MEG-13 Writings From the Margins Indira Gandhi National Open University School of Humanities

Block 7 FICTION AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY UNIT 1 Mother Forest: The Unfinished Story of C.K. Janu 5 UNIT 2 Kocharethi: The Araya Woman – Background to the Text and Context 19 UNIT 3 Kocharethi: The Araya Woman – A Study of the Novel 24 EXPERT COMMITTEE

Prof. Shyamla Narayan (Retired) Prof. Satyakam Jamia Millia Islamia Director (SOH). Dr. Anand Prakash (Retired) English Faculty, SOH Delhi University Prof. Anju Sahgal Gupta Prof. Neera Singh Dr. Payal Nagpal Prof. Malati Mathur Janki Devi College Prof. Nandini Sahu Delhi University Dr. Pema E Samdup Dr. Ivy Hansdak Ms. Mridula Rashmi Kindo Jamia Millia Islamia Dr. Parmod Kumar Dr. Malthy A. Dr. Richa Bajaj Hindu College Delhi University COURSE COORDINATION AND EDITING Ms. Mridula Rashmi Kindo Dr. Anand Prakash (Retd. DU.) IGNOU Ms. Mridula Rashmi Kindo

COURSE PREPARATION Dr. Ivy Hansdak Prof. Anand Mahanand (Unit 2 & 3) Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi Hyderabad University and Ms. Rajitha Venugopal (Unit 1) Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi

PRINT PRODUCTION C. N. Pandey Section Officer (Publication) SOH, IGNOU, New Delhi

January, 2019  Indira Gandhi National Open University, 2019 ISBN : 978-93-88498-61-6 All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission in writing from the Indira Gandhi National Open University. Further information on Indira Gandhi National Open University courses may be obtained from the University's office at Maidan Garhi. New Delhi-110 068 or visit University’s web site http://www.ignou.ac.in Printed and published on behalf of the Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi by Prof. Satyakam, Director, School of Humanities. Cover Page Artist & Cover Design: Ritu Bhutani, an independent artist, conducts regular art workshops at Pathways School, Gurgaon and The Social Canvas, a weekly art program. Cover Design by A.D.A. Graphics, New Delhi Laser Typeset by : Tessa Media & Computers, C-206, A.F.E.-II, Okhla, New Delhi Printed at : BLOCK INTRODUCTION

Block 7 Unit 1 discusses the tribal Autobiography Mother Forest: The Unfinished Story of C.K.Janu. The unit begins by commenting on the uniqueness of the authorship of the text. The unit also critically analyses the text by discussing its important features.

Unit 2 deals with the background of the text Kocharethi: The Araya Woman while placing it in its context. The unit also familiarizes us with the life and experiences of the Araya people.

Unit 3 discusses the novel Kocharethi: The Araya Woman in detail. It takes up important issues of the text and explains them in detail. Fiction and Autobiography

4 Mother Forest: The UNIT 1 MOTHER FOREST: THE Unfinished Story of C.K. Janu UNFINISHED STORY OF C.K. JANU

Structure 1.0 Objectives 1.2 Introduction: A Comment on Authorship and the Nature of the Text 1.3 A Brief Introduction of C.K. Janu 1.4 Structure 1.5 A Critical Reading of the text 1.6 Some important Issues 1.7 Let Us Sum Up 1.8 Glossary 1.9 Questions 1.10 Suggested Readings

1.0 OBJECTIVES

This unit will familiarize you with the text Mother Forest: The Unfinished Story of C.K. Janu. Beginning with a comment on the unique nature of the text’s authorship, the following sections will deal with a brief introduction to C.K. Janu and the text under discussion. Finally, a summary of the text and some critical reflections would be offered that the text may invoke in its readers.

1.2 INTRODUCTION: A COMMENT ON AUTHORSHIP AND THE NATURE OF THE TEXT

Although we have included this text under the category of ‘Autobiography and Fiction’ in this Block, this text is not purely autobiographical, in the sense that it is not written by C.K. Janu herself. The content of the text has been narrated to and transcribed by Bhaskaran. The text is a form of documented oral testimony. C.K. Janu engages in a monologue about her life and experiences as an Adivasi woman and activist, and about her hopes and visions for her community at large.

1.3 A BRIEF INTRODUCTION OF C.K. JANU

C.K. Janu is an Adivasi social activist who belongs to the Adiya community of Wayanad, Kerala. She was born in Trissileri, Wayanad in 1970. Janu is the leader of the Adivasi Gothra Mahasabha (AGMS) which works for the reclamation of lost lands of the Adivasis in Kerala. Having had no formal education, Janu learnt reading and writing through a literacy campaign that was conducted in Wayanad. She had been an active member of the Kerala State Karshaka Tozhilali Union, affiliated to the ruling communist party. After being disillusioned with the party and its failed promises, Janu began to engage in grass root politics at her own individual level. 5 Fiction and Autobiography She started the Adivasi Vikasana Pravarthaka Samiti (Organisation for Tribal Development Workers) in 1992. Since then she has been vigorously working for the mobilization of Adivasis in their joint struggle to reclaim the lost lands, which in turn is pivotal to the subsistence of the Adivasis. Janu won the State government’s award for the Best Scheduled Tribe Social Worker in 1994. However, she returned the award in response to the government’s persistent callousness towards the tribal demands for land. Janu was the only Indian representative to participate in the indigenous people’s conference organized by the UN at Geneva. She has also delivered talks in over 120 locations in various European cities, as part of the Global Action Group. In 2001 she organized a historical protest in front of the State Secretariat demanding justice and redistribution of lands for the landless and starving Adivasis of Wayanad. In 2003, following several cases of starvation deaths occurring in her community, Janu organized a landmark tribal agitation against the continuing apathy of the Government by occupying the Muthanga reserve forest. The police force opened fire at the Adivasi settlements as a means of evacuating them from the forest. This event turned brutal and violent leading to the death of one Adivasi and a policeman. The incident marked a shameful episode in the history of Kerala for the State’s attempt at suppressing the peaceful agitation. A series of cases were filed against Janu and other activists. However, the agitation was not completely a failure. It brought to the notice of mainstream society. Adivasi predicaments in an unprecedented manner. It brought to the limelight the continuous marginalization, suppression and injustice meted out by the State government to the Adivasis over a period of several decades. Although redistribution of land had begun on a small scale, the government continued on its trail of failed promises, and hence Janu and her community still struggle to reclaim their livelihood and get their rightful voice and space in the socio-political fabric of Kerala. Their struggle for survival is still on, and hence the significance of the title of the text, The Unfinished Story of C.K. Janu. The text under discussion was published in Malayalam in 2003 as The Life Story of C.K. Janu and was translated into English by N. Ravi Shankar in 2004. It is perhaps the first instance of a life writing from the margins by an Adivasi in Kerala and is thus significant in nature. Literatures from the margins engage in a form of ‘authentic’ representation of the lives and conditions of the societies and communities situated at the periphery of social spectrum. It is a kind of rewriting or countering the representations by mainstream literature. Thus, literatures from the margin are not merely fictitious or imaginative but highly socio-political. These reflect the predicament and existential struggles of the marginalized community in the face of hegemonic oppression. Thus Mother Forest can be seen as providing a short glimpse of the life of Adivasis, and the socio-political struggles they have been going through for a long period of time. As the name of the genre suggests, autobiography or life writing refers to the subject writing her/his own life. It is different from other genres of fictional representation as it contains mostly events that happen in the life of the subject, inspirations that dawn upon the subject, the achievements, failures, hopes, aspirations and visions and worldviews that form the totality of the subject’s life till the point of writing the text. Often, one sees the subject as having had a great impact and influence on his/ her community and as having brought a major difference in their lives. Also, in the genre of life writing, the subject is considered to have the sole agency for self-representation, as he/she decides what and how to represent. At the same time, it is contestable whether the subject has the absolute agency of self- 6 representation or not. Here, we have C.K. Janu, an Adivasi woman who narrates Mother Forest: The her story to Bhaskaran who transcribes it, and then the text is translated into English. Unfinished Story of C.K. Janu To us, the text is doubly mediated, one by the transcriber and another by the translator, and we are thrice removed from Janu, the subject, the ‘self’ of this autobiography. We will discuss this further in the section on critical reflections.

