THE NUTMEG’S CURSE
Today I was entirely by myself except for breakfast and lunch. At breakfast Vikram, who was sent to get me, sat silently across the table from me staring at me as I ate my soft white doughy mixture with peanuts and raisins in it and drank my masala tea which was mostly milk with loads of sugar with spices. At lunch the school teacher who can speak good English was apparently assigned to eat with me. Gujuratis don’t talk much at meals, they eat silently, take their untensils out to be washed and wash their hands and leave. I did find out from him that he had been with the ashram for 22 years, first at Amirgadh, another Gandhian institution, and then transferred to Virampur when there weren’t enough tribal students at Amirgadh. There are about 150 students here and today four teachers. I see the children playing in the yard and when they take their dishes over to the sinks and wash their own food trays. I think they wash their own clothes as well and do chores as well before running around the large yard playing each other. In the morning I hear them singing at morning prayers which I will video later.
But the rest of the day I have stayed in my room reading and writing. I read another portion of The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh, which began with the history of Western colonization of Indonesia by the Dutch but has now shifted from Banda, Indonesia where the Dutch used genocide of the island of Lonthor, sacred to the inhabitants of Lonthor, to New Amsterdam (New York City) where even the renaming of places with European names reveals the rapid process of clearing North America for European settlement. Always there was a feeling by Europeans that nature was there to be exploited and that the people who lived there were savages making no good use of the land. Sometimes excuses were found to exterminate native Americans, but often it was the appropriation of their forests and hunting grounds and places where they grew crops, as well as imported diseases (often spreading smallpox on purpose), that devastated the habitat of native Americans causing malnutrition which led to diseases that forced the native Americans off their lands, their sacred lands, onto barren lands where there was no way to make a living. The destruction of the large herds of buffalo by the US Army was part of this calculated destruction of Native American life.
This may sound harsh, but it seems true to me. The European notion of nature to be exploited and the Native American sense of nature as a spiritual place to be husbanded and tended were in direct odds. It was especially the herds of cattle and pigs that Europeans brought with them that devastated the forests and were resented by the native Americans who often resisted by killing cattle and pigs as being a kind of vermin.
And then I thought of the story that old man Davidson told me when I was trying to open my storage locker. It was his ancestor who staked out a plot of land near where my house is who followed the sound of a cowbell up Jones Mountain behind my house, luring him to be killed by native Americans. Did they first kill the cow they resented, or did they resent him staking out land in their hunting area? In any case they killed him, which was followed by an armed group of Europeans from Old Fort coming over the hill and wreaking terrible revenge on the native Americans for what they had done, a pattern that continued all the way to the Pacific Ocean. It was Native American hunting forests that the Board of National Missions finally bought from someone who had legal right to it and it is from Warren Wilson College that I bought my land for $1. I feel a part of this colonial occupation.
The Nutmeg’s Curse is a curse that carried over to my owning land that for thousands of years was communal sacred forest which could not be owned by anyone. I often think of that when I look out from my back deck to the Swannanoa river where once a native village and fields of corn thrived beside the river.
So on this trip, in Kandy, in Galle, in my memories of growing up in the British Raj in Allahabad I’ve encountered the nutmeg’s curse again and again.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 