[Editor's note: Kumud Biswas worked for 10 years as an editor, bringing out 30 publications including the 5-volume compilation Rivers of Bengal. He is a
recently retired IAS of the West Bengal cadre,
was a regular contributor to the IAS
Association's journal The Service,
and is writing a memoir. --
c. j. s. wallia]

Bibhutibhusan's Aranyak, unquestionably the greatest epic of the
wilderness in Bengali literature, has a small chapter which narrates the
visit of the storyteller to the king of a lost kingdom. The capital can
boast of no princely palaces or victory towers on a grand scale but
consists of a cluster of modest mud huts in the forest, the mud walls of
only one of which are reinforced with ordinary stones where the king
himself lives. The king is not at home. He has gone to the forest to
tend his cattle. His great-great-grand-daughter, princess Bhanumati, a
girl of some fourteen summers, clad in the short length of a sari and
adorned only with a necklace of the seeds of wild fruits and coloured
stone chips, ushers the visitor in the king's presence. The king is
found to be a very old man approaching his century and seated under a
tree smoking a cheroot of sal leaves. His vision has become dim but his
hearing is still quite good. He receives his guest in a graceful manner
and instructs his grandson to make suitable arrangements for his
entertainment. Having treated him with a meal of wild porcupine meat and
buffalo milk he takes his guest around to show the remains of his
kingdom. According to the tradition of his people the kingdom extended
over a vast area from the foothills of the Himalayas in the north to the
Chotanagpur plateau in the south. For ages they lived in this land in
peace. But when the Mughals came and set up their outpost at Rajmahal
they started to make inroads into these territories. From their forest
fastness armed only with bows and arrows they kept the Mughal hordes at
bay, never allowing them complete sway over their kingdom. At last
whatever was left of that land they lost forever after their defeat in
the battle with the British known as the Santal Rebellion. At that time
the king was in the prime of his youth and had taken part in that
unequal fight. The kingdom is now a mere memory. Its only reminders are
the habitual respect he receives from his people, a couple of caves
which once served them as their fortress and an ancient banyan tree
under whose shadows sleep their glorious dead.

The visitor is an English-educated Bengali Babu from Calcutta.
He has been engaged by an absentee landlord, also a Bengali Babu of
Calcutta, as the manager of a large jungle mahal estate which once
formed a part of the forgotten kingdom. He has been entrusted with the
task of surveying and clearing it for settlement of tenants. The manager
is not impressed by what he has seen. Dobru Panna the king is no more
than a mere tribal chief, uncouth and illiterate, poor and primitive;
his squalid cabin is no better than a hovel or a rabbit hole and
Bhanumati the princess is like any other tribal girl in the bloom of her
youth. However, in the declining light of the westering sun he senses a
solemnity about the burial ground which casts a kind of spell over him.
And in his mind's eye he visualizes a vista of prehistoric times when
the nomadic Aryans were pouring into non-Aryan India through her
north-western mountain passes. The encounter between the original
inhabitants and the newcomers ended in the victory of the latter. While
the victors have chronicled the story of their conquest and expansion of
their domain and culture there is no record of what happened to the
vanquished. Whatever traces of their history exist may be found not in
the handiwork of man like an epic or a Purana nor in the relics of a
stately city or a kingdom but in the primordial things of nature like
the deep dark forests and caves and mountains. The arrogant Aryan in the
pride of his civilization has never felt the urge to find out that
history. Since those ancient times to the present these hapless people
have been neglected and humiliated and kept outside the pale of
civilized society by the Aryans. Acutely aware of his racial superiority
the manager sees himself as a representative of the victors and Dobru
Panna as that of the vanquished.

In prehistoric times racial encounters such as this were not
infrequent, stories of which are not fully known to us because,
according to Darwin, no tradition has been preserved by the present
inhabitants about the ancient monuments and stone implements found in
all parts of the world. With patient and painstaking labours the
anthropologists and antiquarians have sought to reconstruct them on the
available evidence. And the conclusion they have arrived at about the
outcome of such encounters is indeed revealing. In The Descent of Man
Darwin cites a number of cases where some races living in very harsh and
inclement environment have managed to survive and have not become
extinct: "Man can resist conditions which appear extremely unfavourable
to his existence. He has lived long in the extreme regions of the North,
with no wood for his canoes or implements and with only blubber as fuel,
and melted snow as drink. In the southern extremity of America the
Fuegians survive without the protection of clothes, or of any building
worthy to be called a hovel. In South Africa the aborigines wander over
arid plains where dangerous beasts abound. Man can withstand the deadly
influence of the Terai at the foot of the Himalaya and the pestilential
shores of Africa". Whereas "extinction follows chiefly from the
competition of tribe with tribe and race with race" and "when of two
adjoining tribes one becomes less numerous and less powerful than the
other, the contest is soon settled by war, slaughter, cannibalism,
slavery and absorption".