1.4 STRUCTURE

The text begins with a note by the author which gives a very brief background of how the Adivasis of Wayanad (which is located in the northern part of Kerala) began losing their lands to the migrants from Travancore (which is located in the southern part Kerala), how they began to be dislocated, territorially marginalized and pushed to the interiors of the forests, the “worthless wastelands” (vii). The author’s note is followed by the translator’s note which gives his initial impressions of C.K. Janu, and also briefly details the strategic experiments of translation which he used to “retain the flavor of Janu’s intonation and the sing-song nature of her speech in the translation” (xi).

The text is in the form of a narrative of recollection. The main body of the text is divided into two chapters. The first chapter is mostly about Janu’s childhood and early experiences in the forest. It provides a lucid picture of the interconnectedness and harmonious coexistence of the Adivasis’ lives and the forests. It also provides a brief idea about the Adivasis’ first encounters with the world outside the forest and their initial sense of alienation. This becomes more and more pronounced in the second chapter. The second chapter provides details of her adult life and how she groomed herself into a social activist committed to the cause of her land, the life, culture, livelihood and the identity of the people of her community.

1.5 A CRITICAL READING OF THE TEXT

Mother forest and her children The beginning of the narrative is very crucial as it highlights the strong connection between the Adivasis and the forest, which Janu refers to as ‘mother forest’. It gives a vivid picture of the pristine life of the Adivasis engaged in cultivating and collecting food and living in great harmony with their environment. The narrative is replete with the presence of various kinds of flora and fauna, and of the sights, sounds and scents of the forests. Several colloquial words find presence in the narrative – varieties of beans and tubers such as thuvara, chembu, thina, payar, muthari, fruits such as karappayam, mothangappayam, fish such as paral and mussu etc. These instances show that the Adivasis were sufficiently provided for, and they knew what was best for them and their environment. Janu says, “in the forest one never knew what hunger was” (Mother Forest p.2). This statement is particularly significant when one reads it against the backdrop of the starvation deaths and deprivation of Adivasis that led to the Muthanga agitation.

The Adivasis worked and lived together as a community. Nowhere in the narrative does one find any sense of individual ownership of land. “The erumaadam ( a hut built on tree top) was built between two giant trees so high above the ground that from it we could see all our lands, the unending forest and the sky” (3). This statement underscores the sense of oneness they had amongst themselves and with the land and their ecosystem. Janu also demonstrates the Adivasis’ deep understanding and veneration for the forest, when she says, “no one knows the forest like we do. The 7 Fiction and Autobiography forest is mother to us. More than a mother because she never abandons us” (Mother Forest p.5).

In her early childhood, Janu never knew of anyone from her community who went to school. The Adivasis learnt whatever they needed to learn from the forest itself, and had been living harmoniously. They had their own indigenous systems of knowledge which could perhaps be beyond the comprehension of the civil society. Janu provides some instances of how they could predict the change in weather, the direction of the wind, the onset of rain, how they could preserve their food for longer periods, especially during monsoons, etc. Though they were isolated from the mainland, they were happy in their world. In those times, they were not interested in any contact with the outside world. Janu remembers that when they saw strangers in their land, the Adivasis would hide away into the deep forest. Later in the text, we find representatives of civilization who come to take children away to tribal hostels to impart them with modern education. Janu had managed to escape them but her sister was taken away to the tribal hostel. From this point in the narrative, we find the inevitable and increasing interaction between the outside world and the forest.

First glimpse of the world outside the forest In the beginning, we see Janu remembering that her first contact with the outside world was when she worked as a maid at a teacher’s house in Vellamunda. She was eight or nine years of age then. She provides an interesting description of her observations on her first trip outside her village. She noticed several changes in the surroundings such as “the chug chug of the Motor Pump, the sharp smell of sprayed Chemicals on the paddy … the roar of the vehicles from far away” (Mother Forest p.7), and the first time she saw men wearing strange clothes and noticed that they were different from her own people. It was also the first time she felt that she should “keep a safe distance from them” (Mother Forest p.7).

At the teacher’s house, Janu further noticed a lot of differences. The house was lit even at night, unlike the darkness of her hut. The house had a proper roof made of wood unlike the thatched roof of her hut. They had an aluminium pot to serve kanji (while in her village, kanji was poured into a pit dug in the earth with an areca paala lining” (Mother Forest p.13)), a glass tumbler, a kerosene bottle were things she never knew had existed or was needed. There were two big Trunk boxes, a Radio, from which people laughed and wept. She travelled in a bus for the first time accompanying the teacher to her hometown, Athiramphuzha. There, Janu met the teacher’s sister Sally, who was of Janu’s age, and was a good companion to her. There, for the first time, Janu saw a huge building which was the Church where a well-dressed man read out from a Book. For a person living in the forest, a number of things were surprising. Sally showed some of her books to Janu which had stories of forests and speaking animals. Janu wondered that she never saw such speaking animals in her forest. She went to the grocery shop nearby where movie posters were displayed. She even went to watch a movie with the teacher. She saw that the hills and the streams shown in the cinema were very different from the hills and streams that she had seen in her forest. She talks about a song in the movie and she wonders that in her community she never heard women singing except when putting the babies to sleep. Janu talks about her initial association with the school where the teacher worked. 8 The teacher brought uppuma, which must have been the mid-day meal at the school. She wondered how the children would bravely sit inside the school when it rained Mother Forest: The and stormed. What would they smell of? This thought brought back memories of Unfinished Story of C.K. Janu her village life when she along with other children would huddle together when it rained, to keep away from the cold, and they would together smell of something, which she had associated as the smell of hunger. She also recollects that when her mother used to visit her at the teacher’s home, she used to bring the smell of the hut along with her. In her narration, the presence of smells and sights and sounds play a significant role in portraying the sense of community feeling that they have amongst themselves, and also the connectedness with nature.

From freemen to slaves: Working for the jenmi This is what we learn further from the narrative. Janu returned to her village and started working in the fields of the jenmi (landlord) of Trissileri. She remembers that “since the jenmi was the only provider of work, our people were quite frightened of him” (Mother Forest p.12). She also remembers that men from the Party (refers to the Communist Party) used to visit the jenmi. Apart from the jenmi, she also remembers her people being frightened of a man who used to supervise them working in the fields. “In those days we were afraid of almost everything. The backs of our people used to be so bent because we were terrified of so many things for generations. When our people speak they don’t raise their eyes and that must be because they are so scared” (13). Later in the text, she talks of the marriage rituals in her community. While she mentions that there is nothing important about the marriage ceremony, she also notes that one thing that remains unchanged over marriage and over generations, is the slavery to the jenmis: “Man and woman stay together... they have children. The parents go to the jenmi for work. The children graze his cattle. That’s all there is. Frightened of the jenmi and scared of others, they live on with bowed heads till they slowly turn old” (Mother Forest p.25).

Janu narrates the experience of her people working in the field of the jenmi and the numerous tasks they did to ensure good harvest for the jenmi. Their work included “sowing, germinating, tilling, transplanting, weeding, watering, standing guard, reaping, carrying, threshing, and making mounds of grain” (Mother Forest p.15). In the rainy season, it used to get very dark by the time they worked all over the fields. Also, it was difficult to gather food from the forest during the rains. At the end of the day, they used to go home hungry and cold. During the harvest season, they had to work all through the night, to reap the grains. Instead of wages, they were given a small measure of paddy. Or they could return the paddy for a small sum of money. After the harvest season, there used to be no work in the fields. In those times, they would go to the forest to gather food for their daily sustenance.

Earlier in the text, Janu had mentioned how as a child she remembered seeing the whole stretch of their land and forest and the skies, sitting on the erumaadam on a treetop. Later, she explains how they lost their lands over a period of time. To quote: “After our forefathers had toiled so much to clear the woods and burn the undergrowth and convert the hillsides into fields they (the jenmis) had taken them over as their own. That’s how all our land became theirs.” (15). It was in those lands which became alienated from them.

