Propagating Heirloom Seeds

 Kansari nu Vadavno, the Bhil Adivasi women's organisation led by Subhadra Khaperde has been reviving the cultivation of the traditional indigenous seeds of Western Madhya Pradesh over the past eight years. These women farmers have not only succeeded in cultivating over thirty varieties of traditional seeds ranging from millets, rice, wheat, pulses, oilseeds and fibre to vegetables, but have also spread them across the country by participating in organic seed festivals. Bicchibai and Gendabai two stalwart farmers of the organisation are participating in the latest Organic Seed Festival in Indore with their cornucopia of seeds and are holding forth before farmers, consumers and the media about the importance of this campaign to save the agro-biodiversity and so the food security of Western Madhya Pradesh.

Patriarchy and Women's Health

 Nowhere is patriarchy in India more manifested than in the sorry state of women's health. Especially reproductive health. The pressure of bearing, birthing and tending to babies and also doing other work has a telling effect on the reproductive tract of women and they suffer from various gynaecological problems. Due to a culture of silence imposed by patriarchy they are not able to speak about these problems and due to poverty they are not able to seek redress as the government public health system provides only obstetric services but does not provide diagnosis and treatment for gynaecological problems. Over production of babies, over work and lack of treatment for gynaecological problems combine to reduce their blood haemoglobin levels. The results of the Fifth National Family Health Survey (NFHS V) of 2019-21 not only show that 57% of the women surveyed in the age group of 15-49 years are anaemic but what is even more shocking is that there has been a 7% increase in the proportion of women who are anaemic from the results of NFHS IV conducted in 2014-15. The statewise data is shown in the map below. Lakshwadeep has the lowest proportion of anaemic women closely followed by Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Kerala and and Goa. Ladakh has the highest proportion of anaemic women at a shocking 92.8% followed by West Bengal at 71.4%.

This is a horrendous state of affairs and not much is being done to remedy it. There are a few NGOs like ours (https://lnkd.in/ddVhjjxr), which are doing something in this regard but they can only scratch the surface and unless the government health system substantially improves its gynaecological health services, women will continue to suffer

Activate to view larger image,

Primitive Accumulation Proceeding Apace

 The Paschim Bharat Majdur Adhikar Manch reports -

This year Jagrit Adivasi Dalit Sangathan, a people’s organization active in South Western (Nimad) region of Madhya Pradesh has received several complaints from Bhil Adivasi workers of Barwani and Khargone districts who have gone to harvest sugarcane in Maharashtra and Karnataka. The workers were recruited by contractors of Beed district in Maharashtra, whose modus operandi is as follows: A sum of Rs 30,000 – 40,000 is advanced to an Adivasi family in the lean summer months and in return for this loan, the couple is required to work in harvesting and loading sugarcane from October for an unspecified period. Children also accompany their parents. With the worsening economic situation due to inflation, agricultural crisis and near collapse of the MNREGS, more and more Adivasi families are falling into this debt trap. Such cases have also been reported by other grass roots people’s organizations based in the area – Veer Khaja Nayak Manav Vikas Pratishthan in Sendhwa in Madhya Pradesh and Vichardhara Sansthan in Nandurbar, Maharashtra. All the three organizations are part of the Paschim Bharat Majdur Adhikar Manch, a network of trade unions and grass roots organizations that seeks to ensure labour and human rights for migrant Adivasi workers of Central India. The Adivasis now constitute the main agricultural work force in the black cotton soil region of peninsular India. 

The workers have now spent more than three months harvesting and loading sugarcane in conditions of practically slave labour. They do harvesting work for more than 10 hours from dawn to dusk and then they loadthe cane onto the transport vehicles till late at night, often working till 1 to 2 am at night, and are sometimes not even allowed enough time to eat their food properly. They thus work for 16-20 hours a day! They stay in tents of plastic sheets in the open fields. They have not been paid any wages and have been only given very inadequate sums of money or some grain for food and all workers are complaining of hunger. When the workers are asking for accounts of how much they are to be paid after the reconciliation of the loan advance they had taken, they are simply told that the advance amount has not been adjusted yet and they will have to work for many more months. When workers insist on “hisaab” (wage calculations) and say they want to go back, they are threatened and abused, and are told they can only return if they pay a few lakhs of Rupees to the contractor. On 16^th January, 2022, upon asking for “hisaab”, three members of a group in Belagavi in Karnataka had been held as “hostages” and locked up in the Nirani Sugar factory in Mudhol Bagalkot district for 6 days and were only released after the informal intervention of the Barwani district administration.

Pregnant women, women who have delivered a baby only a few days ago, those with injuries and children are also being made to work. Last month a group from district Khargone that escaped from Belagavi came back and reported that 3 women and 3 minor girls were repeatedly sexually assaulted by the contractors in the sugarcane fields. It was with great difficulty that an FIR was finally registered by Khargone police, but no action has been taken yet.

The situation of these workers is that of bonded labour according to the provisions of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act 1976 and there is also blatant violation of the provisions of the Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act (which requires licensing of contractors, registration of workers in both states, payment of minimum wages, provision of basic amenities and a passbook recording work and wages). This is also a case of trafficking as defined by section 370 and 374 of the Indian Penal Code, an atrocity under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, violation of the Contract Labour Act, Prohibition of Child Labour Act, Minimum Wages Act, Payment of Wages Act and many other labour laws. However, the authorities in both the source districts as well as the destination area are reluctant to take action.

While the Sangathan and other civil society activists in Karnataka have been demanding legal action, this is not being done, even in cases such as when the Barwani administration rescued workers from Vijayapura. In none of these cases has the proper procedure prescribed by the National Human Rights Commission for release of bonded laborers been followed. The released workers have to be provided a Release Certificate that entitles them to rehabilitation from the Government. The administration needs to provide an immediate relief amount and arrange for their return journey. In the latest case, the Belagavi district administration dumped a group of Adivasi families comprising 57 persons on the train to Solapur with the same contractor who was forcing them to work in bondage!! The workers had no money to even buy their food. They had to be rescued by civil society organisations and sent back to their homes from Solapur. The three organizations have currently received many complaints from groups of workers in Pune, Baramati, Kolhapur and Satara in Maharashtra and Bagalkot, Belagavi, and Kalburgi in Karnataka seeking release and return. Three of these groups for which data is available, comprise of 200 persons including women and children.

