Bibhutibhusan’s Aranyak, unquestionably the greatest epic of the
wilderness in Bengali literature, has a small chapter which narrates
the visit of the storyteller to the king of a lost kingdom. The
capital can boast of no princely palaces or victory towers on a
grand scale but consists of a cluster of modest mud huts in the
forest, the mud walls of only one of which are reinforced with
ordinary stones where the king himself lives. The king is not at
home. He has gone to the forest to tend his cattle. His
great-great-grand-daughter, princess Bhanumati, a girl of some
fourteen summers, clad in the short length of a sari and adorned
only with a necklace of the seeds of wild fruits and colored stone
chips, ushers the visitor in the king’s presence. The king is found
to be a very old man approaching his century and seated under a tree
smoking a cheroot of Sal leaves. His vision has become dim but his
hearing is still quite good. He receives his guest in a graceful
manner and instructs his grandson to make suitable arrangements for
his entertainment. Having treated him with a meal of wild porcupine
meat and buffalo milk he takes his guest around to show the remains
of his kingdom. According to the tradition of his people the kingdom
extended over a vast area from the foothills of the Himalayas in the
north to the Chotanagpur plateau in the south. For ages they lived
in this land in peace. But when the Mughals came and set up their
outpost at Rajmahal they started to make inroads into these
territories. From their forest fastness armed only with bows and
arrows they kept the Mughal hordes at bay, never allowing them
complete sway over their kingdom. At last whatever was left of that
land they lost forever after their defeat in the battle with the
British known as the Santal Rebellion. At that time the king was in
the prime of his youth and had taken part in that unequal fight. The
kingdom is now a mere memory. Its only reminders are the habitual
respect he receives from his people, a couple of caves which once
served them as their fortress and an ancient banyan tree under whose
shadows sleep their glorious dead.
The visitor is an English educated Bengali Babu from Calcutta. He
has been engaged by an absentee landlord, also a Bengali Babu of
Calcutta, as the manager of a large jungle mahal estate which once
formed a part of the forgotten kingdom. He has been entrusted with
the task of surveying and clearing it for settlement of tenants. The
manager is not impressed by what he has seen. Dobru Panna the king
is no more than a mere tribal chief, uncouth and illiterate, poor
and primitive; his squalid cabin is no better than a hovel or a
rabbit hole and Bhanumati the princess is like any other tribal girl
in the bloom of her youth. However, in the declining light of the
westering sun he senses a solemnity about the burial ground which
casts a kind of spell over him. And in his mind’s eye he visualizes
a vista of prehistoric times when the nomadic Aryans were pouring
into non-Aryan India through her north-western mountain passes. The
encounter between the original inhabitants and the newcomers ended
in the victory of the latter. While the victors have chronicled the
story of their conquest and expansion of their domain and culture
there is no record of what happened to the vanquished. Whatever
traces of their history exist may be found not in the handiwork of
man like an epic or a Purana nor in the relics of a stately city or
a kingdom but in the primordial things of nature like the deep dark
forests and caves and mountains. The arrogant Aryan in the pride of
his civilization has never felt the urge to find out that history.
Since those ancient times to the present these hapless people have
been neglected and humiliated and kept outside the pale of civilized
society by the Aryans. Acutely aware of his racial superiority the
manager sees himself as a representative of the victors and Dobru
Panna as that of the vanquished.
In prehistoric times racial encounters such as this were not
infrequent, stories of which are not fully known to us because,
according to Darwin, no tradition has been preserved by the present
inhabitants about the ancient monuments and stone implements found
in all parts of the world. With patient and painstaking labors the
anthropologists and antiquarians have sought to reconstruct them on
the available evidence. And the conclusion they have arrived at
about the outcome of such encounters is indeed revealing. In The
Descent of Man Darwin cites a number of cases where some races
living in very harsh and inclement environment have managed to
survive and have not become extinct: “Man can resist conditions
which appear extremely unfavorable to his existence. He has lived
long in the extreme regions of the North, with no wood for his
canoes or implements and with only blubber as fuel, and melted snow
as drink. In the southern extremity of America the Fuegians survive
without the protection of clothes, or of any building worthy to be
called a hovel. In South Africa the aborigines wander over arid
plains where dangerous beasts abound. Man can withstand the deadly
influence of the Terai at the foot of the Himalaya and the
pestilential shores of Africa”. Whereas “extinction follows chiefly
from the competition of tribe with tribe and race with race” and
“when of two adjoining tribes one becomes less numerous and less
powerful than the other, the contest is soon settled by war,
slaughter, cannibalism, slavery and absorption”.
The primitive people were less civilized but not less savage than
their modern counterparts. They fought their battles with no less
savagery but with less civilized weapons which were crude and not as
efficient as their modern prototypes as engines of mass slaughter.