Towards Self-Assertion: The Literacy Campaign We observe in the text that being deprived of formal education, Janu always had a keen sense of curiosity. She actively participated in the literacy campaign programme that was conducted in her village. It seemed like eyewash as the tutor was very 9 Fiction and Autobiography irregular. During that time, Janu had happened to see some books from the tribal school that her sister attended. She saw there were lessons on the benefits of using chemical manure for agriculture, and some pictures of machines used for tilling. Janu used to wonder how people already knew these things before they learned about them from books. These instances show the difference in culture and worldviews of the Adivasis and the outside world. Ironically, activities that are so common and connected to the livelihood of Adivasis are being taught as exotic and as process mechanisms in schools. Add to this the fact that such lessons are taught at tribal schools to tribal children who may have different perspectives on these activities. For them, agriculture is not just a process, but a means of daily sustenance. This instance also throws light on the homogenizing tendencies of school curricula to ensure that everybody studied the same lessons irrespective of differences in culture and social background.

The second literacy campaign that Janu participated in was organized by Solidarity Youth Movement which was much more serious and organized in its efforts than the previous group conducting the campaign. The teacher of this campaign, Sibi used to be very committed to the cause of literacy among the Adivasis. We are told that he had a great knowledge of the forests and could create a wonderful rapport with the community people; He lived there as one among them. All these probably helped the Adivasis have closeness with him. It was in this particular literacy campaign that Janu learnt to read and write. She used to practice writing on the slate till late in the night and be very curious to read anything available such as newspaper bits used to wrap grocery items, scraps from weeklies found lying around, pamphlets she got at the party processions etc.

Early Experiences with the Party Our attention is drawn to Party men who visited the huts in the adivasi hamlets where a picture of a hammer and a sickle was stuck to the wall of every hut. Janu remembers that all the people in her community used to go for Party work. People from her community were taken for the party processions and were told that they would get more wages if they joined the party. Janu began to work as a member of the Karshaka Tozhilali Union, a union of agricultural labourers affiliated to the CPI(M).

Janu also mentions in the text that she was married off to somebody from her community at the age of seventeen, but refused to stay with him and came back to her hut continuing work. Meanwhile she was also more actively involved with the literacy campaign and the Party’s Karshaka Tozhilali Union. Very soon, she could read and write fairly well and began teaching other women and children in her community. Finally, she became the Literacy programme’s instructor, and participated in the extracurricular activities such as song, speech etc. conducted by the campaigners. It is mentioned that while going for the Party rallies, she enjoyed shouting the slogans loudly, though she did not know what they meant. In these instances, one could see Janu slowly emerging as a more and more active social person eager to assert her voice and identity.

We are told that in the hamlet, a certain Govinda Warrier, owned lots of lands and fields, and wasn’t very popular among the Adivasis. He took charge of gathering Adivasi people whenever there was a rally. The adivasis were lured into going for the rallies on hopes of increased wages. Janu recollects her first experience of going for a rally in a lorry for the Wayanad District Conference at Kalpetta. She tells 10 herself that, in the lorry covered on four sides with bamboo meshing, “we must Mother Forest: The have looked like cattle being taken to the cattle market” (27). She was surprised at Unfinished Story of C.K. Janu the ritualistic manner and the abundance of the decorations made for the rally and talks about the ornamented para (of the kind which could only be found at the jenmi’s house), filled with paddy, and decorated with coconut flowers at the centre. This is a symbol of aristocracy, landlordism and prosperity earned at the expense of the toiling peasants and Adivasis. Janu must have noticed this very symbol as a contradiction at a Party function that glorified the hardship of peasants. At the function, songs were sung about hardwork of the peasants, about the “golden sickle” which reaps harvest, and about the necessity to increase the daily wage of farmers. An old woman from Janu’s community was called up on the stage and presented with a packet, about which Janu says, “never knew what was in it or why it was given. We all clapped. I watched everything happening on stage very closely. Ammini never even looked. She was terrified of such things” (Mother Forest p.28). This particular incident throws light on the tokenistic behaviour of political parties for appeasement of vote banks and how the poor and the underprivileged often fall prey to it.

The culmination of the function is also significant in the text. After the speeches were over, one of the Party workers bought food for all the Adivasis, after which they loitered around and finally went back home, without raising any slogans or carrying the excitement they had earlier in the day. They reached home late at night, and went for working in the fields the next day. The reader is made aware that nothing changed for them after the rally. Life went on as usual.

New Fissures on the Land: The Arrival of Migrants The account of the book takes us to migrants who started pouring in from Travancore, the southern part of Kerala state. Their arrival caused a lot of changes in the land and culture of the Adivasis. First of all, they started coffee plantations. Unlike the local landlords who made slaves of the Adivasis and made them toil on the fields, these migrants would befriend the Adivasi men, offer them toddy, arrack and tobacco and transferred the lands on the hillsides in their names. The Adivasis who had never known even the need to keep documents and records of ownership, lost all their lands and became labourers in their own erstwhile lands. On the other hand, very soon the migrants got hold of most of the lands. The local landlords no more exerted as much power as they did earlier. The younger generation of these landlords was not interested in traditional agriculture anymore and looked out for other opportunities abroad. Meanwhile the migrants engaged in multiple kinds of agriculture and eventually established large scale commercial farming than paddy. The farming yielded profits in place of conventional harvests. Paddy cultivation was slowly sidelined. Janu notes the arrival of the migrants as a point which led to more and more mingling with the civil society. Their arrival had also resulted in the Adivasis’ loss of hold on the forest, and loss of work in the jenmi’s fields. They were now turned into the wage labourers of the new migrants.

Mother Forest Becomes Departmental Forest and her Children are Orphaned The change in conditions is reflected in barbed wires and fences being drawn to demarcate the boundary lines or to mark ‘no-entry’ zones. Eventually, it became a forest which could no longer accommodate its own people. Having lost their freedom in the forest, where once they used to cultivate different kinds of beans and tubers, and where they used to collect different kinds of fruits and vegetables, the adivasis lost their means for a proper livelihood. They were almost completely dependent 11 Fiction and Autobiography on the daily wages they got from the new landlords. The wages were so meager that it became difficult for them to keep their hunger away. Having lost their access to local vegetation, they had to buy food-stuff from the shops and markets around. Thus, they started eating vegetables that were not cultivated by them. They paid money for stuff which they could very well have cultivated, if only they had the land to grow it. This new habit impacted their health as well as their expenses. Not having enough money, they eventually became indebted to shopkeepers and needed money for medicines and modern treatment. Markets selling various kinds of stuff cropped up, with application forms becoming rampant and the Adivasis made to loiter around filling and submitting application forms for everything. With these evidences of modernization, a whole new environment was created where the Adivasis were compelled to be consumers in the new system, including health care centers and hospitals.

Later in the text, Janu laments the alienated feeling the Adivasis have as a result of this encroachment of civilization and modernization. As the forest became part of a government department, the Adivasis could not even pick fallen twigs from the trees. They had to remain sad witnesses as “tree after tree was cut down and transported in lorries down the mountain” (Mother Forest p.38). A situation arose when they even had to protest in front of the panchayat office demanding for drinking water. The traditional indigenous medicine and occult practices had by then become exotic symbols and display¯materials on calendars and newspapers. Through these instances, one can see the systematic effacement and killing of a culture and people in the name of emancipating and uplifting them to join the mainstream.

We are told that with the passage of time, more and more Adivasis became landless and homeless, and survey numbers appeared on lands to prove new ownerships. Encroachment of forest lands had gone to such an extent that even the tribal burial grounds were not spared. At the burial grounds, the Adivasis used to perform certain traditional rites and rituals. That area was located on a hill surrounded by waste lands. These waste lands and the burial grounds were soon occupied by the migrants. Janu mentions that her people grew anxious that soon they might have no place to bury their dead. Hence Janu organized her people to occupy and reclaim this burial ground and drew a fence to separate it from the other lands. However, the outsider (the real encroacher) who was more powerful than the Adivasis retaliated by bringing the police and getting the men arrested on charges of encroaching their property. The women led by Janu marched to the police station and staged a protest demanding their rights to the burial grounds. On the other side, the outsider managed to get the Party’s involvement in settling the issue. This time again, Janu was certain that things would turn out against her community. Since an election was to be held at the local co-operative bank, and this man’s vote appeared to be crucial, Janu notes that the Party settled the issue in his favour. This was one of the crucial issues that heightened Janu’s disillusionment with the Party.