Sugar industry in peninsular India is organized very differently from North India. Majority of the sugar factories are owned by sugarcane farmers cooperatives. The leaders of sugar cooperatives control the politics of a state like Maharashtra and wield considerable influence in other states like Gujarat and Karnataka where the same pattern is prevalent. One major way in which sugar industry is organized differently is in the method of harvesting sugarcane. In North India, the farmers harvest the sugarcane in their fields and bring it to the factory gate. In cooperative factories of peninsular India, the factory takes responsibility of getting the sugarcane cut and transported to the factory. This requires humanpower on a large scale. Sugarcane harvesting is highly labour intensive. The sugarcane cooperatives have set up elaborate mechanisms to recruit cheap labour for harvesting work from remote areas. Workers are given advances that tie them up to work for the whole harvesting season at very low piece rates. The workers live in temporary hutments, often made of polythene and move from field to field harvesting sugarcane. The unit of work is a couple so children also migrate with their families. Camps of harvesting workers give the appearance of temporary villages from pre historic times. There are no facilities like electricity, drinking water and sanitation.

Bondage like work conditions for sugarcane harvesting work have made the news repeatedly over the last decade. Couple of years back, Beed district, the major source of sugarcane harvesting workers in Maharashtra was in the news with female workers being enticed to undergo the hysterectomy operation. The operation ensured that they continued to work uninterrupted in sugarcane harvesting, without pregnancy leading to work breaks (https://www.newslaundry.com/2019/07/31/a-slaughterhouse-for-wombs-district-beed-maharashtra). Centre for Labor Research and Action (CLRA), a labor rights NGO working in the state of Gujarat for more than a decade, wrote about bondage conditions prevalent amongst sugarcane harvesting workers of South Gujarat, where the workers are recruited against advances at usurious interest rates. One and a half times advance has to be paid back at the end of the season that works out to an almost five percent monthly interest rate (https://www.newsclick.in/sugarcane-harvesters-south-gujarat-are-trapped-bondage-one-generation-after-another).

The roots of the bondage lie in extremely low piece rates. To establish the energy consumed and time taken in harvesting one ton of sugarcane, CLRA sponsored a Time Motion study by Industrial Design Centre (IDC) of Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. The study report was submitted in the year 2019 (http://clra.in/files/documents/9f1d468e-b3e3-4a4b-8c88-ecaf295c2a2c.pdf). After intensive field studies, the study estimated the time taken to cut, bundle, and transport to the truck, one ton of sugarcane as 13.7 hours. Per day production for an eight-hour day for one person works out to be 0.58 ton. The minimum wage for sugarcane harvesting work was Rs. 238 per ton. Thus, per day wage for sugarcane harvesting workers turns out to be Rs. 138. This is 40 percent of the statutory minimum wage rate for agriculture workers in Gujarat that is Rs. 340. Similar situation prevails in states like Maharashtra and Karnataka. The workers’ union Majur Adhikar Manch has now filed a petition in the High Court of Gujarat demanding that the minimum piece rate wages be hiked to Rs. 586 per ton.

In the case of the Adivasi workers now stranded in Maharashtra and Karnataka, even the piece rate is not being invoked, they are simply informed that their debt has not been repaid yet! While debt bondage has been passed down since generations amongst the dalit and Adivasi workers of Central India engaged in sugarcane harvesting work, it is the first time that a large number of workers have raised their voice against this stark exploitation. Adivasis from several villages have started campaigning against this bondage in support of the victims. They are demanding strict legal action.  It is now the bounden duty of the state and civil society to ensure that one of the most vulnerable sections of the working class gets its due.

Nitin Varghese (7869090287), Jayshree (8889289196), Tatyaji Pawar (9421470711), Sudhir Katiyar (94141296542)

 

 

 

The Bhil Adivasi Mobilisation for Climate Action

 Introduction

Tribal Development in India has been problematical from the time of independence. This has been due to a conflicting situation arising from the opposition between the traditional community based subsistence economy of the Adivasis and the modern market based growth oriented thrust of the mainstream economy. The challenge for the State has been to integrate the Adivasis into the modern economy in a manner that was beneficial to them. This has generally not been possible because the Adivasis have lacked the requisite skills for this and the government system for equipping them with these skills has malfunctioned. Moreover, in order to save on the costs associated with modern development the Adivasis have often not been recompensed and rehabilitated properly for the displacement that they have had to face as resources have been extracted from their traditional habitats.

Not surprisingly this has led to dissatisfaction on the part of the Adivasis. This in turn has given rise to outright political revolt, rights based New Social Movements of Adivasis and also an emergence of Non-Governmental Organisations for bringing about better tribal development. Decentralised and local community controlled development has been acknowledged as a major desideratum for tackling tribal deprivation by scholars. With the award of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to Elinor Ostrom in 2009, even mainstream economics has come to acknowledge the importance of collective action for the management of common pool resources. This has also gained in importance currently because of the benefits in terms of mitigation of climate change that such communitarian natural resource management can achieve. The collective action undertaken by the Bhil and Bhilala Adivasis in West-Central India to secure their rights and entitlements and in the process mitigate climage change are detailed here.

2. Traditional Bhil Society

The Bhil Adivasis in West-Central India have traditionally had a communitarian culture based on a subsistence livelihood pattern that ensured sustainable use of their natural resource bases. The important characteristics of traditional Bhil society are as follows -

1.      Habitations of small communities linked together by strong kinship ties

2.      Customs of labour pooling in all social and economic activities

3.      System of interest free loans in cash and kind

4.      Minimal interaction with the external centralised trade based economy

5.      High dependence on forests for daily as well as agricultural needs

6.      Social customs that ensured the redistribution of the surplus of individual families among the community

There was thus a minimal role in this society for accumulation, trade and monetary profits and so it continued for ages at a low level resource use equilibrium. However, Bhil society is patriarchal like others and so women have to bear the double burden of poverty and patriarchal oppression.

