by Narendra 06-11-2012

Of the 237 villages in 4000 Kms of uncharted and forbidding terrain of Abujhmad, Sonepur is the only non-Madia village, and the only one with a primary school, a rarely used Forest Department Rest House, and settled agriculture. It is the only village with a sense of ’work and occupation’. Apart from the predominant Halba* Adivasis, there is a Panka** Adivasi family. Ironically, the lone Jogi*** family owns the only shop in Abujhmad, (selling beedis****, hair ribbons, red plastic combs and occasionally palm jaggery). It is the only one with mud houses and country tiles; Madia villages comprise of bamboo and thatch huts. Whereas the average population of a Madia village is about 20, with 1000 persons Sonepur is the largest in Abujhmad. It is the only village with a non-Madia name. By local standards it is a modern village.

The school is a two-roomed bricks and cement structure. It is about the only structure in the village that leaks. Hence, summer holidays are followed by undeclared stretches of monsoon holidays. Mere door and window frames do not seem to suggest much purpose but they mark their presence. Verma guru***** ji is the head master while Uikey ji is the teacher; the latter is from another part of Bastar and is usually on leave. The peeling plaster class rooms are bereft of installations as blackboards, pictures, maps, charts, and other samples; nor are there any sports activities or drawing contests. In any case, the children do not look upon themselves as students, just children. There is a swaying bamboo flagpole announcing the Republic of India. With the flag ruined by termites and other vermin the pole is, much to the consternation of grandmothers, put to good use by children. The large, unkempt compound with dung heaps, anthills, twigs and strewn leaves, has a fencing with as many openings as humans, cattle, swine and dogs.

Each morning Verma guru ji runs down the village, stick in hand, forcing children to school. Lucky ones swim across the river to the dense forest to trap birds for dinner.

While Verma ji screams out the tables the children yell them back; or invectives while chasing dogs and cats in the classroom or compound. Grandmothers come practically every day for babysitting toddlers who keep screaming till brought here. Goats make it through broken windows, while cows access through the fencing; there is a hand pump that works only for about half hour before the water runs out. Children frequently climb atop each other to replace the twigs and grass that keeps falling from the nest in the wall. Amidst all the ’pandemonium’ Verma ji is trying to teach in high pitch but needs a smoke frequently. The atmosphere is high excitement, enthusiasm and almost celebration, rarely a dull or dreary moment. Old and young, animals and birds, all together; none intruding as such on the other. It pitches highest when rice and porridge are cooked from the monthly stock occasionally sent in by District Education Office at Narayanpur, some thirty Kms away.

The school is the most visible and prominent feature of outside presence in the village. With almost the entire social and cultural space usurped by the State, it is about the only one left in whose conduct and running the State is compelled to have a direct and daily interface with the community , where the community almost always manages to have an upper hand. Purported to be an extension of the State, it is more of the community, their culture, values, beliefs, aspirations and worldview, their genius; as also their hills, lands, forest, memory and visions. It signifies about the last and strongest resistance by people because it involves some basic truths and impulses inherent in their urge for freedom, autonomy and nurturance as against those of the ‘scientific, managerial and technocratic’ temper. There is a daily clash as well as reconciliation. Were the ‘chaos’ that abounds not been there, the school would have run with ‘efficiency and order’. Unlike the Rest House the cadence of the school is that of the village itself. That certain tentativeness one finds in the school is the same tentativeness one sees in the design and structure of a mud house or its large fenced enclosure, of a forest trail, in physical postures, the course of a stream, the apparent disorderliness of vegetation, value and worth of everyday conversations, the laughter and playfulness, the intense engagement with one that is shared by all animate and inanimate: and much more, so finely intertwined with the tentativeness of life, and the ethics and world views that emerge there from.

Kamlu Varda, 30, had done well for a Madia adivasi. He had spent a few years teaching at Dhurbeda, about 15 Kms from Sonepur as the crow flies. In 2011 he was shot dead for being of the "gunda giroh" (gangsters). Kamlu’s fellow teachers insist he "was killed because he dared to defy them." They recount Kamlu objecting when the "dada log" (Maoists) turned up at school and took away rice meant for the children. Already in 2007, he had been warned for objecting to using the school compound for executions.

Abujhmad has been a terrain of primaeval silence. Rituals of celebration, healing and correction have been enacted since the beginning. That silence has been modulated, it is no longer its own silence. Unlike the school of 1982, it is in the image of the Rest House; un-shared presence, cold, aloof, without cadence; and murderous.