Problems with the Party The description of activity happening behind the scene is particularly interesting. We read that the increasing need for money on the one hand, and the insufficiency of the wages on the other had led Janu and others to hold agitations forcing the jenmi and the Partymen to interfere in their affairs. The Adivasis were important resources for the jenmi’s fields as well as the Partymen’s rallies. So, both the groups worked “behind-the-scenes” and managed to create an impression that any issue for which agitations were led, would be settled. Earlier, agitations against the jenmi 12 were dictated by the Party itself. It was felt that every jenmi belonged to the Party. Mother Forest: The Meanwhile, the Party also created an impression that it stood for the welfare of the Unfinished Story of C.K. Janu Adivasis. Gradually, Janu realized that, in the Party meetings which she regularly used to attend,

“problems specifically related to our people were not discussed much in the Party or the Union. The Party saw us as a vote bank only. … The speeches made in the Party circles were not what we could easily understand. They were full of strange words with hidden traps. They tried their best not to let us speak. …. In our area, the Party, the jenmi and the estate owners had grown to merge into a single giant tree” (Mother Forest p.34 - 35).

Here, she notes the vicious nexus of power that works in tandem to suppress the voiceless and the underprivileged. Apart from the fact that the Party used the Adivasis for rallies and as vote banks, In yet another instance, Janu notes,

“The Party always considered labourers and landless people as ingredients for their rallying songs and as a decoration to their speeches. From great heights, they sometimes announced free rations of a kilo of rice. And declared subsidies that we could not understand in times of starvation. They made people excited by showing them statistics of uncultivated land. Made men and women lazy by telling them that their time was coming. … It became one of the needs of the Party to keep this community poor, starved and incapable of resistance” (Mother Forest p.42).

Thus, Janu became increasingly aware that her people were given false promises and were being used as showpieces for the vested interest of the Party. She realized that there is no advantage in serving such a Party and that it is better for her people to get active and be involved in organizing themselves without any political support from outside.

Connecting with People Janu had always been Interested in knowing about and understanding the problems of others. Her interest in the literacy mission and her early involvement with the Party had helped her in connecting with the people. She had also connected with women of other Adivasi and non-Adivasi communities during her brief work as a tailor. While she travelled to other colonies and settlements, she also met people from other tribes such as Paniyars, Kaatunaaykars, Cholanaaykars and Kurumars and understood their problems and concerns.

Separation from the Party, gave Janu the option to get involved in organizing people on her own. One of the earliest missions was to occupy some land in Tirunelli. Janu led 45 families to this land on a hilltop, and built huts and settlements there. They were met with action by the police force. Even the Party tried to disempower the struggle and indulged in slandering the Adivasis. This situation led to a court case which got dragged on for years. Though for the time being, the Adivasis seemed to reclaim their land, they faced problems of survival. Being a disputed land, they couldn’t demand and apply for drinking water, electricity or ration card. Their names did not even appear in the voting list, as Janu feels that they were not a lucrative vote bank. However, being children of the forest, the Adivasis were wise enough to make the best of their situation. They cultivated banana, ginger, coffee and some 13 Fiction and Autobiography varieties of beans, since they knew that these crops wouldn’t need much water and could well be grown even on steep hillsides.

Occupation of land by Adivasis caused the Partymen, landlords and the local non- Adivasi people to turn hostile towards them. They were not allowed to use the public pipe for water, or infact buy anything from the local grocery shops. The Partymen protested against the Adivasis occupation of this land, which belonged to someone affiliated to the Party. The landlords denied work to the Adivasis hence depriving them of their daily wages. The Adivasis also faced threats from the wild elephants and pigs which would uproot and damage their crops. Despite all these odds, they relentlessly struggled for survival to reclaim their rightful lands and livelihoods.

In 1994, Janu led a group of 300 homeless people from her community to occupy an area in Appootti. This was met with brutal resistance from the forest guards and led to several casualties. Regardless of the growing suppression from the state forces, the Adivasis under Janu’s leadership were determined to go on with their struggle, as that was the only way they found to survive. About these struggles, Janu says, “They were not land struggles. They were life and death struggles for our basic rights to live and die where we were born” (Mother Forest p.54). Later on, they encroached upon other places like Vellamunda, Chiniyeru and Kundara. She reminds that in all these cases, both the leftist and the rightist governments were equally oppressive and apathetic.

Women and Community With respect to women, Janu talks about her companions Lakshmi, Devi and Valli who stay with her and help her in organizing people and in cultivating crops. She notes that women share a close bonding in her community, and are more responsible in their work than men. Janu feels that after the encroachment by migrants and forest officers, the men of her community have been bribed and enslaved for paltry sums of money and plenty of liquor. They neither go for work nor look after the family, instead they indulge in domestic violence after being heavily intoxicated. These men also work for the forest officers in felling trees. They seem to have lost a sense of responsibility and commitment towards their families and community. Their carelessness and insensitivity had been one of the prime reasons for the Adivasis’ immense loss of lands. On the other hand, women, as exemplified by Janu and her companions, are more committed to the community. Janu notes: “Our community can surely grow only through the togetherness of women” (Mother Forest p.47). Later in the text, Janu observes that the Adivasi women’s lives are very different from the lives of women in civil society: “In our case, unity in everything emerges from our women. They (our women) have something in common that shelters us from meaninglessly adopting the ways of the civil society. They have enough resilience in them to stand for what they feel is right even though they may have to suffer a lot for it” (Mother Forest p.53). Janu herself and some of her friends had walked out of abusive marriage and now live their lives as independent, self-supportive women, committed to the cause of their people. She adds that the Adivasi women are used to doing men’s work in the fields, and this, she feels, empowers them.

The Other Side of Development: Indigenous Life System Disturbed The lives of the Adivasis are intricately connected to their ecosystem. They have 14 lived in the forests for generations, and they have maintained balance and harmony in their surroundings with dignity and honour. Janu notes that “though it did not Mother Forest: The conform to the needs of the civil society, it was a system of life that was complete Unfinished Story of C.K. Janu in itself” (Mother Forest p.47). Intervention from the civil society has harmed the pristine condition of the forest in a most threatening manner and has disturbed the very balance of the Adivasis’ life and ecosystem. Janu ponders over the precision of the indigenous knowledge system they possessed, with which they could predict even the subtle changes in weather. They had always known what was best for them in their ecosystem and knew how much to take from nature and how much to give back to it. The interference of civil society and the greed for power and money has proven to be severely detrimental to the Adivasis, and has conjured up new images and stereotypes about them. Janu observes: “So they transplant us to where there is no space even to stand up straight. Without drinking water or a place to relieve themselves, the image of a group of unclean people was slowly being created” (Mother Forest p.48). She also condemns the system of tribal hostels which supposedly aims to groom and educate tribal students according to the ways of the civil society. However, in these hostels, the tribal girls get exploited, and Adivasis were generally ridiculed and demoralized. She mentions how the civil society mocks at the way they speak and the way they dress themselves. In short, the civil society makes them feel that they are misfits in society. Unable to adjust in the new education system they look for menial jobs. At the same time, the government would produce fake statistics to prove that the tribals are being emancipated and empowered. From Janu’s narrative, we get the Adivasis’ perspective of displacement and rehabilitation, which is often indiscreet and insensitive, not taking into account the well-being of the Adivasis. Most often, this is sad state of affairs when it comes to the question of development.

Further, Janu condemns the real estate and tourism boom which led to construction of resorts and artificial tourist sites, and has altered Wayanad’s ecology to a large extent. She also mocks at the concerns raised by armchair environmentalists who write articles and editorials, hold conferences and panel discussion about the pathetic situation of the ecosystem in Wayanad. She laments the exhibitionism and display of Adivasi art and cultural traditions by folk art academies, where they are portrayed as fascinating, exotic artefacts (Mother Forest p.50), while the very system that produced and nurtured these cultural traditions is being uprooted and effaced. These exhibitions are often projected as attempts at preserving and promoting Adivasi culture, whereas the crucial point about land and basic means of livelihood for the Adivasis gets camouflaged.

The Way Forward Janu feels that many of the problems of the Adivasis would be solved only if they continued to live and work close to their land. She also insists on the necessity of generating a consciousness among her own people. She feels that people from within the community should come forward and keep the flame of struggle alive. It is further suggested that instead of falling prey to the allurement of the civil society, they should develop resistance so that there is a complete shift in the perspective.