The primitive people were less civilized but not less savage
than their modern counterparts. They fought their battles with no less
savagery but with less civilized weapons which were crude and not as
efficient as their modern prototypes as engines of mass slaughter. Hence
whole enemy populations could not be eliminated with a single bomb in
the twinkling of an eye and those who could not be clumsily clubbed to
death were taken as captives and allowed to survive not so much out of
mercy as out of necessity. In course of time the problem of these
captives came to be solved not in concentration camps or gas chambers
but by the evolution of the institution of slavery. It proved of much
practical advantage to the victors. They could get their arduous tasks
and unclean jobs done by the forced and free labour of these slaves and
thus live a life of comparative ease. It served them also to satisfy
their feeling of racial superiority and a perverted hunger for power and
domination not only over the fowls of the air and fishes of the sea and
all creeping things of the earth granted to the chosen people by an Old
Testament God at the time of creation but also over their fellow human
beings. Ancient Greece was the cradle of democracy yet its citizens were
not ashamed to own slaves. The quarrel of their two great heroes
Agamemnon and Achilles over a slave taken captive in the Trojan war
forms the subject matter of the very first book of their epic Iliad. In
ancient Rome the institution became so widely prevalent that in some
parts of the empire slaves far outnumbered freemen. And ideologues were
not wanting to find out its justification. In the opening book of his
Politics Aristotle takes pains to refute the argument that slavery is
unnatural. The reasoning he employs does not do much credit to a
philosopher who is known as the father of syllogism. Some however
escaped capture and slaughter by fleeing and taking shelter in
inaccessible regions like forests and mountains. Darwin mentions such
"small and broken tribes, still surviving in isolated and generally
mountainous districts".

What happened in prehistoric India could not have been much
different. Even on a cursory examination of the people of India both
according to physical types and languages four broad classes are
discernible -- the Aryans, forming the majority of high caste Hindus,
tall, fair-skinned and long-nosed and whose language is derived from
Sanskrit; the Dravidians of peninsular India, of somewhat different
physical features and whose languages are derived from sources other
than Sanskrit; the primitive tribes -- Kols, Bhils, Mundas, etc. -- mostly
living in the hills and jungles of high plateaus of the heartland of
India, short in stature, dark-skinned and snub-nosed and speaking
languages entirely different from both Sanskrit and Dravidian; and
lastly the Gurkhas, Bhutiyas, Khasis, etc. concentrated mostly in the
sub-Himalayan regions, with strong Mongolian features, almost beardless,
yellow-skinned, snub-nosed with flat faces and prominent cheekbones.
The last two classes are regarded by scholars as the descendants of the
Neolithic peoples who once spread all over India. In course of time they
had to yield first to the Dravidians and later to the Aryans both of
whom were superior to them in culture. These racial encounters resulted
in the extinction of many and absorption of some to form the lowest
strata in the community of the conquerors, while a few tribes escaped a
similar fate by taking shelter in inaccessible areas like forests and
mountains. Segregated both geographically and culturally they pursued
their age old ways of life in a kind of splendid isolation. Culturally
they do not seem to have made any appreciable progress. The placid
existence of the tribes of Chotanagpur plateau and its surrounding
areas, however came to be disturbed during the medieval period when the
Mughals had their cantonment established at Rajmahal for keeping the
chronically insubordinate Bengal subah under watch from a strategically
vantage post. The area they called Damin-i-koh, the foothills of
Rajmahal, attracted their attention also for another reason-the prospect
of diamond mining. As the tribals hardly had any political importance or
knew the difference between a piece of diamond and ordinary stone, the
activities of the Mughals were not actually directed against them and
did not therefore amount to any real threat to their existence. Such a
threat was however not long in coming.

