In India once the British merchants got a foothold in Bengal they
began to push further inland and in the course of a century gobbled
up the greater part of the country. To tighten their grip over this
country and explore and exploit it thoroughly they laid roads and
railways and the areas which were so long out of bounds and where
the aboriginals lived more or less unmolested became increasingly
accessible and exposed. To augment their income, the chief source of
which was revenues from the land, the East India Company began to
reclaim lands wherever possible by draining swamps and clearing
jungles and settlement of tenants. The areas around the Rajmahal
hills hitherto covered by jungles were brought under the plough with
the help of the hardy Santals who settled there in increasing
numbers. All the paraphernalia of the new administration followed �
different grades of zamindars, the court, the police, the traders,
the moneylenders, etc. The minions who manned these organs of
administration were mostly the cunning natives from lower Bengal who
were more civilized than the Santals and had already become
accustomed to and had adopted the Western ways. They followed the
British as scavengers follow the predators. Like a swarm of locusts
they descended on the unwary Santals who were illiterate and
ignorant about the niceties of the new administration. They were a
simple folk like the West Indians described by Columbus. Through
various sharp practices the Bengali �Dikus� began to exploit the
Santals in a systematic manner. The Santals failed to get justice
from the native officials who were hand in glove with the
exploiters. And when this exploitation became a torment beyond
endurance these traditionally peaceful people first petitioned the
�Sahibs� for redress. But their prayer went unheeded. In despair
they rose in a body in defiance against their tormentors. They were
suppressed by brute force. What really happened, according to the
testimony of one of the army officers engaged in the suppression of
the rebellion as quoted in Hunter�s Annals of Rural Bengal, was cold
blooded murder of thousands of innocent people, for the primitive
bows and arrows of the Santal rabble were no match for the fire arms
of a well organized army. The relentlessly exploited Santal prayed
for justice which he failed to get from the unsympathetic and
indifferent Company officials. He was pushed to the end of his
tether and he rebelled in utter perplexity and despair. He was
ruthlessly punished whereas his unscrupulous exploiters � the root
cause of all his miseries � got all the sympathy and protection of
the administration. Ultimately it dawned upon the East India Company
that the simple Santal in his illiteracy and ignorance was not
clever enough to adjust to the complexities of the new
administration � its innumerable regulations and complicated
procedures � and the cunning �dikus� were taking advantage of this
situation. As a remedy, though belated, a new district was formed
comprising the areas inhabited by the Santals to be called after
them � the Santal Parganas � where many of the regulations prevalent
in other parts of the province of Bengal would not be applicable. It
would be placed under the charge of a specially appointed official
empowered to administer it according to the usages and customs of
the Santals.
The Santals were not the only backward community of Chotanagpur who
rebelled against the inroads of an alien culture. Others like the
Kol, the Munda and the Bhumij communities also rose in revolt
against the British rule about the same time. The tales of these
uprisings told usually in a few sentences or paragraphs form a part
of the general freedom struggle no doubt but in the compilation of
their accounts the historians rely mostly on official records. Other
source materials, though meager, to be found amongst the tribals
themselves, are almost totally ignored. As a result the tribal point
of view is not taken into account. A fuller account of these
insurrections is therefore yet to be reconstructed. W.G.Archer, a
Bihar cadre ICS officer, collected some Santal rebellion songs and
published them in the anthropological journal Man in India in 1945.
In an essay co-authored by W.J.Culshaw and W.G.Archer and published
in the same issue of the journal there is a mention of a memoir --
Chotre Deshmanjhi Reak Katha-- of a Santal who had taken part in the
rebellion. It also mentions a novel, Harma�s Village, the subject
matter of which is the Santal rebellion. No historian is known to
have used these sources. In order to be �scientific� historians may
refuse to accept them as valid. The memoir and the songs are first
hand accounts and cannot therefore be invalid as historical
evidences only because they are by illiterate tribal people. The
novel itself was written by a civil servant, R.Castairs, who as
Deputy Commissioner served the newly created district for long
thirteen years. About the validity of a literary work of this kind
as historical evidence one can only cite the views of no less an
authority than Toynbee expressed in his A Study of History.