1.6 SOME IMPORTANT ISSUES

The Personal is the Political Janu’s life and struggle can be perceived as an embodiment of the motto ‘The personal is the political’. She epitomizes a tribal woman who moulded herself into 15 Fiction and Autobiography a committed social activist. Without any formal education and without the support of any political party, one finds Janu challenging the state and the mainstream, staunchly fighting for the rights of her community. From her life experiences and her observations of the society around, she has forged her own path of political struggle through grassroot involvement and one-to-one interaction with the members of her community. No wonder, she has often been referred to as an ‘organic intellectual’ who has her class consciousness and who works towards spreading that consciousness among her people to fight the hegemonic forces.

Ecocritical Perspectives Throughout the text one finds the significant presence of the forest in the lives of the Adivasis as well as the disturbing impact of encroachment of civilization and modernization projects on the livelihoods of the Adivasis. Thus, Mother Forest can be read from the ecocritical perspective to analyse the pivotal role of land and ecosystem in the culture and identity of the Adivasis. Land is not just a territorial entity but is crucially linked to the life of the Adivasis, their indigenous knowledge systems, faith, cuisines, language etc. and hence the loss of land amounts to loss of culture and identity.

Being Othered The book Mother Forest is crucial in terms of being an assertive enunciation of a representative voice of a community that had been silenced for generations. The Adivasis have not only been silenced, but also ‘othered’, marginalized, and unrepresented literature. In particular, the misrepresentations amount to homogenization and stereotyping of the Adivasi cultures and lifestyles. Homogenization of the Adivasis amounts to turning a blind eye to the richness, variety and plurality of their identities. The politics of stereotyping and othering broadly falls under two types, the exotic and the demonic. Representing the other as exotic involves romanticization, and glorification of the ‘primitiveness’ of the natives and borders on tendencies of patronizing them or civilizing them. Representing the other as demonic involves portraying them as a menace and criminalizing them. In either case, the misrepresentations as well as homogenizations show a symptom of projecting the Adivasis as ‘the other’ of the mainstream. The tendency of homogenization also points towards the mainstream’s intolerance of difference and diversity, and its attempts to cast all cultures in the same mould. The encroachment of civilization into the indigenous ways of life, and the attempt at indiscreet modernization and emancipation of the Adivasis end up in effacement of the traditional Adivasis ways of life. Such assimilative tendencies without a constructive dialogue with the Adivasis, amounts to drastic onslaught on them in the name of civilization.

The idea of environment conservation might mean different things to the mainstream and to the Adivasis. From Janu’s narrative, it is clear that with the state’s laws of protecting the forests, the Adivasis have been deprived of livelihood, while other forms of forest based-businesses thrived with connivance of the government officials. Seen from this perspective, one may rethink and interrogate the state’s management of natural resources, the grand narratives of development, and the consequential issues of displacement¯rehabilitation and protection¯emancipation of the Adivasis. These ideas lead us to questions such as: Do the Adivasis as subjects have a choice with respect to what is best for them? Are they even entitled to reject the impositions, if they chose to? 16 Stylistics of the text Mother Forest: The Unfinished Story of C.K. Janu Commenting on the stylistics of the text, the translator has stated: “I wanted to retain the flavour of Janu’s intonation and the sing-song manner of her speech”( Mother Forest p.xi), and hence he experimented with the language and sentence construction. In the initial sections of the text, the sentences do not start with capitals, even the ‘I’ is written in lower case. The upper case is used when something from the civil society is mentioned, as “Motor Pump”, “Shirts,” etc. Commenting on this style, Tom Thomas, in his article, “A Green Postcolonial Reading of Kocharethi and Mother Forest” observes this to be a technique to indicate holism and to dwarf anthropocentrism” (231). Further, the absence of commas between various verbs is noteworthy; for instance, “carrying dung to the fields digging up the soil with spades sowing pulling out the seedlings transplanting them weeding watering reaping carrying the sheaves of corn” (1). Thomas notes that, “language does not merely reflect reality, but also actively creates it. Lives are strongly interlinked with nature, the earth and the trees” (Pillai, Meena T. “The English Speaking Gendered Subaltern: Sales Tags for Postcolonial”. JSL, Spring, 2011. Print. p.231).

The unique nature of this autobiography in terms of its authorship and its translation has invited some debate with respect to the politics of translation, publication and the mediation of the postcolonial intelligentia and their treatment of Janu, the Adivasi woman as a gendered subaltern. Meena T. Pillai, in her article, “The English Speaking Gendered Subaltern: Sales Tags for Postcolonial” comments,

“So what Bhaskaran and Ravi Shankar together do is an act of ‘cultural translation’ where the language of translation does not merely posit the notion of an English vs. a tribal Malayalam but a hegemonic, culturally elitist, academic ‘play’ vs. a certain mode of life that judged by the former standards would translate as primitive and uncivilized” (18).

Pillai also observes that Janu’s monologue does not seem to be a free speech without a context, but

“a process nudged and prompted by the ethnographer and translator in order to construct a particular kind of discourse of the subaltern, that is then condensed, formatted, published and reviewed as a postcolonial text that ‘centers’ the margin”(18).

Despite the criticisms, one may assert that texts like Mother Forest are a progressive leap in the history of regional literature which has always been hegemonic. The text came out in 2003 at a time when the Adivasi struggle for land rights was at its peak, in the wake of the Muthanga incident. The text did help in creating awareness among the general public about the situation of the Adivasis in Wayanad. The translation of the text into English further ensured that the debate is not confined within the Malayalee readership.

The Adivasis have always been at the receiving end of ‘othered’ representations in the mainstream literature and media. However, Janu’s presence in the mainstream socio-political atmosphere, as well as the presence of her ‘autobiography’ in the arena of literature, challenge the conventional representations and provide an insider’s view, highlighting the voice of the Adivasis for their survival.

17 Fiction and Autobiography 1.7 LET US SUM UP

This unit has provided a brief introduction to C.K Janu, the Adivasi activist from Kerala, followed by a detailed summary of and a few critical reflections on her autobiography Mother Forest.

1.8 GLOSSARY • ‘The personal is the political’ was the catch phrase of the student movement and second wave feminism of the late 1960s, underlining the connection between the personal struggles and the larger socio-political struggles. • Organic Intellectual is a term coined by Antonio Gramsci to refer to those people within the oppressed class who are conscious of the workings of hegemonic power, and who resist such forces by articulating the struggles of the people of their class. • Ecocriticism is the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary perspective that examines the representation of nature and environment in literature. • Subaltern is a term coined by Antonio Gramsci to refer to people who are excluded from the power structures in society and are marginalized and oppressed. • Armchair environmentalist is a sarcastic term used to refer to those propagators of environmentalism who engage in writing and discussing issues and theories without any grass root involvement in the actual issues.

1.9 QUESTIONS 1) Comment on the importance of the forest in the lives of Adivasis. 2) What were the signs of changes Janu noticed, on her first trip outside her village? 3) Describe the various changes brought to the Adivasi environment as a result of the arrival of migrants. 4) Explain the reasons for Janu’s disillusionment with the Party. 5) Trace the growth of Janu as a social activist from the grassroot level. 6) From the text, examine the role of Janu in defining the political struggle of the Adivasis in Kerala. 7) Comment on the stereotying of Adivasis in mainstream society and the different ways in which this occurs. 8) Comment on the significance of the way Janu concludes the narrative.

1.10 SUGGESTED READINGS Kumar, Raj. Dalit Personal Narratives: Reading Caste, Nation and Identity, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010. Print Pillai, Meena T. “The English Speaking Gendered Subaltern: Sales Tags for Postcoolonial”. JSL, Spring, 2011. P. 16 -24. Print. Thomas, Tom. “A Green Postcolonial Reading of Kocharethi and Mother Forest”. In Voice and Memory:Indigenous Imagination and Expression, ed. G.N. Devy et al. 224 – 233. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2011. Print. 18 Mother Forest: The UNIT 2 KOCHARETHI: THE ARAYA Unfinished Story of C.K. Janu WOMAN — BACKGROUND TO THE TEXT AND CONTEXT

Structure 2.0 Objectives 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Key questions 2.3 How to Study this Study Material? 2.4 Background to Tribal Literature 2.5 The Author: Narayan 2.6 The Novel: Kocharethi The Araya Woman 2.7 Let Us Sum Up 2.8 Glossary 2.9 Questions 2.10 Suggested Readings

2.0 OBJECTIVES

The aim of this unit is to put the Novel Kocharethi: The Araya Woman in the social context. It also aims at providing a background to the novel by giving a profile of the writer and the situation he confronted as he wrote the novel. This background knowledge will help you to understand and appreciate the novel properly.

