डिंडोरीची विहीर

कथा 2

The Disputed Mango Tree

In a Gond village in the Betul district of Madhya Pradesh, there was a mango tree that had been planted by a man named Lakhmu Dhurve fifty years before his death. Lakhmu had planted the tree on the boundary between his land and his brother Shyamu's land, and for fifty years the question of whose tree it was had never been settled because Lakhmu and Shyamu shared the fruit equally. The tree produced over three hundred kilograms of mangoes every season. It was the most productive tree in the village.

Lakhmu died in 2008 at the age of seventy-nine. His son, Birsa, inherited the land. Shyamu had died a decade earlier, and his land had passed to his grandson, Mohan. The first thing Mohan did after Lakhmu's death was claim the entire mango tree. His argument was that the trunk sat six inches on his side of the boundary. Birsa's argument was that his father had planted it. The dispute was taken to the village panchayat, which could not resolve it because both claims had merit and the boundary had never been formally surveyed.

The 2009 mango season arrived. Mohan hired a crew to pick the tree's fruit — all of it, from every branch, including those that overhung Birsa's land. Birsa watched from his porch. He said nothing. The crew stripped the tree. Mohan sold the mangoes in the Betul market for twenty-two thousand rupees. He did not share a single rupee or a single fruit with Birsa.

Within a month, Mohan's eldest son developed a fever that would not break. The boy — sixteen years old, strong, no history of illness — lay in his cot for two weeks, sweating, shivering, unable to eat. The doctor from the block health center said it was viral and would pass. It did not pass. The fever held at 102 degrees, never rising high enough to be critical, never dropping low enough to provide relief. It was, as Mohan's wife later described it, the exact temperature of discomfort — as though someone were maintaining it deliberately.

Mohan went to the Gunia. Her name was Janki Bai, and she was the most respected healer in four villages. She was seventy years old, nearly blind, and she conducted her trances sitting on a raised stone platform behind her house, surrounded by the tools of her practice: brass bowls, rice grains, a bundle of arrows, and a clay pot filled with water from the village spring. She closed her eyes. She rocked. She hummed. And when she spoke, the voice was not hers.

The voice said: 'I planted the tree with my own hands. I watered it for fifty years. I shared the fruit with my brother because sharing is what brothers do. My son's son took everything and shared nothing. This is not a dispute about a tree. This is a dispute about whether my life's work meant anything.'

The voice was Lakhmu's. Mohan recognized it — the cadence, the phrasing, the particular Gondi dialect Lakhmu had spoken. Janki Bai opened her eyes and told Mohan what he already knew: the tree belonged to both families. The fruit must be shared. The debt to Lakhmu must be paid — not in money but in acknowledgment. Mohan was to go to the tree, place his hand on the trunk, and say aloud that Lakhmu had planted it and the fruit was Lakhmu's gift to both families.

Mohan did this. His son's fever broke that evening. The next season, the tree produced four hundred kilograms — the largest harvest anyone could remember. Mohan and Birsa split it equally. They have done so every year since. The tree, at over sixty years old, shows no sign of declining. The village says Lakhmu is feeding it from below.

कथा 3

The Gunia's Apprentice

In the Mandla district of Madhya Pradesh, which sits at the geographical and cultural heart of Gond territory, the Gunia tradition was facing a crisis by 2015 that no spirit could solve: the young people were leaving. Mandla's Gond villages — some of the most remote in central India, accessible only by dirt roads that washed out every monsoon — were losing their under-thirty population to Nagpur, Jabalpur, and Bhopal. The men went for construction work. The women went for domestic labor. And the Gunias — most of them over sixty, several over seventy — were dying without apprentices.

Kamla Bai of Dindori had trained her niece, but the niece married into a village thirty kilometers away and rarely visited. Sukhlal Markam, the Gunia of a village near Niwas, had no children and no student. When he died in 2016, the village lost its only spiritual intermediary — the one person who could diagnose whether a family's misfortune was caused by a Bhut and prescribe the remedy. The village went two years without a Gunia. During those two years, three families reported disturbances they attributed to unsettled dead — an uncle whose funeral rites had been performed by a Hindu pandit rather than a Gond Gunia, a grandmother whose final wish to be buried near a specific tree had been ignored, a child who had died suddenly and whose spirit was heard crying at night near the house.

The families had no one to consult. They tried the Hindu pandit from the nearest town. He performed pujas. The disturbances continued. They tried ignoring the signs. The signs intensified — one family's goats developed a wasting disease that killed seven animals in two months. They tried modern medicine for the sick child of another family, but the fevers came and went on a cycle that no antibiotic could break.

