A writer and poet, Randhir Khare was born and raised in India and did his degree in English and sociology in Calcutta. He has worked for the Literacy Mission and for UNICEF in India. Sue Bullough, having got her teaching degree in England, came to live in Co Kerry, from where she has been visiting India for the past 10 years through cultural educational programmes.
The overriding interest that Khare and Bullough share is minority communities, and they have just completed an eventful trip into India's heartland visiting some of the most primitive and vulnerable peoples left in the world. Khare confesses to feelings of both despair and hope for the future of the tribal groups in the Dangs in Gujarat and in Madhya Pradesh, in the very heart of India.
"On my first visit to the Dangs," he says, "I felt I was witnessing the desperate struggle between man and nature, between farmland and forest, between settlers and the original inhabitants, between those who believed in change through violence and those who preferred to work tirelessly building for the future, between the old and the new, between values and merchandise, between annihilation and phoenix-like rejuvenation."
At that time, Khare was working as part of a literacy project that brought him into contact with the Bhil tribe and, although innumerable books had been written on the tribes of India, he felt that none had succeeded in telling the true story.
"They have all been either academic studies, quasi-political tracts or romantic outpourings," he declares. Khare was deeply moved by what these simple illiterate people were telling him about their traditions and present threats. "I am a poor man," said one man called Anadbhai, "my dreams are small. These forests, these hills, this sky, these rivers and waterfalls, these streams, this loving soil, are all part of my living. But the forests do not belong to us anymore. We live like shadows on the edge of the world. In our hearts and in our minds we belong here, but we have been forced into a battle."
For thousands of years the tribes had a forest-based lifestyle that over the years also began to include marginal farming. A near virgin sub-continent offered them adequate space to survive. Rich folkloric, religious and cultural traditions flourished forming the core of their community life. Down through the centuries invaders poured in, Muslims, Mongols, Greeks, Moghuls, Dutch, Portuguese, French and English.
The ultimate blow came when forests were declared reserved and protected and the Bhils became strangers and outsiders in the very forests that they so ardently protected. Today, according to Khare, persons belonging to tribes just about survive.
"We are the children of Dangs," cried one woman, "and what have we been made into? Wanderers. How long can we drag our children from forest to factory and factory to forest?"
Coping with settlers and with changes to their environment are not the only threats facing tribal people in India. Conversion to Christianity poses further problems. The murder earlier this year of an Australian missionary and his two young sons in Orissa has caused a huge media outcry. There have been many reports of attacks on Christians, particularly in tribal areas and, as a westerner, Bullough was warned about travelling into the mountainous tribal terrain of central India.
However, she travelled by jeep along unmade roads and tracks for hours, photographing both barren, stony landscapes and densely forested jungle terrain. As she met men striding along the track, bow and arrow in hand, or women fetching water, she photographed them. They stood proud, looking her square in the eye with neither hostility nor self-consciousness. After dusk, no vehicles were allowed to travel alone. Vehicles had to move in convoy because of the fear of attack.
"I was told we were in danger of being attacked by tribals, but this didn't make a lot of sense to me as many of the tribals are Christian converts. Also many of the local Hindus I spoke to were very respectful of the Christians and the education and medical work they are doing.
"The tribal people I met on this recent visit, mainly from the Bhil and Bhilala tribes, demonstrated such dignity and natural composure and harmony within themselves and their environment that I found it hard to imagine them reacting in an irrational, unjustified manner."
This recent trip for Bullough has been particularly significant as she has been commissioned to take some of the photographs for Khare's new book, Dangs - Journey Into the Heartland, to be published in November this year by HarperCollins. She is very excited about the project.
"Randhir Khare's book is important for several reasons," she explained. "Firstly, it is written in a very accessible style which gives all of us an opportunity to learn and understand something of the present situations for the tribal communities. Secondly, as an Indian academic he has an unusual empathy with the natural environment and the indigenous people of India and this comes across very strongly in all his work, including his poetry. Thirdly, the situation of the tribal groups in India is significant not only to a small group of people on that side of the world. It could have world wide implications for the future of the entire planet."
Khare describes the book as a firsthand account of the tribal people living in the Dang jungles in the state of Gujarat. "In telling their story of survival, I have also focused on the natural environment, documenting flora and fauna, and the herbal medicine tradition, so as to create a web of interdependence. The fate of the forest is also the fate of a people.
"While telling this story I have brought in experiences from other tribes in other parts of the country. So, although it is the story of the people of Dangs, it is also the story of the tribes of India."
Already reaction to the work of Khare and Bullough has been so strong that there are plans for them to work on further books covering other minority groups in India. There are some 633 tribes and sub-tribes in India, whose population a decade ago exceeded 50,000,000. Their work is concentrated on minority communities who face increasing pressure to assimilate into the mainstream in a country which has the fastest growing population in the world.
The Dangs area is home to some of the richest teak forests in the world, and yet the Bhils were the original community in the region, depending on hunting and fishing for their survival. When the British came into contact with the Dangs they discovered the region was controlled by five Bhil Rajas and nine chieftains. Repeated attempts to subdue them and capture the Dangs were thwarted. Through opposition and neglect, the Dangi chieftains have retained their individuality, carrying the legacy of never ever having been physically conquered.
This sense of pride and community remains an essential part of their folklore and popular consciousness. The present Raj of Linga says: "We have always been a brave people. No one could ever defeat us in battle. We know this jungle well. This is our home. This has been our home since the times of the Ramayan and Maharbharat. No one could defeat us then. No one can defeat us now".
Khare does not believe that the tribes of India should be venerated as noble savages. "They should merely be given the right to live as human beings, the right to follow their own religious and cultural traditions and the right to once more be truly part of our great and beautiful wildernesses - not as strangers but as the keepers".
Dangs: Journeys Into the Heartland by Randhir Khare to be published by HarperCollins Publishers India Pvt. Ltd, a division of HarperCollins. It will be released in November in hardback.