2.1 INTRODUCTION

The novel Kocharethi:The Araya Woman was written first in Malayalam and then translated into English. It is written by an adivasi writer called Narayan and translated into English by Catherine Thankamma. The noted writer Mahasweta Devi has appropriately remarked that, “ Kocharethi, one of the first tribal novels, is a remarkable work ….” One needs to understand subjects like the meaning of Kocharethi, why it is called a tribal novel, who are Araya people and who is Narayan and why he wrote this novel.

2.2 KEY QUESTIONS i) What do you understand by the term “first tribal novel”? ii) What does the word Kocharethi mean? It is a Malayalam word. Try to find out from someone who knows Malayalam.

2.3 HOW TO STUDY THIS STUDY MATERIAL?

This material will provide you with some background knowledge about the context, the writer and the novel. Since the novel is based on a tribal community in Kerala, you need to gather information about certain concepts and practices related to the tribe. Moreover, using hints and topics from this unit you need to gather information 19 Fiction and Autobiography about tribal literature, the writer and the novel. This will contribute to your appreciation of the book.

2.4 BACKGROUND TO TRIBAL LITERATURE

As you have noticed in the previous section, Mahasweta Devi calls Narayan’s Kocharethi as “one of the first tribal novels”. Since the novel is part of the emerging body of Tribal literature, it is worth understanding the concept of tribal literature at this point. Tribal writings can be divided into two forms: Oral Narratives and Written Narratives.

The tribals have a rich oral literature in the forms of songs, tales, and riddles. Though these are older than the written literature of mainstream tradition, they have been given a lower status than the written word, something we many ponder about but they have influenced the written word to a great extent. Now-a-days, the tribal songs and tales come to us in the form of translation. A number of writers and compilers have gathered these oral forms and translated them into Indian languages and into English. Apart from the theme of protest, other aspects of the life of the tribals too are reflected in these narratives. Their unwritten literature has songs about love, ritual, joy and sorrow. They are sung to the accompaniment of musical instruments and are a clear indication of their celebratory instinct. They also show that tribal life is vibrant.

The genre ‘written tribal narrative’ is not narrow; indeed its horizon is quite large. It aims at self-representation, and the search for tribal identity or ‘adivasiness.’ gets a boost from it. Through this writing, the tribal writers try to demolish the perception of the non-tribal writer that adivasi culture is backward, uninvolved and superstitious. Written tribal narratives are the result of modern education and social consciousness. Like Dalit literature, Tribal literature is also alive to reality and calls for social change since it lays bare the hidden strictures of struggle the community went through. Waharu Sonawane, the noted tribal literary activist outlined the characteristics of tribal literature in his Presidential Address to the Fifth Adivasi Sahitya Sammelan held at Palghar in Maharastra in December 1990. He declared that tribal literature has a “sense of movement and is a step towards social action. It has grown out of consciousness and awareness, and it critiques society”(20). This may inspire the contemporary activist to take cue from such accounts and take the process of development further still.

Apart from the writings of educated tribal writers who have started writing about their own experiences in the form of stories, novels, autobiographies, and poems, there are magazines in different tribal as well as recognized Indian languages that provide tribal writers a platform to express themselves. Magazines like Budhan, Dhol (Drum), Sirjan (Creativity), Haryar Sakam (Green Leaf), and Alari (Divine Light) are a few examples. Tribal writers who have made a name for themselves and committed themselves to writing are—Laxman Gaikwad, Laxman Mane, Kishore Shantabai Kale (from Maharastra), Mangal Ch. Soren, Sarada Prasad Kisku, Ramdas Majhi Tudu, (from Chotanagpur), Lummer Dai, Rongbong Terang, Easterine Iralu (from the North-East), among others. In order to include the writings of tribal writers, Ramanika Gupta the editor of Yudh Rat Aam Admi (The Ever-Struggling Common man) has recently brought out a special issue of the journal on the tribal theme in two volumes. These volumes, titled Adivasi Swar Aur Nai Shatabdi (Adivasi Voice and the New Century) contain poems, folklore, short stories, and plays. The 20 volumes have fourteen short stories and the abstracts of two novels written in different Kocharethi: The Araya Indian languages and translated into Hindi. These writers respond to the social Women – Background to the Text and Context order which has been exploitative in nature. Their writings deal with social awakening and social consciousness. The focus is intimately related to social reality, and is not imaginary or entertainment-oriented. It deals with the struggle for survival, daily problems, and the hopes and aspirations of the tribal people.

2.5 THE AUTHOR: NARAYAN

While reading on tribal literature, you might have observed that the aim of tribal writer is to set the representation of their people right and to establish self representation or to bring the sense of being an adivasi into the world of imaginative writing. The novelist Narayan also had the same aim when he wrote the novel in his language ¯ Malayalam.

Narayan comes from a very humble background. He was born in Idduki district of Kerala in 1940. After completing Matriculation he worked in the Postal Department. He has published five novels and two collections of short stories. He has been an articulate tribal activist. This shows itself in the description Narayan gives in his fiction.

He worked as a clerk when he wrote and published the novel -Kocharethi. He wrote this novel as he and his friends were not happy about the account of his people in texts written by the mainstream writers. In an interview to Thankamma he says, “A few of us were sitting together, talking and discussing related matter. I said why not write our version? They said it was a good idea. I began to write the novel drawing on my childhood memories, my grandfather’s stories, and the rituals that he performed. The title came much later”(209).

He wrote this novel and requested a friend to help with its publication. That friend kept the manuscript for five years and forgot about it. Then on the advice of another friend he wrote to D.C Books with a request to publish his manuscript. It took some time but they published the novel in Malayalam. When it was published, it was received well in certain quarters. Some did not like it and commented he was unaware of “the basics of writing.” But many accepted it and appreciated it. The novel received many awards including Thoppil Ravi Foundation Award, Abu Dhabi Shakti Award and Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award. The novel has been appreciated by many great writers including Ayyappa Panickker and Mahasveta Devi. This goes to show that the novel contained a number of authentic details, about his community missing in the contemporary mainstream writing.

2.6 THE NOVEL: KOCHARETHI THE ARAYA WOMAN

Narayan’s Kocharethi is the first tribal novel of South India. There are novels written by tribal writers and are available in the North East India and in Maharashtra but in Southern India. Yet, Kocharethi is the first novel to be written by a tribal writer in the region to which he belongs. The novel is based on the Malayarayar tribe in Kerala, their history and struggles in life, their myths, rituals, social customs and belief systems. The writer draws heavily from their oral traditions and evokes nature and spirit of the tribe imagined as present in the imagination of the tribe. . Translated by Catherine Thankamma and introduced by G.S. Jayshree, the novel 21 Fiction and Autobiography has been published in 2011. The year the novel was published in Malayalam, it received three prestigious awards. G.S.Jayshree has rightly pointed out in her introduction saying that “It gives us an insider’s view as Narayan chronicles the changes that take place in the lives of the inhabitants of the foothills of the Western Ghats as they negotiate the interests of modernity”( XVI). It is worth exploring Narayan’s strategies of making the novel an expression of an insider. Before coming to these strategies, we can note that Narayan as an adivasi writer is not happy with the representation of his people by many non-tribal writers in their writings. As pointed out by him below, this led him to write the novel. He states the following in the interview which is appended to the novel:

One reason was the growing realization that creative writing was in the hands of the elite upper classes; the communities portrayed in those writings belonged to these classes. The adivasi when represented appeared as a monochromatic figure; like the rakshasan or nishacharan of mythological stories. It was always a negative picture; he was depicted as apathetic, unable to react to injustice or worse, inhuman or sub-human, vicious. …He existed for the sole purpose of being defeated and/or killed by the forces of virtue and goodness, represented by the upper castes. The tribal was the asuran/the kaattaalan (demon). In Hindu mythology the demons are variously called rakshasan, nishacharan, asuran and the connotative significance of being uncultured who had to be killed by a diety wielding a shoolam (trident) or a savarna (uppercaste) of divine parentage. There were a few of us who wanted to resist such biased representation. We wanted to tell the world that we have our own distinctive way of life, our own value system. (Narayan 208-209 )

As mentioned above, the novel has been held in high esteem by many writers and critics like Ayyappa Paniker and Mahasweta Devi. Mahasweta Devi regards it as “a remarkable work.”Catherine Thankamma who has translated it into English calls it “a landmark piece.”