Among the uprisings of the time the Santal Rebellion occupies a
unique position because it was caused primarily by economic reasons.
The Santals were culturally backward no doubt but they were not the
practitioners of scalping, human sacrifices and other savage
practices and the new administration�s attempts to suppress them did
not therefore affect them culturally or socially. They were not a
band of freebooters whose opportunities for depredations had come to
an end because of the British. Nor were they required to do anything
which outraged their religious beliefs and sentiments, as it was in
the case of the sepoys of the Bengal Army who feared the loss of
their religion when required to go on a campaign across the seas or
bite cartridges soaked in cow or pork fat. Their revolt was not so
much against the British as it was against the agents of the process
which was operating at the time in Damin-i-koh. It was the same
process which Marx describes in Part VIII of the first volume of his
Das Capital, the process of primitive accumulation preceding
capitalist accumulation � the expropriation of the agricultural
producer, the peasant, from the soil, which Marx held to be the
basis of the whole process of capitalist accumulation. �The history
of this expropriation, in different countries, assumes different
aspects, and runs through its various phases in different orders of
succession, and at different periods�. In its mature stage of
development it becomes a vicious circle in which the labouring
masses are caught and are condemned to eternal slavery. The Santals
rebelled against such an attempt at their enslavement. Marx�s
clarion call for revolution, given about the same time that the
Santals rebelled, would take years to reach this country. Without
the advantage of an acute analysis of their predicament by an
ideologue like Marx the Santals themselves seem to have intuitively
realized the working of the capitalist process in their society.
About the same time the indigo planters had set the same process
afoot in other districts of Bengal. But it is a pity that the
Santals did not find a Dinabandhu Mitra or a Harish Mukherjee or a
Reverend Long to agitate their cause. Again, no other rebellion of
the period threw up a revolutionary character like Sidhu. He was not
a mere village-Hampden who with dauntless breast withstood the
little tyrant of his fields. From whatever little is known about him
it appears that by the standards of the Santal society he was a
prosperous cultivator and was not personally a victim of
exploitation. He had therefore no personal cause or grievance for
the redress of which he felt impelled to give leadership to the
uprising. This revolutionary character of both the rebellion and its
leader seems to have been completely lost sight of and Sidhu�s
so-called revolutionary countrymen draw their revolutionary
inspirations not from his long march but from the long march of a
foreign revolutionary.
II
The storyteller of the novel Aranyak is none other than
Bibhutibhusan himself who was a great lover of nature. For some time
he actually worked as the manager of a jungle mahal estate owned by
a Bengali zamindar in the same area. And he did as the manager of
Aranyak did. He was instrumental in the wanton destruction of the
sylvan serenity of a vast forest tract. Like the ancient mariner of
Coleridge his telling of the story is in atonement of a sin -- a sin
committed against the deity of the forest. The expropriation of the
Santal was the first act in the exploration and exploitation of
Chotanagpur and its surroundings. It was followed by the
exploitation of its rich natural and mineral resources and within a
short time what was a virgin woodland was turned into a carbonaceous
jungle. What the change means particularly to those who have been
woodlanders for time immemorial is very difficult, if not
impossible, for the modern man, almost completely divorced from
nature, to realize. For a fuller understanding of such a change he
must listen to the speech which was delivered by the North American
Indian Chief Seattle of the Duwamish League in 1854, a year before
the Santal rebellion, in answer to President Franklin Pearce whose
government had proposed reservations for the Indian tribes of the
North-West of the United States:
The Great Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our
land.
The Great Chief also sends us words of friendship and goodwill. This
is kind of him, since we know that he has little need of our
friendship in return. But we will consider your offer. For we know
that if we do not sell, the white man may come with guns and take
our land. What Chief Seattle says, the Great Chief in Washington can
count on as truly as our white brothers can count on the return of
the seasons. My words are like the stars�they do not set.
How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is
strange to us. Yet we do not own the freshness of the air or the
sparkle of the water. How can you buy them from us?
Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine
needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every
clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of
my people.
