Gujjar Diwali
-By Vivek Menon, Executive Director, WTI

It was an unplanned walk but we should have been better prepared. It was three thirty on the afternoon of Diwali. The forests of Salchaur on the outskirts of Sonanadi Wildlife Sanctuary were unusually silent.  A couple of kaleej scratched prematurely by the trail, a serpent crested eagle cried in the distance. Other than that life seemed to be on holiday. The forest post at Salchaur was equally locked and forbidding. The guards must have walked the four kilometres to the main road and taken a passing bus or passenger jeep to their families for the festivities. Ashok and I had wanted a leopard before bursting crackers with the waiting family and had sought out our quarry four nallahs up Salchaur. The area was promising. Broken leopard terrain if there ever was one, Sal stands broken up by the raus of Sonanadi into neat packets of broadleaved forest. The lantana provided undercover, not too dense to stop the regeneration of forest trees but enough to have a gaggle of bulbuls, babblers and flycatchers in its confines. Normally. Today the langurs were silent, the barking deer did not bark and the birds were away. The only sound was that of the flowing water. And the squelching of our tyres as Amit found the only boulder on our path to ground our jeep.

“Reverse, reverse” I cried, for the sound was ominous to the trained ears. He put it into first gear and went forward instead, the differential was now well on board the boulder with much scraping and screeching. The wheels were spinning uselessly in the cold Sonanadi. He could not have done a better landing if it were planned to alight on that one boulder and we were a hovercraft. The two drivers (for Ashok Jr had also come along for the pleasures of leopard spotting), then tried their hand at pushing the jeep out of the quagmire. Shamelessly, I waded out and tried bird watching not as much as to avoid getting my pants wet but to underline the futility of their exercise. Ten minutes later the trio joined me. Ashok had given them sage advice. We had to get out of the forest before it got dark. There was little point in wasting sunlight. At four, the winter skies were already darkening and we were two kilometres from the chowki, six kilometres from the main road and eleven kilometres from home.

It is mandatory to have a torch in the jeep when you set out into a forest. We had forgotten the golden rule and it was clear that at our pace, for Ashok was 75 and our two companions were city drivers unused to the forest, we would take at least two or three hours to get out of the forest. There were six stream crossings, the path was largely plain but with a few crests and troughs and the forest was darker by the minutes. Amit was put to aid Ashok. Our equipment was borne by Ashok Jr. I set off at a brisk pace at least a couple of hundred metres ahead of the trio. There were two reasons for this. One was to set the pace. I knew instinctively that every minute was precious. The other was to check the trail out. I did not want the only thing that I feared in the forest to materialise at a turning. It was also the thing that I most loved. But at dusk, with Ashok not nimble in foot, the last thing I wanted was a lone tusker waiting for us at a blind corner.

All the wildlife that we had missed on the way up now started materialising on the road. As I moved into a patch of tall grass, a sounder of boar burst across my path making me fend them off with my long lens. Luckily they were more interested in getting off the path than on it. The kaleej that we passed were now frantically gathering their evening repast of forest grub. The hens clucked noisily up the slope and as I focused in the dim evening light for what was the last wildlife shot of the evening, the male shot through the clearing, silver crest astray, black body heaving across the slope, a glistening eye fixed on me as he herded his harem across the path. In the distance I heard elephants trumpet. There were more than one animal calling. This was a herd, not a tusker and not very close but the sound seemed to hurry the sun across the horizon. In a moment it was dark. A nightjar swooshed out of the bush and slapped me lightly across the face. I heard Gujjar dogs barking in the distance and then we were enveloped in total darkness and all our incipient fears.

We had actually done quite well and I estimated we were but a kilometre from the main road. We had already crossed five of the six streams but the big one was yet to come. The smaller ones could all be crossed by skipping across boulders laid by the Gujjars. Next door, in Sonanadi and the rest of Corbett National Park, Gujjars were relocated. Here in the reserve forest, they still had their deras. We had been part of helping their relocation in Rajaji- the adjoining Uttaranchal protected area and had always been at the fringes of a fierce political storm about the merits of relocation. Social activists protested moving out a nomadic forest dwelling tribe, wildlife activists roared louder than the tiger about core wildlife areas being sacrosanct and in the middle conservationists like us were seeking a via media. The government aided relocation in its earlier days was pathetic. But then it became better and WTI provided soft hand assistance to those who wanted to come out of the park. Not into cities, I hasten to add before those who care for Gujjars get me wrong. But into peripheral forests that was not part of India’s five percent of protected landmass. This evening a chance nocturnal encounter was to provide a clear reasoning to our efforts.

