On a regular day, Pandi, 40, and his caparisoned bull would visit over 150 houses, him singing praises of a deity and foretelling people’s future and the bull nodding its head. He would collect alms in return. They would start before daybreak and by 8 a.m. he would have earned anywhere between ₹200 and ₹400. In a month, after accounting for the upkeep of the bull, Pandi earned an average of ₹4,000 to support his family of six.
But now, for more than a year, Pandi has not gone out with his nodding bull. Neither has anyone from the 45 families of Boom Boom Mattukarans, the nomadic tribal community that Pandi belongs to, who live in a settlement in Madurai’s LKB Nagar and are nodding bull handlers. “Earlier, the lockdown prevented us from practising our trade; now, the fear of contracting the virus is keeping us away,” says Pandi.
Closed avenues
A Gangireddu man with his festooned bull
G. Kannaiah, 65, from Melaparthibanur in Tamil Nadu’s Ramanathapuram district, belongs to the snake charmer or Kattu Nayakar community. The men from his community are street performers, snake rescuers and handlers, and the women, soothsayers. Their vocation thrives around people — in marketplaces, beaches, temple streets, tourist spots and residential areas. Today, the multiple lockdowns and restrictions on mobility have robbed Kannaiah’s community of their livelihood.
“This trade is my only source of income. This is all I know,” says Kannaiah. Three generations of his family have been snake charmers. “We haven’t been on the streets performing our acts for almost a year. We are more afraid of dying from hunger than from corona,” he says. His family of four has been living on two meals a day.
A report documenting the impact of one year of COVID-19 on incomes and inequality by the Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University, showed a direct relation between mobility restrictions caused by lockdowns and income loss. A 10% decline in mobility was associated with a 7.5% decline in income. While the impact on incomes has been distressing across the country, in the case of nomadic tribes, the loss of livelihood has been complete.
Fear of eviction
A Narikuravar sells slingshots in Erode
According to the 2011 Census, Tamil Nadu has a tribal population of 7.21 lakh, of which some 5.5 lakh are nomadic. Of the 20 different nomadic communities in the State, the Narikuravars make a living selling trinkets such as bead jewellery, the Dombars craft toys with clay and plaster of Paris, and the Kudukuduppai Karars are fortune-tellers. Some communities are street performers, whip-lashers, cane craftsmen and traditional medicine practitioners. They have all mostly led a nomadic life, with permanent settlements being a recent concept.
These communities are mainly concentrated in the southern districts of the State, with Madurai accounting for the largest population. “Madurai’s many temples could have played a role in attracting the communities to the area. The floating crowds of tourists around the temples are a ready market for their wares and skills,” says Santhi N.S., an independent researcher of population studies based in New Delhi. “Except among the Narikuravars, literacy is low in these communities. Less than 50% have any housing. They live in temporary huts and sheds. Basic amenities like electricity and water are scarce,” she explains.
The president of Nomads Foundation, M.R. Murugan, is from the Kudukuduppai Karar community and lives in a settlement in Thiruparankundram in Madurai with 60 other families. The community has settled down on government poramboke land and live in constant fear of eviction.
“My job is such that I go looking for customers. The customers will not come looking for me, they won’t know where to find me,” he says. These days, survival has been tough. “We have been at the mercy of our neighbours, NGOs and philanthropists who have helped with food and dry ration,” says Murugan.
With no permanent address, documents and identity cards, few have ration cards, and the majority have fallen through the cracks of the public distribution system, explains R. Maheswari, secretary of TENT (The Empowerment Centre of Nomads and Tribes), Madurai. “And those who have cards get much less than their entitlement and at random intervals. In some areas, the substandard quality of ration makes it unpalatable,” she says.
Surviving on gruel
Murugan’s family of five, for instance, has always received 15 kg of rice a month on their ration card instead of their share of 20 kg. Although his children are married, they have not been successful in getting separate ration cards for their families. Only 44 families in his settlement of 60 families have ration cards. “The rice we get is of low quality and does not get cooked. Earlier, we could buy rice from other shops. Now we can’t. There’s no money for even vegetables. We make ganji(gruel) for all our meals,” he says.
The 20 odd families of the Street Circus community in Mariamma Nagar in Sivaganga district get even less: 5 to 10 kg of rice per ration card.
B. Ari Babu is assistant professor at The American College, Madurai, and founder of ‘Buffoon’, a non-commercial YouTube channel that has been documenting the hardships faced by marginalised groups in Tamil Nadu due to the pandemic. He says: “The communities live in big groups of 20 to 30 people. Ration from one card is simply not sufficient. Some communities received a one-time dry-ration kit as relief from the State government but that was not enough.”
With hardly any welfare programmes benefiting these communities, food is a bigger problem than the virus, says Maheswari. “In the past year and a half, starvation deaths in these communities have increased manifold. But no one records these deaths as deaths due to hunger.”
The government must make efforts to issue identity documents such as caste certificates for the nomadic tribal communities, says R. Rajangam, founder of TENT. Tamil Nadu has over 40 departments catering to the needs and welfare of various groups including the Backward Classes, Most Backward Classes and Minorities Welfare Department , Adi Dravidar and Tribal Welfare Department, and the Animal Husbandry, Dairying, Fisheries and Fishermen Welfare Department. But there is none that specifically looks at nomadic tribes.
“Each group receives welfare benefits through their respective welfare departments. Since there is no separate department, the nomadic tribal communities rely on general welfare schemes, for which they are not eligible for lack of ID proof,” says Rajangam.
The establishment of a nomadic tribes welfare department in the State has thus been the community’s primary demand. These communities are collectively grouped under ‘denotified tribes of India’, so called since they were de-notified from a list that branded them criminal under the colonial Criminal Tribes Act, 1871. Although the draconian legislation that allowed for the “registration, surveillance and control” of “criminal” tribal communities was revoked in 1949, the stigma and persecution, and disenfranchisement have indeed endured.
pragati.kb@thehindu.co.in