The novel is written by a tribal writer about his community and its experiences. The community in question is called the Malayarayar community that lives in the Western Ghats of Kerala state.

Narayan belongs to this community. The word Mala in Malayalam means hills and “arayar” might have been derived from the word arachar meaning ruler. Perhaps this community had control over the hills once. In other words, they were the rulers of the hills. The novel deals with their life and experience in the changing socio- economic and cultural contexts. The perspectives of the tribals on land have been changing too. Earlier they had a different kind of relationship with land whereas now, it is part of the process of change. The community has also been negotiating with modernity. Another aspect of the novel is that it tells us about the way identity is formed— Adivasi identity formation. Narayan makes a conscious attempt to show his community as a distinct community with distinct form of cultural practices. He elaborately narrates the rituals, myths and world view of the people. The novel also deals with issues related to tribal woman, sexuality, marriage, pregnancy, child birth and so on. Narayan also makes an attempt to reconstruct the past. These are some of the issues one can explore in the novel. When we have a close reading of the novel, we should try to trace these issues hidden in the text. We may also come across other questions that are not pointed out here. 22 Kocharethi: The Araya 2.7 LET US SUM UP Women – Background to the Text and Context i) The aim of the unit is to put Narayan’s novel- Kocharethi in context. ii) Narayan’s Kocharethi is one of the first tribal novels. It not only describes the about life and experience of the Arayara people but deals with several issues. iii) The novel has to be studied in the larger context of tribal literature.

2.8 GLOSSARY i) Kocharethi refers to Arayar woman. Arayar is name of a tribe in Kerala. ii) Araya: Araya is the name of a tribe in Kerala. The term seems to have come from the word ‘arachar’ ruler. It refers to the Arayara tribe who had control over the hill. iii) Tribal literature: Literature written by the tribal writers where experiences of the tribal people are represented. iv) Representation: depiction.

2.9 QUESTIONS 1) What do you understand by the term tribal literature? What is its relevance? 2) What made Narayan write the novel? 3) Why is the novel Kocharethi significant? 4) Have you read any other novel by a tribal writer? How do you compare that with the novel Kocharethi?

2.10 SUGGESTED READINGS

Narayan. Kocharethi: The Araya woman. Trans.Catherine Thankamma.Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011...... ”We Want to be understood... and allowed to live with dignity: An Interview with Narayan.”Kocharethi: Oxford University Press, 2011. Jayasree, G.S.” Introduction.” Kocharethi: The Araya Woman. Delhi:Oxford University Press, 2011. Mahanand, Anand. Tribal Literature in India. Hyderabad; CIEFL, 2005...... Loc(k)al Knowledge: Perceptions on Dalit, Tribal and Folk Literature. Delhi: Authors press, 2013. Devy, G.N. Painted Words: An Anthology of Tribal Literature. Delhi:Penguin. Gupta, Ramanika. Indigenous Writers of India. Delhi:Ramanika Foundation Yadav, Kumkum. Tribals in Indian Narratives. Shimla:IIAS. Mahapatra, Sitakanta. Modernization and Ritual: Identity and Social Change in Santhal Society. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987. Sonawane, Waharu. “Literature and Adivasi Culture.” Lokayan Bulletin 105/ 6.(1994)11-20. 23 Fiction and Autobiography UNIT 3 KOCHARETHI: THE ARAYA WOMAN— A STUDY OF THE NOVEL

Structure 3.0 Objectives 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Key questions 3.3 How to Study this Study Material? 3.4 Background to Writing of the Novel 3.5 Kocharethi: The Araya Woman 3.6 Kocharethi The Araya Woman: Some Issues 3.7 Let Us Sum Up 3.8 Glossary 3.9 Questions 3.10 Suggested Readings

3.0 OBJECTIVES

The objectives of this unit are to facilitate students to understand and interpret the novel Kocharethi and foreground different issues highlighted by the writer. The unit will also help the students to relate this novel to other narratives by tribal writers.

3.1 INTRODUCTION

In the previous unit we learned about Narayanan and his intention of writing this novel. We also had a glimpse of the context in which he wrote the novel in which it has to be studied. By now we have some idea about the theme and issues the novel deals with. As the story goes, Ittyadi, the old man has a beautiful daughter called Kunjipennu. There is a boy called Narayan who claims that Kunjipennu is his murapennu or maternal uncle’s daughter, and for this reason, he should marry her. But Kunjipennu does not like him. Even her brother thinks that Narayan is just a distant relative and she should not be given in marriage to him. On the other hand, Kochuraman, a handsome boy from another village loves her and Kunjipennu also loves him. The novel is at one level about their love story and how they struggle and set up their family and lead life in their hills and fields. But this novel has many other issues to study. This is a complex novel and has many dimensions. We need to keep our eyes open to multilevel interpretations of the text.

3.2 KEY QUESTIONS

As you go through this novel, consider the following questions. i) What are the major issues and concerns the novelist wants to portray? ii) How does he represent the life, culture and customs of his community and 24 what does he aim to communicate through these? iii) Compare some of these representations with that of Gopinath Mohanty’s Paraja Kocharethi: The Araya or Laxman Gaikwad’s The Branded, and see how Kocharethi asserts itself vis- Woman – A Study of the Novel à-vis them.

3.3 HOW TO STUDY THIS STUDY MATERIAL?

We assume that you have read the previous unit. It will help you to give a background to the novel and the writer. You also must have read about tribal literature in India. After reading all these, you must read the novel very closely. The Author’s notes, ’Translator’s note, the Introduction, and the Interview with the Author will be very helpful. With their help, you will be able to gain a comprehensive view of the text in question.

3.4 BACKGROUND TO WRITING OF THE NOVEL

As we have already discussed, Narayan was not happy with the representations of people in texts as they are negatively portrayed in the form of vanaras, rakshasaha and so on. Hence he wanted to write a novel that would include positive values and view points of his people. He states this in his Interview. The title of the interview “We want to be understood … and allowed to live with dignity” spells out his intentions. One is that tribal people are not understood as they should be. Since they are not understood, they are misrepresented. As a corollary, they also lose sympathy of the reading community. There are many positive aspects of tribal life that are ignored and overlooked by writer who wrote about them. Narayanan wants to highlight those points by describing them in detail and from an insider’s point of view. Secondly, tribal people have been taken advantage of and abused by different agencies. He wants them to let them allow for self-determination and to let them live a life of respect and dignity.

3.5 KOCHARETHI: THE ARAYA WOMAN The novel revolves around a tribal family. As the story goes, Ittyadi, the old man has a beautiful daughter called Kunjipennu. There is boy called Narayan who claims that Kunjipennu is his murapennu or maternal uncle’s daughter. Hence he should marry her. But Kunjipennu does not like her. Even her brother thinks that Narayanan is just a distant relative and she should not be given in marriage to him. On the other hand, Kochuraman , a handsome boy from another village loves her and Kunkipennu also loves him. The novel is at one level about their love story and how they struggle and set up their family and lead life in their hills and fields. Though the novel narrates story of an Araya family, it is about the entire community with its different aspects in a changing socio-economic and cultural contexts. From the story we understand that the novelist is depicting a society that has been undergoing transition with the advent of modernity. One of the examples is the decision to marry Kunjipennu to Kochraman breaking social customs. The sub-title of the novel is The Araya woman. Does the writer give enough space to woman issues in the novel? Is the representation of women adequate specially when represented by a male writer? We need to explore some of these aspects. Other issues are description of rituals, social customs, etc. We need to see what purpose they serve in the novel. Such a novel may serve a two – fold purpose: it may tell us about the conditions in which the characters are situated and also let us have a view of the emotions that get generated as the plot gains momentum. 25 Fiction and Autobiography 3.6 KOCHARETHI THE ARAYA WOMAN: SOME ISSUES

It is worth exploring Narayan’s strategies of making the novel an expression of an insider. Before coming to these strategies, we can note that Narayan as an adivasi writer is not happy with the representation of his people by many non-tribal writers in their writings. As pointed out by him below, this led him to write the novel. He states this in the interview which is appended to the novel:

One reason was the growing realization that creative writing was in the hands of the elite upper classes; the communities portrayed in those writings belonged to these classes. The adivasi when represented, appeared as a monochromatic figure; like the rakshasan or nishacharan of mythological stories. It was always a negative picture; he was depicted as apathetic, unable to react to injustice or worse, inhuman or sub-human, vicious. …He existed for the sole purpose of being defeated and/or killed by the forces of virtue and goodness, represented by the upper castes. The tribal was the asuran/the kaattaalan(demon). In Hindu mythology the demons are va riously called rakshasan, nishacharan, asuran and the connotative significance of being uncultured who had to be killed by a diety wielding a shoolam (trident) or a savarna (uppercaste) of divine parentage. There were a few of us who wanted to resist such biased representation. We wanted to tell the world that we have our own distinctive way of life, our own value system. (Narayan 208-209)

Narayan has unique strategies to present to the world that the adivasi have a distinct way of life which may not be experienced by a non-tribal writer. Narayanan’s writing has been deeply influenced by his lived experience and memories. He says, “I began to write the novel, drawing on my childhood memories, my grand father’s stories and the rituals that he performed…”(XVII). A writer coming from a non-tribal background (even with his/her years of experience) will not have access to the rites and rituals and their conventions. At the same time, the author an insider is able to describe them so authentically and comfortably. The detailed description of the harvest ceremony called peranirekkal can be taken as an example. We can note the way Narayan describes the processes of the ritual: Kochuraman went with Kunjadichan to the ironsmith to get the scythes sharpened. Kunjipennu and Paapi smeared the floor—the veranda and the inside of the house—with a mixture of cow dung and powdered coal. They swept and mopped the house clean, preparation for filling the house with grain—peranirkkal. Ittyadi bathed and appeared in his wet clothes. Son, daughter, and son-in- law accompanied him to the field. Paapi waited in the house. It was her house that was to be filled. At the time of sowing, Ittyadi himself had consecrated the seeds and prepared the land for sowing. Now the grain had matured and was ready to be harvested. Ittyadi prayed to the goddess of the harvest, to the sun, and the moon, and then turned to face the east. Gripping a bunch of shoots, he murmured a prayer, begging forgiveness for the act of violence. He then cut it and tied it into a bundle. He prepared a few more bundles, then told the youngsters to carry on with the work and moved towards the 26 house, carrying a bundle on his head. His daughter -in-law waited inside the house. The tapering tip of a banana Kocharethi: The Araya leaf and been placed on the floor near a lighted lamp. Ittyadi placed the Woman – A Study of the Novel bundle on the leaf, smeared sandal paste over it, and hung it up, signaling that the house was well stocked. (26-27)

As a person belonging to an identical culture, Narayan’s descriptions give a sense of precision and focus when we read the sequence, manner and means involved in the rituals. For example, appearing in wet clothes for the ritual, praying the goddess of the harvest, then to the sun and the moon (sequence) are rituals known to a person who is part of the same culture. We find many such descriptions of rituals in the novel which prove Narayan’s interior local knowledge.

Apart from description of rituals, the use of local idioms particularly words typical to the people and proverbs helps him to make his representation distinctly that of a local culture. There are about fifty seven such words. Words like kangani (a tribal who holds a position of authority), kalai (land where paddy is grown), ezhuku (a tree) are just a few examples. Narayan also brings in description of different types of belief systems practiced by the tribals. For instance, he points out that hearing the cry of a particular bird is an indication that the woman at home is going to have her period. As the novelist states: “It was here that she had first met Kochuraman. She was about to remind him of it… suddenly she heard the shrill ‘thirdi..thirdi..ree ree ree..’ cry of the theendari [as mentioned in the footnote Its cry is believed to precede the start of the period; hence considered inauspicious.]” (56). We also find a number of proverbs. For instance, “It’s when the hunt grows intense that the dog wants to piss!”(56). The rough meaning of this may be that when it is required to perform an important job, one is busy in a mundane thing. This is how he wants to make the novel distinct by drawing materials from his oral traditions.

Apart from the rituals and belief systems, he also describes the tricks and trade of the tribals livelihood which are very distinct to their culture. For instance, when a girl asks Kochiri how he used to catch fish and how it should be done: In answer, the author says “Fish tumble on to the sieve in droves. It’s wonderful. When I was young we once went as a group, some eight or nine of us. We went to the northern stream, mixed nanju, and built a bund, filling the gaps with whatever rubbish available” (95)

Narrating the local history might be another strategy of the writer. Through this he tries to make the past alive and integrated with the present. The novelist narrates: “These hills were once part of the kingdom of the Karrikottir kings. The kings and Arayars were on cordial terms. The Arayars had title like “Korambanand “Kaanikkaram.” There were many Arayar in the king’s army. They were strong and sturdy people by birth. The chief of the group was called by the name Thala Arayan. Then during the reign of a week king they quarreled. To safeguard his kingdom and throne, the king brought Pillas from Nanjinadu in Venad. The Pillas were cunning strategists. The Arayar lost the battle” (118).For the novelist, who is part of such a history, it comes easily to present a part of it and create with its help the intricacies of life that history possessed.

Narayan’s portrayal of his inner experience can also be seen as a strategy. The experience is unique as it is specific to the Arayars as they have lived experience of ill-treatment and oppression. The experience of ill-treatment can be one such example. They are ill-treated by the Christian and Muslim traders. Chetty alias Pappan Pilla’s behavior is a case in point. He manhandles a tribal old man who will 27 Fiction and Autobiography be elder than his father. As the novelist narrates: “Chetty raised his hand to strike but the old man deftly parried the blow. He then took one long swig of the toddy in his mug. The people in the room laughed scornfully. Chetty felt his skin burn. He took hold of plate and threw the dregs …” (109).They are also ill-treated by the police.

The experience and awareness of the writer also inspire him to give a solution to his people. In the novel the solution seems to be education. We see that Parvathi gets education and gets a good position. In this sense the novelist not only wants the tribals to re-visit their past and link with the present, but also asks them to look into future. As a member of the community and as an elder who has the experience and vision for the people he is entitled to do this which may not be possible for a non- tribal a writer.

Coming back to the strategies of representation, one can notice a difference in representation of women in this particular novel. In contrast to Mohanty’s description of tribal women as people of easy virtue and therefore succumbing easily, Narayan’s women characters are strong and assertive. In this novel Kunjipennu resists Narayanan’s advances. “Narayanan felt that just then in her anger, she looked like kali. He paused, angry and embarrassed, but the sharp scythe held him back. An Amethi girl would not hesitate to attack the man who tried to molest her: she would even slit her own throat to thwart him”(11). We can conclude that the novelist is also a responsible member of his community and presents his women with a lot of responsibility and understanding which other non-tribal writers lacked; they viewed tribal women from an unrealistic angle.

3.7 LET US SUM UP i) Kocharethi is one of the first tribal novels (written by a tribal writer about a tribal community). ii) The novel is the story of the Ayarayara community in Kerala. iii) The story is about a family, it deals with issues confronting an entire community iv) The novel also deals with many issues such as representation, land, environment, gender, social and cultural practices, inter-community relationships, among others.

3.8 GLOSSARY i) murapennu ¯ maternal uncle’s daughter ii) pernirkkal ¯ a house with grain iii) Kangani¯ a tribal who holds some position. iv) Ezhuku ¯ a tree

3.9 QUESTIONS 1) What do you understand by the title of the novel? 2) What are the issues that you find in the novel? 3) How is Narayan’s representation that of other writers? 4) How does Narayan strike a balance between the craft of fiction with depiction 28 of social and cultural issues? 5) Do you think that the novel addresses a problem of a tribal group and has no Kocharethi: The Araya relevance to other groups in other parts of India? Discuss. Woman – A Study of the Novel

3.10 SUGGESTED READINGS

Narayan. Kocharethi: The Araya Woman. Trans. Catherine Thankamma. Delhi:OUP,2011. Devy, G.N. Painted Words: An Anthology of Tribal Literature. Delhi: Penguin. Gupta, Ramanika. Indigenous Writers of India. Delhi: Ramanika Foundation. Mahanand, Anand. Representations of Tribal India in Fiction. Lambet Academic Publishers, 2010. —- Tribal Literature in India. Hyderabad: CIEFL, 2005. Yadav, Kumkum. Tribals in Indian Narratives. Shimla: IIAS,2003.

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