Hence whole enemy populations could not be eliminated with a single
bomb in the twinkling of an eye and those who could not be clumsily
clubbed to death were taken as captives and allowed to survive not
so much out of mercy as out of necessity. In course of time the
problem of these captives came to be solved not in concentration
camps or gas chambers but by the evolution of the institution of
slavery. It proved of much practical advantage to the victors. They
could get their arduous tasks and unclean jobs done by the forced
and free labor of these slaves and thus live a life of comparative
ease. It served them also to satisfy their feeling of racial
superiority and a perverted hunger for power and domination not only
over the fowls of the air and fishes of the sea and all creeping
things of the earth granted to the chosen people by an Old Testament
God at the time of creation but also over their fellow human beings.
Ancient Greece was the cradle of democracy yet its citizens were not
ashamed to own slaves. The quarrel of their two great heroes
Agamemnon and Achilles over a slave taken captive in the Trojan war
forms the subject matter of the very first book of their epic Iliad.
In ancient Rome the institution became so widely prevalent that in
some parts of the empire slaves far outnumbered freemen. And
ideologues were not wanting to find out its justification. In the
opening book of his Politics Aristotle takes pains to refute the
argument that slavery is unnatural. The reasoning he employs does
not do much credit to a philosopher who is known as the father of
syllogism. Some however escaped capture and slaughter by fleeing and
taking shelter in inaccessible regions like forests and mountains.
Darwin mentions such “small and broken tribes, still surviving in
isolated and generally mountainous districts”.
What happened in prehistoric India could not have been much
different. Even on a cursory examination of the people of India both
according to physical types and languages four broad classes are
discernible – the Aryans, forming the majority of high caste Hindus,
tall, fair-skinned and long-nosed and whose language is derived from
Sanskrit; the Dravidians of peninsular India, of somewhat different
physical features and whose languages are derived from sources other
than Sanskrit; the primitive tribes –Kols, Bhils, Mundas, etc. –
mostly living in the hills and jungles of high plateaus of the
heartland of India, short in stature, dark-skinned and snub-nosed
and speaking languages entirely different from both Sanskrit and
Dravidian; and lastly the Gurkhas, Bhutiyas, Khasis, etc.
concentrated mostly in the sub-Himalayan regions, with strong
Mongolian features, almost beardless, yellow-skinned, snub-nosed
with flat faces and prominent cheekbones. The last two classes are
regarded by scholars as the descendants of the Neolithic peoples who
once spread all over India. In course of time they had to yield
first to the Dravidians and later to the Aryans both of whom were
superior to them in culture. These racial encounters resulted in the
extinction of many and absorption of some to form the lowest strata
in the community of the conquerors, while a few tribes escaped a
similar fate by taking shelter in inaccessible areas like forests
and mountains. Segregated both geographically and culturally they
pursued their age old ways of life in a kind of splendid isolation.
Culturally they do not seem to have made any appreciable progress.
The placid existence of the tribes of Chotanagpur plateau and its
surrounding areas, however came to be disturbed during the medieval
period when the Mughals had their cantonment established at Rajmahal
for keeping the chronically insubordinate Bengal subah under watch
from a strategically vantage post. The area they called Damin-i-koh,
the foothills of Rajmahal, attracted their attention also for
another reason—the prospect of diamond mining. As the tribals hardly
had any political importance or knew the difference between a piece
of diamond and ordinary stone, the activities of the Mughals were
not actually directed against them and did not therefore amount to
any real threat to their existence. Such a threat was however not
long in coming.
Twenty-eight years – almost exactly to the day – before Babur won
his victory at Panipat on the 21st of April, 1526, another
adventurer, Vasco da Gama, had landed at the south Indian port of
Calicut on the 27th of May, 1498. Babur was not aware of this, let
alone of its far-reaching repercussions not only in Indian but also
in world history, nor could he ever dream that the legacy of his
descendants in India would ultimately pass on to these adventurers
from the western world. Babur’s was a land-bound world. Till the
close of the 15th century land routes were the primary system of
communication. It was very primitive and not very effective in
bringing countries and regions within countries into close contact.
For centuries they existed in comparative isolation, each like a
little world in itself, populated by a vast majority of poor
peasants, steeped in superstition and ignorance and technologically
stagnant, and ruled over by a minority of aristocrats who enjoyed
the monopoly of power and privileges. These aristocrats constantly
scrambled amongst themselves, in the words of Milton, like ‘kites
and crows’, for capture and retention of power which was their chief
concern. As their power was won and maintained by force of arms and
did not depend on the consent of the ruled the common people and
their interests and well-being were their least concern. After their
ambition for power was sufficiently satisfied some of the rulers
might do some good for the common people. But they did do so not
from a sense of duty but to satisfy their megalomania. The common
people in their turn were least bothered about their rulers whose
rule seldom interfered with their day-to-day life which flowed
timelessly in an even rhythm. Empires and kingdoms rose and fell
without raising any ripple in the placid flow of that life. Wars and
political revolutions were temporary and passing phenomena like
natural calamities which the people faced with stoical fortitude.
