Biography is an underdeveloped genre in our country. We Indians know how to flatter the living, but not how to write with insight and authority about the dead. While books on our major national leaders (past and present) exist, few qualify either as scholarship or as literature. (The exceptions include B.R. Nanda on Gokhale, Rajmohan Gandhi on Patel, and S. Gopal on Radhakrishnan.)
This lack is not restricted to the realm of politics or public affairs. Our literary and cultural history is equally poorly served. I would love to read, for example, rigorously researched and well-written biographies of the Kannada polymath, K. Shivarama Karanth, the Bengali writer-activist, Mahasweta Devi, and the globally influential musician, Ravi Shankar. But they do not exist.
However, things may finally be about to change. I know of four outstanding younger writers who have now embarked on biographical projects. These will be in English; meanwhile, I have come across an interesting biography just published in Hindi. The author is the senior journalist, Sudeep Thakur, and his subject is an activist of adivasi origin named Lal Shyam Shah: a man well known in his own native Gondwana, but whose work and example resonate across the country.
Lal Shyam Shah was born in 1919 into the tribal aristocracy. Owning large tracts of land and forests, he could have followed a typical zamindari life of indolence. But he chose to serve his people instead. As the leader of the Adivasi Mahasabha, Shah defended tribal rights in land and forests and demanded respect for their history and culture. Travelling widely through Central India, he was greatly loved and respected by the adivasis of the region.
After Independence, Lal Shyam Shah decided not to join a political party, but to remain independent. He lost his first election narrowly, but then his opponent's victory was annulled by the court. A rerun was called for; this time Shah won, but shortly afterwards resigned from the assembly. In his resignation letter, he spoke sorrowfully of the continuing exploitation of the adivasis by contractors, officials and politicians. He wrote of how adivasis had been consigned by the State to the garbage bin (' adivasiyon ko raddi ki tokri mein phek diya gaya hain'), and how politicians bowed on bended knees before the wealth of influential businessmen ('sarkar ne thekedaron ke dhan ke aage ghutne tek diye hain').
Thakur narrates the story of Lal Shyam Shah's multiple campaigns. He documents the various assembly and parliamentary elections he fought, winning some, losing others. He plays close attention to the struggles that Shah led outside of the electoral sphere, asserting adivasi rights to natural resources or protesting against destructive projects that displaced tribal communities. Shah also played a leading role in the (sadly unsuccessful) campaign to create a tribal majority province of 'Gondwana', which would have brought into its fold the contiguous, adivasi-dominated, hill-and-forest areas of present-day Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Odisha.
As Thakur demonstrates, Lal Shyam Shah was both a thinker and an activist. He had a deep understanding of the adivasi predicament, and of the legal framework as well. Shah argued that while the Constitution had made the president of the republic as well as governors in the states protectors of tribal rights, those holding these high offices had abdicated reason and responsibility, leaving adivasis to the mercy of more powerful economic interests. On the ground, Shah worked to rescue adivasis from the clutches of moneylenders, taking up many individual cases in this regard.
The centrepiece of the book is a vivid account of a meeting between Lal Shyam Shah and Jawaharlal Nehru in Raipur in October 1960. That city, now the capital of Chhattisgarh state, was the venue of a meeting of the All India Congress Committee which Nehru attended. Shah had the inspired idea of bringing the demands of the adivasis directly to the prime minister. He organized a padayatra in which tens of thousands of adivasis participated, marching from their homes and villages. On arriving in Raipur, they camped in a ground a mile away from where the AICC session was being held.
The gathering wished to place several demands before the prime minister. These included the creation of a separate Gondwana state and the forging of public policies to safeguard the economic security of adivasis. The massive Bhilai steel plant, Nehru's and India's pride and joy, was coming up close to Raipur; yet this showpiece of development would employ few adivasis, although they were the sons of the soil, the long-time inhabitants of the district in which the steel factory was being built.
Lal Shyam Shah was keen that Nehru speak with the adivasis. But the prime minister's minders wanted to keep him confined to the AICC meeting. So Shah boldly went across to where Nehru was staying, and told him that his fellow citizens had walked for days to see and speak with their leader. Nehru was persuaded; disregarding his security detail, he drove across to meet the adivasis, assuring them that their demands would be looked into.
In 1962, Lal Shyam Shah was elected to the Lok Sabha from the constituency of Chanda (now Chandrapur, in Maharashtra). But within two years of becoming an MP he resigned, because the government had chosen to settle migrants from East Pakistan in the forests of Central India. Shah saw this as as the latest mark of the government's insensitivity to adivasi rights and demands. His letter of resignation spoke of how the adivasis were being made refugees in their own home. Their lands and forests were being handed over to outsiders, or submerged by mega projects. They were denied access to education in the mother tongue.
Some years later, Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, became prime minister. In June 1975, she imposed the Emergency. Although Lal Shyam Shah was not a member of a political party, the Congress government arrested him, keeping him in jail for a whole year.
Harassment by the State did not deter Shah. In the 1980s, he became active in a movement that went under the resonant name, 'Jangal Bachao, Manav Bachao'. This fought for tribal rights in jal, jangal, jamin - water, forest, and land - the three pillars of the local economy, the three resources that outsiders wished to pillage and to exploit.
Meanwhile, the State was planning a series of large dams on the Indravati that would inundate massive tracts of natural forests and displace tens of thousands of tribal families as well. Lal Shyam Shah knew from past (and bitter) experience that these mega projects brought few benefits to tribal people, but a great deal of suffering. With the veteran Gandhian, Baba Amte, he organized a popular movement against these destructive projects, succeeding in stalling at least two of them. He died in March 1988, active (and combative) till the last.
Lal Shyam Shah was the voice and conscience of the adivasis of Central India. As Thakur tells us, he often signed his name as 'Lal Shyam Shah, adivasi', this a proud and defiant mark of his complete commitment to, and his total solidarity with, his own people. Unlike the netas of today, he struggled not for political power for himself but for self-respect for his community. This book deserves to be widely read, both for its historical significance and to inspire a younger generation to take forward the legacy of Lal Shyam Shah and build an India worthy of his dreams and his struggles.
