Work, Tools, and Austerity

For the Abujhmadia, a hunter-gatherer tribe in central India, work, like much else, is a living abstract mediated by the mystery of the wild.

IN ABUJHMAD, 4,000-square-kilometer area in the tribal belt of Bastar in central India, life needs only a few tools, sometimes none. Daily life stems from an economy of effort, making tools and their technology — and their industrious sensibility — superfluous. A certain pristine defenselessness about the people and their wilds helps them live simply and happily, having much time in the simplest of ways and for the simplest of reasons. When a people has few assignations they give the Earth, too, much reassurance in its daily life.

In its own small way, Abujhmad is a story of nourishing ease and quiet, essentials of human lives now diminishing to the point of erasure almost everywhere. Their few tools, fewer words, and little apparatus provide a humbling perspective for those of us trying to save a damaged world with ever-evolving technologies. Theirs is also a story of how the Earth creates magic for its life and for those dependent on it.

Work here is an occasional cutting, digging, or scraping. For these tasks, the people need a few handmade tools. Stray rocks serve as regular tools for powdering dead animal bones as calcium to add to their chewing tobacco. Much of the day is spent “idle.” There is only one maker of tools, the blacksmith, for every 20 or so villages. He makes axes, arrow tips, and knives. The blacksmith, too, is “idle;” more than he works, he rests. There are no carpenters, potters, or weavers. There is not much to do when the wilds work and provide their apparatus.

As though intuitively, the Abujhmadia see how work and its tools penetrate the Earth and sever it.

Apart from the business of staying alive, the Abujhmadia’s needs are not many. Food grows on its own. There is abundant bamboo and thatch for the huts. Tobacco is available for anyone who wishes a chew or a puff. Liquor grows on trees. Infant and old are alike in merriment. People gather and hunt what is already provided. They themselves produce nothing for sale or barter with other people, only sometimes exchanging tamarind with the outside world for salt, an occasional piece of cloth to cover the pubic area (in deeper villages they use vine leaves), or a red comb for the hair. The simple methods, behaviors, and works in their lives arise from the milieu of their trees, trails, shrubs, rivers, animals, birds, gods, ancestors, spaces, and skies. Like the milieu, they do not want much work — and its ways — for themselves or their Earth, nor do they manifest a wish to advance in the “human order of things.”

As though intuitively, the Abujhmadia see how work and its tools penetrate the Earth and sever it. They penetrate and sever its people as much, so the people have few of them. An axe, a bow and few arrows, two or three knives, a snare and fishing sieve — these are about the only tools people have. Three or four pots and pans (usually of bamboo), a ladle scooped out of a gourd, a gourd for carrying liquor, perhaps an umbrella made of giant leaves of Sihadi vines, a loincloth or two tucked into the hut’s bamboo walls, a lugga (knee-length cloth wrapped around a woman’s waist), a bamboo mat, and a tobacco pouch rounded off a root, are about the Abujhmadia’s only earthly goods. They hardly want anything more for themselves. There is a certain austerity to living.

The axe, knife, bow, and arrows are used for many different tasks during their lives. An axe is not simply an axe. As much as for cutting and chopping, like the knife and arrow, it is also used for scraping, digging, hammering, and piercing. For this reason, a single design, and the length, breadth, and weight of their axes have persisted over a long time. The blacksmith knows the nature of both his Earth and the tools he makes. A hammer, a few tongs, bellows and fire, hand-eye coordination, strength, patience, and pain are his technologies.

With a red hot knife, the owner of an arrow or an axe spends painstaking hours embellishing it with fine tattoos, to ensure it is directed towards its mark, just as tattoos protect the human body from the influence of mysterious evils. Painstaking hours go into re-sharpening and remaking tools throughout their lives. Every tool and its footfall is an aggregate of its whole technology.

There is the occasional growing of kohla, a small edible grain believed by some to be the ancestor of rice, and some use of penda (shifting cultivation).

