Sweet tamarind of Bastar

Is a defining feature of the rough jungle terrains of Bastar, a region in Southern Chattisgarh in the state of Madhya Pradesh in India.

Arundhati Roy inhales the tamarind that perfumes the air and looks up at the families of tamarind trees "watching over the villages, like a clutch of huge, benevolent gods." 

The villages she walks through under cover of the canopy of dense fauna are imperilled by the lurking presence of the Bastar police and special ops forces called the Salwa Judum, commissioned by the Central government of India to fight Maoist guerillas and the tribal residents of the village. The Maoists give protection to the tribals.

In Gandhi But With Guns, Roy writes of her experience touring the Maoist strongholds in Central India.

The literary quality of the writing is high, but as essayist and word Jane par excellence, Joan Didion has observed in a different context, language deceives as it is the tool of the articulate who take it upon themselves to express the truths of the inarticulate with the tool.

Language not only deceives, but it also constructs a secondary truth or reality that may be twice removed from the primary one.

Over and above being supremely articulate, Roy writes in English and translates the life-worlds of the Bastar residents and their Maoist vigilantes for a Western audience. Can English do justice to the language of the Chattisgarh tribals who speak a tongue that bear no resemblance to the major Indian languages?

Better perhaps to read this? (down below)

Satnam's Jangalnama is about the Gonds; According to the blog The Middle Stage he writes in Punjabi and revels in a

Depiction of the day-to-day life of the Gonds that Jangalnama touches its greatest heights. Satnam marvellously opens up for us the peculiar innocence, fragility and unworldliness of these people. Many Gonds, he reports, cannot count beyond the number twenty; after they reach this limit they start all over again from one, and finally add up the twenties. How then are they to imagine that around them lie mineral resources worth thousands of crores in the world market, or even to hold their own in small transactions with shopkeepers and moneylenders? Because of their indigence and ignorance, most Gonds do not live beyond the age of fifty, yet they are not particularly exerted by questions of life and death, and do not have extended rituals of mourning for those who pass away. Their sense of time is not of minutes and hours, but rather of day and night, of the coming and going of the seasons. Many have never seen a bus or a train, or any of the wonderful machines which are forged from the iron ore that is extracted from sites beneath their own feet.