10/3/2007

scene I: tribal farming

 

The road rose to meet us, the wind was at our back, the sun was shining on our faces and the rains were falling softly on the fields. The Irish blessing my mother had read to me as a child seemed appropriate even in Indian coffee country. Thanks to those wacky colonial Brits I've been able to drink espresso on Connaught Place in Delhi and eat curry in a pub in Dublin. Somehow life ties it all together. We continued our road through the strangeways of Wyanad District driving around massive craters and through washed out crossroads. The rains were falling softly, especially for the beginning of the southwest monsoon. The locals wore lungis, which lets the wind blow freely, if you know what I mean, particularly useful in humid climates. They can also be folded up to walk through the flooded fields during the monsoon. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I stuck with jeans and an umbrella. We grabbed our umbrellas once we'd reached the end of the drivable road and hiked about two miles through the jungle to get to a cluster of huts which housed tribal farmers. These farmers each held about an acre of land and sold their produce collectively. In addition to coffee, they grow jackfruit, pepper vines and vanilla beans. They are truly subsistence farmers subject to the vagaries of both weather and market. There is even a threat of rampaging wild elephants lurking just across the dirt path in the Wyanad National Park. If the jackfruit is not picked quickly enough, the elephants emerge for their tithe, trampling other cash crops in the process. How amazing that in a densely populated country like India, there would still be wild elephants.

The elephant in the room for these tribal villagers is the issue of landownership. When India gained its’ post-colonial independence, many Indians from the plains made their way up into Wyanad and claimed land that the tribal people had been farming for centuries. The tribals didn’t understand what was at stake as they had lived communally without regard to boundaries. Sounds like the Oklahoma Sooners. On your marks…

The village huts were set down below the red dirt path. We were fully in the jungle now. Primitive is a good way to describe both the way of living and culitivating crops. The huts were made of the same mud that paved the path and in which the plantlife grew. Everything sprang from the soil. It was the first time I had seen a coffee tree up close. The trees had craggy trunks, somewhat reminiscent of old-growth vines, and fern-like leaves spreading horizontally in every direction. Clusters of coffee cherries grew along the branches. It was the beginning of a growth period for the coffee but you could see some of the black rot in the coffee cherries where there should have been only green. "If the been ain’t green it won’t taste clean." Free attorney/roaster advice. The forest canopy was dense with extremely tall trees, mid-range trees which supported pepper and vanilla vines and the lower range coffee and fruit trees. Splotches of brightly-colored flowers grew haphazardly as in an abstract painting. In a way it felt like paradise. Lost in the forest were the women of the village who were doing all the work on the hillsides. A group of children had just returned from school and were running in and out of one of the abodes looking at this strange group of men who had appeared. As quickly as we appeared, we disappeared.

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