The Confessions of a Goat: An Oral History on the Resistances of an Indigenous Community

Abstract

Betta Kurumba is an indigenous (also known as Adivasi / tribal) community living in the Gudalur block of Nilgiris district, Tamil Nadu, India. This district is part of the Western Ghats mountain range that runs parallel to the Western Coast of India. It is an anthropological research on a hamlet, Koodamoola, located inside a tea and coffee plantation, the Golden Cloud Estate (pseudonym). Few years ago, the owner (under legal contestation) of this plantation attempted to enforce a ban on rearing of livestock arbitrarily. Betta Kurumbas did not agree to this enforcement since they are the ancient inhabitants of this forest (now, plantations) and they resisted. Ethnography, oral history, and in-depth interviews are the methods used to understand their everyday resistances. The field intricacies such as powerlessness, atrocities and litigations forced me to narrate their resistances through the voice of a goat (a metaphor) and I have incorporated both factual and fictional elements. I neither attempting here to exaggerate nor demean the community by this way of narration. In broader context, I have written this story from a postmodern perspective. This paper brings forth multiple facets of their realities, power nexus between capitalists and apparatuses of the State, differences between and within the indigenous communities, and resistances as negotiations.