Offerings of the Primitive Peoples of the World
The first signs of human
expression which appear on stone walls from deepest antiquity are images of
natural forms that had first inspired the primitive artists, and which were in
a way the forerunners of what would become writing, although nature has its own
many forms of writing that we are only now through the aid of science beginning
to realize is in fact an expression asking to the purpose served by writing as
we now know it, which is the conveyance of thoughts and ideas through form.
Thus the writing of early man was in tangible forms, an idea still expressed in
over eight thousand characters of Chinese writing.
One of the weapons of conflict
has been writing for when a new form of writing or visual communication is
imposed upon alien societies then their own systems of expression and thinking
become confused and begin breaking down before the new model imposed upon them.
Tangible phenomenal expressions of this are to be found in the European
conquests of Pre-Columbian America and in other places where European
colonization broke down indigenous societies destroying their ancient highly
evolved forms of writing, language, worship and social and cultural values and
behaviour which were all forcibly destroyed and replaced by new forms of
thinking and action imposed by their conquerors.
Primitive hunting and gathering
tribes could communicate with the prey they hunted through an understanding of
their ways and language. Socrates was the first to observe how writing is at
best a reminder to the one who reads of what is already known, a forerunner of
Carl Jung’s hypothesis of a universal unconscious. We are aware of powerful
signals which exist between animals and birds and their natural environment for
example forewarnings of tsunamis and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions or
tsunamis. There is much which we know which science cannot explain and much in
the realm of intuition that may never be explained. It would seem that evolution
itself is moving steadily towards entropy in the process of which primal
knowledges are steadily being lost and
is in accordance with the principles embodied in the second law of
thermodynamics. All the so called new ideas which confront us daily are merely
recollections of what past ages have experienced even thousands of years ago,
which was then known and understood and acted upon more profoundly than in our
own times, for the human has basically remained unchanged for nearly half a
million years. And hence the space for our new religions and churches, mosques,
temples and religions from theologies to economics. The indigenous societies –
even those living amongst us at the present time –have managed to preserve much
which is precious primeval knowledge which cannot be discovered by science and
has developed from what Darwing called evolution through natural selection.
These knowledges in theabsence of the written word in these societies have been
orally transmitted through millennia in an unbroken oral tradition and social
example which is now being so rapidly lost, and which is one of the greatest
threats to human survival on this planet. Because of the deep connection
between an object and the name which men have given it in palaeolithic times
comes down to us in the roots of our own modern languages creating the
alphabets themselves. Only after the development of phonetic alphabets would
the words and characters begin to lose their original connections with the
forms (and even ideas) which they expressed,
perhaps best preserved in the present traditions of the characters written in
Chinese.
Among many existing primitive
cultures the sensory awareness has not become a word that is existing in
writing and in which uncountable sensory inferences remain
Unexpressed in our own writing but which may
yet be transferred from one person to another without speech or writing. This
is seen in the language of birds and animals, their songs and calls the most
famous examples being in the animal kingdom between whales and dolphin and
elephants where messages are conveyed over hundreds of kilometers. The deep
evolved sensory participation through their interaction in a common natural
environment is extraordinarily highly developed among the human
hunter-gatherers still to be found in Africa , India ,
Australia and
other regions in nearly their ancient
states. What has been called extra-sensory perception is rather, a heightened
sensory participation. Primitive peoples understand the calls of birds and
animals and even though these are often their food prey they have not lost
sight of the sacred bond which binds them in a wild survival environment. And
the anthropologists have discovered the deep ritual connections which these
societies maintain with these birds and animals which they hunt, remarkable
examples being between the Australian Aboriginal and the kangaroo, the Kalahari
Bushmen and the eland, and the entire bases of totem among tribes and the
sources of totemic clan and place names is devolved from this deep
relationship. In the primitive languages of these peoples bird and animal
calls, the sounds of wind and water, have entered not only into their speech
but in their dances and musical expressions and is most deeply felt in their
songs in the literary sense. The leap of a kangaroo or the whistling of an
arrow or the halt of a startled deer are as beautifully expressed in their
dance or rock paintings as in their songs and folk stories. We should not be surprised to be reminded
that these are the startling heights in our own classical music or artistic
expression for both are in the worlds of the supersensory awareness of our race
and express the highest points of our expression and awareness. After immense
spans of time and uncountable changes man has basically remained unchanged as
an animal from the kingdom of the animals which he still inhabits despite his
cement and concrete barriers. The relationship between primitive peoples and
their bird and animal friends there is such a close bond that they are careful
in their utterances lest they offend them. This remains between them and the
natural world an innate respect which modern scientific man who worships only
the gods of money and science has lost. These deep connections remain only with
those who live close to the land and when they move away from the lands and
forests they used to live in to the towns and cities they lose these contacts and
they lose the powers which go with them.
