Much before the term became a byword for crime and glamour in Bollywood, a British army officer, Lt General George MacMunn wrote a book called The Underworld of India. The 1932 treatise spent much of its print describing Mac-Munn’s personal trysts with those whom he called “ladies of flimsy virtue”, but also devoted a section to another obsession of contemporary British administrators — the “criminal tribes and classes” of India. Betraying the deep-seated prejudice of the times, The Underworld dismissed Pardhis, Ramoshis, Vanjaris and Chantichors (‘bundle stealers’) as “absolutely the scum, the flotsam and jetsam of Indian life, of no more regard than the beasts of the field”.
Six decades after Independence, the Pardhis of Madhya Pradesh will tell you that nothing has changed. Only two years ago, forest officials in central India declared war on their tribe, officially calling it the “number one threat” to the country’s dwindling wildlife. Mass media and environmental experts too found the enemy of the tiger in the Pardhi, using records to argue that there wasn’t a single poaching incident where a Pardhi imprint was not visible.
Thus boxed in by what they have always perceived as a hostile state, the Pardhis’ biggest lament is that for centuries they have been invariably hanged before a trial. The signs of institutional injustice were visible in 1871 itself, when the British first declared 150 tribes, including Pardhis, as “criminal”. The cold logic ran that in India’s caste-based society just as there were hereditary carpenters and weavers, there must also be hereditary criminals. This meant that a Pardhi tot was branded a thief even before he took his first step — a badge that Pardhi elders say ensured that their children never got even a first chance in life, let alone a second. Now, in a unique initiative at work in Madhya Pradesh’s Panna Tiger Reserve and Vidisha district, an effort is on to break this cycle of never-ending prejudice.
The Pardhi gentrification project, as it were, has two linked objectives — one, persuading the adults to change their ways and two, giving the community’s children a shot at education and a subsequently normal life. To this end, the partners in the project have set up what the Madhya Pradesh forest department calls a ‘residential bridge course’, which helps Pardhi children cross over to conventional schools. They are brought to a ‘boarding school’ in the tiger reserve where they must live for nine months away from their families — a step deemed necessary so that the children can learn the ways of a stable, crime-free life. “We realised that the mindset of the adults could not be changed. There was too much distrust. Thus, we went for the kids,” says Sudeep Singh, conservator of forests at Vidisha.
Running the boarding school with kids accustomed to accompanying their parents on dangerous hunts for wild boars, leopards and tigers threw up its own challenges. “Initially, there were many dropouts. The children would simply disappear back into the forest,” says S S Rajput, chief conservator of forests, Bhopal. On another occasion, aghast school authorities found their students roasting a freshly killed boar on campus.
The positives, however, have kept the project going. Pardhi children have shown themselves to be naturally fearless and intelligent. Their in-depth knowledge of flora and fauna also struck their teachers. By now, nearly 250 children have gone through the bridge course in the last three years. Sangita Saxena of the WWF, which is partnering the project, had her hopes raised when on a recent visit to Panna, several Pardhi students told her that they wanted to grow up to be policemen and tackle poaching.
The grown-up world has been a different ball game. The forest department and WWF have been trying to cajole the men to drive jeeps, repair cycles, rear goats or open shops selling grain and knick-knacks. Women are taught manihari or making traditional cosmetics. Loans have been dispensed and training courses held in a bid to get Pardhis to settle down into “legally viable” jobs.
But the going here hasn’t been half as smooth as with the children. For obvious reasons — a successful tiger kill, for instance, can enrich the Pardhis involved by up to Rs 15 lakh, leaving little incentive for them to fix punctured cycles. Sitting at his house in Bhopal amidst hunting trophies that hark back to an era when game was in plenty and shooting a tiger was gentlemen’s sport, Ashok Noronha, son of legendary civil servant R P Noronha, explains why winning the hearts and minds of Pardhis will take more than asking them to take to goat farming overnight. “Today if the Pardhis find hunting profitable, you have to show them that the real fruits lie in protecting animals. Revenue that is generated from wildlife tourism has to be ploughed back to the local community. Instead, luxury hotels have come up around national parks, but they don’t employ any Pardhi,” says Norhona, a wildlife expert.
It is a fact that is admitted in muted tones even by forest officials. “No matter how many loans we may promise them, a constant Pardhi demand is to be given land,” says an officer. A demand that runs into stiff opposition from local groups and politicians. “The need is to co-opt them in the Indian state rather than fight them,” says Noronha. It is then that the bridge to a tribe once derided for something as absurd as a “sneaking gait” may truly have been built.
