Down In Pitsburgh

Come with us on a small trip back in time. About 500 years or so back. All you need is a car to drive you out of Bhopal. Or you could take any of the state transport buses plying the Panchmarhi route. Bump and clatter along till you reach the hamlet of Matkuli. Turn off now and head for Tamya, perhaps India's best-kept hill-station secret. Take the diversion from Tamya. Twenty-two km from Tamya, stop the car at Bijudhana and look down from the road. You are now standing at the edge a 79-sq km crevasse, sheer cliff faces dropping 2,000 feet and 500 years under you.

Patalkot. The name literally means Netherworld. At the very centre of India, 2,000 people live in 12 villages 2,000 feet below civilisation, surrounded by perpendicular cliffs with no gradients to allow access to man or machine. A gigantic fort in the earth's womb.

You will have to be a bit agile to reach Patalkot.

At Bijudhana, you will meet Balaram, patel (chief) of Kare-aam, one of the Patalkot villages. He will guide you down to his world. Climb down after him. Visible signs of development as you know them will vanish with the 100-odd stone steps constructed by the Patalkot Development Authority. From here on, it is hop, skip, jump and slide down trails carved into the cliff walls by rainwater. When you sit

down on a rock to rest after 40 minutes of walking on your toes, stepping from ledge to ledge, Balaram will take out his chillum for a smoke and light it with a chakmak. He has no use for matchsticks; matchsticks become soggy in the monsoons. He will strike a small iron bar on a stone which ignites the semal (cotton) held close to it. Works every time.

Talk to Balaram, and you will discover a rare and fortunate human being who can recall with ease the names of his forefathers going back at least five generations. But he won't be able to fathom your surprise and - perhaps - admiration. He has never been to a city; he has never been in the mad race into the future where maximum speed is often achieved by jettisoning the past. To Balaram, it's the most natural thing to know his grandfather who taught him how to till the land, milk the cows, thatch the hut and light a smoke. But the lessons of history are lost on him. He does not know why the Bhariyas - his people - live in a forsaken, infertile (some would say, cursed) land.

Perhaps it does not matter to him that 1,000 years ago his ancestors were Bhor Rajputs who came from northern Madhya Pradesh. Around 950 AD, when the Muslim invasion of India began, the Rajputs from Rajasthan and Gujarat pushed their way into the Vindhya region of Madhya Pradesh. The Solankis of Gujarat settled around the Rewa-Satna region in the Vindhyas, forcing out the indigenous Bhor Rajputs. The Bhors then made their way to the Satpuras around modern Chhindwara. There they chose Patalkot for its natural resemblance to a fortress. "They also broke down a few gradual slopes that might have existed to make the area safe from enemy attack. The dense forest also provided them a ready cover," says anthropologist Hiralal Shukla. They hid themselves too well.

"The history of Patalkot also has a very strong allegorical significance for our times. Arjun Singh controls the Vindhyas while Kamal Nath occupies Chhindwara," laughs writer Girja Shanker.

There are two other theories about the origin of the Bhariyas. One is simple enough: the Bhonsales of neighbouring Nagpur were on the run from the Mughal army and hid in the gorges. The term Bhariya is derived from the coolies who carried their luggage (bhar), and who opted to stick on after the Bhonsales left. In fact, there's a cave called Raja Ki Khoh (Cave of the King) - where the leader of the Bhonsales is believed to have stayed - in one of the gorges made by the untamed Doodhi which rushes through Patalkot, carving out canyons at will. The other theory is born in its very distance with the thing it seeks to theorise about. It states, matter of factly, that all criminal tribes of central India are to be found in thick jungles and it is assumed that the Bhariyas are one of them.

But meet the Bhariyas - now listed as one of the five vanishing tribes of Madhya Pradesh, along with the Madias of Bastar, Baigas of Chattisgarh and Bhils and Bhilalas of Jhabua - and you will find it difficult to believe this last theory. As you negotiate the last slopes down to Kare-aam, you may meet Jham Singh on his way to his field with his wife Motibai, three children and two dogs. He will be carrying no tools. "I leave the sickle, plough, axe and so on on the field itself. No one will take it away," he will tell you confidently.

After a two-hour trek, you will reach Kare-aam to a pure and warm welcome. The residents - those left behind to look after the fields and the cattle - will come out from their houses to greet you. "Jai Ram ji ki," Puran, Adhar Singh and Chhunilal will greet you in traditional Chattisgarhi style, to your surprise. But look around. Barring the rocky surface and the backdrop of gigantic cliffs, it could have been any deprived village in Chattisgarh. Poverty feels and smells the same everywhere.

Had it not been for the excessive rainfall this monsoon, most of the Bhariyas would quite possibly not have discovered the 20th century. They lived happily in the medieval ages, oblivious of the happenings on the metalled road 2,000 feet above them, till nature decided that it had had enough. In one unimpeachable stroke, it shook a section of the cliffs which came tumbling down in a landslide which in turn took with it huts, cattle and men, and broke the spirit of this ancient race, forcing them to move to Bijudhana. Bijudhana, up there, an abstract artist's impression of modern India.

