The tribals of the Nagar Haveli jungles had never known what plenty was, though what they had was adequate.
The more affluent among them had small plots of land to till, although these plots grew smaller with each passing generation as they were divided between brothers. In the good years, the single crops of nangli and arahar (finger millet and a pulse, respectively) that they produced, even after the chauth (tax) the Patel took away, lasted them through most of the year. They had hens and goats, so milk and eggs were aplenty, and they could hunt if food fell short. On good days, when someone managed to snare a fat hare or a deer, the entire community would rejoice, drink, dance under the banyan tree and thank Waghdev for the life they had. When the rains failed, they managed to survive by working in the fields of the Patels and the landlords, whose areas were irrigated with water from the Daman Ganga River.
All this changed when the fanaga, or foreigner, came. The Patels suddenly started demanding half the crop as chauth, claiming that it was the law of the fanaga. In reality, the Portuguese had little interest in the territories and maintained only a skeletal presence, relying entirely on the Patels for revenue collection. Given free rein, the Patels began to exploit the tribals and appropriate the tiny parcels of land they owned.
The standard procedure was to understate the produce from their own fields, overstate that of the small tribal landowners and extract taxes from them. The tribals ended up giving away almost the entire crop they had grown and ran out of grain within a few days of harvesting. The Patels would then “lend” them grain to tide them over the lean period and demand twice that amount back during the next harvest in a system referred to as “khavti”. Obviously, few could abide by such terms; those who could not were beaten up and lost their houses, families and lands. All they had to help them through rough times was the country liquor they brewed. Entire populations, it is said, succumbed to alcoholism.
Daman continued to thrive because it was the main centre for importing opium and almost all the Portuguese officers had a stake in the illicit trade. There was no such attraction in Dadra and Nagar Haveli, so visits by officers to Silvassa were rare. When they did visit, the Patels and the landlords would wine and dine their benefactors and send them back with handsome gifts. The chicken and mutton they feasted on came from the tribals, as did the girls who were summoned for “entertainment”.
As soon as the Patels’ men entered a village, accompanied by the odd Portuguese soldier clad in khaki shorts and a shirt, a shout would go up: “Pada re pada, fanaga aala re!” (Run, run, the firangi has come!). The villagers would gather up what they could and flee into the jungle, leaving their doorless hovels for the outsiders to plunder to their heart’s content.
With their small parcels of land being seized by the landlords in lieu of grain, most of the tribals were left without any possessions to call their own. Many left their villages to work in the cities of British India. While the young worked, the elders begged and died on the streets, far from their beloved hamlets and jungles.
During the famine of 1859, most of the able-bodied men left for the cities. The following year, the Patels had no one to work in their fields, and when harvest season came, the entire district was barren. Revenues plummeted.
Having been repeatedly hit where it hurt them the most, the Portuguese sought to remedy the situation. A reform committee was set up in 1870, consisting of a senior Patel, a local officer and an officer from Goa. The committee reviewed the plots of land the Patels had misappropriated and returned some to their original owners. Another committee was set up in 1878, which surveyed and reallocated parcels of farmland. With some order restored, the tribals began to trickle back home and agricultural trade blossomed. Soon, Dadra and Nagar Haveli were supplying rice, eggs, poultry, mutton and firewood to the entire Daman province.
This new-found prosperity provided only a brief respite from exploitation since it drew greater interest from the Portuguese officers in the district. The number of police posts, border checkpoints and supervising officers multiplied almost overnight. Suddenly, the fanaga were everywhere. The exploitation and the beatings, which had never really stopped, intensified. The parasitic landlords lived off the tribals, who gradually sank back into abject poverty. They were forced to work in the fields as bonded labourers – stories abounded of sick men being dragged out of their houses and sent to the landlords’ farms. The women – easy targets for the landlords and their hangers-on – were ruthlessly exploited. Having tribal concubines became the norm, and women were discarded and replaced at will.
When there was less work on the farms, the landlords made the tribals cut jungle grass, bind it into fifty-pound bales and load these into carts. Sometimes, the men were yoked to the carts and made to pull them. All they got in return were two or three annas, whereas the landlords made profits of up to Rs 20 a bale.
The landlords lived in huge houses with well-manicured lawns while their tribal servants were housed in squalor. They maintained luxurious holiday homes in Mumbai and Goa and took a keen interest in the officers who were posted to Silvassa. These landlords were a mix of Parsis, Hindus, Muslims and Iranis, and though their religion distinguished how they lived, the one thing common to them all was their contempt for the tribals. They left all the dirty work to hired supervisors and their goons, all of whom shared the view that the tribals were mere beasts of burden.
The supervisors enforced fourteen-hour work days, disallowing even toilet breaks, and dealt with any drop in productivity, as defined by them and regardless of reason, with a stern hand. Workers were beaten mercilessly, at times without cause, merely to “set an example”. The multi-tailed whip was a standard issue for all supervisors, who applied it liberally on the bare backs of men and women alike. A common punishment the men suffered was having their long braids tied to their feet and standing in the sun in awkward, contorted positions while their backsides were lashed. Sometimes they were left bound to a tree for hours without food or water or hung upside down from the branches and beaten soundly. The Patels often made them put their thumbprints on documents they did not understand, then used these to accuse them of theft and throw them into jail. A few who protested were burnt alive by the landlord’s accomplices.
Once again, the old warning began to echo through the tribal villages: “Pada re pada, fanaga aala re!” And once again, they gathered whatever they could before fleeing into the jungles.
Excerpted with permission from Uprising: The Liberation of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Neelesh Kulkarni, Westland.
