South India – Day 7, part 1
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
Fr. Babu
It’s another beautiful day and the first unexpected order of business was to meet Fr. Babu. He had somehow caught wind of the fact that someone from ARI was in town and came all the way from Ooty to meet me. Ooty. Yet another one of those fun names to say. The Oo part is like “Oops” with a “tee” at the end. Apparently, it is a popular tourist area.
Fr. Babu is a Catholic priest who practices and teaches herbal medicines, following in the footsteps of his father. In fact, he is a certified naturopath. This should not to be confused with an ayurvedic, he warned, as natural medicine is even more traditional. Coming from a traditional farming family, his dynamic life story includes his own time spent farming with the WSSS, as well as working with villagers in Mysore, while living in a hut. Not long ago, he spent three years in Rome studying healing of trauma and counseling of love. At present, he is serving three parishes in Tamil Nadu. As I looked into his gentle face and heard to his stories, I felt a glimpse of a deep, lifelong search for peace and healing in this world and his role in it.
Puttu
Fr. Babu joined Siby, Naran, and me for a breakfast of puttu with curry sauce. What is it? Well, I am not the best person to ask, because I still don’t really know what I am eating from meal to meal, but it is amazing. On the sweet side, with a light coconut flavor, Puttu is a specialty of Kerala. You put it on your plate, smash it down, spoon sauce over the top, and enjoy.
Little by little, my eating by hand technique is improving. It’s a lot harder than you think, if you don’t want to look like a slob. There are manners and etiquette involved. First, and this is just outright obvious, you wash your hands thoroughly with soap. Who would eat with a dirty spoon? Every restaurant and home has a sink near the dining area. When your food is served, you take in its beauty, and then formulate an eating strategy. Using only your fingertips, below the wrinkle line as much as possible, mix the curry and rice or any other foods on your plate to get just the right flavor combination. This is why you need a strategy, because each curry has a distinct personality to be appreciated. Absolutely, do not just mix everything as I tried to do. Form a bite-sized ball and pop it in your mouth – food only – no fingers beyond the lips. Also, use only one hand. If you go mucking up both hands, how are you going to take a drink, or these days, answer your phone? If you have meat or fish, it is customary to pull off bite sized pieces (using one hand), to mix with your curry, rather than chewing it off the bone. When you are finished, enjoy conversation until everyone else is done, while holding your hand over your plate, using it for nothing, as if it is a useless appendage. The better your technique, the cleaner your hand will be at this point. Lastly, go once again to the wash basin.
I was often given a spoon, but it just didn’t feel right. Eating Indian food in the company of Indian friends, in India. No, it must be done by hand.
Non-formal education
After breakfast we headed back to Solidarity, so let’s pick up the story I promised yesterday. Solidarity was established in 1982, but Naran’s work with the Adivasi predates that. They started with basic education and to do that, he and his colleagues would go to these “forest dwellers” in their homes to teach them how to read. Called non-formal education, that is, not in a school with a specific curriculum, this practice of meeting the Adivasi in their own environment helped to build trust. At the time, 28% of the population of Wayanad were Adivasi.
But wait a minute. I think I need to back up a few steps. I have already spoken of the Adivasi a few times, but who are these people? And why are they in need of assistance? A proper reply would require pages and pages, and since those pages have already been written, long articles and whole books, by people who know far more about the topic than I do, I am going to be brief, and incomplete.
The original inhabitants
The Adivasi are said to be the original inhabitants of India. The word literally means something close to “original inhabitants.” However, their story, as is the case with indigenous groups the world over, is a deeply painful one. According to their culture and tradition, they live close with the land, but have no concept of owning it. The earth, the rivers, the air, the trees and their roots, the tigers, elephants and bees, and the Adivasi are all an intertwining of life. They are in the land and the land is in them, and it is all very peaceful … until people with different values enter the picture.