Till then, their contact with your world was limited to a visit every week or 10 days to the Chhindi market to sell brooms and wicker baskets, the only things they make which would be of any interest or value in your marketplaces, and buy supplies of salt, pepper, tobacco and so on. In fact, the money economy infiltrated the Bhariya universe only about a decade ago. Till then, it had been barter for five centuries.

Some Bhariyas, though, now have a bit more experience of your world. Look for Kusumbibai. She is a Gond tribal who has married and moved to Patalkot from the world above. She and her husband, who plays the tanse, a small drum tied around the waist, have even been to the great cities of Bhopal and Delhi to perform on Republic Day, performing the vanishing art of bhadam and setam (male and female dance). The 14 days they spent there have not changed her life, neither have her aspirations soared. She only expects a better piece of land so her husband can feed her growing family.

She will bring out the kodo and kutki (coarse rice) in a wicker basket to show you. "This is all that grows here apart from some corn. It is of poor quality and lasts us only about two months. After that, we have to look for daily wages to keep things going," she'll tell you. Her husband has to migrate to neighbouring Hoshangabad to work as farm labour for six months before he returns to plough his fields again. He sows 20 kg of kutki to reap only around 150-200 kg of it in three months.

Look around again for Chhunilal, the only known matriculate in Patalkot. The tribe has heard of another boy who has done school but no one has met him. Chhunilal, of course, is also the only one who bears a mark on his person of genteel virtues that clearly belong to the world outside; you may find him wearing that clean saffron-coloured shirt which the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram people gave him - call it brown man's burden. Some of the villagers will be wearing talismans around their necks, but ask them and you will find that they know nothing about the 'Om' on it. To them, these are just ornaments given by the ashram activists who once came visiting. Their spiritual guide and protector is Muthwa Dev, a stone under a tree. Join them as they sit, smoking, around Him. No pomp or decorum that you always attached to your temples. Muthwa is a friend and the relationship is truer than any organised religion.

Visit Gaildubba. It is more easily accessible, being on the periphery of the pit and has an NGO working here; it even has electricity. But why, you may wonder, is young Kaushalya sleeping with the lights on in the late afternoon? If she switches them off, the bulb fuses, she will inform you. Better to keep it on than to spend on another bulb or try to grapple with the incomprehensibilities of electrical wiring.

Some time ago, the Patalkot Development Authority came with a gobar-gas plant which the tribals could use. But how do you get the plant down that steep gradient? After trying to find a way out for days, the officials simply rolled the plant down the cliff walls and hoped for the best. The plant wreck still lies there at the bottom.

Looking for flickers of hope? Since Patalkot has rich forests, the forest department is the only one overtly active in the area. The foresters have kept the green cover intact and even managed to befriend and teach the Bhariyas the restrained use of firewood. "With the pressure on their habitat, the Bhariyas constantly want more land for agriculture. Unfortunately, there isn't any left, so we are teaching them other things like bee-keeping and collecting forest produce," B.K. Singh, deputy forest officer of Chhindwara, will tell you. Singh has also managed to implement the Joint Forest Management programme successfully in Patalkot where villagers are directly involved in protecting forests.

However, that hope will remain a mere flicker. For at Gaildubba, you will meet Gobind, Ganesh and Radha, the three albino children of Draupadibai. Have you brought your camera? Because the prospect of photography gets them really excited. Ganesh may even tell you that he'll run and get his vest to look good in the pictures. Draupadi, her husband, and their immediate forbears are not albinos but unfortunately, all her children are. "There is another brother-sister albino pair in Chimtipur village who are about 35 but unable to get married because no one wants to marry them," says Vishnu.

For a shrinking community afflicted with sickle cells, five unmarriageable children out of 2,000 is a huge number. But, inbreeding for a thousand years has led to its inevitable result: a static and corrupted genetic pool. Look now at their faces closely. Notice their teeth. From Balaram to Adhar Singh to Motibai to Draupadi, all of them have teeth that look chiselled. The bones

too are not too strong. You may, after this, not really like to look too closely at their eyes. For there lies a chilling vacantness, as if life had been left looking for footholds on cliffs. Run, rabbit, run. Up the cliff walls. Climb back up to Bijudhana, the new temporary settlement for the Bhariyas displaced by the landslide, come back to where you left your car. Before you can locate your driver, maybe you will meet Sukhdas, 74, who is convinced that the world is laughing at them for living in government shanties. He wants to go back home where he has social respect. He wants no tiled roofs, no two-free-meals-a-day, no electricity and water schemes. He wants to till his land, smoke his chillum, play with his grandchildren and gaze at the sun setting over those cliffs. Leave now, for you have nothing to tell Sukhdas, and your driver has been found. It's a five-and-a-half-hour drive to Bhopal.