Stan Thekaekara is a social activist who has worked with indigenous and Adivasi communities for over forty years. Born into a deeply religious family in Bengaluru, Stan found himself grappling with his privilege at a very young age. These feelings, accompanied with his exposure to social action through All India Catholic University Federation, or AICUF, set him on the path to working with marginalised communities.
After stints in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, Stan and his young family moved to the Nilgiris in South India, where he was involved with mobilizing the Adivasis of the Gudalur valley to fight for their rights. In 1986 he co-founded ACCORD, or the Action for Community Organisation, Rehabilitation and Development.
Through his work in ACCORD, he also helped found the Adivasi Munnetra Sangam (AMS), a membership based tribal organization with 4000 families as members. In all his endeavours, Stan Thekaekara has set out without a larger plan and a belief that the community would find him and shape his purpose. In his life living and working with the Adivasis, he learnt the importance of balancing progress, with cultural preservation.
In 2000, he founded Just Change, an international cooperative linking producers, investors and consumers in an effort to reimagine a community-based trade and marketing system. Stan has also served as a trustee of Oxfam GB and was Visiting Fellow at the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Said Business School, Oxford University. Stan is married to Mari Marcel Thaekekara, the journalist, writer and co-founder of ACCORD.
In this episode, Stan is in conversation with Dr. Roopa Devadasan a Public Health expert and school teacher. This conversation was recorded at the Bangalore International Centre in Bengaluru. This is part one of a two-part episode. For more information go to www.rohininilekaniphilanthropies.org.
TRANSCRIPT
HOST
Welcome to Grassroots Nation, a podcast from Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, a show in which we dive deep into the life, work, and guiding philosophies of some of our country’s greatest leaders of social change.
Stan Thekaekara is a social activist who has worked with indigenous and Adivasi communities for over forty years. Born into a deeply religious family in Bengaluru, Stan found himself grappling with his privilege at a very young age. These feelings, accompanied with his exposure to social action through All India Catholic University Federation, or AICUF, led him to move to Bihar in 1974 to work with Adivasi communities. This experience was a formative one, one that would shape his entire life.
After Bihar, Stan moved to Andhra Pradesh, where he spent a few years helping local communities rebuild after the cyclone of 1977. It was during this experience that he was introduced to the workings of the development sector In 1984, Stan with his wife Mari and young family moved to the Nilgiris in South India, where he was involved with mobilizing the Adivasis of the Gudalur valley to fight for their rights. In 1986 he co-founded ACCORD, or the Action for Community Organisation, Rehabilitation and Development. Through his work in ACCORD, he also helped found the Adivasi Munnetra Sangam (AMS), a membership based tribal organization with 4000 families as members.
In 2000, he founded Just Change, an international cooperative linking producers, investors and consumers in an effort to reimagine a community-based trade and marketing system.
Stan has also served as a trustee of Oxfam GB and was Visiting Fellow at the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Said Business School, Oxford University. Stan is married to Mari Marcel Thaekekara, the journalist, writer and co-founder of ACCORD.
In all his endeavors, Stan Thekaekara has set out without a larger plan and a belief that the community would find him and shape his purpose. In his life living and working with the Adivasis, he learnt the importance of balancing progress, with cultural preservation.
In this episode, Stan is in conversation with Dr. Roopa Devadasan, a Public Health expert and school teacher. Her association with Stan began when, along with her husband, she joined the team at ACCORD and ran the community health welfare program that was known as the Association for Health Welfare in the Nilgiris or ASHWINI. Dr Roopa Devadasan has been associated with a number of NGOs and non profit institutions, including OBLF, the One Billion Literates Foundation and Shibumi.
This conversation was recorded at the Bangalore International Centre in Bengaluru.
This is the first of two episodes on Stan Thekaekera’s life.
ROOPA
Well, Stan, it’s really a joy to be able to do these sessions with you and Mari. I feel very privileged to be able to do this with you. By the time we met you in ‘87, I think you had already begun a journey which started many years ago. Could you share with us what sort of prompted you to take this path and what were the things that sort of guided your movements in the early years?
