India 2007
of the tribal people who live in Orissa.
There are many different tribes and on this trip I visited six.
The Bondas are the most primative, living in the hills
and still hunting with bows and arrows.
The women shave their heads and wear up to 250 strings of small beads and hardly any clothes.
The beads do a surprisingly good covering job.
The Godabaas, whose women wear two huge metal rings around their necks;
the Mali, Paroja and Didai look different only
by the configuration of nose rings that the women wear.
Like many Asian minorities they are anamist by religion,
and the women are the dominant sex.
This is totally at odds in a Hindu/Muslim society,
as are many of their sexual practices.
The Indian government are trying very hard
to pull these people into "normal" society,
sometimes by knocking their houses down
and building concrete blocks for them to live in.
Land appropriation in the past has been another ruse,
but this has just pushed them further into the jungles
and the mountains and made them more militant.
