this darker but not-less-beautiful world. Beyond is Ashurer Beel, a picturesque waterhole favoured for picnics and famed for migratory birds.

Into the forest...

And suddenly in the forest are faces… not the middle-class motorcycle-riding ones of picnickers but curious, distinctly non-Bengali faces…

The national park keeps another history. Under its canopy, at its edges, the culture and wisdom of the Santhals finds shelter.

Alekutia village is home to 40 Santhal families.

Peeling jungle potatoes.

In Gabriel Hemrom’s leafy yard a little beyond the park boundary, in Alekuti village along the same track, women sit on the ground preparing date leaves for weaving. Another is busy with jungle potatoes, which are soaked in water for several days and eaten with molasses-like jaggery, known in Bangla as ‘gur’.

A well-constructed mud brick Santhal home.

Alekuti is home to forty Santhal families, Hemrom estimates. “Our ancestors are from a place called Dumka,” says the forty-year-old father of three sons. “But we were all born here.”

House detail.

As in Bangladesh, Santhals are one of the most populous minority peoples in India. Mainly they live in Odisha, West Bengal, Bihar, Assam and Jharkhand. Dumka is a district in the last of these states. There are also a small number in Nepal.

Nearby Ashurer Beel with boat and fish traps.

By tradition Santhals engage in hunting, forest clearing and farming.

The village’s forested location reflects the Santhali tradition of forest clearing and subsistence farming. They are also famed hunters, with bow and arrow. But in Alekuti, along with some small-scale farming, most earn as they can through cycle-van riding or day labour. It isn’t much of a living.

House painting. Santhals capture their history and daily lives in design.

“For the poor, food is always a problem,” says Hemrom.

In contrast to the dire economic reality of Alekuti, in India it’s not uncommon for Santhals to be living in cities and working in areas as diverse as medicine, engineering and the public service.

In Alekuti meanwhile, are traces of the well-developed, unique culture of which any Santhal can be proud. Most visibly it’s in the painted designs on the walls of their well-constructed mud-brick homes. By tradition Santhals present history and daily life in wall paintings, although the Alekuti examples are modest.

“Those who can paint do so,” says Hemrom.

Painting around an internal doorway. 50 - 70% of the villagers in Alekuti are Christian these days.

The forest nearby.

The Austroasiatic Santhali language, of the Munda languages and distantly related to Khasi, Khmer and Vietnamese, is sophisticated and well-studied. Its unique script, called Ol Chiki and invented in 1925 by Pandit Raghunath Murmu in response to deficiencies in representing the range of Santhali sounds in Roman or other Indic alphabets, has thirty letters.

Santhals are famed hunters with bow and arrow.

In general, the Santhals have preserved their language well; but in Alekuti it’s facing difficulties. “Our children used to study Santhali at the mission schools in Dhanjuri and Patarghat,” says Hemrom, “but now they only learn at home. We use our own alphabet but it’s explained in English.” Including Bangla, Alekuti relies on three languages.

The church in Alekuti.

Hemrom estimates that like his family, 50 – 70% of the families in Alekuti converted to Christianity some thirty years ago. The village features a small church attended by visiting clergy.

The remainder observe the old religion, which worships Marang buru or Bonga as supreme deity. It features a court of spirits to regulate aspects of the world, from whom blessings are sought through prayer and offering. There are also evil spirits to be protected from.

An old mango tree on the forest road.

Traditionally, Santhal villages feature a sacred grove on the edge of the settlement where spirits live and sacred festivals occur. In Alekuti neighbours participate in the rituals of both religions.

“We dance and sing in Santhali and in Bangla,” says Hemrom, “The children enjoy the festivals the most.”

In their political history Santhals can also take some pride. In response to land grabbing and enslavement, on 30 June 1855 leaders Sidhu Murmu and Kanu Murmu mobilised 30,000 Santhals to fight the British.

Sal tree trunk.

Caught by surprise, initially the Santhal Rebellion met with some success, but ultimately bows and arrows proved no match for British guns. Battles were akin to massacres. Many Santhals, including the two celebrated leaders, were killed; and subsequently the Nawab of Murshidabad used elephants to trample Santhal huts.

More recently, the Santhal community was instrumental in successfully advocating the creation of Jharkhand state in India, which was carved from southern Bihar in 2000. It was hoped that statehood for Jharkhand would allow better representation for the various minority peoples who account for about 28% of the state population. Santhals are the largest group.

Yet Gabriel Hemrom speaks of his heritage humbly. “Everybody likes his own culture,” he says.