3. Colonial Dispossession

The Maratha invasion of the region in the late eighteenth century and later the advent of the British colonialists in the early eighteenth century the situation changed drastically. The penetration of the modern market economy and the settling of non-tribal peasant farmers began in the Bhil areas. This put the Bhils in a precarious situation with the beginning of a process of alienation from their natural resource bases and their integration as ill paid debt ridden labourers in the centralised market economy.

The British enacted the Indian Forest Act in 1865 and took vast areas of community forests out of the control of forest dweller communities and handed over their management to the Forest Department created by it and this was the single most debilitating development for the Adivasis in India. Even though this act was implemented only in the provinces directly controlled by the British it nevertheless provided the new direction of commercial exploitation of forests to forest management in the Princely States that largely ruled over the Bhil areas and so they too were adversely affected.

4. Post Colonial Situation

Ironically, the coming of independence aggravated the livelihood situation of the Bhils instead of  improving it. Most of the Bhil areas that were under the governance of Princely States prior to independence were assimilated into the states of Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan and the Indian Forest Act (1927) (IFA) was implemented. Vast areas of forests which were earlier still being managed by the Bhils with the Princely States only nominally in control, were converted into Reserved Forests.

The Bhils mostly were illiterate and so did not understand the legal procedures for conversion of their habitats into Reserved Forests and so lost most of their lands.  Under the IFA, the government “can constitute any forest land or waste land which is the property of Government or over which the Government has proprietary rights, a reserved forest, by issuing a notification of this effect”. Settlement of rights was not carried out and large areas remain unsurveyed even today. The history of forest management thereafter has been one of continuous deprivation of the Adivasis and is briefly described below followed by a description of the failure of economic and social development schemes in Tribal areas.

4.1 Disempowerment and Maldevelopment of Bhil Adivasis

The situation of the Bhils was made worse by the fact that government services like education, development extension and health have not functioned properly and so the Adivasis have been deprived of the welfare benefits that they were entitled to under various schemes. Finally the patriarchal nature of Bhil society led to the burden of increasing poverty due to wrong development policies falling disproportionately on the women. The necessity of bearing more children to get male progeny has also led to a population explosion, increasing pressure on the natural resource base.

4.1.1 Decline of Local Self Governance - The most debilitating phenomenon immediately after independence was the marginalisation of the customary community based local self governance systems of the Bhils. The third tier of Panchayati Raj was not set up and instead the power in rural areas was transferred to the bureaucracy and especially the Forest Department and Police. The Forest Department staff took undue advantage of the restrictive provisions of the Indian Forest Act to demand bribes from the Bhils to allow them access to the forests without which they could not survive but which had become legally proscribed. The Police interfered with the traditional communitarian dispute resolution mechanisms of the Bhils and instead forced them to report their problems to the Police leading to unnecessary arrests and litigation.  Even though the Bhils elected their own representatives to the state and national legislatures due to the policy of reservation this did not translate into power for the Bhils at large as the elected representatives went along with the overall policy of marginalisation of the Adivasis.

As a result, the general Bhil population was completely disempowered and left at the mercy of the bureaucracy. This disempowerment is the root cause of the mal-development of the Bhil areas. The specific micro level needs and aspirations of the Bhils have not been articulated and so macro level development policies that have been pursued have been inimical to them.

Thus, the actual state policy that evolved for Bhil tribal areas was as follows - “ top priority has been given to a programme of rapid industrialisation and extension of means of communication to the most interior regions. Our firm view is that the development of land and agriculture alone will not be adequate for the rehabilitation of the tribal communities. Agricultural land is insufficient and cannot serve the needs of even half the tribal population. The tribal areas are rich in industrial and power potential. There is no reason why in the wider interest of the nation and in the long-term interest of the Adivasis themselves, industries should not be developed and localised in tribal areas”. 

4.1.2 Industrial Development versus Tribal Development - The assumption that industrial development in tribal areas is in the long-term beneficial to them has been proved to be totally fallacious. Invariably Adivasis are not rehabilitated and compensated properly for the loss of their traditional livelihoods and neither they are trained to gain employment in the new industries that are set up. The industrial areas set up on tribal lands in West-Central India are an example of this. The government provided cheap land and other subsidised infrastructure to the industrialists along with tax-holidays but the displaced Adivasis were given only pittances as compensation. Not being educated or skilled they did not get any of the permanent jobs that were created and are even today working as casual labourers. Pithampur, Indore, Vadodara, Ahmedabad, Surat and Kota, which are the main industrial centres in West-Central India in fact draw in Bhils from the whole region as casual labourers.

The other fallacious assumption is that agricultural land was insufficient to provide suitable livelihoods to the Adivasis. Inadequate attention was paid to developing the productivity of dryland agriculture on sub-optimal soils in upper watersheds on which the Bhils are dependent. Instead stress was put on developing green revolution agriculture on the plain lands with irrigation and chemical inputs. This was totally unsuitable to the hilly dry land farms of the Bhils. Today the green revolution technologies are proving to be unsuitable for the areas where they were started off with in the 1960s in Punjab and Haryana primarily due to soil quality degradation and lesser and costlier avialability of water and chemical inputs.

A resource conservation policy for land, water and forests, a research and development policy for the traditional organic agriculture of the Adivasis and appropriate technology for processing agricultural and forest produce combined with a vibrant local government system with a clear gender focus to counter the internal patriarchy of Bhil society would have worked wonders if it had been implemented. Appropriate education and health systems incorporating tribal knowledge would have been a bonus that would have produced a new generation of Adivasis able and ready to take on the development challenges faced by their community. This was not done and so the human development indices in the Bhil tribal areas have remained the poorest in the country.