Twenty-eight years -- almost exactly to the day -- before
Babur won his victory at Panipat on the 21st of April,1526, another
adventurer,Vasco da Gama, had landed at the south Indian port of Calicut
on the 27th of May,1498. Babur was not aware of this, let alone of its
far-reaching repercussions not only in Indian but also in world history,
nor could he ever dream that the legacy of his descendants in India
would ultimately pass on to these adventurers from the western world.
Babur's was a land-bound world. Till the close of the 15th century land
routes were the primary system of communication. It was very primitive
and not very effective in bringing countries and regions within
countries into close contact. For centuries they existed in comparative
isolation, each like a little world in itself, populated by a vast
majority of poor peasants, steeped in superstition and ignorance and
technologically stagnant, and ruled over by a minority of aristocrats
who enjoyed the monopoly of power and privileges. These aristocrats
constantly scrambled amongst themselves, in the words of Milton, like
'kites and crows', for capture and retention of power which was their
chief concern. As their power was won and maintained by force of arms
and did not depend on the consent of the ruled the common people and
their interests and well-being were their least concern. After their
ambition for power was sufficiently satisfied some of the rulers might
do some good for the common people. But they did do so not from a sense
of duty but to satisfy their megalomania. The common people in their
turn were least bothered about their rulers whose rule seldom interfered
with their day-to-day life which flowed timelessly in an even rhythm.
Empires and kingdoms rose and fell without raising any ripple in the
placid flow of that life. Wars and political revolutions were temporary
and passing phenomena like natural calamities which the people faced
with stoical fortitude. Once these were over they resumed their
accustomed way of life as usual. The surface of their social existence
was often ruffled but its core rarely got seriously disturbed.

But with the birth of the European Renaissance at the end of
the 15th century maritime communication, so long only of secondary
importance, became revolutionized. Geographical explorations not only
broke down barriers of distance between countries and societies but also
extended the frontiers of the known world by discovery of new lands. The
European water gypsies were driven by greed of gold and glory and a zeal
for spreading the Christian gospel. Exploration was soon followed by
invasion to capitalize on the new discoveries. These were intensified by
another revolution that was soon to come - the industrial revolution,
which in its turn turned the value system of the traditional societies
almost upside down. Freedom to do as one likes - laissez faire - came to
be regarded as more important than one's social obligations.
Co-operation gave way to ruthless competition and accumulation of
material wealth by means foul or fair for consumption here and now to
one's surfeit instead of laying up something spiritual by acts of
charity to be enjoyed in a life hereafter became the driving force
behind all human actions. Insatiable greed, one of the seven deadly sins
of the ancient and medieval society, became the greatest virtue of the
newly emerging modern world. In their relentless search for more and
more profits the mercenaries spread their tentacles far and wide so that
no place or people was safe any more from their grabbing hands. They
penetrated every nook and corner of the globe which were hitherto
untouched by any sophistication of civilized society.

