Inside Chhattisgarh: A Political Memoir by Sen Ilina

Author:Sen, Ilina [Sen, Ilina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789351188988
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-12-14T18:30:00+00:00

We made many other friends during this period; and many remarkable people, who would remain part of our circle, crossed our path. In the process of promoting our literacy material in pockets across Chhattisgarh, we met Utpala and Anita, who had been part of an all-woman ‘spearhead team’ which had been put in place by the National Institute of Bank Management in Chhattisgarh’s Surguja district. They stayed on to work with Prayog, an NGO that metamorphosed into the Ekta Parishad. Ahilyabai from Magarlod, who joined our team of song writers, was already past sixty when we met her, but had the capacity to compose lyrics and music on any theme in the blink of an eye. Firangilal, Ramlal, Chhannuram and Parma were from the Mahanadi plains area and, along with Jeevrakhan Ghritlahre, they brought elements of Panthi music, poetry and dance of the Satnami community and a Dalit consciousness into our work and our study material.

I first came to know of the Panthi music and dance of the Satnamis of Chhattisgarh by watching the plays of the late Habib Tanvir and his Naya Theatre. This must have been while we were still in Delhi, but memories of the opening song of the musical Charandas Chor2 were brought back when I heard Jeevrakhan Ghritlahre singing ‘Guru Baba ke aarti utarav re sangi tor jeevan bana le na’ (Let us build our lives as we pay homage to Guru Baba) during one of our text-writing workshops. Listening to the music and watching the vigorous movements of the Panthi dance, one could understand something of the energy of the revolt against casteism and feudal land relations that were part of the message of ‘Satyanaam’.

Guru Ghasidas, the founder of the ‘Satnam Panth’ (The Path of the True One), had lived at Girodhpuri, close to the Mahanadi, very close to the Sonakhan of Veer Narayan Singh. Kurrupat Dongri, where Ghasidas attained enlightenment, was the spot where Veer Narayan had meditated before taking the colonial forces on. Both these leaders lived in the mid-nineteenth century, and clearly their messages reflected the breakdown of society and polity on the defeat of the old kingdom, the Maratha interregnum, and the passing of power in Chhattisgarh into the hands of the British. Ghasidas’s message of a simple religious life, allegiance to a single monotheistic God, and the rejection of social hierarchies found a ready following among the depressed sections of the population, and soon the Satnamis were a force to be reckoned with in the plains of the Mahanadi.

Although there were a few big landowning Satnamis, the majority of the followers of Satnam were landless farm workers. In large parts of the undivided district of Bilaspur, Satnami– Savarna (upper caste) clashes in the late nineteenth century were actually about control of land and other productive resources, and had class as well as caste dimensions. The religious hierarchy of the Satnamis was institutionalized in the hereditary Guru gaddi (seat of the teacher) at Bhandarpuri by Guru Ghasidas’s son Balakdas. Balakdas

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