“Forest officers should be fed ‘vista ginjalu’. They’ll all die of the bitter taste,” says Chigurla Eeramma with a straight face.
No wryness, nor a tinge of sarcasm in her face or voice. It’s difficult to comprehend the humour, but wit was meant to be.
Eeramma is vexed with the foresters who keep telling her Chenchu ilk that they should abandon their villages and leave with the rest, because the number of tigers is on the rise in Amrabad Tiger Reserve.
“They also say we won’t be given electricity and water in future. Already we are not getting any government benefits. They didn’t even give us forest pattas. That’s alright. We lived in a shack on the banks of the forest stream. This is hardly a trouble,” Mandli Eedamma, another Chenchu woman from Vatvarlapalle village in Amrabad mandal says.
A tribe out of time: how Chenchus have been caught between ancestral past and uncertain future in Andhra Pradesh