5. Mobilisation of Bhil Adivasis

The Bhil Adivasis of West-Central India began mobilising from 1970s onwards primarily for their basic constitutional rights. Later this movement spread to include the integration of the Bhils into the modern market system without exploitation by moneylenders, traders and corrupt government officials. Currently the umbrella organisation of Bhil Adivasis in West-Central India is the Adivasi Ekta Parishad.

The introduction of the special Panchayat Raj for Scheduled Tribal areas under the provisions of the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas Act 1996 (PESA) gave a boost to the work of mobilisation. The provision in PESA Act that the tribal Gram Sabha is to be the final arbiter on all issues of local development and that this Gram Sabha could be as small as a hamlet of a village made it easier to implement development programmes. Often it is not possible to carry the whole village together on some development programme because the tribal hamlets of a village are situated at a distance from each other. Another law that promises to have far reaching consequences is the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forestdwellers (Recognition of Rights) Act 2006 (FRA) which gives rights to the land that the Adivasis have been cultivating and also community rights to the forests in which they have been residing. Finally there is the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme which if properly implemented can in addition to providing employment to the Adivasis also improve the natural resource base of their habitats.

The specific mobilisational strategies adopted that have got the people to act collectively for getting their entitlements and the conservation of natural resources for climate change mitigation are –

1. Problem analysis workshops in which the people have participated in open discussions to pinpoint the problems they were facing.
2. Legal and rights training workshops in which the people were taught the basics of the liberal democratic framework.
3. Collective Action for assertive rights through public demonstrations and sitins.
4. Revival of traditional labour and resource pooling customs.
5. Special women's meetings to get them involved in resource conservation work and also public demonstrations and also counter the internal patriarchy of Bhil society.
6. Legal and policy advocacy to change the laws and rules in favour of the Adivasis.

6. Gaining Access to Forests and then Conserving them

The mass mobilisation began with the problem of ensuring access to the encroached farms of the Adivasis in the reserved forest. As a solution to this problem it was decided to protect the remaining forest area and prevent it from degradation. This was done to counter the claim of the forest department that the Adivasis were destroying the forest. Consequently, social protection of the forests to ensure their regeneration was undertaken. Small groups patrolled the forests by turns through a labour pooling system. The fodder generated from such protection is cut and bought by the members at the end of the monsoon season and the money thus generated is kept in a fund for carrying out plantation work. This forest protection has considerably increased the availability of fodder, fireweood and non-timber forest produce in the study watershed and this has especially benefited the women and children who are the main collectors of forest products. It may be mentioned here that tribal children treat the collection of forest produce as a playful activity and it is not labour for them. This is how they come to know their natural environment. Greater fodder availability has facilitated goat and buffalo rearing and so increased the supplementary incomes from animal husbandry which provides an insurance against livelihood shocks to the tribal households. It is not possible to quantify the increase in forest product availability because of a lack of records but people say that they now enjoy much greater forest product availability and have bigger herds of goats and cattle than earlier.

7. Soil and Water Conservation

The villagers organised themselves into small groups of ten to twelve farmers each who then pooled their labour and cooperated with each other to perform their agricultural operations together and also undertake soil and water conservation activities. This was a revival of the traditional labour pooling custom of the Bhils called Dhas. In this system people used to work together to do agricultural operations on each others' fields, build each others' houses, and improve the quality of the farm fields through soil conservation work. However, this traditional labour pooling custom is dying out because of their integration into the mainstream money economy and the exploitation by the forest department staff.

A major feature of this cooperative soil and water conservation work is the participation of women in it. As is well known the ravages of natural devastation caused by bad development are mostly borne by women. Consequently it is not surprising, that when offered an opportunity to cooperate to reduce their drudgery, women come forward enthusiastically. This has not only ensured that women have participated in the community actions and improved their status in society but they have also as a result, changed the gender relations at home.

The intensive soil and water conservation work and the forest conservation have together ensured that both natural and artificial recharge in the watersheds have increased considerably and as a result the streams are flowing throughout the year. The farmers have used this enhanced water availability to cultivate dryland varieties of wheat which require less water. The greater availability of animal manure has resulted in the farmers using treated organic manure in larger quantities and improving the quality of the soil. The soil and water conservation work has also ensured the greater availability of soil moisture and so double cropping has become possible even without irrigation in some of the upper fields where a crop of gram is taken. In some cases the kharif jowar crop after being harvested, regenerates to give a small rabi yield from the soil moisture.

8. Implementation of the FRA

The FRA has been plagued with problems right from the beginning. Even though the Act was passed in 2006 it took another year for the Rules to be framed and passed by parliament. Even after that Governments have been very tardy in setting in motion the process for application and verification of the rights of the Adivasis. The people have had to organise many demonstrations to first get the process started and then for it to continue. The people have also pro-actively used the MGNREGS to carry out soil and water conservation works on the lands for which they have gained lease rights under the FRA.

An associated achievement of the people is their success in getting the proposal by the Government to set up a Wild Life Sanctuary in the Katthivada Forest Range of Alirajpur district in Madhya Pradesh cancelled. Under the provisions of the PESA Act and also the Wild Life Protection Act any displacement of people in a scheduled tribal area has to be sanctioned by the Gram Sabha. Hard mobilisation by the people forced the Government to implement this provision and the Gram Sabhas unanimously rejected the proposal because of its many infirmities and it had to be shelved. This is the first time that a proposal for a Wild Life Sanctuary in this country has had to be shelved due to strong legal and mass action by the Adivasis.

9. Conclusions

The most important achievement is that the Adivasi Ekta Parishad has been able to inspire the Adivasis to assert their identity and clearly demarcate their sovereignty over their habitats. The laws and rules for utilisation of the forests were that laid down by the government and administered by the Forest Department and were not matched to the local needs and conditions. The Adivasi Ekta Parishad succeeded in mobilising the people through regular meetings and trainings to stand up for their rights against the forest department staff and design their own rules for governing the use of the collective natural resources. A section of the people initially braved the opposition of the traditional Patels who were agents of the Forest Department and even went to jail fighting for their rights and established the organisation. Once the organisation was established and natural resource conservation work began, the benefits began to flow and this acted as a reinforcing factor in the continuation of the process and so later even the Patels, who were initially opposed to the process, later became a part of it.