The old civilized societies first resisted but had gradually
to yield to superior European technology and organization and finally to
resort to cultural adoption and adaptation for survival. The reaction of
primitive and less civilized societies was different. In the beginning
they accorded a friendly reception to these newcomers as is evident from
the letter of Columbus which he wrote to his royal patrons on his first
voyage. Columbus found that the people of the islands which he
discovered in the West Indies "all go naked as their mothers bore them",
"they know neither sect nor idolatry, with the exception that all
believe that the source of all power and goodness is in the sky and they
believe very firmly that I, with these ships and people, come from the
sky" and wherever Columbus went they announced with loud cries, 'Come,
come! see the people from the sky'. "And of anything they have, if you
ask them for it, they never say no; rather they invite the person to
share it, and show as much love as if they were giving their hearts; and
whether the thing be of value or of small price, at once they are
content with whatever little thing of whatever kind may be given to
them". Columbus "gave them a thousand good, pleasing things .in order
that they might be fond of us, and furthermore might become Christians .
and try to help us and give us of the things which they have in
abundance and which are necessary to us". Accounts such as this by
Columbus and other voyagers made the savages and their societies topical
subjects for an idyllic treatment in Renaissance literature. Theirs was
a golden world, a Utopia, where these simple people lived a naturally
virtuous life in an ideal state of nature, unpolluted and uncorrupted by
civilization. Montaigne mused about them in his famous essay 'Of
Cannibals'. His contrast between the natural and artificial societies
and men formed a kind of pastoral theme in many literary works of the
time. This romantic attitude found its culmination in the 17th century
English dramatist Dryden who, in his Conquest of Granada, went so far as
to call these primitive people 'Noble Savages'. But the angels whom the
savages believed to have descended on them from heaven - the explorers
and the invaders - treated them in a manner which was far from angelic.
By virtue of their superior technology and organization and through
treachery, intrigue and other unfair means, these conquistadors
conquered and massacred these savages, reduced them to slavery and made
them aliens in their own native place. In their prosetilizing zeal they
went to the extremes even of cutting off the hands and feet of
recalcitrant natives to convince them of the omnipotence of
Christianity. The attitude of the European settlers to these so-called
'noble savages' ultimately came to be epitomized in the saying 'the only
good Indian is a dead Indian'. Old civilizations of the Aztecs and the
Incas were wiped from the face of the earth and the numbers of the
primitive peoples of other newly discovered lands are today a fraction
of what they were at the time of their first contact with the Europeans.
The dark continent of Africa became a huge carcass of a mastodon to be
carved up at will by the European nations among themselves. Its vast
western coastline came to be known as the 'slave coast' after the slave
trade which was shamelessly carried on till the other day by the
civilized people of Europe. The descendants of these forcibly taken
Negro slaves are often denied equal civil rights, while not long ago the
native North American Indians had to acquire citizenship in their own
ancestral home where many of them still live a segregated life in
reservations. In chapter 31 of the first volume of Marx's Das Capital
there is a description of the process by which the 17th and 18th century
merchants thus plundered the whole world. The basis of their operation
was slavery and slave trade. Whole continents were pillaged of their
inhabitants for the benefit of the European merchants. It was one of the
most frightful processes that have ever taken place in human history. It
needs a strong stomach indeed to read this chapter. But these are
historical facts which cannot in any manner be denied.

In India once the British merchants got a foothold in Bengal
they began to push further inland and in the course of a century gobbled
up the greater part of the country. To tighten their grip over this
country and explore and exploit it thoroughly they laid roads and
railways and the areas which were so long out of bounds and where the
aboriginals lived more or less unmolested became increasingly accessible
and exposed. To augment their income, the chief source of which was
revenues from the land, the East India Company began to reclaim lands
wherever possible by draining swamps and clearing jungles and settlement
of tenants. The areas around the Rajmahal hills hitherto covered by
jungles were brought under the plough with the help of the hardy Santals
who settled there in increasing numbers. All the paraphernalia of the
new administration followed -- different grades of zamindars, the court,
the police, the traders, the moneylenders, etc. The minions who manned
these organs of administration were mostly the cunning natives from
lower Bengal who were more civilized than the Santals and had already
become accustomed to and had adopted the Western ways. They followed the
British as scavengers follow the predators. Like a swarm of locusts they
descended on the unwary Santals who were illiterate and ignorant about
the niceties of the new administration. They were a simple folk like the
West Indians described by Columbus. Through various sharp practices the
Bengali 'Dikus' began to exploit the Santals in a systematic manner. The
Santals failed to get justice from the native officials who were hand in
glove with the exploiters. And when this exploitation became a torment
beyond endurance these traditionally peaceful people first petitioned
the 'Sahibs' for redress. But their prayer went unheeded. In despair
they rose in a body in defiance against their tormentors. They were
suppressed by brute force. What really happened, according to the
testimony of one of the army officers engaged in the suppression of the
rebellion as quoted in Hunter's Annals of Rural Bengal, was cold blooded
murder of thousands of innocent people, for the primitive bows and
arrows of the Santal rabble were no match for the fire arms of a well-
organized army. The relentlessly exploited Santal prayed for justice
which he failed to get from the unsympathetic and indifferent Company
officials. He was pushed to the end of his tether and he rebelled in
utter perplexity and despair. He was ruthlessly punished whereas his
unscrupulous exploiters -- the root cause of all his miseries -- got all
the sympathy and protection of the administration. Ultimately it dawned
upon the East India Company that the simple Santal in his illiteracy and
ignorance was not clever enough to adjust to the complexities of the new
administration -- its innumerable regulations and complicated procedures
-- and the cunning 'dikus' were taking advantage of this situation. As a
remedy, though belated, a new district was formed comprising the areas
inhabited by the Santals to be called after them -- the Santal Parganas --
where many of the regulations prevalent in other parts of the province
of Bengal would not be applicable. It would be placed under the charge
of a specially appointed official empowered to administer it according
to the usages and customs of the Santals.

