Kaala Paani

The voice of Om Puri, Tom Alter and Jalal Agha take us to a different time in history as their voices boom through the Cellular Jail during the sound and light show. The pain, the terror of those times and the grit and determination of the people who fought for the freedom of this country comes out live as we are immersed inside the darkness around us with nothing but the lights and the sounds guiding us through history. As the show ends…people get up with great urgency, wanting to catch their cars back to their respective hotels. People busy flashing with their cell phone cameras as the show is happening; even after being told not to take pictures…I wondered what if the Peepal tree that stood the test of times could speak what would it say now? People who cannot think of a little discomfort for the sake of their brethren, who wish to take the first flight out to Uncle Sam, swearing by the White Man’s superiority….what would those people who defended the country’s freedom, killing themselves in the bargain, unable to bear the torture of the British, some force fed through their nose as they went on hunger strikes, and died due to the act of the uncaring officers…waiting for years inside the 6 by 3 foot cells, to hear a single word from their families – and their motherland…what would they say, if they came back and saw the audience that sat through the show as if it was another entertainment…?

Going to Kaala Paani is always an emotional experience. I once went there 18 years ago, on a family trip…and the island people were a surprise coming as I did from Mainland India. The one place where the legacy of the freedom movement still lingers on as the nation forgets its genesis…made me feel, there is still hope for India. And 18 years later, today, I felt refreshed, once again seeing the innocence of the people, and their honesty. The India which Kipling wrote about, “If there was a paradise on earth, it is here, in India”…perhaps a vestige of that paradise still lingers on in these islands. A paradise of not just the green earth, but of people with a sense of camaraderie, and understanding amongst various cultures, languages, religions and castes, where people bonded with each other intermarrying across castes and religions, having been thrown far away from the motherland and cut off from most mainstream communication for most part of the last century. Even to this day, the saying goes that if you lose something somewhere in the islands…chances are 100% to find it lying in the same place days later.

But the increased influx of people from Mainland is showing its impact – slowly but steadily. There is the trouble of encroachers. I didn’t understand what they meant when I first heard a lady of Punjabi descent mention this to me. “These are people who come from Mainland and encroach the land”. “We are settlers, we were brought from the Mainland and settled in these islands, and were given land to cultivate”. True there are no real local farming practices in the islands, since the original inhabitants were the Adivasi people who are mostly hunters and gatherers depended more on fishing and hunting than agriculture per se. Post Independence, since the 70’s a lot of ex-servicemen and Bengali refugees were settled in these islands, by giving them land for tilling and so they are called the Settlers. Then there are the Locals – the people who came out of the penal settlement – after the British left, stayed on in the islands, intermarried, and created a casteless and to a certain extent religion less society. But the current influx is of people coming from the mainland in recent times. “They have grabbed land in our areas and are paying money to the Sarpanch and the Panchayats and getting pattas”.

 The whole discussion started when I was interacting with the island farmers at a seminar on Organic farming. And they brought up the issue of monkey menace which was more prominent for Campbell bay – that is closest from the mainland. “They come in hundreds and have made friends even with the dogs and now even our dogs don’t bark when they come. It’s a horror situation for us and we have no clue what to do about it.” “Earlier we could bring up the issues with the authorities directly, now since the encroachers have come – they call the shots with the Panchayat, in fact, our present Sarpanch is an encroacher – and they don’t allow us to meet the officers anymore”.  I was surprised that even after there being 80% forest cover in the islands monkeys are attacking farm lands. One of the farmers replied, “Earlier there were no monkeys in the islands; some were brought in a ship from the mainland to rehabilitate them here. And thus, they multiplied and have now become a menace. Our forest department tells us to “adjust” with them! Now how do we adjust when they uproot everything that we grow?” “It could be that there is not much food inside the forest that is why they must be attacking your fields? So why don’t you plant some fruit trees in the forest?” “That is true, what we have is mostly timber species and therefore the monkeys were not originally meant to be here. As for planting fruit trees:  that can be taken up only by the forest department”. 

