A day out in the adjoining village of a Black buck Sanctuary - 18th Sep. 2011

In the dry plains around Mydanahalli are small villages like Talekere, Id halli, Puruvara  and Hosalli which have communities that have really faced the brunt of the Black buck population.  With an inquisitive mind we went to meet the people and know the nitty-gritty of conservation of blackbucks.

We drove into a small village called Uttarahalli with some 160 house holds.  The adult population of about 565 was secular enough by all Indian standards to have more than a dozen castes among them-the Bovi, Vokkaliga, Kuruba, Bhajantri, Kumbara, Kuruba, Sunnadakallara Banajiga, Madivala, Golla and Lambanis- who traditionally had a nomadic existence. Uttarahalli was under the jurisdiction of Kudlapura Panchyath along with twelve such villages.

 Though Uttaralli was basically agrarian, there were potters, Sheep herders, Black smiths, lime stone burners and folk singers; a variety of occupations thrived here half a century ago. Today all occupations and traditional skills have become redundant.

Muthappa, a potter is the last in their generation to practice pottery. The pots he used to make have become non functional and is used only during rituals. As a result his son Ramesha has not taken the pains to learn the trait. He could not even manage to place the wheel in balance on its base as much like any stranger to the profession. 

Byra only has faint memory of his father’s looms outside the village that wove woolen blankets. No one in the village waits for sunnadakallamma anymore to burn rocks in a kiln to get lime stone for white wash. They simply go in for a factory-made distemper.

The holiday had kept most men relaxed in the village. Women were busy with their daily chores.  Most  activity seemed to be around the village tap.  Some of them were engaged in preparing the harvested pulses to be put on the road for drying.  A woman sat mixing red clayey soil into a fine paste right on the road. She had some alasandhe(Cow peas ) and was coating them with fine soil. The coated seeds are sun dried for a day or two and ground under a stone to get rid of the seed coat. With the seed coat goes the soil leaving behind finely polished cotyledons.

Some young men sat under the peepal tree cutting thupra leaves to a particular size to be rolled into beedies. The leaves collected in the forests of Bastar (Maharashtra and Madhyapradesh) region, the heartland of India are dried and transported this far. Here they are soaked in water and softened to enable rolling them into beedies. Leaves were being piled up together and cut into to small rectangles. Great care was taken not to waste a single millimeter of the leaf. An old metal plate, about the size of a visiting card and an equally old scissors were the only piece of machinery that the process involved.

A local rolling thupra leaves.

There were goats, cattle and a large number of very colorful cockerels strutting in pride all over the village. There were only four small shops that sold the essentials of the community. Two of them were also tea shops during the morning but sold alcohol by sun set. There were three auto rickshaws that shuttle between Pururava and Madugiri all day and serve as the last mode of transport into the village in every night.

There was an anganavadi, the govt. run child care centre and a Govt. Lower Primary School to which the teachers come regularly. There were couple of well to do farming families who owned multiple pump irrigation  and every thing seemed perfect with the community.  But as time passed one would come across more and more people   involved in the Beedi industry - no bar for age or sex.

 A vast majority in the village were seen squatting in the front porch with a small tray on their lap. Their fingers worked non stop until their self designated targets were reached. Often the targets were in thousands and were decided by the family requirements.  For some it is only a supplementary income and they rolled out a thousand beedies by the day. But families that were full time into this profession may roll up to two thousand every day. The entire family is involved in the long chain of process ranging from soaking the leaves in water to packing finished beedies in bundles of ten. The process involves a sequence of nine handlings- each that demands the skills of highly experienced and nimble fingers. The local beedi company owners come to the village twice a week to exchange raw material for finished goods leaving behind a paltry sum as the labor costs.

Young Sushma filling tobacco into the beedies.

The community which had a glorious life just a generation ago is now completely out of business. With their skills inherited for centuries become redundant the community struggles to eek out an existence. In fact almost all the families have some decent piece of land upon which they cultivated crops during every rainy season. 

While Murthy was filming village life, Manu listened to the personal experiences of the villagers with black bucks.

Murthy with the local kids.

Except for those who had the luxury of pump irrigation or barbed wire fencing the rest of the farmers had given up cultivation. They had repeatedly lost every single grain to the invading blackbucks year after year.

An adult male buck seen in the outskirts.

The cost of night watchman ship did not match the returns from the single ‘dry-land crop’ in a year. Very few people persisted with sowing ragi (figure millet) or groundnut. They showed us how the blackbucks had made their fields their home. Dozens of them were squatting in peace chewing cud in the heat of the noon. It wasn’t difficult to believe the sorrowful words of a lanky 50 plus Meenamma “it must have been at least ten years sir, since we sowed a seed.” She burst out in grief recollecting her past “we would sow 300 kilos of groundnuts every season; today we don’t even have a few seeds at home for the kids to eat.”

By the look of things it was clear that the situation of the conflict was grimmer than we believed. Was this conflict there all through history? What did the farmers do or how did they tolerate the onslaught on their crops? Why are the blackbucks doing this now?