{"id":731,"date":"2018-05-25T13:35:00","date_gmt":"2018-05-25T13:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/idronline.org\/2020\/12\/23\/gathering-campfires-niyamgiri\/"},"modified":"2025-11-26T12:39:03","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T07:09:03","slug":"gathering-campfires-niyamgiri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idronline.org\/kn-in\/gathering-campfires-niyamgiri\/","title":{"rendered":"Photo essay: Gathering at the campfires of Niyamgiri"},"content":{"rendered":"

Goats, sheep, chicken, buffalo, roots, leaves, fruits – all are available in abundance at the annual Niyamgiri festival. And the Adivasis of Rayagada and Kalahandi districts of southwestern Odisha are here in large numbers too.<\/p>

Every year, from February 22 to 25, soon after the harvest has been brought in, the Dongria Kondh tribe prepares to worship Niyam Raja. Their King of Law is represented by the forested Niyamgiri hills. This is the time of the annual Niyamgiri festival, which dates back to a time when “there was no government in this part of our world… [only] the Dongrias were here,” says Lodo Sikoka. “It was a time, he says, when his people were “happy, enjoying life with liberty and dignity, speaking in our language. There were dense forests with lots of streams, and it was full of wildlife.” Sikoka is a Dongria Kondh, and a leader of the Niyamgiri Suraksha Samiti, an organisation formed in 2003 to protect the Adivasis and the hills from bauxite mining in the region. (See ‘The mountain, forest and streams are our gods’<\/a>)<\/p>

“The tribes don’t worship any other god except nature and the environment,” says Lingraj Azad, a Kesinga-based activist from Kalahandi district, and convener of the Samiti. “In the Kui language, they speak of the ‘Dharni Penu’, the Earth Goddess, and they regard ‘Horu’, the mountain, as the Father God. The water, forests, trees and air are also regarded as the base of life, and they too are worshiped. That is why we protested against the mining of the Niyamgiri hills when [the government] proposed to hand over the land to Vedanta.”<\/p>

\"What<\/a><\/div>

For long, the Dongria tribes have opposed a project by the government-owned Odisha Mining Corporation and Sterlite Industries (now Vedanta), a British multinational. The project proposed to mine their sacred hills for bauxite (which is used in making aluminium) for Vedanta’s refinery in the state’s Lanjigarh tehsil<\/em>.  Even though 12 gram sabhas<\/em> of the Dongria Kondh and other tribal groups voted against any mining operations in a public referendum ordered by the Supreme Court in 2013, the Odisha government has continued to petition the court to allow mining in these ecologically-sensitive hills.<\/p>