I follow Muskan into her house at the edge of the village. It has only been three days since two elephants visited at night, broke through the earthen walls of the home, and ate 1.5 quintals (150 kgs) of her stored rice. Muskan lives at her mothers’ house with her children, separated from her husband. They are the only family in the village who do not own land. These were grains they had bought. This rice was to sustain her three young children, her mother, her cousin sister, and herself for the entire year. It was all gone. I stare silently, helpless. I have come to her village in the Korba district of Chhattisgarh to conduct preliminary PhD fieldwork on elephant-farmer relations. In those moments in her home, my intellectual notions of human-elephant coexistence scatter like the grains of rice left behind in the crumbled clay. Across Muskan’s house is an abandoned house with sky blue-colored walls and overgrown plants. Manoj, a young relative of those who lived in that home tells me that the family fled when elephants broke into their home. They didn’t return. As I walked through the dark house in the pouring rain, I tried to imagine how they must have felt abandoning their home and fields. Or was it they who were abandoned, displaced again and again? In recent Korba history Adivasi and lower caste villages have been displaced first by the mega dams, then by mines, and now by the elephants. The Hasdeo Bango dam displaced 13 primarily Adivasi villages with its 103km flood zone. Manoj was from one of those villages. Chotia open cast coal mines, one of the many mines established over thousands of hectares of forested lands, is 1.5 kms away from Manoj’s current home. Harassed, starving, and displaced elephants are arriving in large groups from mining torn areas of Jharkhand, Bihar, and Orissa. As more and more elephants arrive, the government in collaboration with the forest department and conservation organizations is establishing protected areas, using elephants as a way to discriminate against Adivasis by keeping them out of forests and denying them their forest rights. Manoj’s family used to live off the forest, but they can barely enter it anymore. They have been abandoned by colonization, capitalism, and conservation. “Tell the forest department that we are at the final stage of our anger. Either they take their elephants away from here, or we will find each one and kill them all.” Many people are angry. Elephants in a remote Pando village had trampled two women to death who were guarding the village’s crops in the fields. The elephants didn’t leave enough seeds to sow for the next season. First the polluted water from the coal mines poisoned their crops, and now the elephants eat what is left. When the elephants come at night, they are pursued with fire torches and firecrackers. The forest department cannot be trusted. It continues to follow the path of its colonial legacy: exploitation, corruption, and exclusion. “How many elephants would you be willing to live with, if they behaved well?” I ask awkwardly, muscles knotted in my stomach. “They say these might be the last couple of generations of elephants left before they go extinct”, I take a chance to say when I sense less anger in the group. In my mind I think about how I might be talking with the last generation of farmers in this village. The last generation who knows the ways of living with the forest. The last generation who will be so angry because they remember what they have lost. Recently, 3 elephants were chased by a crowd of 400 people continuously for 8 days. They were pursued from one part of the village to another to another, until something snapped for one of them. She crushed a man to death. A villager said to me, “elephants know who thinks badly of them, they remember who has abused them and they will find and kill them.” “What do you think is the solution to this struggle with elephants?” I asked a group of Pando villagers. Will they tell a stranger how they really feel? A grandma replied, “once people reform, then the elephants will be reformed too.” The applause that followed revealed a shared conscience. But the mining corporations were not listening. There was no applause from them. A Baiga elder said to me, “industries and mining have hollowed out the forests and the earth itself. The elephant families are wandering, hungry. Forgive me for saying this, but humans have fallen lower than animals.” Muskan shows me the spot where the grains had been stored. The larger elephant had broken the mud walls of the house right above where the grain was stored. Perhaps with his tusks, he pierced the walls, sensing the presence of grains on the other side. The gaping hole in the wall, shaped like a large V, had been covered with some sheets and barricaded with sticks for now. I imagine the head of the elephant emerging through the top of the wall, the trunk reaching in. The smaller elephant had entered through the front, breaking parts of the walls as he moved through. The roof of the house had not collapsed. Mansoor, a biologist working with the elephants in that area for the last 20 years believes that the elephants are very careful about how they break into houses, taking care not to let the roof collapse and kill anyone sleeping in the house. Muskan and her children were not there when they came. No one had been sleeping in the house the night the elephants came. Had the elephants known and sensed that? "If the elephants want they can rampage through villages and fields, destroying and killing everything in their path" said Mansoor. "We have ways to kill them with our bows and arrows. Leave them to us" a Dhanwar villager expressed to me. Coexistence is hanging by a thread in Korba, Chattisgarh. How long before historically persecuted communities can bear no more loss? How long before traumatized elephants become unforgiving? How long before the last forest is stolen by the mines?
*I was able to do this fieldwork thanks to Ekta Parishad activists who took me to multiple villages and guided me during my time. Ekta Parishad is a mass-based people's movement known for several milestone successes including securing land rights to nearly 500,000 families, creating grassroots leadership of more than 10,000 people, protecting forest and water bodies, and framing several laws and policies related to the land reforms in India.
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