The mobilisation process resulted in a fairly strong people's organisation spread over the whole of the Bhil Adivasi homeland and the people were able to ensure that the Forest Department was forced to allow them to manage their common resources according to their own rules. The monitoring of the forests as well as the soil and water conservation work is done by the people themselves and that is why the system has worked very well for over three decades. The people have developed a system of sanctions beginning with fines for small infringements of the rules and going upto ostracism for more serious violations and this is administered by the people themselves. The traditional community conflict resolution mechanisms of the Bhil Adivasis have also been revived and these are also working very well.

However, unless the government ensures a participatory framework of rule making and monitoring at several levels it is difficult for a people's organisation to build up a larger movement of conservation. Since the government through the forest department and police has actively opposed the people's mobilisation it has taken place only in isolated patches in the Bhil homeland. The laws and policies that favour Adivasis are not implemented primarily because most people are not aware of these provisions and the Government is not serious about them. The Adivasi Ekta Parishad by raising the awareness of the Adivasis in this regard has brought about a positive transformation in West-Central India. Thus, despite its limitations, the mobilisation process described above has ensured justice for the Bhil Adivasis and provided them with a better livelihood situation while simultaneously making a significant contribution towards climate change mitigation.

 

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.

The Lust for Life

Long years ago I made a tryst with destiny and arrived in Alirajpur district among the Bhil Adivasis to work as a grassroots activist to redeem the pledge!! The person who facilitated this was Khemraj Choudhary who had gone there in 1982 to work for the rights of the Bhil Adivasis and had already been beaten up by the Forest Department for doing so. Khemraj hails from a marginal farmer family in Rajasthan but pursued higher education and became a student activist while in college. After that he joined the Social Work and Research Centre, which has now become the Barefoot College, in Ajmer district of Rajasthan, as a social activist. He led campaigns against the enduring problem of caste oppression of Dalits while working for the Barefoot College. However, he wanted to take on greater challenges and so he left for Alirajpur because he had heard that the Bhil Adivasis living there were very oppressed. He began organising them to fight for their rights by living among them and doing farm and labour work. That's when I met him when I reached the Barefoot College in search of my mission and after hearing his description of the work he was doing decided to tag along with him and that is how my life among the Adivasis of western India was decided.
Khemraj moved out of Alirajpur in the late 1980s deciding to return to his village in Chittor and starting work there among the Adivasis who worked as labourers in the stone quarries. Since then he has taken up many a struggle of the Adivasis and Dalits in Chittor district including the famous Khat Campaign. The casteist oppression was such in the rural areas that Adivasis and Dalits could not sit on their cots in front of their houses and had to take off their shoes when they passed in front of the houses of the dominant castes. So Khemraj launched a mass movement to stop these abhorrent practices which was very successful.
Last month Subhadra and I went to Chittor to hold one of our reproductive health camps in Khemraj's area of work and that is how I met him again face to face after more than a decade. Things had changed for the worse in the meanwhile. A few months back he was diagnosed with colon cancer which had metastasised onto his liver. Luckily immediate chemotherapy has resulted in the cancer being contained and he is in good spirits again. However, the ravages of the chemotherapy are there to be seen and he has lost his earlier strength. Yet he continues even at the advanced age of 65 to go on his daily morning walk followed by the rounds of the villages to distribute clothes and money to destitute families like a real life Santa Claus. He has not only spent his whole adult life fighting for the rights of under privileged people but is now running a hostel for Adivasi and Dalit girls to educate them and prevent them from getting married as child marriage is rampant in Rajasthan.
However, our close encounters with the village scene in the course of organising the reproductive health camp showed to what extent people like Khemraj and activists in general are marginalised given the huge barriers to justice and equality in the society and the economy. Try as we might we could not get a gynaecologist for our health camp. All the gynaecologists in the town of Chittor area engaged in private practice including the ones serving in Government hospitals. They are busy in doing caesarian sections to deliver babies or in in vitro fertilisation to make it possible for childless couples to have babies. Eventually we had to rope in a general practitioner lady doctor who had some gynaecological experience and somehow hold the camp. Casteism too is rampant as the laboratory staff who came to collect the samples refused to eat in the Bhil Adivasi home in which we had organised the camp saying that he would be ostracised by his caste if he did so. As is usual, the camp revealed that the women are mostly anaemic and suffering from various gynaecological problems. What is even more disturbing is that a large number of women tested positive for chronic typhoid. The women go to private quacks and get a few tablets and injections which do not solve their problems apart from giving them temporary relief. Thus, casteism, patriarchy and class rule all combine to keep the Adivasis and Dalits downtrodden and Khemraj's and my life long missions haven't made much of a difference.
Khemraj soldiers on regardless. He said he had initially been very depressed to learn that he had cancer. However, the huge support that he got in the form of friends coming to help him with the treatment and other contributing financially, which resulted in the cancer abating fast has filled him with greater energy to carry on he says. When in college I had read the book "Lust for Life" written by Irving Stone on the life and work of the Dutch post impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh had battled mental problems to live life to the full and paint some exhilarating pictures like the famous one below that even today light up our lives. Khemraj too displays a similar lust for life

The Sky is the Limit

Amidst the hullabaloo of this October 2nd being the 150th birth anniversary of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi it has been generally forgotten that this is also the 150th birth anniversary of his wife Kasturba who too had fought valiantly for India's freedom and died in prison in 1944. Not only Kasturba but many other women fought against the British. One example is that of Preetilata Wadadar who along with Surya Sen carried out the famous Chittagong Armoury raid in 1930. Once again recently when a meme on Surya Sen became viral on Facebook there was little mention of Preetilata. This neglect of the contribution of women is a part and parcel of the patriarchal structure of society.
So on this anniversary day of Gandhi I decided to celebrate Kasturba's legacy instead by attending a meeting of a group of girls and women who were discussing the huge patriarchal obstacles to the emancipation and empowerment of women organised by the NGO Eka in the Aishbag area of Bhopal.

