Sujatha's book: first chapter

Nomads to Farmers

My great-grandfather was born in the jungles of Khammam. His name was Venkataswami. As far as I know neither he nor any of his forefathers had a surname. Later, when they came in contact with society outside the jungle and needed a surname, he and his clan called themselves Kambhams people from the Khammam district.

Venkataswami’s clan were hunters. They killed and snared animals, including rats and insects, and ate them. They ate roots, fruits, and leaves. They caught fish and ate honey from honeycombs. They ate birds’ eggs and drank goat’s milk.

Sometimes they would attempt to grow something, like rice or wheat or maize. They would clear a patch of earth in the forest by cutting down trees and burning them. They did not know plows. My ancestors, almost naked, men and women squatted on the ground and used small pointy sticks to poke into the soil and cut furrows. They did not know fertilizers. They used the ashes of the trees they burned as fertilizer. The first year the crop would be good, the second year poor, and after that the patch of earth would stop yielding altogether. They would move on to another place and clear a new patch.

Because of the futility of this kind of farming, Venkataswami and his clan fed themselves mainly by hunting and gathering. To them, the forest was their amma, annam, asrayam, arogyam (mother, sustenance, shelter, well-being). They wanted nothing more. They knew not to want more. They bothered no one and no one bothered them. For centuries they lived like that, worshipping nature.

And then the white man came. The white man said that the tribals were incapable of taking care of the forest and the land, that they were destroying the forests. The white man, then, took over the forests. The trees now belonged to the government. The government “relocated” (drove out) the tribals. And then the trees that gave food and medicine, all the things that fed and clothed the tribals were burned down. In their place came teak plantations.

Of all the trees on earth, teak trees have the largest leaves. Those leaves contain a strange substance that is inimical to all other plant life. When they fall, they kill off every plant in the vicinity. Nothing ever sprouts near a teak tree. Very soon, under the deathly shadow of the teak trees, the flora and the fauna of the forests lost their habitats and perished.

It wasn’t just the forests that the white man seized. Outside, in the countryside, farmland that produced rice, wheat, sugar, corn was also taken over and converted into British-owned plantations. What little food was grown was sent off to Britain. There was nothing left for the native population to eat. The British then bled the starving Indians with heavy taxation to support their war in Afghanistan.

When Venkataswami’s grandfather was a little boy, a famine devastated their region. There was no rainfall. Not a drop of water. Rivers dried up. The earth cracked. There was nothing to eat. Not a drop to drink. Birds fell off the trees, dead. There was nothing in the forest. It was as if the gods had turned their wrath on the earth.

Decade after decade, the ravage continued. The famines did not cease. There were famines inside and outside the forests. One after the other, one after the other. Relentless famines. They were not normal famines. They were not natural famines. They were demonic famines. They were man-made famines. In a matter of a few decades there were twenty-five catastrophic famines and hundreds of minor ones. Starvation stalked the subcontinent. Forty million human beings perished of hunger.

When some humanitarian citizens of Britain appealed for famine relief for the victims, the lords said that no good would come out of such measures. It would only “encourage shirking by Indian workers”. Instead, they said they had a better famine relief policy that involved putting the famine victims to work through public-employment schemes. This type of relief proved more fatal to the malnourished men and women than the famine itself.

When Venkataswami was a young man, Khammam region was visited by yet another famine. It was one of the worst famines ever and people called it Dokkala Karuvu. Karuvu means famine and dokkalu, ribs. The victims were mere skeletons covered with skin whose ribs could easily be counted. They were so hungry they ate anything they could find, even poisonous roots. In a matter of two years ten million men, women, and children starved to death.

That dokkala karuvu flushed Venkataswami’s clan out of their forest, like fleas from fire. Their mother, the forest, could not provide for them any more. Venkataswami took his wife Atchamma and his six sons, including one newborn, and ventured out into a world unknown to him. They came out of the jungle, onto the plains to face civilization. They set out eastward, walking in the direction of the sea. They had no belongings to carry with them. Only their sons. Atchamma carried her newborn son in a pouch and the next youngest on her hip. Venkataswami carried two other young sons on his shoulders. The two eldest sons walked.

As they walked towards the coast, people told them of an enormous lake whose shores crawled with snails. If nothing else they could fill their bellies with snails. There were also fish in the lake, they were told, and growing in the grass around it was a strange edible weed. Thousands of birds migrated to the lake seasonally.

The family of skeletons walked and walked, one hundred miles, until they found an enormous lake in the interior of Krishna district. It was a wild, unused lake known as Kolleru. There, they found the snails, the fish, the grass, and the birds that they came seeking. And the great clear lake stretching out before them.

But they also found millions and millions of large mosquitoes that swarmed around their heads so thickly it made them look like strange walking trees. The grass was tangled with poisonous snakes. The mud sucked their feet in at every step. The grass was thick and tall and taller than they were. Leeches clung to their arms and legs. The nights screamed with the noise of a million different kinds of insects. There was no sign of human habitation as far as they could see.

Venkataswami and his family decided to settle there and live on what the lake had to offer. By and by the rest of their tribal clan, following them, migrated to the lake. Scores of them died of starvation, cholera and malaria and snake-bite, but those who survived founded a village. They named it Sankarapadu after the ascetic god Shiva Sankara, the god of the ashes.

The villagers, who in the forest had just begun to learn how to cultivate food, were thrown back to primitive food-gathering. Some collected snails, some killed birds, some picked edible weeds from the grass. They had plenty. By and by their ribs were filled out with flesh. The villagers shared everything. In the middle of the village there was a fish pond. They established a special day on which one man from each family would get together there and fish. When they had caught enough for the whole village, they put all the fish in a pile and divided them equally among all the families.

The land around the lake was fertile but because of the mosquitoes, leeches, snakes, cholera, malaria and other hazards no one had ever settled nearby. When the villagers, who had settled there out of desperation, gradually started planting rice, the virgin soil gave them back plenty. It was as though they had sprinkled the seeds and the next day woke up to see the earth sprout plants. Water is scarce in many parts of India and most famines are due to dry spells, but in that small village of Sankarapadu, with its lake, there was plenty of water. Since the land was abundant and no one had ever claimed ownership before, each family took as much as they could work on and marked it off with little stones. The tribals who settled in Sankarapadu were the ones who cultivated the land that had been spurned by the civilized people.