The Santals were not the only backward community of
Chotanagpur who rebelled against the inroads of an alien culture. Others
like the Kol, the Munda and the Bhumij communities also rose in revolt
against the British rule about the same time. The tales of these
uprisings told usually in a few sentences or paragraphs form a part of
the general freedom struggle no doubt but in the compilation of their
accounts the historians rely mostly on official records. Other source
materials, though meagre, to be found amongst the tribals themselves,
are almost totally ignored. As a result the tribal point of view is not
taken into account. A fuller account of these insurrections is therefore
yet to be reconstructed. W.G.Archer, a Bihar cadre ICS officer,
collected some Santal rebellion songs and published them in the
anthropological journal Man in India in 1945. In an essay co-authored by
W.J.Culshaw and W.G.Archer and published in the same issue of the
journal there is a mention of a memoir -- Chotre Deshmanjhi Reak Katha--
of a Santal who had taken part in the rebellion. It also mentions a
novel, Harma's Village, the subject matter of which is the Santal
rebellion. No historian is known to have used these sources. In order to
be 'scientific' historians may refuse to accept them as valid. The
memoir and the songs are first hand accounts and cannot therefore be
invalid as historical evidences only because they are by illiterate
tribal people. The novel itself was written by a civil servant,
R.Castairs, who as deputy commissioner served the newly created district
for long thirteen years. About the validity of a literary work of this
kind as historical evidence one can only cite the views of no less an
authority than Toynbee expressed in his A Study of History.

Among the uprisings of the time the Santal Rebellion occupies
a unique position because it was caused primarily by economic reasons.
The Santals were culturally backward no doubt but they were not the
practitioners of scalping, human sacrifices and other savage practices
and the new administration's attempts to suppress them did not therefore
affect them culturally or socially. They were not a band of freebooters
whose opportunities for depredations had come to an end because of the
British. Nor were they required to do anything which outraged their
religious beliefs and sentiments, as it was in the case of the sepoys of
the Bengal Army who feared the loss of their religion when required to
go on a campaign across the seas or bite cartridges soaked in cow or
pork fat. Their revolt was not so much against the British as it was
against the agents of the process which was operating at the time in
Damin-i-koh. It was the same process which Marx describes in Part VIII
of the first volume of his Das Capital, the process of primitive
accumulation preceding capitalist accumulation - the expropriation of
the agricultural producer, the peasant, from the soil, which Marx held
to be the basis of the whole process of capitalist accumulation. "The
history of this expropriation, in different countries, assumes different
aspects, and runs through its various phases in different orders of
succession, and at different periods". In its mature stage of
development it becomes a vicious circle in which the labouring masses
are caught and are condemned to eternal slavery. The Santals rebelled
against such an attempt at their enslavement. Marx's clarion call for
revolution, given about the same time that the Santals rebelled, would
take years to reach this country. Without the advantage of an acute
analysis of their predicament by an ideologue like Marx the Santals
themselves seem to have intuitively realized the working of the
capitalist process in their society. About the same time the indigo
planters had set the same process afoot in other districts of Bengal.
But it is a pity that the Santals did not find a Dinabandhu Mitra or a
Harish Mukherjee or a Reverend Long to agitate their cause. Again, no
other rebellion of the period threw up a revolutionary character like
Sidhu. He was not a mere village-Hampden who with dauntless breast
withstood the little tyrant of his fields. From whatever little is known
about him it appears that by the standards of the Santal society he was
a prosperous cultivator and was not personally a victim of exploitation.
He had therefore no personal cause or grievance for the redress of which
he felt impelled to give leadership to the uprising. This revolutionary
character of both the rebellion and its leader seems to have been
completely lost sight of and Sidhu's so-called revolutionary countrymen
draw their revolutionary inspirations not from his long march but from
the long march of a foreign revolutionary.