STAN
If I have to talk about how I got onto this path, it’s many different strands. Very often I’ve been asked this question, especially by younger people, “What made you start?” And it’s very difficult to pinpoint one particular thing because I think it’s various strands that were woven together to create a path that I took. My father, we grew up in Bangalore, and he bought this farm in a village outside Bangalore, and I hadn’t yet started going to school. So for my first three months I was on the farm and my first friends, real friends that I can remember, were kids from the village. My mother was not very happy about it, that I was mingling with these kids. And so at a very, very early age, I became aware of this class divide – that there is a difference between… we belong to some privileged class and they were there… And also the difference that they didn’t go to school, and I had to go to school, which I hated. So I didn’t feel I was privileged, I felt they were far more privileged because they didn’t go to school.
And then I further became aware of the caste divide, because when we started playing with the kids, the upper caste people came and told my father that we should not play with the lower caste kids, with the Dalit kids. And when you’re four years old, five years old, you don’t understand what these things are, but it stayed with me. So I suppose that was a very early influence because I’ve always been sensitive to it.
I was born into a very religious family, brought up in a typical Catholic kind of tradition, where we went to mass regularly and everything, and was brought up in a Jesuit Catholic, Jesuit school and everything. But strangely, Mari and I had the same priest who, at a very early stage of our lives – for her in Calcutta, for me in Bangalore – came and radically transformed our whole attitude to religion by forcing us to question it, not to accept it. He said, “You have to question it, and then if it makes sense to you, you follow it.” That was another strand. So, on one hand, we have these village kids, my best friends, and then at a school which I hated where this priest comes in and poses something very challenging.
And then finally, when I got into university, I became, especially in my final year, became very involved with the AICUF, which is the national student movement thing and was, more by accident than anything else, elected the national president. And then I worked for one year as a full timer. And those are very, two very formative years, because that was when, you know, we were exposed to leftist thinking, Marxian analysis. And then within the church, there was all this thing of liberation theology.
You know, so this questioning went to a completely different level, where we questioned the church, we questioned institutionalized religion and everything like that. And so suddenly, but at the root of it, we had to. I personally felt I had to make a decision – did I want to continue calling myself as a Christian? Or do I just turn my back on it and say, “I don’t believe in it any more?” And so a group of us were going through the same thing so we all got together, spent a week together studying the four gospels to see whether there was anything in it that had meaning for us. And out of that…
ROOPA
How old were you at this time?
STAN
Just out of college so I’d have been 17 or so. So during that camp, about 15 of us, we came to the conclusion that religion didn’t matter. It was not about religion. There was a message about social justice. And that message made sense to us that we had to work to bring about a world of social justice. And this was coupled with camp that I was not able to attend, but the year before, where students came together and from the AICUF, and they came under the Poonamalli declaration, which the last sentence has stayed with me my whole life, said “We are born into an unjust society and we are determined not to leave it the way we found it.” That was the closing sentence of the declaration.
Part of this was also, I think Mari would also have the same experience that this, the big influence in our life are Jesuits and all of them laid this heavy guilt trip on us that, “You came from a privileged background so what are you going to give back?” So I decided that I would go to throw my lot in with the adivasis. And this was because during AICUF we had a lot of work camps, and meeting Adivasis in Bihar – which was then Bihar, now Jharkhand – meeting Adivasis, going to some of the villages for our camp and all that made me totally aware of the Adivasi issue, which nobody is talking about then, you know, nobody was talking about it because Adivasis tribals were seen as some, like the flora and fauna in the forest, you know, like the Australian aboriginal people. So nobody was aware of it, didn’t know there was an issue. But this exposure during that one year made me realize and I decided that I would go to work with them. And in my ignorance, and young as I was, I thought all Adivasis were in central India, I didn’t know there were Adivasis just outside Bangalore, so I decided to go to Bihar.