The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the
red man. The white man�s dead forget the country of their birth when
they go to walk among the stars. We are part of the earth and it is
part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters: the deer, the
horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests,
the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man � all
belong to the same family.
So, when the Great Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to
buy our land, he asks much of us. The Great Chief sends word he will
reserve us a place so that we can live comfortably to ourselves. He
will be our father and we will be his children. So we will consider
your offer to buy our land. But it will not be easy, for this land
is sacred to us.
The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just
water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you land, you must
remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it
is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the
lake tells of events and memories in the life of my people.
The water�s murmur is the voice of my father�s father. The rivers
are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our
canoes, and feed our children. If we sell you land, you must
remember, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers,
and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you
would give any brother.
The red man has always retreated before the advancing white man, as
the mist of the mountain runs before the morning sun. But the ashes
of our father are sacred. Their graves are holy ground, and so are
these hills, these trees. This portion of the earth is consecrated
to us.
We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion
of the land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who
comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The
earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered
it, he moves on. He kidnaps the earth from his children. He does not
care. His fathers� graves and his children�s birthright are
forgotten.
He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things
to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His
appetite will devour the earth leave behind only a desert.
I do not know, our ways are different from your ways. The sight of
your cities pains the eyes of the red man. But perhaps that is
because the red man is a savage and does not understand.
There is no quiet place in the white man�s cities. No place to hear
the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of insects� wings.
But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The
clatter only seems to insult the ears. And what is there to life if
a man cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or the
arguments of the frogs around a pond at night? I am a red man and do
not understand. The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind
darting over the face of a pond, and the smell of the wind itself,
cleansed by the midday rain, or scented with the pinion pine.
The air is precious to the red man, for all things share the same
breath � the beast, the tree, the man, they all share the same
breath. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes.
Like a man dying for many days, he is numb to the stench.
But if we sell you our land, you must remember that the air is
precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it
supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also
receives his last sigh. And the wind must also give our children the
spirit of life. And if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart
and sacred, as a place where even the white man can go to taste the
wind that is sweetened by the meadow�s flowers.
So we will consider your offer to buy our land. If we decide to
accept, I will make one condition. The white man must treat the
beasts of this land as his brothers.
I am a savage and I do not understand any other way. I have seen a
thousand rotting buffalos on the prairie, left by the white man who
shot them from a passing train. I am a savage and I do not
understand how the smoking iron horse can be more important than the
buffalo that we kill only to stay alive.
What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men
would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to
the beasts soon happens to man. All things are connected.
You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is
the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land,
tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin.
Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth
is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the
earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. This
we know � the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the
earth. This we know, all things are connected like the blood which
unites one family. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of
the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand
in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
But we will consider your offer to go to the reservation you have
for my people. We will live apart, and in peace. It matters little
where we spend the rest of our days. Our children have seen their
fathers humbled in defeat. Our warriors have felt shame. And after
defeat they turn their days to idleness and contaminate their bodies
with sweet food and strong drink. It matters little where we pass
the rest of our days � they are not many. A few more hours, a few
more winters and none of the great tribes that once lived on the
earth, or that roamed in small bands in the woods will be left to
mourn the graves of a people once as powerful and hopeful as yours.
But why should I mourn the passing of my people? Tribes are made of
men, nothing more. Men come and go like the waves of the sea. Even
the white man, whose God walks and talks with him as friend to
friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers
after all, we shall see.
One thing we know which the white man may one day discover. Our God
is the same God. You may think that now that you own Him as you wish
to own our land. But you cannot. He is the God of man. And His
compassion is equal for the red man and the white. This earth is
precious to Him. And to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its
Creator. The whites, too, shall pass � perhaps sooner than other
tribes. Continue to contaminate your bed and you will one night
suffocate in your own waste.
But in your perishing you will shine brightly, fired by the strength
of the God who brought you to this land, and for some special
purpose gave you dominion over this land and over the red man. That
destiny is a mystery to us, for we do not understand when the
buffalos are all slaughtered, the wild horses are tamed, the secret
corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men, and the
view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires. Where is the
thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone. And what is it to say
goodbye to the swift pony and hunt? The end of living and the
beginning of survival.