This should be quite obvious but
in our modern haste for material comforts we forget that the bonds we have had
with nature sustained an earlier far better world, and one we have abused in
our tryst with destiny. For the locals the places and wild creatures whom they have traditionally lived and loved and
struggled to survive among have special significances and names as of living
things and they are always referred to as relatives such as fathers or mothers,
brothers and sisters. This close relationship modern industrial man has lost
with the natural world and it is the cause of his downfall from an apex species
to one on the road to extinction. Be they streams or rivers, mountains or
hills, or the great temperate and alpine forests that are the mothers of the
rivers, and in turn their basins from where evolved theancestors of the great
river valley civilizations, these are all are the matrix from where our species
has sprung and alone can save our species, the humans, from the dark clouds and
climate changes that today threaten our arrogance in an industrial
civilization.
All this, however, assumes the
maintainence of a natural symbiotic order imposed by the fact of our common
planetary existence on a single planet spinning in a dark and hostile
universe.In our modern industrialized world in which we have mined the deepest
river lands and run the rivers dry and mined the mountains where the ice has
begun to melt and collapse of their fragile environments, where we have
bulldozed our way through the living earth destroying agricultural survival and
displaced their peoples both settled and nomadic , we have thus destroyed this
ancient and sacred connection between man and the environment that sustains
him. The ancient societies and their lands, forests and rivers have rapidly
disappeared in the short space of a few centuries since the industrial
revolution began.
The traditional autochthonous
imagination which is rooted in these
fragile elements have collapsed and a new Orwellian industrial manifestation
turns to literature and the arts for solace as new cultural forms force their
way out of the mire of ecological destruction and we become children of a dark chaotic world
in which there is no compass and no guide for our future survival. Of necessity
as the higher orders have become economically resilient on the harvesting of irreplaceable
natural resources the impoverished agrarian and
forest societies ate the
forerunners of extinction and desolation.
This is why it is patently
impossible for the modern industrial western mind to come to terms with reality
or to read the significance of the
pre-historic epic sagas of antiquity still nestling in remote corners of the
world still holding out against impossible odds which are being steadily
destroyed through the industrial economy and mindset based upon greed and
profit ploughing heedlessly through the most defenceless human populations and
their very last pristine environments which they have for so long protected
over millions of years. It has been correctly observed that primitive societies
cling precariously to their primitive technologies in spite of modern
technology because in doing so they maintain their balance with nature. These
actions are inextricably bound to their ways of living, their moral and social
order, and their animist religion of worshipping nature as mother and provider.
Clinging to primitive ways must be seen as more that a desire to be primitive,
it must be seen and understood as an umbilical link to the very sources of
subsistence that have saved these societies for so long on a planet of immense
earth upheavals in the past and which they face again in the momentum of the
mechanical industrial upheaval of the present times. They know they must not
give up their beliefs in the profound spiritual essences found in the natural
world and which are indispensable to them.