II

The storyteller of the novel Aranyak is none other than Bibhutibhusan
himself who was a great lover of nature. For some time he actually
worked as the manager of a jungle mahal estate owned by a Bengali
zamindar in the same area. And he did as the manager of Aranyak did. He
was instrumental in the wanton destruction of the sylvan serenity of a
vast forest tract. Like the ancient mariner of Coleridge his telling of
the story is in atonement of a sin -- a sin committed against the deity
of the forest. The expropriation of the Santal was the first act in the
exploration and exploitation of Chotanagpur and its surroundings. It was
followed by the exploitation of its rich natural and mineral resources
and within a short time what was a virgin woodland was turned into a
carbonaceous jungle. What the change means particularly to those who
have been woodlanders for time immemorial is very difficult, if not
impossible, for the modern man, almost completely divorced from nature,
to realize. For a fuller understanding of such a change he must listen
to the speech which was delivered by the North American Indian Chief
Seattle of the Duwamish League in 1854, a year before the Santal
rebellion, in answer to President Franklin Pearce whose government had
proposed reservations for the Indian tribes of the North-West of the
United States:

The Great Chief in Washington sends
word that he wishes to buy our land.

The Great Chief also sends us words of friendship and goodwill.
This is kind of him, since we know that he has little need of our
friendship in return. But we will consider your offer. For we know that
if we do not sell, the white man may come with guns and take our land.

What Chief Seattle says, the Great Chief in Washington can count on as
truly as our white brothers can count on the return of the seasons. My
words are like the stars--they do not set.

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The
idea is strange to us. Yet we do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water. How can you buy them from us? Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.

The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of
the red man. The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when
they go to walk among the stars. We are part of the earth and it is part
of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters: the deer, the horse, the
great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the
meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man - all belong to the same
family.

So, when the Great Chief in Washington sends word that he
wishes to buy our land, he asks much of us. The Great Chief sends word
he will reserve us a place so that we can live comfortably to ourselves.
He will be our father and we will be his children. So we will consider
your offer to buy our land. But it will not be easy, for this land is
sacred to us.

The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not
just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you land, you must
remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is
sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lake
tells of events and memories in the life of my people.
The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father. The
rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our
canoes, and feed our children. If we sell you land, you must remember,
and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers, and yours,
and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any
brother.

The red man has always retreated before the advancing white
man, as the mist of the mountain runs before the morning sun. But the
ashes of our father are sacred. Their graves are holy ground, and so are
these hills, these trees. This portion of the earth is consecrated to
us.

We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One
portion of the land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger
who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The
earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it,
he moves on. He kidnaps the earth from his children. He does not care.
His fathers' graves and his children's birthright are forgotten.
He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as
things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His
appetite will devour the earth leave behind only a desert.
I do not know, our ways are different from your ways. The
sight of your cities pains the eyes of the red man. But perhaps that is
because the red man is a savage and does not understand.
There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to
hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of insects' wings.
But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The
clatter only seems to insult the ears. And what is there to life if a
man cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or the arguments of
the frogs around a pond at night? I am a red man and do not understand.
The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of a
pond, and the smell of the wind itself, cleansed by the midday rain, or
scented with the pinion pine.

The air is precious to the red man, for all things share the same
breath - the beast, the tree, the man, they all share the same breath.
The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man
dying for many days, he is numb to the stench.
But if we sell you our land, you must remember that the air is
precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it
supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also
receives his last sigh. And the wind must also give our children the
spirit of life. And if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and
sacred, as a place where even the white man can go to taste the wind
that is sweetened by the meadow's flowers.

So we will consider your offer to buy our land. If we decide to
accept, I will make one condition. The white man must treat the beasts
of this land as his brothers.

I am a savage and I do not understand any other way. I have seen
a thousand rotting buffalos on the prairie, left by the white man who
shot them from a passing train. I am a savage and I do not understand
how the smoking iron horse can be more important than the buffalo that
we kill only to stay alive.

What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men
would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the
beasts soon happens to man. All things are connected.
You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet
is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land,
tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin.
Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is
our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If
men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. This we know - the
earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. This we know,
all things are connected like the blood which unites one family.
Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not
weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to
the web, he does to himself.

But we will consider your offer to go to the reservation you
have for my people. We will live apart, and in peace. It matters little
where we spend the rest of our days. Our children have seen their
fathers humbled in defeat. Our warriors have felt shame. And after
defeat they turn their days to idleness and contaminate their bodies
with sweet food and strong drink. It matters little where we pass the
rest of our days - they are not many. A few more hours, a few more
winters and none of the great tribes that once lived on the earth, or
that roamed in small bands in the woods will be left to mourn the graves
of a people once as powerful and hopeful as yours.

But why should I mourn the passing of my people? Tribes are
made of men, nothing more. Men come and go like the waves of the sea.
Even the white man, whose God walks and talks with him as friend to
friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers
after all, we shall see.