In 2018, a young man named Raju Markam — a distant relative of the deceased Gunia Sukhlal — returned from Nagpur. He had worked in construction for three years, saved some money, and come home because his mother was ill. His mother's illness was diagnosed by a visiting Gunia from a neighboring village as the work of Raju's dead grandfather, who was angry that no one in the family had taken up the Gunia practice. The visiting Gunia told Raju: 'Your grandfather chose you before you were born. He is making your mother sick so you will come home. He will not stop until you sit on his stone and learn.'

Raju did not believe in Bhuts. He had lived in Nagpur. He used a smartphone. He had a Facebook account. But his mother was sick and the visiting Gunia was specific: the illness would end when Raju began his training. Raju, who loved his mother more than he loved his skepticism, agreed to try.

He began training under the visiting Gunia — learning the trance techniques, the rice-grain divination, the arrow reading, the specific Gondi invocations that open communication with the dead. His mother's illness resolved within a week of his first trance session. Whether this was coincidence, psychosomatic relief, or something else, Raju could not say. What he could say was that when he entered trance for the first time, he felt his grandfather's presence — not as a voice or a vision but as a knowledge, a certainty, a sense of being in the right place doing the right thing.

Raju is now the Gunia of his village. He is thirty-one years old. He still has his smartphone. He still has his Facebook account. He conducts trance sessions on a stone platform behind his house, surrounded by brass bowls and rice grains, and when families come to him with signs of Bhut disturbance, he enters the space between the living and the dead and finds out what the dead need. He charges nothing. The Gunia system does not operate on money. It operates on obligation — the same obligation that binds the living to the dead, the same obligation that brought Raju home from Nagpur, the same obligation that will, someday, call one of his children to sit on his stone.

कथा 4

The Dam That Disturbed the Dead

In 2004, the Madhya Pradesh government began construction of a small irrigation dam on a tributary of the Wainganga River in the Seoni district, deep in Gond territory. The dam was modest — a fifteen-meter earthen bund designed to create a reservoir that would irrigate four hundred hectares of farmland in three villages. The project was welcomed by the villagers, who had been requesting irrigation support for years. The trouble began when the reservoir filled.

The area behind the dam — the land that would become the reservoir bed — included the cremation ground of one of the three villages. The cremation ground had been in use for at least five generations. The government had offered compensation for the land and had promised to establish a new cremation ground on higher terrain. The compensation was paid. The new cremation ground was designated. But the old ground — with its specific trees, its specific stones, its specific geography that generations of Gond dead had been sent off from — was submerged under four meters of water.

The first disturbance was reported within a month of the reservoir reaching capacity. A fisherman setting nets at dawn saw figures standing in the water — knee-deep, motionless, facing the shore. He counted seven before he fled. The figures were not there when he returned with witnesses at midday. The next week, two families in the nearest village reported hearing drums at night — the specific drumbeat pattern used in Gond funeral processions, coming from the direction of the water. There were no drums on the shore. The sound was coming from the reservoir itself.

The village Gunia — an old man named Phoolchand — was consulted. He entered trance on the shore of the reservoir at dusk. The trance lasted longer than usual — over an hour, during which Phoolchand sat motionless, his eyes closed, his body rigid. When he spoke, it was not in one voice but in several, overlapping, as though multiple speakers were trying to communicate simultaneously. The message, once the Gunia's apprentice sorted through the voices, was clear: the dead had been drowned. Their resting place was under water. They could not sleep. They could not breathe. They wanted to be moved.

The demand was impossible to fulfill literally — the bodies had been cremated years ago, and there were no remains to relocate. But the Gunia understood the demand metaphorically. The dead did not need their bodies moved. They needed their memorial moved. The stones that had marked the cremation ground, the trees that had shaded the funeral pyres, the specific geography of death-and-departure — these needed to be recreated at the new cremation ground.

The village organized what became the largest Bhut appeasement ceremony in the district's memory. Over two hundred people participated. Stones from the submerged cremation ground were recovered by divers — young men who went into the reservoir and brought up the boundary markers, the memorial posts, and three carved stones that had stood at the entrance. These were installed at the new cremation ground in the same relative positions. A Gond funeral ceremony was performed for all the dead collectively — a mass farewell that acknowledged every person who had been cremated at the old site.

The drums stopped. The figures were not seen again. The reservoir continued to function. The new cremation ground, with its recovered stones and its transplanted memorial geography, became a site of particular reverence — the dead had spoken, the living had listened, and the contract between them had survived even a government dam.

Phoolchand told the anthropologist who later documented the case: 'The government can move water. The government can move earth. The government cannot move the dead without asking.'