These arguments will find no takers amongst missionaries and social
developers let alone the industrialists eager to exploit mineral and ore
deposits, harvesters of forests and builders of big dams, who claim they are
bringing the poor people a higher standard of living when in fact they are
extincting their populations, worship
and culture and turning them into urban and industrial labour forces.
One of the most destructive
factors in the modernization of these traditional societies has been literacy
itself. It has introduced a new industrial mindset into the vulnerable youth in
tune with the rapidly escalating economy which has place only for the rich and
not the poor. In fact doing away with the poor creates wealth for the rich and
is reminiscent of what happened during the imposition of the corn laws in Ireland
during the nineteenth century which shipped the dispossessed into the vast
vacant spaces of North America . Social thoreticians will
ever argue in favour of development that suits the pockets and interests of the
wealthy against the impoverished, oppressed and displaced. History repeats
itself. The modern developers still argue that they are working in the
interests of upliftment of the poor while there is ranged against the poor the
entire industrial and state machinery of exploitation. The most powerful
machinery in this endeavour of industrialization is literacy itself! Today we
are in the age of computers and super computers and the needs of the future
demand more from the earth than simply minerals, they require rare earths.
Deeper and wider grows the web of mineral extraction, faster and faster the
forests and rivers disappear, the climate is changing even as barren lands
replace once fertile agricultural fields.
The peasantry disappears and with it the future food security of the
planet. A new world dawns before us, the gulf between the old and the new
becoming impassable,. While the industrial revolution during the heyday of
colonialism placed an increasing
dependancy upon natural resources from foreign continents today these things in
third world countries are happening closer to home…and these minerals and rare
earths, ores, metals, and chemical substances to be gouged from beneath the
fields and forests to the sun’s stored carbon energy in coal, to the altering
the hydrology of river systems and subterranean sources of ancient water all
part of the great industrial machine driven by oil, coal and electricity from
carbon, vast water bodies for growing cotton and cooling thermo nuclear plants
drives a gargantuan mill as the very stamp of death upon once fertile lands,
and drive our modern world with its indigenous inhabitants and young school
children uncertain of a darkening future into the oblivion of Tomorrow,
In our own times in this opening
decade of the twenty-first century it is fortunate a new realization has sprung
from the very top – though driven by early grassroots activism from the very
bottom – into the realization of the portents of the future in such heedless industrialization
and exploitation of non renewable natural resources; a new awakening to the importance of
indigenous knowledges has begun; the connections between man asnd nature have
been understood; the importance of traditional cultural activities and belief
systems have been recognized as the sustainable way forward. But research and
documentation by themselves are useless unless we stop the rampant destruction
of nature still going on or else an ecological catastrophe of such enormity
will engulf us that it will not be capable of being met through the world’s
economies or insurance companies. And I believe of late that this consciousness
is beginning to settle in the minds of
those in control of power. But we can never rule out the threats from the conspiracy
of evil which cares not for anything but itself.
The effects of industrialization
of the planet are now easily observed from outer space, from the changing of
green cover to the new events of climate change. The deep relationship between
tradition and the natural landscape is increasingly being accepted even as a
younger generation is stepping into the offices of an older generation. The
impact of industrialization upon the art and literature of our planet is being
understood outside the circle of small literary societies and art galleries in
the cities and their wider importance as a global phenomenon is being
understood. The sacredness of ancient systems of survival are being searched
for again. It is my fervent hope that it is yet not too late for traditional
societies to reassert themselves and gain recognition on the need to protect
and preserve their lands. Unless there is a mass awakening worldwide in the
common human consciousness that this blue planet stands defenceless before a
few giant industrial corporations and corrupt governments the world , and
mankind as we know it, is bound to disappear very soon, perhaps even within the century. The
greatest challenge before us is to control carbon, methane, and other
industrial emissions warming the atmosphere at an unbelievably rapid rate (1.5C
per decade). This is our first and foremost challenge.
Bulu Imam
Sanskriti, Dipugarha
Hazaribagh, Jharkhand
