Karnataka's Hakki Pikki tribespeople have proved their mettle as traders

The arrival of the odd visitor in a colony of 120 houses some 40 km from Bengaluru’s central business district has quickly attracted a small crowd. Two motorists riding into the area, called Hakki Pikki Colony, swiftly park their bikes and join the chorus of people asking what has brought us to their settlement. “Have you heard about our boys?” asks a woman. “They had gone to Mozambique and haven’t been able to come back.”

It’s difficult to make sense of things at first since everyone is speaking at the same time. By the time I understand that it’s been over three months that three men of their community have been stuck in Mozambique, I find myself holding someone’s phone with WhatsApp’s video call turned on. “Namaste, ma’am. How are you?” says the man on video call. I’m told this is Madhuchandra Jailor, one of the three men stranded in Mozambique. The faces peering at the screen from behind him belong to the two others, Praveen Kumar Rajesh and Saiju Papchaery.

“It’s really hot here. We are running out of resources and we haven’t heard anything about when we can come home,” says Madhuchandra, 30. His brother Chandrakumar, who had handed the phone to me, chimes in. “We lost our 105-year-old grandmother yesterday. Madhuchandra couldn’t even be there for her funeral.”

An elderly woman making jewellery | Photo: Saggrere Radhakrishnan

Over the phone, Madhuchandra explains how during the course of their attempt to renew their visas, the officer in charge offered them the opportunity to opt for one that would be valid for a year. “What we did not know was that this was a work permit that wasn’t applicable to us,” he says.  

It’s a time of mourning for the people here, made worse by the fact that three of their young men weren’t there when an elder passed away. In nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes such as Hakki Pikki, family ties run strong. In this colony of some 400 to 450 people, almost everyone is related either by blood or marriage. 

The Hakki Pikki, meaning “bird catchers” in Kannada, once roamed the forest of Karnataka when it was still known as the State of Mysore. Then, sometime around the early 1960s, indigenous tribes were evicted from forests. They were all to get land, but those rehabilitation efforts have gone awry. Only some of them now own land, and the tribe remains dispersed across different settlements.

Women of the community making plastic flower garlands | Photo: Saggere Radhakrishnan

The Hakki Pikki are different, perhaps even by the measures the world tries to understand tribal communities. Unlettered and living in clusters often on the periphery of forests and cities, this is a tribe of globetrotting traders with an exceptional entrepreneurial spirit. At a time when countries are fortifying their borders and nomadic communities, be it the Roma gypsies or the nomads of Iran, are choosing a settled life, the Hakki Pikki seamlessly continue to roam the world, selling their produce, mainly medicinal oils extracted from herbs and trees.

Many from the Hakki Pikki community do not have what some may think is essential to be a globetrotter — a formal education. But the dozens of well-stamped passports held in the community tell one of a life lived differently, across continents. “London, Malaysia, Thailand, Dubai, our people have gone everywhere,” says Chandrakumar. 

A narrow road with nothing but rows of eucalyptus trees on one side and farmland on the other leads to the Hakki Pikki Colony. The signboard announcing one has arrived comes up out of the blue, revealing behind it pucca and semi-pucca homes and a tiny shop with an asbestos roof. Besides the grey asbestos, packed clotheslines and all-black chickens catch one’s attention. Spread out in three or four lanes, this settlement has been the home of the tribe for over 50 years. The oldest settlement, however, is Pakshirajpura, a village in Hunsur taluk near Mysuru.

The 2011 Census put the Hakki Pikki population in Karnataka at 11,892. The current population is estimated to be around 15,000. 

“After their way of life was criminalised, there were efforts to settle them down in the ’60s, but none of them took to the land initially,” says Bengaluru-based activist Madhu Bhushan, who has “walked and worked” with the Hakki Pikki since the ’90s. In Sikkidre Shikari Ildiddre Bhikari (If I trap a prey, I’m a hunter, else, a beggar), a documentary made by Vinod Raja and narrated by Bhushan, a tribe elder named Division says, “The stork belongs to no lake, Hakki Pikki belong to no place.” 

The Hakki Pikki primarily trade in medicinal oils. When the monsoon arrives, the tribespeople gather around forests such as the Nagarhole National Park looking for the herbs they can collect. The oils are prepared in their own kitchens with the base being wild ginger, aloe vera, eucalyptus, and so on. Most of them are licensed to sell these oils, which they do in plastic bottles of varying sizes. 

From combating hair loss and keeping headaches at bay for a good night’s sleep to fighting joint aches and cramps, the Hakki Pikki have a massage oil for everything. They sell these oils at exhibitions and trade fairs in India and overseas. They’ll also courier these to you. “We are forest people, this is what our forefathers learnt when they lived in the forest,” says Diless, a woman in her 40s. “Generally, people abroad give us slightly better money and are more receptive to our medicinal oils,” she adds. 

