Bastar Dispatches

Abujhmad is a referent for the Adivasi universe in India and the world at large. Situated in the deep interiors of Bastar, and inhabited by the Abujhmadias, a primitive hunter-gatherer tribe whom Verrier Elwin has called the Hill Murias, Abujhmad stands today as one of the few mirrors left the world over wherein modernity can view itself its calamities and collapses. Their dialect has no more than 300 to 500 words and they count only up to five. We do not need more than that, as they put it. The lone (home in their dialect) is not inside the hut. The hut is only a shelter for the night, against its elements, animals and spirits who roam it. We live in the outside; that is where our parentage and affections are centred, the say. They keep cows but never milk them. Brimming with many such singular insights into a fascinating way of life and based on the author s over thirty years of association with Abujhmad (he is probably the first outsider to live there) and its contiguous areas in the Bastar division of Chhattisgarh, Bastar Dispatches provides a compelling narrative of a people at peace with themselves and nature, their dialect, their festivities, their delightful interactions.