Journeys to the Edge: In the Footsteps of an Anthropologist

With Princes into Wilderness

With Princes into Wilderness The Three Princes A great misty-blue range along my route kept beckoning. I felt the pull of Saduragiri each time I passed the midpoint of my ride to Shenbagatoppu . My eyes were drawn to its forested slopes and to its savanna uplands, hidden at times in clouds. Shy relatives of the people I was studying were said to dwell there, but the blue range was a wild land, without roads or villages, and it was still relatively unspoiled by outsiders from the plains. To ascend Saduragiri I needed to have a rifle to protect myself from elephant herds and other big game. But, when the mountain’s magical pull was strongest, my fascination almost outweighed the silly matter of my not yet having procured a gun license or a suitable weapon. I had to go up there. Some months earlier, I had been told that Periya Raja, the eldest son of a former raja, would be the best person for me to speak with about locating Saduragiri’s tribal bands. The Paliyans trusted him, due to his lifelong history of care and kindness toward them. His role of patron was a continuing one, even though his family’s rule over the wooded range and nearby cultivated lands had ended in 1947, when India became a republic. Paliyans still came down to his back door at night when needing such things as medicine for a seriously ill child. Given the young prince’s reputation as a committed benefactor of the forest people , it seemed only natural that I should pay him a visit, if only for suggestions on how to ascend the range and meet with his reclusive friends. 55 Motorcycling into his family’s former domain, with its modest central town of fifty-one hundred residents, its eighteen or so scattered farming communities, and its lands with twice the area of the European nation of Liechtenstein, I had little sense of what lay ahead. Except for its location, snuggled as it was at the very foot of Saduragiri, the agricultural part of the landscape did not strike me as being much different from the dry lands nearby. Looking down the road, I saw a familiar mix of a diesel bus, slow bicycles (many with extra passengers on the crossbars or back carriers), strings of creaking bullock carts, and farm folk on foot. But it was easy to identify Periya Raja’s whereabouts when I finally entered the town, for the burg boasted only two dwellings of any size. They stood apart on the far western edge of the community, surrounded by a grove of substantial trees. The aging father owned a grand house with a pillared porch; Periya Raja resided in a more modern but smaller dwelling, nestled in the trees beyond the larger house. My host and his wife were lounging on a shady veranda when I motored up their driveway. He was a clean-cut, powerful young man, a former college athlete, about eight years my senior; she was an attractive, sophisticated woman in a lovely sari. As I recall, they brought me the customary brass pot of water to rinse road dust off my feet and invited me to join them in a cool drink. A three-year-long drought was having such an effect on the region’s hydroelectric power generation that an iced drink was almost as great a treat for them as for me. Although they owned a refrigerator, their local allotment of three hours of electricity a day was scheduled for nighttime; the machine had to be kept padlocked throughout the hours of heat if it was to be of any use. I had no sooner mentioned my reason for coming than I discovered for myself the depth of Periya Raja’s interest in the Saduragiri Paliyans. His eyes lit up, he was eager to talk about them, and he expressed an earnest hope of revisiting them in the near future. Some months had elapsed since he had last trekked up to see them. There were three bands, I learned—one on the side of the range facing us, another in a high-altitude valley with two tiny Hindu temples nearby, and a third in a more isolated spot at the far end of the range. He went on to tell me that members of the tribe had served as priests at the two Hindu temples for centuries. Perhaps the Saduragiri bands were not as isolated as...