Despite the current hardships of life in Alekuti, it’s not possible to be entirely pessimistic. Santhali culture has survived great hardship before. And, as when leaving the forest, perhaps it’s generally true that sunshine will inevitably come to replace the shade.

Gabriel Hemrom, 40, with his son Remechus Hemrom, 10.

Tea Reconsidered

A Hindu temple in Chatlapore tea garden.

I’m invited to the home of Mintu Deshwara, the Daily Star correspondent for Moulvibazar. He’s the proud son of tea labourers.

It’s not every day the chance arises to stay in a tea worker’s cottage; but with the afternoon heat and the walking, when we arrive I’m tired. I wonder where on Earth I am.

The realities of Moulvibazar’s Chatlapore Tea Estate are complex. There’s a gruesome history. There’s a multicultural community all too ready to smile. People want a better future in spite of the pressures of the international tea trade. I don’t know what to think.

It’s usual for it to take time. The brain has to process, to meld some sort of sense into new experience. Precisely what part of the result arises from the raw and what part is constructed as memories arranged through the brain’s filter of personal values, life experience and culture I couldn’t say. But there’s no such thing as objectivity.

The village has a sweet, pungent smell. Is it incense or a range of native cooking styles from various Indian places? It doesn’t smell like regular Bangladesh. The faces that stop to ask who I am – they aren’t Bengali faces.

The welcoming introductions are easy enough but when that is done I give in. For a couple of hours I sleep.

Meanwhile, word travels. Eight women from nearby houses want to see what the foreigner looks like. They don’t just arrive: they’ve spent time dressing up in best saris, with bangles and make-up.

Mintu offers to wake me. They don’t let him. So they wait for one and a half hours...

The tea garden ladies waited for one and a half hours...

As I take in their excited faces gathered along the edge of the bed and in the hastily arranged chairs I feel overwhelmingly honoured. It’s that blessing that only a traveller knows – quite a welcome!

But I feel other things. There’s minor guilt at having kept them waiting. There’s some uneasiness. I know enough of the history. I’m not British but most Australians are at least in part descended from those same colonisers. You can’t get away from that.

Those ladies’ ancestors were shuffled about, lured by lies in order to build a tea industry. It’s hardly history – they still live in poverty. Part of me wants to be invisible so as not to be in any way a Sahib.

Better to focus on their welcoming friendliness...

We chat away in Bengali, mother tongue to none of us. They aren’t shy. We drink tea.

In the evening with Mintu I set off through the village. It leads to the courtyard of the Bauris’ home. They speak Bauria language.

Hari Kamal Bauri, 70, with his wife Ahila Bauri, 60.

Retired worker Hari Kamal Bauri, 70, heard his maternal grandparents came from one Bakuria District. “We have no connection with that place,” he says, “Maybe it’s near Dhaka?”

Bakuria is a place name in Jharkhand state of India but it’s likely his ancestors came from Bankura District of Paschimbanga which, along with Birbhum and other districts along that state’s western edge, is home to the Bauri people.

Basic research says Bauris revere their tribal emblem the red-backed heron and hold dogs to be sacred. They eat beef, pork, fowls, fish and rats, but not snakes or lizards – and they like a drink. It’s unlikely the Bauris of the tea garden know much of this.

His wife Ahila Bauri, 60, says her paternal grandparents never said where they came from but her parents said they came from Sreemangal.

How much do we lose of ourselves if we don’t know our true origins?

The Bauris at home.

“On the first day my mother gave birth to me,” Ahila Bauri says, describing her life. “Later they married me off and sent me to my husband’s house. He sent me to the garden for work.”

Before their wedding day they’d never met. I ask how she felt. She says, “What did I think? Everybody was sitting there! What could I think?”

With many days behind them, they seem relaxed and content. Five children later – and they couldn’t quite manage to send them through school – they have an allocated cottage to live in and a family to enjoy as they age. They seem quite fond of each other.

“Smith Sahib used to drive a car and give salaams,” he says of the British management.

“Memsahib was beautiful,” she says, “She gave the children biscuits.”

I’m considering the cottage behind them. While there can be no doubt the British entertained their own interests, a brick cottage is far from nothing. I remember rural Bangladesh even most of twenty years ago. It wasn’t just anybody who had a brick house then.

When the Bauris’ ancestors were first deposited in the garden, after the jungles were cleared, it likely would’ve been a more materialistically comfortable life than the way locals lived. It was long before the mansions of Londoni ex-pats rose in the quiet streets around Kulaura. Things have changed, except in the garden.