One thing we know which the white man may one day discover. Our
God is the same God. You may think that now that you own Him as you wish
to own our land. But you cannot. He is the God of man. And His
compassion is equal for the red man and the white. This earth is
precious to Him. And to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its
Creator. The whites, too, shall pass - perhaps sooner than other tribes.
Continue to contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in
your own waste.

But in your perishing you will shine brightly, fired by the
strength of the God who brought you to this land, and for some special
purpose gave you dominion over this land and over the red man. That
destiny is a mystery to us, for we do not understand when the buffalos
are all slaughtered, the wild horses are tamed, the secret corners of
the forest are heavy with the scent of many men, and the view of the
ripe hills is blotted by talking wires. Where is the thicket? Gone.
Where is the eagle? Gone. And what is it to say goodbye to the swift
pony and hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival.
We might understand if we knew what it was that the white man
dreams, what hopes he describes to his children on long winter nights,
what visions he burns into their minds, so that they will wish for
tomorrow. But we are savages. The white man's dreams are hidden from us.
And because they are hidden, we will go our own way.
So we will consider your offer to buy our land. If we agree, it
will be to secure the reservation you have promised. There perhaps we
may live our brief days as we wish. When the last red man has vanished
from the earth, and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving
across the prairie, these shores and forests will still hold the spirits
of my people. For they love this earth as the newborn loves its mother's
heartbeat. So if we sell our land, love it as we loved it. Care for it
as we have cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land, as it
was when you take it. And with all your strength, with all your might,
and with all your heart, preserve it for your children, and love it as
God loves us all.

One thing we know, our God is the same God. This earth is
precious to Him. Even the white man cannot be exempt from the common
destiny. We may be brothers after all. We shall see.

III

In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels give a kind of inventory of
the miraculous achievements of the bourgeoisie and in some passages they
grow almost lyrical about their ingenuity and enterprise. In the
Manifesto they also give warnings about the numerous dangers, both
material and spiritual, inherent in the politico-economic system that
was emerging as a result of the teachings of the high priests of laissez
faire - Adam Smith et al. The promise of the creed propounded by Marx
may not have proved fully effectual as a panacea for the malaise from
which the civilization born of the industrial revolution suffers but his
diagnosis of the disease has proved correct to the letter. His prognosis
could not foresee all the evil symptoms which the disease developed as
it progressed and today the industrial civilization has arrived at a
crisis which humanity finds it almost impossible to handle. The
inventive genius of man gave him unimaginable mastery over nature and in
proud overconfidence he tinkered with its mysterious processes. Today
his technology has proved to be a monster of unmanageable proportions
defying all control. The Renaissance let loose the energies of the
European nations and infused them with a new vigour. In their march
forward they overcame all racial and cultural obstacles and imposed a
cosmopolitan culture of their own over the whole world. In their success
they forgot that they were causing miseries to other peoples and
destroying their cultures, disturbing the delicate balance existing
amongst the various aspects of creation and destroying the very
conditions which make survival of life on earth possible. With the
passage of each day this civilization endangers the whole world and
makes the extinction of life that this world supports inevitable. The
population explosion, the greenhouse effect and global warming, the
pollution of the atmosphere and holes in the ozone layer, the AIDS, the
threat of nuclear terrorism, the widening gap between the rich North and
the poor South, the danger of famine, the depletion of the biosphere and
the mineral resources of the planet, the expansion of commercial TV
culture, the armament race and the growing threat of regional wars -
these are only a few - represent a general threat to mankind.

Man's moral degeneration has also been almost complete. In his
material opulence he has become spiritually bankrupt. He discounts the
values which his fathers held most dear. The institutions which his
predecessors built and which stood them in good stead for generations
are disintegrating. He has become more intelligent and cunning but not
wise, more intolerant, more violent and not catholic and kind. Not less
barbarous than his primitive forefathers he is the more dangerous
because of the enormous destructive powers he has acquired. His vices
are many but the greatest of them all is his governing instinct of greed
that knows no contentment. He has thoroughly dehumanized himself and
become a mere consuming organism.

