Visit to Oldest Indigenous Dravidian Tribe in OrissaApr 19, 2009
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Women carrying wood along the road in the early morning.
Village of Dravidian tribe.
Object in center of village that is worshipped by Dravidian tribe.
It is 11 p.m., and I am writing this entry while sitting next to the campfire at our campsite. The sky is dark black with the stars in full view. Very relaxing…
Today we continued our journey through the interior of Orissa's adivasi tribal areas. We visited in the morning the village of an indigenous tribal group who claim to be the oldest indigenous Dravidian tribe in India today. The village appeared neat in appearance, with a concrete walkway between the rows of attached houses. The houses were very low to the ground, with doors only slightly higher than a meter high. I would guess the villagers to be primarily of Burmese-Mongolian stock. The people of this village were diminutive in stature. Or to put it in non-politically correct terms, really short! Many appeared even shorter than the Batwa, the pygmy people I had seen in Uganda late last year.
My guess is that periodically tourists come through the village, as the girls of the village easily launched into a traditional song and dance only minutes after our arrival at the village. The dance seemed quite similar to the dance we saw yesterday randomly occurring on the street of one of the towns we drove through. We ate lunch on the outskirts of the village, kicking a soccer ball around with some of the village children both before and after lunch.
We spent the entire afternoon today driving en route to our current campsite on the outskirts of an adivasi tribal village. The village - Kachapai - is populated by members of the Desia tribe. A number of local male residents came over to the area near our campsite and watched - with a bewildered look on their faces - as we set up camp, cooked dinner and built a campfire using wood we had collected along the road during the drive today. Since few people in Orissa seem to have any command of the English language whatsoever, I cannot confirm it unequivocally, but I suspect foreign visitors are quite a rarity in this village.
During dinner, one of the locals showed up with a traditional guitar-like instrument and played for us during dinner and for a while thereafter. Great entertainment! We'll be going over to Kachapai in the morning to have a look around.