By another villager I’m shown a slip of paper: it’s a Charge Sheet from management. The charge is stealing a shade tree. The charged worker is required to provide an explanation – in writing or, if they are illiterate, verbally, why they should not be dismissed or otherwise punished. They may cross-examine witnesses.

There are no police in the gardens. Where is the court? It’s as though the laws of Bangladesh don’t properly apply there. Those are anachronistic privatised communities run by the tea companies.

A nurse walking home from the dispensary.

I’m told that in September 2012 the Tea Worker’s Union negotiated a wage increase, settled by the government’s Wage Commission, from 48 to 69 taka per day – for an A-grade garden. In addition workers receive housing, promises of health care and education.

At the same time workers needed to increase productivity. Before, they’d needed to collect 16 kilograms of tea leaves per day to avail full salary. It was raised to 23 kilograms – in other words, they would still be paid 3 taka per kilogram – a pro rata increase of zero.

The last elections for the Tea Worker’s Union were in August this year. With bargaining soon to commence for a new salary agreement to last the next two years, the Union’s hoping for a new salary of 200 taka per day.

Rehearsals for Durga Puja in the tea garden.

I wonder why we often hear ambassadors from the United States and Europe making public comment on the rights of garments workers but not tea workers. Western countries don’t, in general, produce tea – western companies do, in developing countries. Unlike with the garment sector where the west still has some local production and jobs to protect – and besides, dramatic events like the Rana Plaza collapse embarrass western consumers – perhaps for the tea industry profit margins are all that matter?

It’s not that there aren’t alternatives to champion. New ownership and production systems have been introduced in parts of Sri Lanka, India and also in Panchagarh, to better compensate labourers.

The colonialism cycle can be broken. It’s time to reconsider tea – because the Bauris may live quietly in an old allocated brick cottage, but at what human price? Okay, so, maybe I do know what to think...

Tea workers busy with gardening.

This article is published in Star Magazine, here: Tea Reconsidered

Me with the tea ladies.

Memsahib Was Really Nice

The Self-Help Centre, Chatlapore Tea Estate, Moulvibazar.

Back in the mid-twentieth century, Memsahib didn’t like to see babies brought into the tea garden fields, which working mothers had little choice but to do. “I am paying money,” she said, one day while passing by, “Why is this baby here?”

Time is short. Every Wednesday the makeshift Tilakpore bazaar area in Chatlapore Tea Estate in Moulvibazar District is busy, nowadays. Vendors arrive from outside the garden to sell produce to their tea labourer customers. There are queues beside the dispensary. People gather for medical treatment, to collect salaries and apportioned supplies of subsidised rice grain and essentials.  There’s a sign on the old building noting the contributions of Heed Bangladesh and US Aid.

The road leading to the manager's bungalow.

A little further up the road, the red roof of an old pump house or small cottage has written on it in big white letters “Self-Help Centre.” There’s activity there too, though any worker will confess the place is usually quiet. At the Self-Help Centre women should be able to learn handicraft and needlework skills in free courses offered by the current Duncan Brothers management.

Such skills are promoted as helping raise family incomes. When a worker’s salary is just 69 taka per day – and Chatlapore is an ‘A’ grade garden: salaries at lower grade gardens are less – every taka counts. Presumably working women can set to work on handicrafts in the evenings after hours in the garden, after taking care of their families, and on Sundays, their day off.

But this is not the reason the centre is busy. The garden’s assistant manager, who lives in the big bungalow atop the hill, smaller only than the larger manager’s bungalow by the main gate, doesn’t have time to talk. A relative of one of the Duncan Brothers board members is due to visit from the United Kingdom. He wants the garden to look its best. He wants the Self-Help Centre spic-and-span. Today is not an ordinary day. Time is short.

Tilakpore bazaar area in the tea garden.

But the assistant manager and his boss are lucky, in a way, to be there at all. They’re Bengalis. Retired workers like 75-year-old Jibon Nayek Palkichara know well that until the mid-1960s no Bengali could enter a tea garden. “Even a big judge couldn’t get inside,” he remembers.

According to the Bangladesh District Gazetteer, Sylhet, of 1970, wild tea was first discovered in now Sylhet Division in 1855, with cultivation starting in the following decades. By 1900, 71,490 acres of land were under cultivation, producing 3.5 crore pounds of tea which ranked Sylhet favourably in comparison with leading tea-growing districts of Assam. By 1965 production had risen to 5.81 crore pounds per year.