Once these were over they resumed their accustomed way of life as
usual. The surface of their social existence was often ruffled but
its core rarely got seriously disturbed.
But with the birth of the European Renaissance at the end of the
15th century maritime communication, so long only of secondary
importance, became revolutionized. Geographical explorations not
only broke down barriers of distance between countries and societies
but also extended the frontiers of the known world by discovery of
new lands. The European water gypsies were driven by greed of gold
and glory and a zeal for spreading the Christian gospel. Exploration
was soon followed by invasion to capitalize on the new discoveries.
These were intensified by another revolution that was soon to come –
the industrial revolution, which in its turn turned the value system
of the traditional societies almost upside down. Freedom to do as
one likes – laissez faire – came to be regarded as more important
than one’s social obligations. Co-operation gave way to ruthless
competition and accumulation of material wealth by means foul or
fair for consumption here and now to one’s surfeit instead of laying
up something spiritual by acts of charity to be enjoyed in a life
hereafter became the driving force behind all human actions.
Insatiable greed, one of the seven deadly sins of the ancient and
medieval society, became the greatest virtue of the newly emerging
modern world. In their relentless search for more and more profits
the mercenaries spread their tentacles far and wide so that no place
or people was safe any more from their grabbing hands. They
penetrated every nook and corner of the globe which were hitherto
untouched by any sophistication of civilized society.
The old civilized societies first resisted but had gradually to
yield to superior European technology and organization and finally
to resort to cultural adoption and adaptation for survival. The
reaction of primitive and less civilized societies was different. In
the beginning they accorded a friendly reception to these newcomers
as is evident from the letter of Columbus which he wrote to his
royal patrons on his first voyage. Columbus found that the people of
the islands which he discovered in the West Indies “all go naked as
their mothers bore them”, “they know neither sect nor idolatry, with
the exception that all believe that the source of all power and
goodness is in the sky and they believe very firmly that I, with
these ships and people, come from the sky” and wherever Columbus
went they announced with loud cries, ‘Come, come! see the people
from the sky’. “And of anything they have, if you ask them for it,
they never say no; rather they invite the person to share it, and
show as much love as if they were giving their hearts; and whether
the thing be of value or of small price, at once they are content
with whatever little thing of whatever kind may be given to them”.
Columbus “gave them a thousand good, pleasing things …in order that
they might be fond of us, and furthermore might become Christians …
and try to help us and give us of the things which they have in
abundance and which are necessary to us”. Accounts such as this by
Columbus and other voyagers made the savages and their societies
topical subjects for an idyllic treatment in Renaissance literature.
Theirs was a golden world, a Utopia, where these simple people lived
a naturally virtuous life in an ideal state of nature, unpolluted
and uncorrupted by civilization. Montaigne mused about them in his
famous essay ‘Of Cannibals’. His contrast between the natural and
artificial societies and men formed a kind of pastoral theme in many
literary works of the time. This romantic attitude found its
culmination in the 17th century English dramatist Dryden who, in his
Conquest of Granada, went so far as to call these primitive people
‘Noble Savages’. But the angels whom the savages believed to have
descended on them from heaven – the explorers and the invaders –
treated them in a manner which was far from angelic. By virtue of
their superior technology and organization and through treachery,
intrigue and other unfair means, these conquistadors conquered and
massacred these savages, reduced them to slavery and made them
aliens in their own native place. In their prosetilizing zeal they
went to the extremes even of cutting off the hands and feet of
recalcitrant natives to convince them of the omnipotence of
Christianity. The attitude of the European settlers to these
so-called ‘noble savages’ ultimately came to be epitomized in the
saying ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’. Old civilizations of
the Aztecs and the Incas were wiped from the face of the earth and
the numbers of the primitive peoples of other newly discovered lands
are today a fraction of what they were at the time of their first
contact with the Europeans. The dark continent of Africa became a
huge carcass of a mastodon to be carved up at will by the European
nations among themselves. Its vast western coastline came to be
known as the ‘slave coast’ after the slave trade which was
shamelessly carried on till the other day by the civilized people of
Europe. The descendants of these forcibly taken Negro slaves are
often denied equal civil rights, while not long ago the native North
American Indians had to acquire citizenship in their own ancestral
home where many of them still live a segregated life in
reservations. In chapter 31 of the first volume of Marx’s Das
Capital there is a description of the process by which the 17th and
18th century merchants thus plundered the whole world. The basis of
their operation was slavery and slave trade. Whole continents were
pillaged of their inhabitants for the benefit of the European
merchants. It was one of the most frightful processes that have ever
taken place in human history. It needs a strong stomach indeed to
read this chapter. But these are historical facts which cannot in
any manner be denied.
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