I could smell the Gujjar dera now. Of souring milk and unwashed buffaloes. The dogs were going berserk. This was useful in finding our way.  I was also sure that no tusker would be on the path with the dogs at one end. “Koi hai” Ashok cried out, that ubiquitous northern Indian cry that heralds the arrival of someone infinitely more important into humbler dwellings. “Koi nahin hai” trilled a female voice enigmatically “Sab gaye huen hain” They have all gone. They, the men folk. “How can she say there is no one when she is there” asked Ashok grumpily “Can’t she give us a charopoy to sit and wait?” He was probably close to giving up. He had walked three hours on the trot keeping up the morale of the two city lads who were quieter than the forest on the way up. We walked on. The large stream got us out of our shoes. The pants were hitched and a stout sal sapling broken off for Ashok to wade through. It was simpler than we expected and the only thing we disturbed was a plumbeous redstart that flashed deep orange in the gloam. We were now clambering up the last slope where a few weeks ago Ashok had seen a pair of jackals herd otters onto the bank. Unlikely hunters and unlikely prey. Today, we felt more like prey. In a minute, there was a rustle in the undergrowth and as we bunched together waiting for the unseen predator to lunge forth, were surrounded by a group of Gujjar men.

File photo: Gujjar men in Rajaji National Park

The lambardar rubbed his red short beard thoughtfully. He recognised Ashok whose house was a few kilometres up the road. It took us a few minutes to tell our tale and from under a bush a motorcycle was produced and he offered to take Ashok and one of the drivers back home. It would take an hour for the driver to get my vehicle back for us. It was a great relief to have Ashok safely out of the forest and for a moment we contemplated continuing our walk, but by then there was no way we could see the path. The Gujjar youth meanwhile were having nothing about our departure. “These are elephant forests, sahib” the leader said; “come and stay at our dera. Wait for your car there. We are not afraid of tigers or leopards here, but the elephant…he can kill.” I could not have agreed more. In a minute bushes were parted and we were taken into another world.

Celebrating Diwali under an impromptu clearance of lantana was a typical Gujjar nomad party. There were seven or eight men. I saw two women at the fire. There were ten or twelve children and as I stretched out on the hastily proffered blanket to sit on, I smelt the buffaloes. Forty four of them stretched out behind me. Two dozen Gujjars, four dozen bovines. The children made their ratios better than the Kiwis and their sheep. “Aap bhi pardesi ho, ham bhi hain,” offered one of them. I had told them I was from Delhi. “We are from Kashmir, our ancestors walked here many years ago”. “And you have not thought of building a house” asked Ashok Jr incredulously “A roof…shelter?” “The sky is our roof” he replied poetically, “and what do we know but to herd buffaloes. Look at our children. No schools to put them in, no hospitals to take them when they go sick and there is no one to take us out of these forests” I had not told them my profession and there was no need to. They were telling me the story of their lives and I wanted to listen. “How much milk do you get from your buffaloes” I asked “Two maybe three litres, sometimes five, but mostly two” Ashok Jr was a mathematician when he did not drive “44 buffaloes into two litres, that is 88 litres a day, 2500 litres a month. Milk retails at 20 rupees a litre …so that makes….” “What rubbish” the Gujjar cut him short. “Do you think all our buffaloes give us milk everyday? Do the males give you milk in your city? Do the calves give you milk or do they take away milk from the cow?” And then there are the old ones. We can’t eat them either for we are vegetarians. And then we have our own children who drink the milk that we get. So we may get ten maybe 20 litres to sell. If there is someone to buy.” Their nomadic lifestyle had undergone many changes since the past. The villagers in the hills stopped them from migrating up, protecting their pastures from the buffaloes. Or they levied heavy taxes. The foresters in the terai harassed them and took bribes for them to cross the forests. “Accha hua sahib” the most voluble of them said “ki chowki main koi nahin tha. Hamse to doodh lete hain, aapse paise lete” “Is that why you want to go out of the forests” I asked as if I did not know much about their history. “No, the world is passing us by,” he said. “We want to progress as well. We want our children to go to school. Our ancestors have made us buffalo herders; our children don’t want this life. They want to go to the cities”

I heard the jeep in the distance. I thought of my kids hunched over their homework and bursting crackers. I looked at their age mates huddled with their buffaloes. I was now absolutely sure that we were on the right track. Those who wanted out should be given a shot at the chaos that we call the civilised world. Education, right to health care, an ability to carve their own destinies rather than be trapped by a nomadic lifestyle that some of my brethren romanticised and others berated. Shoddy rehabilitation is no excuse for not trying it out at all. This was not the Greater Nicobars or the Blue Mountains. We were 250 kilometres from the National Capital Region and surrounded by capitalist lucre and the booming Indian economy, were these sons of a lesser god. As I lit my crackers with the children back at Ashok’s forest home in Dhauntiyal, I smelt their souring milk on my jacket. A different festive night.

Photo: Dr Anil Kumar Singh/ WTI

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