 This meeting is one among many that are regularly held under the name "Hamara Aasmaan" Our Sky attended by adolescent girls and women who are survivors of gender based violence within and without the home. I was asked to deliver a speech as a guest. Its been a long time since I have stopped giving speeches and so I did what I generally do when asked to speak. I asked questions and cleverly brought the discussion round to patriarchy!!
Then the dam broke as women and then girls began to speak about the barriers to women's freedom and empowerment. Most of the women and girls were from the Muslim community where generally they are married off early and then have to spend their lives as home makers. Yet in this small group at least there was a huge desire to break out and do something. Eka's work is centred around providing an opportunity to these women and girls to break out of their confines and dream big. It was heartening to see so much vibrancy among the participants and especially the adolescent girls with the latter daring to dream big. A few well educated and working Muslim women gave talks on how they had broken out of the home and pursued their own careers to inspire the girls.
It has been my case for quite some time now that the biggest blunder that our policy makers and planners committed after independence was in not tackling patriarchy. Even today despite so much talk of women's liberation and empowerment, the situation of women and girls remains pathetic due to rampant patriarchal oppression. So it is great that some women and girls feel that only the sky is the limit.  

Celebrating V Day in Pandutalab

February 14^th  2018 was celebrated as V Cubed day at the Majlis Centre in Pandutalab. Three Vs because of Valentine, Vagina and Violence Against Women. Subhadra has from the beginning insisted that the centre would promote feminism and sustainable agriculture. It is her contention that on the basis of the limited evidence available regarding the human transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, the neolithic revolution, the probability is higher that it was women who brought about this transition. Since women had already been domesticated due to the need to continually produce babies to keep the human race alive, it is they, she argues, who were most likely to notice that the seeds of some of the grasses were edible and tended to germinate easily when spilled on the ground in favourable conditions. It is only later that men appropriated this discovery and its immense civilisational benefits and further suppressed the independence of women.

One of the modern expressions of patriarchy is the celebration of Valentine's Day on February 14^th annually as a day of love to mask the huge violence that exists in man woman relationships. True love is possible only if the relationship is free from violence and oppression. That is why for Valentine's Day to be a true celebration of love it must also be a day of resistance against patriarchal violence.

The story begins in 1994 with the staging in New York of the iconic play "Vagina Monologues" written by and starring Eve Ensler. Based on interviews with many women this play consists of many stories about women who have suffered various forms of gender based violence including the most terrible - rape and trafficking. The huge success of this play and the inspiration it provided women to stand up and speak out against gender based violence instead of quietly suffering to avoid the stigma attached to publicly admitting to being a victim of the same. Ensler and some other women then formed the voluntary organisation V Day on February 14th, Valentine's Day in 1998 to combat gender based violence with the V standing for Violence which was to be ended, Valentine or love which was to be genuinely established and Vagina which was to be foregrounded as an expression of womanhood instead of being hidden by the stigma that surrounded women's sexuality and its unjust exploitation by men. Initially the thrust was to organise shows of the play and raise money to fund campaigns against gender based violence. However, over time the organisation has become a worldwide movement against gender based violence that has raised over $ 75 million for the purpose.

As a prelude to celebrating their fifteenth anniversary on 14th February 2013, V Day hit upon the idea of a campaign to have one billion women rising up against gender based violence on that day. The simple idea being that given the fact that one third of all women suffer some form of gender based violence or other during their lives, roughly one billion women are victims of this. So to counter this there should be a movement of at least one billion women rising to fight gender based violence. The tremendous credibility that V Day has achieved over these last two decades in its fight against gender based violence resulted in the United Nations putting its might behind this campaign and carrying it across the world.

The Majlis centre in Pandutalab too, consequently, celebrated V cubed day and women and men from Indore and nearby villages gathered there for this. The high point was a feast prepared from the organic produce of the farm where Subhadra is conserving indigenous varieties that are slowly becoming extinct due to the onslaught of modern chemical agriculture.

Food was made on wood stoves from jowar, rice, maize, pulses and vegetables grown on the farm and processed by hand with the help of stone grinders and pounders. The people who visited from Indore enjoyed the food and the outing very much in the serene surroundings of the farm which is at the foot of a hill.

Close Encounters of the Gender Kind

I have been associated over a decade now with The Hunger Project (THP) which trains and guides elected women representatives (EWR) in Panchayati Raj in various states in India to enable them to effectively carry out their duties in the face of opposition from a patriarchal society. Their work is exemplary and I have attended many of their annual conferences of the EWRs of Madhya Pradesh panchayats in Bhopal. Last year in December too I attended one such conference and met some exceptional women who are quietly breaking patriarchal barriers and effectively carrying out their duties for the benefit of their community. A few years back I had done a detailed evaluation of their training programme in Madhya Pradesh and had made suggestions for improving them. One main suggestion was that the district level federation of EWRs should be made more active so that the Panchayat bureaucracy which generally stymies the efforts of the EWRs to deliver on development and services can be effectively countered. This suggestion was implemented and the results are there for all to see. One EWR, Pushpa Singh of Shahdol district who is currently a Sarpanch, said that she had been an EWR since 2005 but it was only in this term that she had come into contact with the THP and because of the training and the functioning of the Jagriti Sangathan, she had become active and effective. Another EWR, Baisakhi Markam, had used the power of the Jagriti Sangathan to put pressure on the district administration to allot house plots to landless beneficiaries of the Prime Mininster's Housing Scheme. She had thus tackled a recurrent problem in government schemes of improper planning, in this case giving housing grants to people who did not have any land on which to build the houses!!
This time the conference was organised around three main themes -
1. Tackling malnutrition, which is a serious problem in Madhya Pradesh
2. Ensuring Livelihood Security
3. Implementing Development Works
Selected Women came up to the stage and described the ways in which they had worked in their panchayats to improve matters in these three crucial areas. This included the following -
1. Identifying severely malnourished children and convincing their parents to take them to the nutrition rehabilitation centres for extended stays of two weeks and the planting of kitchen gardens to improve the availability of vegetables.
2. The implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme which is facing serious problems of shortage of fund allocation.
3. Improving the functioning of the Public Distribution System
4. Improving the functioning of the National Rural Livelihood Mission which involves the generation of incomes through self help groups.
5. Implementation of the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana for providing housing to all people who are below the poverty line.
6. Implementation of well irrigation schemes.
The EWRs said that their strength has been considerably enhanced by their federation, the Jagriti Sangathan, which enables them to put their problems before the Block Level and District Level officials and also the members of the legislature and the parliament. They said that as individual EWRs they did not carry much clout but when they went as a group under the banner of the Jagriti Sangathan, then they were able to get their work done. One lady from Balaghat district, Ramkali Sanjam, who is a Sarpanch or head of the Panchayat, has been especially enterprising and it was a treat to listen to her. She is the lady sitting in the front row to the left. The banners on display are that of the Jagriti woman EWR Sangathan and the name of the conference - The Flight of Confidence.

