India’s lawmakers have elected Droupadi Murmu as the next President of India. While in India’s parliamentary democracy the Presidency is seen as “symbolic”, the role is very powerful in the symbolism it projects as to the identity of who ‘represents’ the nation. And it is here that Murmu’s election is historic: because of her identity as a “tribal”.
In India, there are 705 groups with distinct cultures, who are recognised as “Scheduled Tribes” (ST). They are also referred to as “Adivasis”, which literally means Indigenous Peoples. At approximately 104 million, they comprise 8.6% of India’s population, but are quite fragmented. In the Ramcharitmanas, composed around 1574 by Tulsidas from the much earlier Ramayan of Valmiki, which was brought to Guyana by the Indentured Labourers (Girmitiyas), there is an interesting anecdote that comments on the status of Tribals at that time. An elderly female Tribal devotee of Sri Ram, Sabari, tells him, “In every society, women are the lowest strata; and as a tribal woman, I am the lowest of the low.” Unfortunately, not much has changed since then for the Tribals.
Murmu is a member of the Murmu clan of the Santhal tribe – the largest in India, with at least 10 million members, and concentrated in Jharkhand (formerly part of Bihar), Odisha and West Bengal. The Santhals have a direct connection with the Indians who were shipped out as Indentured Labourers during the colonial era, starting with Mauritius in 1834, and then British Guiana in 1838. In both cases, they were among the first batches, and were dubbed “Dhangars”, or “Hill Coolies”. In fact, they could have been drawn from any one or combination of the three major tribes who lived in the forested Chhota Nagpur plateau – Santhal, Munda or Oaroan.
But who distinguishes among the “lowest of the low”?
In the case of the then Guiana, in the 1st shipment on the Whitby and Hesperus, there were 150 Tribals among the 414 shipped out. Eventually, only 90 overall chose to remain after their indentureship ended in 1843. But up to the 1860s, after shipments resumed sputteringly between 1845 and 1851, many others had been brought to Guiana. From the 1860s’, recruitment shipment shifted westwards into Bihar and UP. The Santhal Tribal people, as all Indigenous Peoples, try to live in harmony with their forests, and express their reverence for nature by paying obeisance at Jaher (sacred groves) in their villages. They practice intensive wet cultivation of rice, and some historians have stated that it was “Hill Coolies” who cultivated the first large acreage of rice in Guiana by Girmitiyas – 16 acres at Edinburgh, WCD. This is where the Leonora Secondary School is presently located, next to the National Track and Field Stadium.
We are told that many recruits were picked up in the “bazaars and markets” of Calcutta up to the 1860s. These would mostly have been the tribals of Chota Nagpur, who continued to be driven out from their forest habitation since the British draconian “Permanent Settlement” regulations of 1793. Two years before the 1857 “Indian Rebellion” against the East India Company, there was the “Santal Rebellion” with just as ferocious a reaction as their expulsion accelerated and continues to the present, now pushed by mining interests.
After the 1860s, the Tribals preferred indentureship to the Assam Tea Plantations, from where they could more easily return to their homes. Among the Tribals, Santhals have since become most educated, and President Murmu comes from that stratum. She graduated from college (1979); worked in the Government of Odissa service; then taught school; elected to District Council (1997), Minister of State (2002); Member of Local Assembly (MLA) (2004) and in 2015, Governor. Tomorrow, in 2022, she becomes President of India.
But Murmu’s accession to this high office, in which she succeeded Ram Nath Kovind, who is the second Dalit or “outcaste” President, raises the issue of whether entrenched inequalities in Indian society are moving beyond symbolism. This entrenchment was codified and made into a procrustean framework by the British when they enforced their painstaking classifications in India and their colonies with their full panoply of force. The “Hill Coolies, as Gillanders & Arbuthnot informed John Gladstone on his 1836 enquiry about shipping some of them to British Guiana, “…have no religion, no education, and, in their present state, no wants beyond eating, drinking and sleeping.”
Will they continue to be just fungible “Dhangars”? Notwithstanding Murmu? Will we continue to be called “Coolies” in Guyana?