“The prospects of a vast market for tea gave rise to the problems of labour,” reads the Gazetteer. “The question was to find a class of people who by temperament would like to settle in the countryside permanently and get attached to the tea estate for good.”

With local labour considered unsuitable the British brought workers from Bihar, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere, first to clear jungle, then to work on the plantations. Santhals and workers from Assam with tea garden experience were also brought, though in smaller numbers due to cost. It was “with utmost difficulty that they could be procured.”

By 1890 a total of 71,950 workers had been relocated. In the next decade alone another 1.4 lacs joined them.

The climate suited these workers, according to the Gazetteer.

The climate suited these workers, notes the Gazetteer, “and planters were thus enabled to work their gardens with labourers who would not quickly sicken and die.” “Unfortunately,” however, with recruitment particularly brisk during famines, many workers arrived “in a poor state of health” leading to occasionally high mortality. The memories of current workers do not extend back to the gardens’ beginnings but there are stories: widespread fever and many deaths.

The British managed well. They created a workforce from disadvantaged groups that would prove flexible. For one thing, with many disparate groups any kind of unity would be difficult for workers to forge. For another, with the exclusion of Bengalis tea workers would barely be able to speak to outsiders if they ever made it outside.

At Sreemangal’s Tea Garden Museum it’s possible to view a bone stick used to beat badly behaved workers. There are samples of “hazira” coins minted solely for garden use. The use of different money made it impossible for any worker to secretly stash whatever money they could scrounge from their wages in preparing an escape. Nobody would accept their money beyond the boundary – and besides, escapees would be hunted down. There could be no going home.

For long term colonialism to succeed it’s important to colonise the mind – to foster a belief in the colonisers’ superiority. In the gardens, the luxurious bungalows built to compensate for the “hardships” of British managers certainly underlined distinction – in Assam the British even had a ratio of golf courses required per manager to ensure adequate socialisation facilities.

In such a reality any level of patronising would be greatly appreciated by workers. There could be no harm in allowing churches and temples; and religious festivals like Kali Puja continue to be celebrated with much fanfare.

Sorting tea leaves, Chatlapore.

Palkichara says his grandfather first came to the garden from ‘Agartala’ – which may mean Odisha – at age 30. His father’s studies were good so he was rewarded with a foreman’s job.

When Palikchara was twenty-two and charged with pruning, one day Sahib noticed him and asked him to demonstrate. “Without cutting the tea bushes, the leaves do not spread,” he explains. He could do it well. Sahib made him, like his father, a foreman. He believes his salary in the 1960s was about 7.5 rupees per week.

Jibon Nayek Palikchara with his granddaughter.

“The Europeans had a really good formula for growing tea bushes,” he says, “and they kept every kind of food in the godowns. We had no tensions. They provided all sorts of clothes – saris, dhotis, half pants, shirts and suit pants. We weren’t allowed to wear lungee in the office.”

He recalls how any problem was soon fixed with a word to Sahib or Memsahib, the manager’s wife. “Now it’s difficult to consult management,” he says.

“One day there were huge clouds and much rain,” Palkichara reminisces, “Memsahib noticed the women still working. ‘Women will work in such conditions?’ she said, ‘Go to the factory at once and blow the whistle! It will be a holiday.’”

On another occasion she saw women working with hoes and said, “Give me a hoe. I am also a woman. I will work.” Memsahib’s words shamed the field manager into reassigning the women.

Only with the rise of Bengali political clout in late 1960s Pakistan did the British leave. No doubt they could sense significant change. And something big happened, something the workers never forget. With independence, under the leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, tea garden workers were granted citizenship in that new and better country, Bangladesh. As never before, they belonged.

The gate to the processing plant and offices.

Foreign companies continue to hold a large stake in the Bangladeshi tea industry – they’re credited with reviving the industry following near collapse during the liberation period, which may have been influenced by the deliberate lack of experienced Bengali managers; also by war damage and the loss of the product’s then main market: Pakistan.

It’s only natural therefore that still today some company man will jet into Bangladesh to inspect. He probably wants to see a spruced-up Self-Help Centre to report about to shareholders.

When Palikchara retired six years ago the loyal worker was told favourably, “You will stay in the garden after you retire.” He receives 48 taka per day as pension. 

Tea workers and their family members relaxing of an afternoon in Tilakpore, Chatlapore.

This article is published in Star Magazine, here: Memsahib was Really Nice