Field Notes: An Adivasi Anthem Spreads Its Wings

SHAMIK BAG

Meghnath, the lyricist, at his office in Ranchi, Jharkhand/SHAMIK BAG

Gaon chodab nahin,

jungle chodab nahin,

maain maati chodab nahin,

ladai chodab nahin.

(We will not leave our villages, we will not leave our forests, we will not leave our mother earth, we will not give up our fight.)

Set to a repetitive, percussive beat, this is the chorus of Gaon chodab nahin (we won’t leave the village), an anthemic song of resistance sung by nature-worshipping Adivasi communities of Jharkhand. It is a song that I heard in Adivasi gatherings across the lands of some of India’s most disadvantaged communities, and it is a song I heard in rum-fuelled soirees in Kolkata, where I mostly live.

It is a song sung with passion because it speaks to the evocative Adivasi slogan of Jal, Jangal aur Jameen. Water, forests and land are issues umbilically linked to the religion that Adivasis in one of India’s poorest states follow, the ancient faith of Sarna. Indeed, water, forests and land and all of nature’s bounties are what the followers of Sarna worship.

I had heard Goan chodab nahin before I travelled to Jharkhand to research and write a story on the Sarna religion and the resentment that attempts by right-wing Hindu groups to subsume it into Hinduism had caused.

Sarna witnessed a revival with Census 2011, the last census to be conducted in India, reporting a rise in followers over a decade. Nearly five million Indian tribals chose to register themselves as Sarna, over 83% of these, or 4.1 million, from Jharkhand, the rest from other states with tribal communities, such as Bihar, Odisha, West Bengal and Assam.

Goan chodab nahin is now a staple not just at Adivasi mass movements but as much in urban protest gatherings, students’ agitations and marches. Within the cauldron of Left-leaning society in Kolkata, where I’m largely based, you can hear it often during evening get-togethers over drinks.

A commentary on the tribal way of life, the song addresses the conflicts erupting in Adivasi communities everywhere.

“They built dams, drowned villages and built factories,

they felled forests, dug mines and built sanctuaries,

without water, land and forest, where do we go?

Vikas ke bhagwan (O god of development), pray tell us how to save our lives.”

It is a war cry against exploitative development brought about by the union of politics and business, as much as it is a rumination on loss caused by the displacement of Adivasis from their land and livelihoods.

Meghnath (he uses one name), 72, a Ranchi-based tribal rights activist and one of the filmmaker-founders of audio-visual communication house, Akhara, thinks the movement for recognition of the Sarna religion is connected to the cultural displacement of Adivasis.

Inspired by a song by Bhagwan Maaji, who led an Adivasi struggle against bauxite mining in Odisha, Meghnath delved into decades of working in India’s tribal hinterlands to contemporise and write the lyrics of Gaon Chodab Nahin, supported by Sunil Minj and Vinod Kumar.

A music video, directed by K P Sasi and co-produced by Akhara, was released in 2009 and helped disseminate the song and the subject beyond tribal society.

The forces of Hindutva talk of the assimilation of tribes into the Hindu fold, said the affable and soft-spoken Meghnath, when we met at his office in Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand.

“But we know that assimilation, as the anthropologist Verrier Elwin too had noted, can make tribal communities lose their socio-cultural identity against the effects of modernisation, capitalism and the influence of majority religions,” said Meghnath. “The fight for recognition of their nature-worshipping Sarna religion is against these efforts at assimilation.”

In a subsequent stanza, Gaon Chodab Nahin refers to how the northern rivers Yamuna, Narmada and Subarnarekha are often dry, the Ganga is often reduced to a drain, while the Krishna in the south is but a black line.

“You may drink Pepsi cola and Bisleri water, but how shall we quench our thirst by drinking such polluted waters?

Were our ancestors fools that they conserved the forests? Made the land so green, made rivers flow like honey?

Your greed has charred the land and looted its greenery. The fish are dead, the birds have flown, who knows where?”

“The fight to preserve tribal identity in Jharkhand has the indigenous religion as a major sub-issue,” said Meghnath, a key intellectual figure in the protracted movement for a separate state for tribals, a protest that led to the creation of Jharkhand in 2000.

An atheist, Meghnath said he dropped his Bengali Brahmin surname many decades ago as a mark of protest against Hindu caste practices, among other reasons. Over the years, he has closely followed and studied tribal religious practices and rituals and consider them to be the epitome of simplicity and sustainability. In many aspects, tribals, to him, are at the top of the civilisational pyramid because of the respect and reverence they have for nature.

Cultural expression has its own way of summarising life, society and politics. On 22 March 2025, when about 50 tribal organisations enforced a Ranchi bandh in protest against a proposed flyover obstructing access to a sacred forest grove, a Sarna sthal. Gaon Chodab Nahin could not have been more relevant.

You can read Shamik Bag’s full story here.

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