I’m sure you know what is coming next. The newcomers want the land for themselves – to own it, cultivate it, make it “productive” – and they are much stronger. So, the Adivasi are forced out, or turned into laborers. The British cut their forests to plant tea and the Adivasi work on those tea plantations. Later, coffee and pepper came to the region, so they started working on those plantations too. When the Adivasi are evicted from their homes, they have absolutely nothing and nowhere to go. All they had was in the forest. Those that try to stay are considered squatters on land their family has lived on for generations. So, you see. Naran and his friends were very much needed and there was a lot of work to be done.
Finding their voice
The reason they started with literacy was so that the Adivasi could find a voice. In the forest, they know how to call out to the animals, but in the cities, they did not know how to talk to the politicians and land owners. They first learned to read, so they could read the laws that were oppressing them. However, within those laws they found certain words that explained that as human beings, the Adivasi had something called human rights. They found that the concepts of justice and dignity and even land ownership applied to them as well as everyone else, and so they began to take action to move these words from paper to reality. Over time, the Adivasi peoples across India, all different in terms of language and culture, but similar in terms of their connection with the land and their oppression, began to meet, organize, and raise their new-found voices together. Naran described a historic Sangam (or gathering) of different tribes and tribal organizations in Wayanad in 1992. Throughout the country, similar gatherings occurred, growing each year in size and reach and today there are nationwide gatherings of Adivasi, where they discuss the issues affecting them and lay those before the government. When Naran first started his work, this could not even be imagined.
A changing world
By 1992, seeing that the Adivasi had become organized and much empowered, Solidarity slowly started to withdraw. In addition to literacy activities, the organization had also been concerned with their development. That is, how can the Adivasi adapt to the world as it is today, while maintaining their own distinct culture and identity. To quote one of Naran’s writings, “Development is qualitative transformation of the people and not the quantitative abundance of amenities of life. Development is a gradual process and is to be acquired by the people themselves; decisively and critically employing their own potential for the desired change.”
Naran had arranged a meeting with several board members and Adivasi leaders that morning, but since it was a weekday, only three could make it. This facility, the Solidarity Development Education Training Research Center, started with a library in 1986. Devoted to the cause of the Adivasi, you will find some of the books on its shelves are authored by Naran himself. Later, offices and an elegant round meeting room were added, along with an art gallery. The current exhibition was from a Kerala artist camp. “This center is for the tribal people to achieve their rights,” explained Naran. “When we were starting the organization, we were very young. Whatever we could do, we did. We even had a mobile library. Now we are all getting old.”
Solidarity
I met three men that day. The first was Joseph, an artist. His work was not on display in the gallery, but he showed me some on his phone. Then there was PT John – a good talker full of interesting facts. He is an activist working with farmers. The third was Mr. Balakrishnan, a founding member of Solidarity. He is one of those rarities in India, a quiet man. He is also a pioneer organic farmer, starting more than forty years back. He has introduced three new varieties of black pepper and one of turmeric. I asked him why he started organic farming and he said because modern farming is against human beings and nature. Fertilizer is destroying the environment – the microorganisms, the native fish, and many other things. “Whatever is increased through chemical farming, is lost somewhere else. It is the wrong method of farming.” The Kerala State Government has awarded him for his work in preserving 127 species of medicinal plants that were at risk of going extinct. And his answer to climate change? Trees. Let’s cover the earth in trees and let the ground be covered by their leaves and become alive with microorganisms.
Naran’s activeness has been limited the last couple of years by poor health. I sensed he wanted to convey much more about his work, especially the struggle and passion of those early days, but feared I wouldn’t really understand. Those born today, can never fully know how it once was – the drive and the sacrifice of working for a seemingly impossible, but deeply important cause. It may be the same with ARI. Those founders worked day and night, never knowing if ARI would even make it to the next year. I have read and listened to their stories, but those don’t capture the full essence – the worry, the setbacks, the uncertainty about the future, and at the same time a conviction, a deep-down faith that what they are doing is profoundly needed.