50-odd children enrolled at a school in the colony | Photo: Saggere Radhakrishnan

It is common practice to borrow money from each other to finance these trips abroad. “A bulk of the profits we make are used to pay back these loans,” says Chandrakumar. 

The globetrotting ways of the nomadic community, at first glance, look as much at odds with the “normal” world as does their habit of finding names to give the young ones. For instance, the elder called Division was named so because he was born near a sub-divisional office. Another elder was named Depot because his parents lived near a depot that supplied rice.

“Our parents named us after whatever they saw when we were born, or anything they liked. It’s just random,” says Jeeniya, whose mother named her for the zinnia flower. In the tribe you will find people named Hotel, Cycle, Mysore Pak (after the sweet), Shaktimaan (India’s first television superhero), High Court, Chocolate Bai, Express, Disco, and so on.  

But this practice of adopting sounds, words or experiences into the language and culture is not really unique. Fewer communities end up doing so now because cultures and communities do not collide with each other as strangers anymore. 

Hakki Pikki names are now also becoming more conventional, and their days of bird-hunting today exist only in stories passed down orally. But some traditions remain, like men paying the dowry, and the mangal sutra being tied at midnight. The resistance to doctors and hospitals is also diminishing among the younger generation.

But what has remained unchanged is their exceptional resourcefulness. Walk around the village and you see the many ways in which they have created means of livelihood that play to their strengths. For instance, when they aren’t preparing and selling oils, they are making plastic flowers, garlands and bouquets. Or else, they are trading aluminum vessels for hair during their travels to other villages. This hair is then sold further to make toupees and wigs. 

Men and women of the community equally involved in making handicrafts | Photo: Saggere Radhakrishnan

Their travel-ready bags and boxes also have space for other handicrafts, like the copper-coated bracelets they make. They say they’re made out of elephant hair, but are actually crafted out of bull horns. They also sell what they call “tiger claws,” which are actually showpieces fashioned out of cattle hooves. 

In fact, their fake tiger claws are such good imitations that several years ago, some Hakki Pikki people were stuck in yet another country because of them. “Authorities in Nepal thought they were selling wildlife products,” recalls Bhushan. When forensic testing proved otherwise, they were back among their own, making more of these. None of these experiences seems to discourage the Hakki Pikki from packing their bags and taking off again.

Earlier this year, 16 members of the tribe had travelled to Malawi and from there to Mozambique. A few days after their visas were extended, the group was questioned by Mozambique’s anti-corruption bureau for allegedly bribing local immigration authorities. “We were unaware that the money taken from us was meant to be a bribe,” Madhuchandra tells me on the video chat from Mozambique.

Since the documentation was in Portuguese, the men had no idea what it said. “They let the other 13 members of our group go because they spoke no English at all,” says Madhuchandra, who has studied till Class XII. 

Their passports are now with Mozambique’s immigration authorities and the young men are forbidden from leaving the country.

Bhushan has made a case for these men with the external affairs ministry which has informed her that the Indian authorities have requested a “meeting with local authorities to appeal leniency in consideration of their illiteracy and ignorance of rule of law”. Sources in the know say there have been some positive developments on the front. 

Like in the past, this incident, too, is unlikely to affect the tribe’s globetrotting ways. It’s just who we are, they say. “Our people have been travelling long before they could read bus numbers and signboards,” says Chandrakumar. 

What the Hakki Pikki lack by way of institutionalised education, they make up for in networking skills. That they are quick to pick up languages also helps. “We can speak several languages — Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam,” says Diless. “Since we don’t have a lipi (script), our language keeps growing as we add words from other languages too,” adds Aishwarya, the 20-something wife of Rajesh, one of the men stuck in Mozambique. 

Between themselves, they speak Vaghri Boli, the Gujarati-based language they’ve customised with a fair sprinkling of words from South Indian dialects. They recount tales of an uncle who came back having learnt a little bit of Chinese, and an aunt who can manage Malay. 

But a stereotypical understanding of their world often prevails. Formal schooling isn’t something they take naturally to, though that is slowly changing, says R B Gowda, the headmaster of the primary school in the settlement. The school has two other teachers and nearly 50 children from the community. 

As Diwali rolls in, the Hakki Pikki are busy sealing bundles of artificial flowers. Diwali is traditionally not a festival from their belief system. But, true to their nature, they have taken to it, too, like to all other festivals they came across in other villages and cities. Soon they’ll start visiting nearby villages to sell the yellow and red flowers that will adorn doorsteps and puja rooms. For the tribe, however, it will only be a celebration when their men return home.