It is the tendency of popular media and culture to homogenise our ways of life. Movies show a single India that speaks Hindi and dances at lavish weddings.
Newspapers barely distinguish between an Indian city and village life.
Amidst all of this, cultures that did not adapt and move into the mainstream risk being ignored, or worse, turned into objects of ridicule.
In White as Milk and Rice, Nidhi Dugar Kundalia takes us to the tribal communities in India that have resisted dilution of their identity, while maintaining their old ways of life.
The book focuses on six communities from across the country, from distinct landscapes such as coastal, central and north-east India—although these communities have a culture that’s different even from other groups in their neighbourhood (or even the state-level mainstream).
Often, they are limited to a small geographical area, away from the cities or even the villages, and their interactions with the larger world are limited to essential commerce.
For one reason or another, each of these communities stretches the boundaries of “civilised behaviour” as the mainstream defines it.
The Kanjar community’s members have traditionally been dacoits, not hesitating to murder their victims if the need arises.
Warriors in the Konyak community have been headhunters during inter-clan battles.
Teenagers from the Maria tribe live in a sexually permissive “common house”, allowing them to explore their urges before they finally settle down into a household.
A tribe in Andhra Pradesh is traditionally comprised of shamans who give out charms for various magical purposes. It is instructive to realise the breadth and varieties of cultures within India itself.
But let’s not make the mistake of expecting a dry ethnographical account. Most such books tend to look down upon the communities they chronicle, implicitly treating them as oddities and “inferior people”.
There may also be the hidden eurocentrism in the discipline that drives such an attitude. Kundalia, in this respect, is extremely empathetic.
She treats the tribals’ way of life as something that has evolved over time to cope with their environment—sometimes their coping strategy contains elements that the modern world would do well to learn from.
Most of the studied cases, for example, understand the resources of their environment intimately—edible and medicinal herbs, unknown to medical science, or animals that we would not think of eating. In so doing, they place as low a burden on Earth’s resources as possible.
There’s another aspect of Kundalia’s empathy with her subject. As a mechanism to walk us through the community’s ethos, she selects one or two people from the community and walks us through their life story.
For the Halakki community, for example, she selects Sukri, a woman who sings her way through life.
We see Sukri first as a young girl, then follow her as she gets older, marries, winds up a widow, and finally is welcomed to the wider world as an ambassador for her culture.
For the headhunting Konyak tribe, we start with Pangshong, a young man from the tribe who has actually grown up in Delhi, but is drawn back to Nagaland to learn about his culture from his grand-uncle Wangloi, a once-fearsome warrior.
The chapter flashes back and forth between Wangloi’s life today and his heyday. The stories are as gripping as any novel.This is a book to expand your world. Read it.
White as Milk and Rice
By: Nidhi Dugar Kundalia
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 256
Price: Rs 399