One thing that will strike us immediately on reaching the islands is the cleanliness that is maintained, and believe it or not, I have not seen a single man peeing in public! The services are available in most points and you can be sure they will be clean wherever they may be. However, the plastic menace has caught up with the islands as well as increased urbanization and the signs of strain can be seen especially in places like Port Blair. Auto guys are mostly honest and have fixed prices. But that too is changing a bit. At the Phoenix bay, I came out asking for an auto to go to the Tourism office, and one of the rickshaw guys demanded 30 rupees. Then his colleagues who were busy playing a card game shouted back at him, “Its only 20 rupees madam” and scolded that guy for overcharging me.  However, that fellow didn’t relent later and I got duped by the same guy the next day when he charged me 50 instead of 30 rupees to my guest house. And from his behavior which was quiet unlike the islanders and pretty rude, I deduced he must be a recent addition. I was discussing this aspect with one of the workers at the Circuit house, and he said, “What you say is true, the culture is changing and now these outsiders are slowly outnumbering us. I feel we should have something like a permit system whether to allow people or not”, he added. But then it’s not just some unruly kind that land up here, and it’s the moneyed people who change the dynamics of a place. The well heeled think of buying villas and homes here, like this wife of a Navy Officer whom I met at the guest house, “I think we should sell out one of our properties in Delhi and buy a house here”.  And just moments before that, she was lamenting about how her home town Dehradun had become a concrete jungle and the forests are all gone in Uttarakhand, and how the weather has become unbearably hot! “People don’t realize the importance of preserving environment. Now they are talking about it. But I say to them that it’s too late now!” She added.   Hmm, this lady with her awareness cannot connect that when people like her come and go on building houses, soon, the islands too will become concrete Jungles? 

The concept of converting agricultural land into plots has caught up. And people want to sell the land. And as for agriculture, most of the young people like elsewhere in India don’t want to continue in agriculture. They find it too tough and non lucrative. That could be a tough thing for the islands because with great difficulty some kind of self sufficiency has been achieved in food production. And if the trend continues, then once again there will be a dependency on the Mainland for food!!! Now that is again an anti-climax. Mainland India herself is suffering from an overdose of drought and food and water shortages. The island administration has a big agenda to convert the entire island agriculture which is about 50,000 hectares into completely organic agriculture. “Fortunately for us, the entire supply of fertilizers and pesticides are given to farmers directly from the govt. departments. We are creating awareness about the hazards of chemical agriculture. But we are also stopping the supply of fertilizers and chemical pesticides, so the farmers will have no choice but to switch to organic practices”, said the Chief Secretary for Department of Agriculture, Mrs. Menaka. One of the agricultural officers said, “here we pamper our farmers and literally beg them, please do agriculture, but they are increasingly getting alienated with agriculture”.

So, during the discussions, we talked about the need to preserve the agricultural economy and also discussed the impacts of global warming and the current paradigm of development which is destroying the mainland’s ecology. As a mainlander, I could share with the farmers and the officials, all the Don’ts to safeguard their islands.  The people could connect to it easily as they had faced the wrath of Tsunami.  Post Tsunami, there are many initiatives to protect the island’s ecology, but unfortunately, they are unable to stop the impacts of the Mainland activity. The increase in chemical pollution into the seas, from coastal India, and the increasing temperatures in the sea due to global warming, has destroyed most of the coral life. There was a time when the Andaman Islands were full of colourful corals and now there aren’t many corals left there.  At Neil Island when we went in a Glass Bottomed Boat, I could see mostly dead corals. My fellow passenger said, “It looks like a grave yard. Sad!” People say it’s because of the Tsunami. “No, Tsunami can’t be the only reason, it’s the increasing temperatures in the sea that must be killing them”, he said, and turned to his son, “I wonder if there will be anything left for your generation?”  One of the Port employees said, “Since we don’t have much industry, at least we don’t have that pollution”.  True, that is one factor that must have kept the waters still clear and blue. But who will stop the dumping of pollution into the seas from the Mainland? Who cares what happens to small islanders cut away from their mother land, for which their forefathers sacrificed their lives?

 I wondered at the beautiful rock formations that have disappeared in Ross Island. A local lady sitting next to me remarked,” they had to build walls along the island, since most of the beach was washed out in the Tsunami”. Then she said, “But the impact in Car Nicobar was extreme. Many people were lost. My brother in law went to work there, and till date we don’t know if he is alive or dead. Another sister of mine and her husband were washed away. But they were rescued 3 days later – they didn’t even have their clothes on them!’ But those of us, who pitch for the “so called” modern comforts (nicknamed as development)….which are increasing the heat on the earth, do we care what happens to our fellow human beings?  Or to us? Another sound and light show this time at the Ross Island comes to an end…and I see people being happy, it was good paisa vasool…it’s now time to rush back to the comfort zones.