[Assam] A Tragic Story--from Tehelka

[Chan Mahanta]

THE HUB

Silhouetted Memories

A bare hut, a stark life. A woman who is a shadow of her iconic self. 
Kosi, the proud Gond who once bridged cultures to marry the prominent 
anthropologist Verrier Elwin, has been cruelly forgotten by the 
world, says Hartosh Singh Bal
  Yesterday: Kosi with a picture of Verrier Elwin
He is English. He has come from another land to love us. From how 
great a distance have you and he come together, over land and sea, 
over mountain and forest, drawn together by fate. To you he is Raja; 
to him you are Rani, and because of you two we are all of royal 
blood. And listen again, brother! Today you eat her tender flesh; 
tomorrow do not despise her bones. Never leave this girl, nor leave 
this country, for she is yours and this land is yours.

The girl who opens the door is 17 and stunning. She goes by the name 
of Akrita Elwin. It is an unusual name for a Gond girl, and it has 
everything to do with the story of her grandmother, Kosi. She is 
surprised to find a stranger at the door, the last time someone in 
search of a narrative came to this village hut in Raitwar she was not 
even 10.

  Kosi's story has not really changed since that last visit by a 
journalist, it has only got worse. The facts are easy to list out. In 
1939 when she was probably just out of her teens, she met and married 
Verrier Elwin, a 37-year-old Englishman who was already living out a 
life that was incredible even by the standards of the extraordinary 
men who peopled the Indian independence movement.

  A missionary influenced by Gandhi, Elwin and his friend Shamrao had 
come to Mandla district to work among the tribals of central India. 
By the time he met Kosi he had already come to believe that the 
Gandhian prescription of abstinence made little sense in the world he 
now inhabited. He would go on to become the foremost documentor of 
tribal life in central India and later in the northeast. After 
independence, his association with Jawaharlal Nehru ensured that he 
played a key role in shaping this nation's tribal policy.

  But even as his knowledge of tribal India deepened, his marriage 
with Kosi began to come apart. He would eventually be able to live 
out only part of the marriage vows the Gond priest had recited at 
their marriage. Elwin never did leave this country, but he did leave 
this girl. His meticulous biographer Ramachandra Guha writes that 
"Kosi Elwin was very much her own woman; independent, intelligent and 
self-willed, and in some matters vastly more experienced than her 
husband. Her view was that sex was her right; she'd 'shout and rage, 
get tight, brag of her lovers, scorn V's skill and then expect a 
night of passionate love'.''


Elwin's biographer Ramachandra Guha  writes, 'Kosi Elwin was  very 
much her own woman.... Her view was  that sex was her right; she'd 
shout and rage, get tight, brag of her lovers, scorn V's skill and 
then expect a night of passionate love'
Their first son was named Jawahar, after Nehru, the second son Vijay 
was conceived in 1945, while Elwin was away studying the tribes of 
Orissa. In all likelihood he was not Elwin's son though he bore his 
name. (Akrita is Vijay's daughter.) By 1948, the marriage was clearly 
coming apart.

  Today it is difficult to talk to Kosi about this life. Not because 
she is reluctant to speak, but because of the circumstances in which 
such a conversation would take place. When Akrita disappears inside 
the bare hut to summon her grandmother, there is nothing to 
foreshadow the shock of Kosi's appearance. She cannot walk, she 
shuffles along the ground on her arms. She enters the room and drags 
herself to one corner, where she seats herself on the floor, leaning 
against the wall.

  She says she is a 100 years old. It is an exaggeration but it rings 
true. Her son, Jawahar, died several years earlier. "We had named him 
after the Prime Minister. We met him in Delhi when I was pregnant, 
and he said that we must name the child after him if it was a son,'' 
Kosi says. Her younger son, Vijay, died last year of a burst ulcer, 
much in the same fashion as his elder brother. A few years ago she 
hurt her back in a fall. Although she managed to start walking again 
after treatment, she fell down and hurt herself again. There was no 
money to resume the treatment. Today the family - Kosi, her 
daughter-in-law Santi Bai and her three
  children, Akrita, Pramod and Arun - lives on the money Santi earns 
by working as a labourer on nearby farms.

  Even the pension started in 1981, when the poet Dom Moraes visited 
Raitwar, has been stopped for nearly a year. Shocked by the state of 
a family he had once known in Bombay, where Jawahar had been his 
schoolmate, Moraes got the Madhya Pradesh government to sanction a 
pension from the department of culture for the family of a 'writer 
and artist'. The pension, a sum of Rs 600 a month, stopped arriving 
in March 2005, shortly before the death of Vijay. With the family 
struggling to make ends meet, the state government has finally agreed 
to release the money due to Kosi.

  As Santi relates these facts, Akrita returns to the room with a 
glass of black tea, sweetened with gur. She apologises for the lack 
of milk and sugar in the house. She says she knows nothing about the 
man whose name she bears. All she knows, she says in Hindi, is that 
"he wrote books in English". And, she adds, no one in the family now 
reads the language. In these surroundings, even though Kosi is more 
than willing to speak about the past, it is difficult to discuss 
evenings spent in the company of Jawaharlal Nehru or late night 
revelries at the Taj Palace in Bombay.

  In this hut it is easy to see why Guha once cautioned that "in the 
prevailing political climate, it is all too easy to represent the 
Elwin-Kosi encounter as one of the anthropologist exploiting his 
subject, the Oxford scholar dominating his tribal wife, and the
  Englishman being arrogant towards the Indian. These are all gross 
simplifications of a complex story''.

  Perhaps. Encounters across cultures are a given in the region Kosi 
inhabits. The source of the Narmada lies barely 15 kilometres away at 
Amarkantak. Along its banks the Indo-European met the Dravidian, the 
agriculturist encountered the forest dweller, the Afghan fought and 
assimilated with the Gond and Baaz Bahadur fell in love with 
Roopmati. Circumstances differ and if each encounter was a love 
story, it was also a tragedy where the burden of loss weighed far 
more on one side. Kosi's tale is no different.

Mar 18 , 2006