The Night Meeting

What I miss most from my early years of activism in Alirajpur are the night meetings. They started off as a necessity initially but evolved into an art eventually. Given that Adivasi farmers are busy throughout the day working on their fields or as wage labourers, the only time for holding political meetings was at night after dinner. In the early 1980s in Alirajpur, very few adult Adivasis in the villages were literate and generally they had no idea that India was a constitutional democracy in which they had considerable rights and special provisions. Therefore, it became necessary to hold political meetings in each and every village to raise the level of knowledge of the workings of a modern democracy among the people.
Not that the people were very keen to attend these meetings. After a hard day of physical labour most people would prefer to hit the bed after dinner (Now that I work through the day on our farm I realise how tiring it is and feel apologetic for having scolded some of the people for falling asleep during the night meetings!!). However, the fact that mass organisational agitation had secured some rights for them and improved their condition and since this had been possible because of the intervention by us activists, the medicine men of grassroots politics, they would heed our call and come to these meetings. So initially, as I said, these meetings were the result of necessity and it used to be a challenge to teach the people the inner workings of a modern democracy based on the rule of law. However, Adivasis being Adivasis, they soon transformed these meetings into something that was more akin to their culture - song and dance!! The younger Adivasis composed lyrics based on the political discussions and sang them to the traditional Adivasi tunes. Even though this started off in fits and starts, it soon became the norm and so the night meetings would, after beginning with political discussions, gradually turn into performances of emancipatory song and dance. One of our activist colleagues, who had had formal training in music at one time before coming to Alirajpur, Amit Bhatnagar, excelled in adapting the songs of the Telengana revolutionary singer, Gadar, to the local situation and also in transforming the traditional epic singing of the Gayana into an emancipatory musical performance. He composed songs of his own in Bhili also.

Later still in the late 1990s these songs became a craze and then many new Adivasi singers emerged not only composing political songs but also newer love and farming songs sung to the accompaniment of modern musical equipment like keyboards and with sound systems. The Adivasi Ekta Parishad was also formed in the early 1990s to promote and conserve traditional Bhil Adivasi culture and also to synthesise it with modern culture in a positive manner. So strong is this Adivasi cultural revival and synthesis now that Hindi film and pop music finds no place at all in the lives of the new generation of educated Adivasi youth. They dance to the tune of their own songs as they have been doing for centuries together but the songs are now different and modern in more ways than one.
The enactment of the Panchayati Raj Act in 1992 after the constitutional amendment making it mandatory and the spread of literacy and education among the Adivasis, alleviated the need for night meetings and so they gradually faded away by the end of the twentieth century. Moreover, the advent of mobile telephony with its huge media content in the twenty first century made it near impossible to hold night meetings as people were more interested in watching or listening to stuff on their phones than sitting in meetings discussing politics. The urgency to organise and agitate for immediate livelihood problems also has gone. Many of the things that we had to fight hard for in the 1980s and 1990s have now become easily accessible due to laws like Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, Forest Rights Act, Right to Education Act, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act and Food Security Act.
So these days we have workshops instead during the day where we try to understand things like neo-imperialism, fascism, patriarchy, climate change and casteism with a new generation of Adivasi activists who are bent on establishing a strong Bhil Adivasi identity to counter the majoritarian homogenising thrust of the Sangh Parivar. Even though there is singing of songs and dancing in these workshops also but they do not have the same flavour of the singing and dancing that we used to do in the night meetings in Alirajpur.