Adivasi Megaliths c. 500 -1000 BCE, near Hazaribagh, India

Adivasis (literally, in Sanskrit, "original dwellers") are thought to be the earliest inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. Some 80 million in number today, they constitute a large, powerless minority. Over the centuries, living in the hills and forests of India out of the ambit of the Gangetic Plains civilization, the Adivasis have evolved an intricate communitarian, largely agrarian mode of living. Adivasis belong to their territories, which are the essence of their existence: the source of their religion and culture and the abode of the spirits and their dead . Though their lands, resources, languages and customs are theoretically protected under the Fifth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, the Adivasis are being systematically uprooted and dispersed.

India Shining was the slogan of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a right-wing, Hindu fundamentalist party.

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My parents c. 1952

My father had moved there to become the assistant medical superintendent of the mental asylum in nearby Kanke. These were not his normal environs. But this was pre-Independence India, and he (University of Edinburgh, FRCS, FRCOG) had been passed over for promotion at the Prince of Wales Medical College in the state capital in favor of some upstart Englishman. My dad resigned in protest, to Hazaribagh we came, only a few kilometres from the megaliths in the picture above, next to the dense jungles of Palamau, where indeed tigers could be heard.

In the evenings, my father had his "surgery" -- essentially a free clinic -- for patients from miles around. His Adivasi patients would often pay him with vegetables, fruit and chickens. We ate a lot of chicken.

The story has a happy ending. In a few years, my father moved back to the Prince of Wales, now renamed the Patna Medical College, as Head of Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. The Kanke mental asylum, thanks to the work of my dad and many other dedicated physicians, was upgraded and reconstituted as the Central Institute of Psychiatry, now a leading psychiatric teaching hospital.

But things have not turned out as well for the Adivasis of Jharkand.

The state of Jharkhand was formed (under the federal structure of India) in 2000, ostensibly to give Adivasis a bigger voice in their fate. Their traditional lands comprised 25,000 sq. miles (the size of West Virginia) of the 60,000 square miles of the new state. Their nominal population of 10 million would have been almost 50% of the entire state.

To the Adivasis' misfortune, Jharkhand mines 37% of India's coal, 23% of its iron ore, 34% of its copper, all of it from Adivasi lands. Not only are the native people not compensated for this, the troika of state capitalism, "market economy" and globalization has literally stripped them of their lands and forests; rivers have been dammed up for power production, displacing millions, desiccating the earth; unchecked industrial effluents are poisoning the air and the waterways. And a systematic process of internal colonization has brought in over 4,000,000 "outlanders" into the state (with cash, connections and corruption) while dispersing an equal number if not more Adivasis into the far-flung reaches of urban India to work as day-laborers, coolies, domestics, cut off from familial ties, living in shantytowns and slums. Rohinton Mistry's Bombay landscape in A Fine Balance is populated by these economic refugees.

The megaliths in the first panel will probably soon be gone. They fall under the aegis of something called the Barkagaon Mine Block of the Central Government's Ministry of Coal (coal mining in India is predominantly nationalized) which will destroy the entire area of over 20 sq. km. See International Council on Monuments and Sites report.

Tha harrowing condition of the Adivasi population in present day Jharkhand is movingly and eloquently depicted with unforgettable imagery in the documentary Running Out of Time . I can do no better than reproduce some of those images here. In my next piece, I shall fill out the history and extent of the present devastatation of these peaceable people.

Dedicated to my friends Abhijay Karlekar, Ahmed Hussein and Probir Ghosh, who have kept the faith.

Photography: Ranajit Ray