Ramkali said she had formed twelve self help groups which were making the midday meals for supply to schools and anganwadis or creches and these were functioning properly resulting in both nutrition for the children and income for the women members of the groups. She as the chairperson of the Block Level Jagriti Sangathan had used this position to get these groups sanctioned by speaking to the Chief Executive Officer of the Janpad or Block Level Panchayat. She had also sourced high quality seeds of potatoes and turmeric and provided them to the members of the self help groups to help them to produce high value crops on their farms. Considerable employment had been generated within the Panchayat through the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and this had curbed migration from her Panchayat. Finally and most importantly she had taken advantage of the Government scheme for subsidised solar energy pumps and by lobbying with the District Collector, sanctioned a hundred such pumps for farmers in the Block. This last is an exceptional achievement, because it is generally difficult to get solar pumps installed given the lethargy of the bureaucracy at the district and lower levels in this regard despite the push for renewable energy from the Central Government.
The affirmative action that has ensured that more than 50 per cent of the posts in Panchayats and urban local bodies are occupied by women has not realised its full potential because in many cases these women are just proxies with their male kin actually exercising the powers. Thus, the THP, by training hundreds of EWRs throughout the country and also organising them in federations to leverage their combined strength has been doing great work in breaking patriarchal barriers to women's involvement in development and politics in this country.

Grand Old Man of the Fringe

Literature has always provided me with great inspiration to live a life of passion. However, over the past decade or so various circumstances have combined to keep me away from reading literature. Even when I feel like doing so I prefer to re-read classic stuff rather than venture to read new work which I mostly find pedestrian!! My connection with Bengali literature has become even more remote even though some of the best books I have read are in Bengali. In recent times it is because of book presents from my friends that I have read a few Bengali books. One friend presented me with a collection of later modern Bengali poetry and the anthologies of the poetry of Shakti Chattopadhyay and Sunil Gangopadhyay. I have never been a fan of poetry and so had given the later modern bengali poets the miss earlier having read only the likes of Tagore, Nazrul and Sukanta. I did not gain much from reading these later poets even though they are acknowledged and much awarded masters of their craft.
Then my good friend Ramaswamy announced on Facebook that he had recovered a whole set of books of Subimal Misra in the latter's home and people could buy them. Ramaswamy, as another mutual friend once said, is a master of Bengali slang!! He speaks Bengali fluently as he was born and brought up in Kolkata despite being a Tamilian. Ramaswamy, however, had never read Bengali literature and so wanted to fill this gap and asked a friend about some offbeat author to read as he wasn't keen on reading the well known ones. This friend directed him to the works of Subimal Misra.