Three months of penda are about the only activity that comes close to “doing something.” Penda is not the primary “livelihood” here, but only partial work. It is practiced occasionally, and not each year by each family. It requires no more than an axe, a knife and two flint stones to kindle a fire. Individual trees on a small hill-face — usually less than an acre — are felled. Sometimes, depending on topography, trees are indented to make them fall in a certain direction. A large tree on the far edge, when felled, knocks down the nearby ones, and these in turn bring down the next in line. Thus the entire clump of trunks and canopies fall together in successive chain reactions. They are then left to dry for months. Unless there is a forest fire, a fire set by flint stones and raw silk wool burns the brushwood, small branches, and trunks lying around. Ash is then spread over the patch. It serves as a seedbed. The ground is neither hoed nor worked nor manured. The first monsoon showers are ever so gentle, soft, almost like dew. They firm the ash and the seed and prevent them from washing away when the strong showers follow. Gradually the seeds germinate and tiny roots meet the soil. Perhaps the Abujhmadia’s labor amounts to no more than 15 percent of this process; the rest is handled by the elements.

The simple methods, behaviors, and works in the Abujmadias’ lives arise from the milieu of their trees, trails, shrubs, rivers, animals, birds, gods, ancestors, spaces, and skies. Photo by Narendra.

In his less-than-meager loincloth, Banda, whose name means “stone,” was every inch an emperor. Stout, straight and dark, mostly silent, he had a dignity that surfaced in his majestic appearance. At less than 50, and having lived a “full life,” he was the “grand old man” in Garpa, the largest village, with seven scattered huts. He was an economist with words, movements, and postures. He was also an economist in familial and community relationships, issues and aspirations, an economist in sensibilities and understandings. But he did not “work,” as we understand the word.

“Everyone and everything has a body, and the body is not without intent,” he said. “The business of our wilds — our gods, ancestors, trees, ponds and rivers, skies and earth, hills and plains — is to be available and provide for us. Our business is to stay within the intent of our bodies, and do nothing that severs other bodies. Nothing is whole without its intent. When we transgress and sever, the wilds retreat, and we cannot pursue them. It can be an endless pursuit, futile and foolish. They may never make themselves available to us again. We will have to, then, fend for ourselves endlessly.”

For the Abujhmadia, work — like much else — is a living abstract. It is mediated by the wilds, by their unintelligibility and mystery. The Earth is not resolutely material, nor bound to the senses, or their tangible-visible forms. Work is neither made to the measure of human mind, nor is it quite of human authorship. Work, and all that it entails, serves to alert people to the undisclosed and unintelligible. In that measure — an immense measure — the wilds determine work, its purpose, tools, and methods.

To practice work in a latitude greater than this would be intrusive. Abujhmad does not create systems that need control and “sustainability,” or need more and more tools for controlling an unmediated system.

There is no conception of damaging the earth, dividing the land or bounding the forest, or of property and ownership or of the estrangements involved, or of progress, hunger, and lingering disease. There is, however, a rich conception and vocabulary for living agreeably on undivided, unowned, and unbound land since the times of the ancestors. There are numerous ways of being with the ancestors and letting the landscape also be. This is a vocabulary of agreeability and nurture.

Though the Abujhmadia may not know where his landscape or its constituents come from, practically all areas of knowledge arise from it — be they architecture of the hut, size of the village, distance between villages, distance he has to walk between sunrise and sunset, upbringing of children, family size, healing of illness, near-nakedness, fishing, hunting, or the occasional shifting cultivation. There is apparently no strife; nothing that calls for protection against the other. Even the tiny hut nearly completely corresponds to the shape, texture, and contours of surrounding dense vegetation; for the untrained eye it becomes extremely difficult to tell where one ends and other begins.

Tools and technologies emerge from the work that people ask of themselves. Their presence has significant tales to tell about their people, as does their absence. They tell of human relationships with Earth and its things. Looking at Abujhmad, more often than not, life seems most reassuring and happy when work, tools, and technology are at their fewest.