When I came out from James Cameron’s new film Avatar, I pondered the similarity of a contemporary Indian scenario and the movie plot. The movie critics are saying this sci-fi blockbuster Avatar is influenced and inspired by plot of a 1957 Poul Anderson novella called Call Me Joe.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with being inspired or influenced by other writers, and Cameron has mentioned a host of influences for Avatar like Dances with Wolves, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs etc.
But, while he didn’t mention Anderson as a specific inspiration, neither he mentioned central India, which I believe must be a major influence. There is this deep resemblance of Planet Pandora’s (Pandora is in Alpha Centauri solar system) mineral reserve (unobtainium in the film), with central India’s rich Bauxite reserves as well as the cultural practice of Na’vi people and our own Adivasis. And, yes, of course, the ever greedy, brutal and apathetic capitalistic forces.
In the film, a group of soldiers and scientists tried to extract a certain mineral, which will solve Earth’s energy crisis from the verdant moon Pandora, whose landscapes are ethereal, dreamy and surrealistic. The moon’s inhabitants, the Na’vi, are blue, catlike versions of native people: they wear feathers in their hair, worship nature-based gods, paint their faces for war, use bows and arrows, and live in tribes.
Similarly, certain mining corporates are trying to extract Bauxite from the hills of Niyamgiri, Orissa, India. The low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the Dongria Kondh tribe from time immemorial. Now these hills have been sold for the bauxite they contain.
And if the mining in flat-topped hills is not sustainable, the forests that covered them will be destroyed, and so will the rivers that flow out of them that irrigate the plains below. So will the hundreds of thousands of tribal people who live in the forested heart of India. And they are fighting back these corporations, like Na’vis in Avatar fought for their rights to live with dignity.
In the film, the Na’vi are the only known species outside of Earth to have human-like intelligence and their society is essentially Neolithic. They have a complex culture based on a profound spiritual and symbiotic connection to their planet, to one another, and to the deity they call Eywa. They are superb artisans who celebrate the interconnectedness of nature through storytelling, song, dance and crafts.
The abundant flora and fauna of Pandora have ensured a steady population of Na’vi; it is hypothesized that that widespread access to natural resources has also helped limit (but not eliminate) warfare among the various Na’vi clans.
They live in ancient trees that can house dozens of clan members. The trees are honeycombed with natural hollows and alcoves in which the Na’vi sleep, eat, weave, dance, and celebrate their connection to Eywa. Like many sacred sites on Pandora, this Hometree sits above a large deposit of unobtanium.
Here in our home front, Adivasis are dependent upon rivers that flow out of Niyamgiri for cultivation. These rivers have been helping the people for decades. They are highly dependent upon these hills for their livelihood. They work hard throughout the day to meet their food requirements and happily sing and dance in the evening. The culture and traditions of this area is very organic. For them, the Niyamgiri Hill is not just a hill full of medicinal trees, but their mother whom they have worshiped for ages. They call it Sacred Niyamgiri – Niyam Raja, the God of Universal Law.
These people’s culture is governed by principles of reciprocity and redistribution. They do not believe in creating surplus but, rather, live a day-to-day existence. What they collect, hunt or gather from nature is always within limits. Hence it is sustainable (from a resource utilization point of view) and does not place a burden on nature. They do not have the concept of privately owning land or bodies of water, or of generating profits. They believe in co-existence rather than “ownership” or “control”.
How symbiotic with nature, so much like computer generated Na’vis.
In Avatar, hero Jake Sully explains that Earth is basically a war-torn land with no greenery or natural resources left. The humans started to colonize Pandora in order to mine a mineral called unobtainium that can serve as a mega-energy source. Through a software program, they wire their brains into the bodies of Na’vi avatars and try to win the natives’ trust. Jake is one of the team of avatar pilots.
Here, to get the bauxite out of the flat-topped hills, to get iron ore out from under the forest floor, India has to become a police state. These docile tribals are pitted against a juggernaut of injustices, including policies that allow a wholesale corporate takeover of people’s land and resources.
Right now in central India, the Maoists’ guerrilla army is made up almost entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine of the kind we only associate with sub-Saharan Africa. These are the people who have been mercilessly exploited for decades, consistently cheated by moneylenders, the women raped as a matter of right by police and forest department personnel.
Avatar imaginatively visits the crime scene of corporatization’s foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out.
Jake in Avatar is so enchanted by these politics of greed that he gives up on carrying out his mission, which is to persuade the Na’vi to relocate from their home, where the humans plan to mine unobtanium. Instead, when the marines arrive to burn down the Na’vis’ Hometree, Jake switches sides.
Advocacy groups are filing petitions, and they are highlighting the proposed mining that will strip open the forest and destroy the Niyamgiri hilltop. It also highlights the significance of hilltops and specially Niyamgiri for the Dongaria Kondh community – the hilltops and plateau are seen as the “playground” of gods and goddess (i.e. Dasak or Patra).
The politics of greed are mammoth and more dangerous than those in Avatar. The financial value of bauxite deposit of Orissa alone is $2.27 trillion (more than twice India’s GDP). It is the story of the bauxite in Orissa. Expand the $4 trillion to include the value of the millions of tonnes of high-quality iron ore in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand and the 28 other precious mineral resources, and add to that the hundreds of MoUs that have been signed. This gives us a rough outline of the scale of the operation and the desperation of the stakeholders. Scores of corporations, from those relatively unknown to the biggest mining companies and steel manufacturers in the world, are in the fray to appropriate Adivasi homelands — the Mittals, Jindals, Tata, Essar, Posco, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and, of course, Vedanta.
What kind of war is Operation Green Hunt going to be? Will we ever predict?
We can think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be heartless capitalists, giving up, deconstructing, and joining the blue people. But will Jake ever really knows what it’s like to be a Na’vi, as he will always have the option to switch back into human mode?
Citations:
http://io9.com/5390226/did-james-cameron-rip-off-poul-andersons-novella
http://www.imdb.com/news/ni1130680/
http://info.interactivist.net/node/13286
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/11/ff_avatar_cameron
http://www.pandorapedia.com/doku.php/us:na_vi
http://www.merinews.com/article/niyamgiri-tribals-struggle-for-existence/150741.shtml
