It was Kondoo’s first visit to Jagdalpur. He sat outside the imposing court of the collector, trembling. Though he mutely put his thumb impression on all the papers that Babulal placed before him, he secretly resolved that when he stood before the great officer, he would plead with him. Master, I don’t want to lose my land. I know I have taken much money from the Seth, who has always shown so much kindness in hard times. I pledge that my family and I will work our whole lives to repay the loan. But we do not want to lose our land. Please, great master, our father and mother, give me one more chance.

Suklia recalled how he had summoned all his courage and strength in preparation for this moment. Kondoo, gentle Kondoo, who had never raised his voice even at a child, prepared to speak out before the great officer, in defiance of the Seth. Anxious and fearful, he trembled, as he waited that day in Jagdalpur for the moment when he would stand before the collector.

But that moment never came. He sat with tens of other litigants outside the collector’s court, awaiting the announcement of his name by the court peon. But while the others went in one by one, his turn never arrived. He never understood what happened. Only years later, when his son Jagtu read the collector’s orders did he realise what had transpired. The order said that despite notice Kondoo Gond failed to appear before the court, therefore, an ex-parte order was passed against him. Jagtu learned soon enough from his rounds of the courts that sometimes only a few rupees to the peon were enough to ensure that the illiterate litigant was not even summoned before the court.

From that day, said Suklia, began Jagtu’s father’s decline. It was not that he did not drink before. Like all other tribal men and women, he had always loved his drink. But now he no longer drank with joy, but with a lingering sadness, and a deep, quiet anguish. The bottle was rarely out of reach. In the last months madness overcame him. She recalled the long, expensive, nightmarish bus journeys to the district hospital at Jagdalpur, with little Jagtu beside her, and Kondoo’s friends from the village for support. But all these efforts were hopeless; the doctors said that they could do nothing. Kondoo was a shell, a husk of his old self when he died.

Jagtu had always been different from his friends. Even in the ghotul, he rarely joined in the merriment of festivals, or the gossip and laughter of his friends. Always aloof, he spoke rarely and little. He had studied up to the fifth standard in the tumbledown primary school five kilometers from his village. The middle school was too far away, and he could see that his mother’s daily struggle to fill their stomachs was becoming too arduous for her frail and aging body. He decided, rather than his mother, that he would not attend school any further. He began to work in the fields of the Seth, side by side with his mother.

But although he no longer went to school he had a strange hunger for the printed word. Children’s textbooks, the odd government handouts that reached the village, the posters that appeared during election time, even the newspapers in which purchases made at the village haat-bazaar were wrapped, would be devoured with a passion.

When his mother first told him about his father’s land, he resolved to get it back one day. The resolve endured and strengthened with the passing years, but he did not know how he could get his land back. He felt, however, that it would only be through the courts. He would trek there each day in the lean months of the year, when no work was available. While his friends amused themselves with the girls at the ghotul, he learnt about life in quite another environment, the courts. He saw it all, the unlettered litigants caught in a bewildering maze of petition-writers, touts, lawyers, peons, court-clerks, and magistrates, and the unhurried complex corridors of the law itself. I will get justice from this, he resolved. Even from this I will get justice.

The year was 1982. It was in the courts that Jagtu learned for the first time about the new law regarding tribal land. He quickly learned the section, 170B, introduced by the new legislation in the Madhya Pradesh Land Revenue Code. This radical piece of legislation provides that in all old cases of land transfer from a tribal to a non-tribal in which the tribal was defrauded or deprived in any way of his legal rights, the land would be restored to the tribal forthwith, without even the payment of any compensation. What is more, this progressive new section provides that the presumption of the court in all cases of land transfer from tribals to non-tribals would be that the tribal was the victim of fraud, and the burden of the proof was placed on the non-tribal to prove that there was no deceit or illegality in the transaction.

This was the law, Jagtu said, greatly excited, which he would use to get his land back.

He spoke of this new law to his wife Manglia that night. But she remained sceptical and unenthusiastic. The courts are not for the poor, she said. Have you known anyone to get justice from the courts? And the courts cost money. You, who eat what you earn each day after backbreaking work, and still remain hungry, how do you expect to find the money that you need to swim your way through the courts? And do you know who you are fighting against, the Seth, the great master? Will he let you survive if you raise your voice against him? Today we do not have much, but we are still living. If you succumb to this madness of the courts, we will be ruined. We will have nothing. Why can’t you learn to be content, why can’t you accept, why can’t you be like the others?

Jagtu did not argue. But his mind was made up. He missed his mother greatly. She would have understood. But not Manglia. He had met Manglia in the annual spring festival of Marhai. That was three years ago, when his mother was still alive. According to the custom, he built his own separate hut at a small distance from his mother’s and he set up home there, with his wife. His mother spoke much less those last months. Bent and wrinkled, she lived increasingly with her own thoughts. But in the evenings sometimes, she would sit with him as of old and watch the setting sun, and speak of gentle Kondoo, and of the land which was no longer theirs.

Yes, his mother would have understood. This he was sure of. But not Manglia.

Contd...

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