We might understand if we knew what it was that the white man
dreams, what hopes he describes to his children on long winter
nights, what visions he burns into their minds, so that they will
wish for tomorrow. But we are savages. The white man�s dreams are
hidden from us. And because they are hidden, we will go our own way.
So we will consider your offer to buy our land. If we agree, it will
be to secure the reservation you have promised. There perhaps we may
live our brief days as we wish. When the last red man has vanished
from the earth, and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving
across the prairie, these shores and forests will still hold the
spirits of my people. For they love this earth as the newborn loves
its mother�s heartbeat. So if we sell our land, love it as we loved
it. Care for it as we have cared for it. Hold in your mind the
memory of the land, as it was when you take it. And with all your
strength, with all your might, and with all your heart, preserve it
for your children, and love it as God loves us all.
One thing we know, our God is the same God. This earth is precious
to Him. Even the white man cannot be exempt from the common destiny.
We may be brothers after all. We shall see.
III
In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels give a kind of inventory
of the miraculous achievements of the bourgeoisie and in some
passages they grow almost lyrical about their ingenuity and
enterprise. In the Manifesto they also give warnings about the
numerous dangers, both material and spiritual, inherent in the
politico-economic system that was emerging as a result of the
teachings of the high priests of laissez faire � Adam Smith et al.
The promise of the creed propounded by Marx may not have proved
fully effectual as a panacea for the malaise from which the
civilization born of the industrial revolution suffers but his
diagnosis of the disease has proved correct to the letter. His
prognosis could not foresee all the evil symptoms which the disease
developed as it progressed and today the industrial civilization has
arrived at a crisis which humanity finds it almost impossible to
handle. The inventive genius of man gave him unimaginable mastery
over nature and in proud overconfidence he tinkered with its
mysterious processes. Today his technology has proved to be a
monster of unmanageable proportions defying all control. The
Renaissance let loose the energies of the European nations and
infused them with a new vigor. In their march forward they overcame
all racial and cultural obstacles and imposed a cosmopolitan culture
of their own over the whole world. In their success they forgot that
they were causing miseries to other peoples and destroying their
cultures, disturbing the delicate balance existing amongst the
various aspects of creation and destroying the very conditions which
make survival of life on earth possible. With the passage of each
day this civilization endangers the whole world and makes the
extinction of life that this world supports inevitable. The
population explosion, the greenhouse effect and global warming, the
pollution of the atmosphere and holes in the ozone layer, the AIDS,
the threat of nuclear terrorism, the widening gap between the rich
North and the poor South, the danger of famine, the depletion of the
biosphere and the mineral resources of the planet, the expansion of
commercial TV culture, the armament race and the growing threat of
regional wars � these are only a few � represent a general threat to
mankind.
Man�s moral degeneration has also been almost complete. In his
material opulence he has become spiritually bankrupt. He discounts
the values which his fathers held most dear. The institutions which
his predecessors built and which stood them in good stead for
generations are disintegrating. He has become more intelligent and
cunning but not wise, more intolerant, more violent and not catholic
and kind. Not less barbarous than his primitive forefathers he is
the more dangerous because of the enormous destructive powers he has
acquired. His vices are many but the greatest of them all is his
governing instinct of greed that knows no contentment. He has
thoroughly dehumanized himself and become a mere consuming organism.
In the words of Rabidranath in the poem �Borobudur� ---
In a paroxysm of perverted greed
Now we know no peace of mind
And our selfish hearts are hard.
Driven by onrushing appetites
Insatiably we run without rest
And our world is ever in a turmoil.
For fresh conquests
Breathlessly we race in an accelerating pace
And aimlessly roam in myriad ways
Failing to reach any destination at last.
Seeking satisfaction for an endless acquisitive urge
We have lighted a flame of omnivorous lust.
