THE BEE, THE BEAR AND THE KURUBA
Directed by Vinod Raja
64 mins, Kannada with English sub-titles, 2001

A document of the displacement of indigenous lives, not by ‘development’ but by ‘eco’-development

Vinod Raja’s film about the Kuruba tribe in the Rajiv Gandhi National Park , Nagarhole, Karnataka, is beautifully shot. The songs and the stories that punctuate the film give it a lyrical, pastoral quality. But what the film talks about is at great variance with its bucolic look. The Bee, The Bear and the Kuruba is yet another document about the destruction of the lives of indigenous peoples. In this instance of displacement, the villain is not development in the strict sense of the word. Ironically, the villain is eco-development, ie, a project for the preservation of forest lands and the habitat of the region’s animal life. The Wild Life Act 1972 has designated forest preserves as Reserve Forests , Wildlife Sanctuaries and National Parks. While sanctuaries permit some human habitation, the national park strictly forbids any human habitation within its confines. National parks in India are "exclusive" preserves for wildlife.

The film opens with a song and a story about the Kurubas’ intimate connection with honey and the bear. The bear and the ancestors of the tribe had always shared the honey and lived in the forest together. The forest is the place of the ancestors and the gods, a home that nourishes and provides and sustains, but more than that, it is also the locus of identity for the Kuruba. Take them away from their forest and they are in a state of profound existential exile: there is nothing left – rituals, community, tradition, songs and stories, all die with dislocation. Or, as the developers prefer to call it, 'relocation'.

Raja’s initial impetus for making the film was the Kuruba protest against the proposed Taj Hotels resort in the forest. That would appear to be a relatively simple and 'common' event – the colonisation of land from marginalised peoples to feed the urbandwellers’ insatiable appetite for novelty and adventure. However, the film unearths a far more macabre aspect:: how are we so willing to sacrifice humans – their livelihood, their community, their sense of self and identity – at the altar of self-righteous 'eco'-development? Especially when we know that our sense of the 'eco'-universe is learned, while that of the indigenous peoples’ is lived.

In fact, the Kuruba have their own solution for how to deal with a habitat that is rightfully theirs, one that they shared with animals for generations and centuries. The problem that 'eco-developers' have with the Kuruba is that they occupy a zone that has been designated for the protection of elephants, deer, bison and the like. In the artificially created wildlife preserve, there are simply too many humans. Government policy is to keep the animals and move the humans out.

The Kuruba suggest that they inhabit the outer perimeter of the forest (the 'inhabited forest'). This surrounds the 'protected forest' that they can use as their traditional source of livelihood and finally, there is the innermost forest which is designated the 'sacred forest', where they will go only once a year to worship their ancestors and the trees.

The relocated Kurubas have been given houses and lands to cultivate. But there is no water and there are no pumps. Besides that, cultivation is not their natural occupation. What the relocation has done here, as elsewhere, is demand that a people remake themselves in order to 'fit' new social and economic paradigms and a new world order. It has placed them in a money economy without the means to participate in it fully.

Raja’s film makes the viewer realise how utterly endemic the exploitation of tribal peoples is. One of the Kuruba says in the film, “we have never lived at the cost of anyone else.” What hits home is that we have and that we continue to do so. When the already marginalised Kuruba provide their solution to the problem, who is listening? And if anyone is, do they have the power to overturn the system that sets these oppressions in place, a system that we all participate in, one that has become “naturalised” over the centuries, at enormous human cost.

For more information, contact: vinodraja@hotmail.com
                                                        Grass Roots Media Pvt. Ltd.
                                                       143, 4th Main Road , Malleshwaram
                                                       Bangalore 560 003. India