In the words of Rabindranath in the poem 'Borobudur' --

In a paroxysm of perverted greed
Now we know no peace of mind
And our selfish hearts are hard.
Driven by onrushing appetites
Insatiably we run without rest
And our world is ever in a turmoil.
For fresh conquests
Breathlessly we race in an accelerating pace
And aimlessly roam in myriad ways
Failing to reach any destination at last.
Seeking satisfaction for an endless acquisitive urge
We have lighted a flame of omnivorous lust.

Another of his great vices is his arrogance about the infallibility
of his own civilization. He has forgotten that compared to the past ages
his achievements are not much but meagre. In the words of Sir James
Fraser, "We stand upon the foundation reared by the generations that
have gone before," "our gratitude is due to the nameless and forgotten
toilers, whose patient thought and active exertions have largely made us
what we are," and "it argues stupidity or dishonesty, besides
ingratitude, to ignore the heap while vaunting the few grains which it
may have been our privilege to add to it. There is indeed little danger
at present of undervaluing the contributions which modern times and even
classical antiquity have made to the general advancement of our race.
But when we pass these limits, the case is different. Contempt and
ridicule or abhorrence and denunciation are too often the recognition
vouchsafed to the savage and his ways. Yet of the benefactors whom we
are bound thankfully to commemorate, many, perhaps most, were savages.
For when all is said and done our resemblances to the savage are still
far more numerous than our differences from him; and what we have in
common with him, and deliberately retain as true and useful, we owe to
our savage forefathers who slowly acquired by experience and transmitted
to us by inheritance those seemingly fundamental ideas which we are apt
to regard as original and intuitive. We are like heirs to a fortune
which has been handed down for so many ages that the memory of those who
built it up is lost, and its possessors for the time being regard it as
having been an original and unalterable possession of their race since
the beginning of the world. But reflection and enquiry should satisfy us
that to our predecessors we are indebted for much of what we thought
most our own, and that their errors were not wilful extravagances or the
ravings of insanity, but simply hypotheses, justifiable as such at the
time when they were propounded, but which a fuller experience has proved
to be inadequate. It is only by successive testing of hypotheses and
rejection of the false that truth is at last elicited. After all, what
we call truth is only the hypothesis which is found to work best.
Therefore in reviewing the opinions and practices of ruder ages and
races we shall do well to look with leniency upon their errors as
inevitable slips made in the search for truth, and to give them the
benefit of that indulgence which we may one day stand in need of.."
Modern man is intoxicated by his marvellous scientific and technological
achievements. This has made him blind to the danger that he may have
committed mistakes and his thoughts and actions may flow into channels
which ultimately lead to disaster and barbarism.

A lack of such humility led the European races to look down upon
the other races as inferior and sub-human with nothing in their cultures
considered as worth preserving and they went out to suppress them
ruthlessly. This attitude found its worst expression in their
colonization and exploitation of the world and in the Nazi theory of
'master race' and the racial holocaust perpetrated by them during the
Second World War. The treatment of the colonial population by other
European colonial powers was not much different. Their insatiable hunger
for material wealth and power over others caused two great wars in quick
succession and the threat of yet another war more barbarous hangs over
the human race like the sword of Damocles. The greatest paradox is that
modern man knows all these and is well aware of the Nemesis that awaits
him, yet he is utterly incapable of doing anything to forestall it. It
is not a purgatory which he finds himself in, but a hell of his own
making out of which he finds no way of escape.

At this moment of his greatest crisis where will the modern man
turn to find the means of his redemption and salvation? Anthropologists
justify the study of savage societies on the ground that they give us an
idea about our own past. Can these societies help us to save and secure
our future too? Modern civilization in its arrogance treats their
cultures as bundles of superstitions. Many of them however teach us, for
example, that man does not live by bread alone; that greed is a vice
which if indulged goes on growing and ultimately devours the consumer
also; that one should not covet what belongs to others and that the best
way to satisfy one's desires is not by acquisition but through
renunciation. Moral values are real and not the figments of our
imagination. The nexus of relationship between man and man is not narrow
self-interest and a clash of those interests but a community of
interests, not competition but co-operation, not hatred and enmity but
love and fellow feeling. Reason may not be the only gateway to knowledge
and knowledge is not always equivalent to wisdom. Finally, there is a
higher principle which is the foundation of all creation and a complete
harmony with that principle is the highest state of existence. When any
portion of that harmonious whole is lost it affects us all, for, in the
words of John Donne, "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed
away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death
diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never
send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

So, when the bell tolls for the kingdom of Dobru Panna, it
tolls also for us.