Another of his great vices is his arrogance about the infallibility
of his own civilization. He has forgotten that compared to the past
ages his achievements are not much but meager. In the words of Sir
James Fraser, �We stand upon the foundation reared by the
generations that have gone before,� �our gratitude is due to the
nameless and forgotten toilers, whose patient thought and active
exertions have largely made us what we are,� and �it argues
stupidity or dishonesty, besides ingratitude, to ignore the heap
while vaunting the few grains which it may have been our privilege
to add to it. There is indeed little danger at present of
undervaluing the contributions which modern times and even classical
antiquity have made to the general advancement of our race. But when
we pass these limits, the case is different. Contempt and ridicule
or abhorrence and denunciation are too often the recognition
vouchsafed to the savage and his ways. Yet of the benefactors whom
we are bound thankfully to commemorate, many, perhaps most, were
savages. For when all is said and done our resemblances to the
savage are still far more numerous than our differences from him;
and what we have in common with him, and deliberately retain as true
and useful, we owe to our savage forefathers who slowly acquired by
experience and transmitted to us by inheritance those seemingly
fundamental ideas which we are apt to regard as original and
intuitive. We are like heirs to a fortune which has been handed down
for so many ages that the memory of those who built it up is lost,
and its possessors for the time being regard it as having been an
original and unalterable possession of their race since the
beginning of the world. But reflection and enquiry should satisfy us
that to our predecessors we are indebted for much of what we thought
most our own, and that their errors were not willful extravagances
or the ravings of insanity, but simply hypotheses, justifiable as
such at the time when they were propounded, but which a fuller
experience has proved to be inadequate. It is only by successive
testing of hypotheses and rejection of the false that truth is at
last elicited. After all, what we call truth is only the hypothesis
which is found to work best. Therefore in reviewing the opinions and
practices of ruder ages and races we shall do well to look with
leniency upon their errors as inevitable slips made in the search
for truth, and to give them the benefit of that indulgence which we
may one day stand in need of�.� Modern man is intoxicated by his
marvellous scientific and technological achievements. This has made
him blind to the danger that he may have committed mistakes and his
thoughts and actions may flow into channels which ultimately lead to
disaster and barbarism.
A lack of such humility led the European races to look down upon the
other races as inferior and sub-human with nothing in their cultures
considered as worth preserving and they went out to suppress them
ruthlessly. This attitude found its worst expression in their
colonization and exploitation of the world and in the Nazi theory of
�master race� and the racial holocaust perpetrated by them during
the Second World War. The treatment of the colonial population by
other European colonial powers was not much different. Their
insatiable hunger for material wealth and power over others caused
two great wars in quick succession and the threat of yet another war
more barbarous hangs over the human race like the sword of Damocles.
The greatest paradox is that modern man knows all these and is well
aware of the Nemesis that awaits him, yet he is utterly incapable of
doing anything to forestall it. It is not a purgatory which he finds
himself in, but a hell of his own making out of which he finds no
way of escape.
At this moment of his greatest crisis where will the modern man turn
to find the means of his redemption and salvation? Anthropologists
justify the study of savage societies on the ground that they give
us an idea about our own past. Can these societies help us to save
and secure our future too? Modern civilization in its arrogance
treats their cultures as bundles of superstitions. Many of them
however teach us, for example, that man does not live by bread
alone; that greed is a vice which if indulged goes on growing and
ultimately devours the consumer also; that one should not covet what
belongs to others and that the best way to satisfy one�s desires is
not by acquisition but through renunciation. Moral values are real
and not the figments of our imagination. The nexus of relationship
between man and man is not narrow self-interest and a clash of those
interests but a community of interests, not competition but
co-operation, not hatred and enmity but love and fellow feeling.
Reason may not be the only gateway to knowledge and knowledge is not
always equivalent to wisdom. Finally, there is a higher principle
which is the foundation of all creation and a complete harmony with
that principle is the highest state of existence. When any portion
of that harmonious whole is lost it affects us all, for, in the
words of John Donne, �No man is an island, entire of itself; every
man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be
washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a
promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend�s or of thine
own were. Any man�s death diminishes me, because I am involved in
mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.�
So, when the bell tolls for the kingdom of Dobru Panna, it tolls
also for us.
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