Leaving a Mark
I am a Gond adivasi, born and brought up in Dokal in Chhattisgarh-a small village far away from the hustle and bustle of city life.
My village is more than a hundred years old, and ever since I was born I have seen that the villagers are largely governed by the Gond sociality that ensures a focus on working and living together. The members of the village were bound by the principle of inter-dependence.
Women have had an important role in the spiritual customs of the village. Death rituals being a notable example, where only women are the spirit bearers, of the deceased. Without women, these death ceremonies cannot take place. However, in recent times women’s role in decision making has become limited to being a labourer – both at home and in the fields. We accept this fate at a very young age and do not find a reason to fight it. For young girls like me, balancing work at home and home-work at schools or colleges has been even more difficult.
In 2018, the young women of Dokal came together and formed a collective called Chinhari: The Young India. Chinhari is a Chhattisgarhi term that means – to leave a mark. It is an effort that hopes to enable young women to find a path of self-discovery. When I first went for a Chinhari meeting, I did not understand their approach. I did not know why we were meeting. However, what made sense to me was that, because of this platform I could meet my friends once a week. Before Chinhari, my friends and I rarely found time to meet each other, especially once the young women had completed schooling. I mostly stayed indoors and shared my dreams, joys and pain with my younger sister, Tomeshwari. I was immersed in a routine that looked to be socially prescribed for women. I had lost the ability to understand whether someone around me is troubled. The less I met others, the less could I make sense of what they were feeling. As a young thirteen-year-old, I had slowly started to accept the loneliness in my life.
But Chinhari gave us a new outlook. We could sit together and discuss our day-to-day activities. Initially, leaving the house for these meetings was not easy. It was a culture that was only eventually created. Our families expected us to stay at home. A weekly meeting was a new tradition that family members took time to accept. As we kept attending these sessions we slowly learnt to contemplate about the change in our society and in our lives. We were now building deep relationships and slowly starting to share our personal stories with each other. This was not easy. Even though we were friends, sharing the intimate details of our lives could have brought moral judgements. I feared that sharing too much would put me in a bad light. This is something I continue to work on.
In my learning, as a part of Chinhari, I have understood that relationships are not easy. We have to constantly work on them. This space has given me a sense of community; a space to share my problems. It not only helps me understand my own feelings and emotions but also the difficulties and sorrows of others in the collective. In the last four years, I have grown to become more sensitive towards the problems that the rural-adivasi youth face and the degradation of the environment. This sensitivity has helped me learn the need to articulate my perspective. I have shared the difficulties of the adivasi young women with our village council as well as with the district level Gond council.
Our collective has not just looked at the social status of women within Gond contexts but has also tried to recover old adivasi practices that are non-violent towards nature. We have tried to rediscover the practices of nurturance by adivasis. We have revived Adim kheti – the indigenous, non-violent way of agriculture in our village and have also undertaken lac cultivation to reintroduce the insect Kerria Lacca and bring greater diversity to our forests.
Working towards bringing back the Gond culture called for a lot of reading and researching. So we started a Gond library in our village. Reading has helped us understand our practices and culture. It has helped us understand why we - the adivasis must continue fighting for – jal, jangal aur zameen (water, forest and land) and our ancestral spirits dwelling in them. Some believe the pandemic is a call from our spirits. It is, perhaps, an alarm.
During the lockdown, we took up painting. Art was not only therapy but also a platform through which we could draw our world. May be that’s why the adivasis in the old ages expressed themselves through art. One can visit the Bhimbetka cave to experience a different kind of storytelling.
The people of our village remain truly moved by our work and have started to support us too. I think they are proud of us. This overwhelms me. This collective has given me both self confidence and a new meaning of life. I have come to believe that I too can do something. One of the small achievements my friends and I are proud of is the recognition that we now receive from our village council. We have also been gifted a piece of land for vegetable cultivation and seed bank. This gesture makes me feel respected. I could take up this journey because my family did not stop me, and in turn, motivated me to step out and attend meetings. A lot can happen if women can just gather.
My mother believes that we, the young girls of Chinhari, have enabled the rural adivasi women to dream, discover and leave a mark.
Written by Keshbati Netam
Translated by Urvashi Neha
Illustrated by Sangita Jogi
Keshbati is currently a first year student of Bachelors in Commerce at N.R.M Government Girls College. She has been a member of Chinhari:The Young India since 2018. She frequently writes in the Chinhari newsletters.
Urvashi Neha is working as a researcher at Chinhari:The Young India. She has been working on models of horizonal organizational structures. She is currently studying organizational behavior within Human Resource Management.
Sangita Jogi, a homemaker and a young artist from Rajasthan’s Sirohi district is a second generation practitioner of the Jogi art- a tribal art form that features folk through drawings and etchings. Sangita started drawing when she was a child, heavily influenced by her parents who were nomadic musicians in Rajasthan before becoming artists.
Chinhari: The Young India is a collective of largely young women (not to the exclusion of men though) that works towards reconstructive praxis in remote locations of Chhattisgarh. The work engages with approximately hundred young women and men in five villages in the districts of Dhamtari and Kanker. Chinhari has been working on learning from sustainable ways of living and works towards habitable village life.