Bastar: a traveller’s tale

In the introduction to Landscapes of Wilderness, the author Narendra confesses that his book is “not a formal sociological work” and is “more like a traveller's tale”.

- Aparna Karthikeyan

The 39 chapters draw from his “wanderings” in Bastar, and Abujhmad, which he describes as “pre-society”.

When he arrived here in 1980, the three or four bamboo and thatch huts did not meet the “criteria of forming villages”. They lacked hierarchies and occupations. In Abujhmadia, the people, were “soft-footed and soft-spoken, never loud, assertive or intrusive”. Much of Abujhmad is “revealed-con-

cealed” by the “ancient dark that comes each night.”

Once he began moving deeper into the interiors, he experienced the “vast ancient silence of centuries”. Not surprisingly, he stopped taking field notes. The book is about powerful truths. “Nature has the materials to create the atomic bomb but Nature by itself is not an atomic bomb.” “Human society is as much a human invention as the steam engine.” All this is written without scorning or overtly critiquing “modernity”.

In Abujhmad, Narendra is reminded of his native village, in the 1950s and ’60s. People rarely left the area. When they did, to visit a daughter, for instance, they walked or rode donkeys.