Jal, jungle and jewellery

Chandrama is stringing the fragrant creamy white and yellow flowers of kathgolap (frangipani, or Plumeria rubra) into a long garland. Her elaborate golden nose rings – three to be precise – outshine the vibrant yellow sun of this April afternoon as well as the deep yellow centre of the beautiful frangipani flowers in her hands. She and twenty other women from her Gadaba Adivasi community are all busy weaving garlands in an open space right outside Putpandi village of Koraput district in Odisha. All of them wear two or three nose rings.

“This nose ring on the right we call besri, the middle one is dondi, and on the left is natto. I have been wearing these for ever. Maybe, I was born with these,” 70-year-old Chandrama Gadaba says with a laugh. Her dondi lifts a little upwards, showing her lower lip otherwise hidden by the bells of gold hanging from the septum of her nose.

“Earlier in our Gadaba tribe, they used to make girls wear all three when they were really babies. But now they do the piercing late – after they are five or ten years old. And sometimes the young girls don’t like to get their nose pierced at all,” she says. With each sentence, her deft fingers tie a handful of freshly plucked flowers into a garland that will be used to greet the men in the evening when they return from their hunting expedition. It is Chait Parab (also called Chaitra Parva).

A 14-day-long agricultural festival celebrated by many Adivasi communities across Odisha and Jharkhand, Chait Parab marks the beginning of Chaitra, the first month of the Hindu calendar. The time of the festival, mid-April, is also traditionally the time of rest from work in the fields, when the air is filled with summer songs and the bounty of fruits and flowers that the season brings. Young and old women of the Gadaba community sing, dance, drink, offer raw mangoes to the village deities, and weave garlands to welcome men returning from hunting adventures.

This practice once symbolised the amazing interconnectedness of the lives of these communities, their food systems, spiritual beliefs, and knowledge of the forest ecosystem. Men used to go hunting during April as there were no standing crops and the communities living near the forest had to rely more on wild berries, fruits and wild animals. The idea was always to depend on the forest without exploiting it. For some decades now, the tradition of hunting survives as a symbolic gesture, especially after the ban on killing of wild animals under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. Men when they return with a catch of fish, most probably, would be greeted with the garlands that Chandrama and the others are weaving.

Chandrama quickly ties one long garland around a small bun on her head and continues talking about the jewellery. “Besari, dondi and natto, are worn by women of Gadaba, Paroja, Dongra and many other Adivasi communities. Some women wear a gold dondi with an engraved red stone like mine, while some wear just the besaris and natto on either side of their nose. They also call the rings on the sides a bulak.”

A total of 30 of Odisha’s 64 Scheduled Tribes live in Koraput, the Gadabas being one of the prominent Adivasi groups among them. Of the state’s nearly 60,000 Gadabas, almost 80 per cent live in Koraput. The life of the community is highly dependent on its surroundings. “They spend most of their time collecting, firewood, timber, food, Kendu leaves from these forests,” says Bidyut Mohanty, who runs a non-profit in the region to spread awareness among Adivasis about protecting the commons. “Their relationship with the forest reflects in their culture, lifestyle and livelihood,” he adds.

“We live with them, so we wear them,” says 67- year-old Kalama Gadaba. She is showing me her nagulu, ear hoops. Coiled snake-shaped earrings in gold, each a centimetre wide, hang from her ears. “We are the people of the jungle, so are these snakes. They are our friends,” she adds. Kalama lives in the hamlet under the same gram panchayat of Mahadeiput as Chandrama and I had first met her when she was making garlands along with other women.

She has come to catch some fish for the feast at a nearby pond. “This is a baira,” she says holding out a snakehead fish in her hands. “Since a decade now the vegetables and mushrooms have become scarce. There is so much heat. And every year there is a forest fire which eats up our greens,” says Kalama.

“We use what we find in our surroundings. We use flowers, red soil and fruits to celebrate our girls attaining puberty. We use leaves, timber and flowers in our wedding ceremonies. But now everything is becoming scarce, just like the nagulu,” says Kalama.

“This earring you see is a sign of our culture. I also saw my mother and grandmother wear these and they wore two in each ear. They would tell me the snake represents our jameen and jungles. Any girl or woman can wear it, either made in gold or brass. One pair of gold nagulu needs almost 1 tola gold (11.66 grams),” says Kalama. “But these days the young generation of girls don’t wear it. Maybe, that’s why our jal-jungle are also threatened.”