Subimal Misra is a unique personality in modern Bengali fiction. He has published only in little magazines, which are a distinctive feature of Bengali literary culture and never in commercial magazines. He has broken the established notions of the short story and the novel and come up with narratives that have no structure and concentrate on exposing the underside of human life which generally gets papered over. He has used the cinematic techniques of the French New Wave film director, Jean Luc Godard, the montage and the cut, in his works and has provided empty spaces in them inviting the reader to use his own imagination to write and give completeness to the stories and novels. Misra is the ultimate sceptic, severely critical of both capitalism and the kind of socialism that has been implemented to fight it and this scepticism is expressed in dark humour.
Ramaswamy, a diehard anarchist like I, became so enamoured of Misra's work ( it is he who had clicked Misra's photo above, when Misra was still mobile as he is now bedridden, in the iconic Calcutta Book Fair) that he undertook the onerous task of translating some of his anti-stories into English and then getting them published by established capitalist international publishers!!! So now Misra is not just the toast of a select anti-establishment coterie of the Bengali little magazine literary fringe, but of  anarchists and anti establishment freaks the world over. For the first time in his life, Misra is now earning money from his writings. ( He never received anything from his writings in the little magazines obviously since these are all voluntary efforts which run on shoestring budgets and made a living as a school teacher. He then published collections of his short stories and novels with savings from his salary much to the chagrin of his wife who said that the money spent on his publications if used wisely would have given them a better life (Touches of Xanthippe and Socrates here!!)). Lately he has named his publishing enterprise as the Underground Publishers!!
Ramaswamy said in the Facebook post that Misra was now ill and required money for his treatment and so it would be nice if people bought these books that he had recovered from his home. Since Misra had said that people could pay as much as they wanted for these books over and above the listed price,  as he left it to the readers to decide their own price in the same way as he left it to them to decide their own meaning of his works, so I bought the whole set of books that were available with Ramaswamy after paying a suitable price and after a long time read short stories and novels in Bengali again.
I can only say that the experience has been an enjoyable one. Nothing angers me more than the way in which the human race has got straight jacketed into institutions, rules and regulations and almost universally is wasting its time chasing money instead of fulfilment. Passion for life has been replaced by an insane rush to accumulate money which has not been dented any bit by the recent ill conceived demonetisation foray. Such is the control of this rush for money that I find myself chasing it also, just to be able to survive and do something creative on the side!!! Subimal Misra has consistently challenged institutions and norms and made fun of them through his dark humour and has even broken with the accepted forms of the short story, novel and non-fiction writing and published in little magazines and self published his books to retain his literary independence and his abhorrence of structure. He is the master of the anti-story written without any structure comprising arbitrary montages and cuts of the darker side of life and with any kind of overall meaning possible depending on the worldview of the reader. Thus, he has gone one step ahead of Godard and created a free form literature that is unparalleled the world over. As opposed to Marquez's magical realism we can deem Misra's oevre as anti-magical realism!! He has written anti-novels also but they get mixed up with non-fiction, political comment and literary criticism and so don't really qualify as great literature in my understanding in which literature should be only fiction devoid of any socio-political haranguing and analysis. However, his anti-stories are really great stuff that, while providing a searing and humorous criticism of modern decadence and hypocrisy, also provide inspiration for living a life on the fringe cocking a snook at the establishment.
Many of his anti-stories are available in English Translation and there is a lot of literary criticism also of his works available on the internet but I will discuss here a recent one from his last published collection "Kika Cut" because it represents in many ways the quintessential Misra. The name of the anti-story is "Lenin is Lenin even if he had Syphilis (The bus won't start just because you bang its sides)". The book Kika Cut itself is a fantastic composition containing among other things a lengthy interview with Sartre, where he emphatically says that the author must not become an institution but must rather leave things open for the readers to interpret his writings in their own way and insert their own meaning into it. There are empty spaces provided for readers to write their own stuff but unfortunately these are not there in the part of the book where this anti-story is placed and so I am writing in this blog post of mine which can be considered to be an extended part of Kika Cut!!!! The book is a tour de force in montage and cut writing as everything is mixed up and at times one finds oneself reading various articles and anti-stories and the Sartre interview together along with the criticism of Misra's work by his readers all at one go. Life is actually all mixed up and we desperately try to order it for convenience instead of living it as it comes and the book Kika Cut is an invitation to live life as it is - chaotic and aimless. The book starts with a riddle which the reader has to solve. There is no answer of course to the riddle as it all depends on the reader!!!
Coming to the anti-story, there is a short paragraph at the beginning saying that the world has become a market and everything is being sold in it from the objectification of women in films to Lenin's posters in the World Trade Centre in New York.
Set in a village in Bengal, there are five narratives in the anti-story - Lenin's poems, the fight of the farmers against the marauding wild boar at night to save their crops, the meeting of the Gram Sabha to adjudicate on a formal complaint of domestic violence by a woman against her husband, the sexual escapades of a man with a teenaged girl who is a domestic help and the sexual escapades with an unmarried but ageing woman and her unmarried sisters of a young man from the city who has come to the village on a holiday. All four narratives proceed simultaneously interspersing each other without any warning sometimes a paragraph at a time and sometimes a line or two at a time. Eventually all the narratives remain inconclusive like life, presenting just montages fitted in cuts.
Lenin's poems that have been cut into the anti-story are a dark portrayal of Tsarist oppression of the masses in Russia but there is no call in them to the oppressed to revolt unlike there is in his political writings. The narrative of the poor farmers fighting the wild boar too is a depressing one, from the point of view of the farmers, as it is the wild boar that win even if the farmers unite to try and control them. The most interesting is the meeting of the Gram Sabha which is being held for the first time as never before has a married woman filed a formal complaint against her husband for domestic violence. The way the meeting proceeds clearly shows the extent of patriarchal control of village life in Bengal. The narratives of the sexual escapades also underline this patriarchy which makes men constantly seek sex and women too fulfil their desires despite a veneer of ethicality that masks the rampant underlying sexuality. All in all it shows that rural life in Bengal is complicated by various dark forces not the least that of the global market that has commodified everything as was mentioned in the beginning of the anti-story.
So this brings us to the title of the anti-story. It refers to the thesis propounded by some on the basis of some medical evidence of a peripheral nature that Lenin suffered from syphilis and this was the cause of his premature death in 1924 but that it was hushed up. Lenin tried to make the revolution successful in a country that he knew to be deeply patriarchal and feudal as is clearly portrayed in the poems that have been cut into the narrative. Thus, he attempted the impossible and so the statement that Lenin is Lenin who despite having known of the difficulty of bringing about a revolution in a pre capitalist country nevertheless tried to do so even though he was not in the best of health at most times. The subtitle is also interesting as it says that the bus won't start even if one bangs the sides. The revolution won't be successful even if one launches one if the society in which it is being launched is not ready for it. Rural Bengal even today is highly feudal and patriarchal as is most of India and the industrial proletariat has been atomised and depoliticised and so just shouting slogans of long live revolution are not going to bring about one!!!! Especially since the world is today, both economically and intellectually controlled by the market. The world we live in is a complex one and not amenable to simple solutions.
While, I generally liked Misra's approach to literature, breaking the confines of structure, especially his open ended story telling around events of a dark nature which leaves a lot to the imagination of the reader, I feel that he dwells a little too much on sexual intimacies between men and women. It is true that there is considerable amount of sex going on outside marriage in this country, with an increasing number getting caught on video indulging in it but it is within the framework of patriarchy and mostly oppressive of women even if in some cases women do enjoy themselves. Literature, as an insight into the complexities of the human condition,  is not enhanced by the graphic description of sex between men and women and in one case in this anti-story between a man and a minor girl. However, this grand old man of the Bengali literary fringe has to be respected for his uncompromising writings against the institutional hypocrisy that has strangulated human life. He has gone even further than Sartre as he does not philosophise and he does not provide any solutions - anti-magical realism. After reading him one gets further strength to live a life free of myths and masks.