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Reel time Vinod Raja on the sets of The Mahua Memoirs

I started off as a free-lance cinematographer. I also assisted filmmakers like G.S. Bhaskar and Ashwini Kaul. “The Bee, The Bear and the Kuruba”, started in 1996, took four years to complete, after learning about the Advasi (Kurubas, Yeravas and Paniyas) movement in Nagarhole against the Taj hotel groups who wanted to build a resort in Rajiv Gandhi National Park openly violating the ‘national park protocol’. The sustainable, conservationist, beautifully organic lifestyle of adivasis juxtaposed against the commonly followed western ways of conservation was a story I felt compelled to tell.

We filmed it for three years in four states — Chattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh, with the help of various individuals and NGOs and with renowned writer Mahasweta Devi providing the inspiration. I’d seen the minority tribal population in southern states, but it’s the state of the majority tribals who live in these states that I wanted to explore. All through, especially in Orissa, I got to witness mass devastation by corporate big guns.

I have been interrogated several times, constantly kept under surveillance and even roughed up. In a peaceful protest in Tikri in Kashipur the police attacked me from the back and my camera was smashed. But what’s gratifying is the film is being shown at several places including schools and colleges. Even some parliamentarians have watched it and the first response I get is ‘What can we do about this’. That’s a great reward for what you do. Does your documentary try to raise caution on collaborations of the nation state and the corporations?

Certainly. On one end you have high levels of consumption; on the other you have the ‘induced’ poor whose livelihoods have been taken away for someone else’s comfort.

Job compensation is how you create poverty; and most of the tribals cannot accept it, as money is utterly useless for them. India is a country where people inhabit most of the livable land area. So land for land compensation cannot be practiced anymore. Realistically speaking, even cash for land doesn’t work since people don’t want to give up their land, which is their only security. Policy-makers have to reconcile a lot of matters, and ultimately the will of the people has to prevail. On the contrary; mining policies are relaxed and draconian policies like SEZ are introduced instead of ensuring food security. With SEZs we’re witnessing creation of states within a state and institutions of democracy completely excluded.

Gramsabha decisions are violated everywhere by corporations and people are forced to fight for their rights. This is a heightened form of imperialism.

We’re an “educated myopic class” who are looking at immediate gains, conveniently forgetting the long-term risks. Deluded with figures of various forms of ‘growth’ we’re alienating ourselves from the earth, which the adivasis are still strongly connected with. Clean water, clean air, and clean food are all slowly starting to seem like utopian concepts.

We must re-think our lives, before it’s too late. Thousands of years of civilizations and cultures bite the dust as a few plunder the wealth of the earth with diarrheic consumption. These tribals are communities who have suffered wrongs throughout history and it’s high time we learnt from their wisdom and stopped with our recklessness.

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