To my Adivasi significant others,
Johar,
The reason I am writing this to you today is that a few days back, six girls at the Adivasi Ashram school were bitten by a snake while sleeping on the floor. This incident took place in the Japatlai Residential Ashram in Dhanora Taluka, Gadchiroli district. Three of them died. I am gripped by despair at the fact that little has changed, even a decade since I passed out of the Ashram school. We also used to sleep on the floor. During the day, we used to arrange benches in the classroom, and at night we would stack them on top of each other to make space for our beds. At that time, we also faced incidents of black scorpions biting students, and they were rushed to the primary hospital twelve kilometres away from our school. In retrospect, I wonder why we didn’t demand a van for transportation in an emergency or to have health insurance? Why were thoughts of health and life insurance so elusive for us? My current university, where I pursue my PhD, provides me with one. My previous university in India also had insurance. It is a basic safety net during health emergencies. As we go to Ashram schools in Adivasi areas where basic infrastructure is lacking, we continuously fight for the education of Adivasi children.
In this country, we rarely talk about the education of Adivasis, or the conditions in which it is offered to them. I miss those deep conversations, the rage we felt and the vision we had of changing the education system for Adivasis. I remember our days in Adivasi ashram school. It was fun learning Marathi letters and numbers. When I think back, it’s so funny how our English teacher would ask us to go to our senior class teacher to ask the meaning of certain words. I guess it wasn’t easy for our teacher to look up the meanings of those words because there was no Android mobile dictionary he could consult. Thankfully, we did pass 10th class without even understanding English. That’s why I think I always feared English. But today I sit in the University of California, San Diego Library on the sixth floor, facing the Fallen Star cottage atop the Engineering building. The Fallen Star, Do Ho Suh’s artwork, gives feelings of dislocation and disorientation. But I reorient myself to our lives, past, present, and future.
Do you remember our 6th class teacher who used to taunt us by singing “ABCD marli chidi, takli chulyat khalli bhujun” (ABCD killed the bird, put it on the stove, roasted and ate)? I clearly remember those words, mocking us for our Adivasi-ness, for being closer to the Jungles. These upper-caste teachers never understood our cultures or us. Also, they never took responsibility for us as teachers. If anything ever happened, they blamed our parents, saying they did not understand the importance of education. I feel sad that we never had an Adivasi teacher in our school who could understand our situation. We did enjoy our cultural festivals at home during holidays. But we missed some of them, since they did not make it into national holidays, and even if we could go home – home was 50-60 kilometres away. It kept us separated from our family. I missed my mother every day and cried, but you were there, you consoled me and cried with me. I guess you were also missing your family. Enrolled as six-year-olds, separated from our family, we entered a completely new world that bore no resemblance to our surroundings at home, in our community, or in our culture. What else could we have done? Even what we were taught in school had no relationship to our language, cultural identity, or epistemology. Our worldview was never the worldview of the Ashram school. Even our Adivasi leaders were not there in the history textbooks of the school, not to mention that we did not even celebrate their Jayantis.
Did I tell you I visited our school last year, and the Project Officer came to speak with the students? He was arrogant, scolding students, saying, “Your parents do hard labour on the farm, and what do you do? You just eat and sleep. You do not study. That gives me a clear understanding that you will not succeed in life.” This checking on the students was more about surveillance and moral policing than about education. It upsets me that the authorities think that Adivasi children are in schools just for free food. This narrow mindset has to go away. You know, that day I saw photos of the Adivasi leaders in the headmaster’s office, which students generally do not dare to enter except when they are called in. It is funny that students are not taught about our leaders, yet their photos are displayed in the office – a place students are not allowed to visit frequently.
I hear Adivasi students all across Maharashtra are protesting. There are all kinds of demands for securing Adivasi students’ future. I must emphasize that the continuous resurgence of our resistance to the injustices is and has been the Adivasi way of life. It has become part of our everyday. We have not simply been given anything, not even our rights; we have fought for them. We fight to protect our Eklavyas, but the Drona makes his presence known in different forms.
For me, it is no longer only about the thumb or the symbolism attached to it, but about the Adivasi lives and experiences that continue to shape the land we call home. The Adivasi lives of those who Ulgulan, who resist oppressive rules and carry forward the legacy of Dharti Aaba; those who continue to resist the plunder of their land and resources and struggle to protect their Jal, Jangal, Zameen. It is also about communities whose histories and identities are often overlooked in the present education system, whose Adivasi identity is questioned because of how they look, and whose accents and dialects are mocked in schools, colleges, and universities. It is about the continuing demand for education in mother tongues and the right to preserve language, culture, land, and identity. For me, remembering Birsa Munda also means recognising these ongoing realities and listening to the struggles that continue around us.
Jai Adivasi,
Shankar