Slight deviation, I was invited to the Taizé monastic community in Europe, which was open to young people. I spent a year there, which only further strengthened my resolve.
But for my family, everybody was up in arms. When I say family, my parents and uncles and aunts and all that, because first and foremost, I decided not to do science in school, where I come from, a family of scientists. I decided to do literature and the humanities and did my degree in literature, so that was bad enough, “What is a boy going to do with the literature degree?” was the standard question. Now I’m saying that, “I’m going to go and live in a village,” whereas the path would have been to join the IAS, you know, that was the big thing. So there were a lot of attempts made to convert me from this thinking. And one of them was, when I went to Europe, I was in France, that thing included spending a couple of months in the US, where my sister was already settled in. They literally bribed me to stay there by getting me a degree, I mean, a seat in a college to do a masters in literature and everything like that but I decided that I was going to go back to Bihar with no clue where, how, etcetera, just – I’m going to Bihar, that was it.
When I came back, I said, “Okay, what will I do?” Started planning strategically, wrote to all the schools that I could think of, mainly all the Christian Catholic schools, because that’s a point of contact, asking for a job. Not one school replied, I don’t know what they thought. But then somebody told me there was this priest who had come to the Indian Social Institute in Bangalore, who was the principal of one of the schools I had applied to. So I went to meet him and it turned out to be Stan Lourduswami, who is now much more well known. And I went to Stan and I said, “Is there any chance of getting a job? I have applied to the school where you were principal, can I get a job?” So he looked at me very quizzically and he said, “Why does somebody with your background want to go teach in a school like that?” Then I told him that, no, my main plan was to go live with Adivasis, so I thought I’ll teach, get a job, support myself, and through the students I’ll move into a village. And then there was this silence. He was always a man of very few words in any case, which I came to discover afterwards. He just stared at me and it was very disconcerting, you know, he just kept looking at me, looking at me and then he said, “What would you say if I gave you a chance to go and live in a village straightaway?”
And that’s how, at the ripe old age of 21, armed with very little other than a kind of half baked Marxian analysis and liberation theology, I landed up in this village called Baraibir in Bihar with Stan Lourduswami and became part of the village. And that was a time when we were all, because of our Marxian analysis and Marxian thinking… Identifying with the masses was a big buzzword. That was the ultimate thing that we privileged people had to do – identify with the masses. So I threw my heart and soul into identifying with the masses. I lived like them, ate their food, learned the language, learned their singing, learned their dancing, then finally learned their livelihood. Because I grew up on a farm, I knew to plough, so I could plough. It’s a long story but I spent four years there, very much a part of the community. This was before NGOs, before funding. It was just, you know, a personal kind of journey and a personal choice.
ROOPA
What kept you going those four years?
STAN
The community. That was the community. That was then and till today, not those four years, the 70, it’s been the community that’s kept us going, because there was something about this community which all of us who come from urban areas would long for, because there’s a sense of belonging, there’s a sense of community, and more than everything else, there’s a sense of joy. They are so, you know, in French, when I was in Taize, they used to talk about the joy of life, joy of living. That was always there, in everything they did they were happy, whatever they did. Even when there’s no food, they were happy. The lack of food didn’t make them unhappy.
And so apart from the tribal community, the Adivasi community, we became a small, fairly radical community because I was there as a layperson, we had Stan Lourduswami, a Jesuit priest, and two other nuns joined us. And so this mix of religious and laypeople around and some other friends Xavier Dyess, other friends all came there, and we became one hub. We didn’t realize that everybody’s talking about us. So all this kept us going. And then there was this incredible person called Father Rob Curry, who was, again, another American Jesuit who was thrown out during the Emergency. He was also a very big influence and then got involved with the students of the town, which is a movement that Rob Curry had started. When he was thrown out, I kind of started supporting those students to continue the work they were doing.
More than anything else, it was just being part of a community and this acceptance from the community. And because I was able to learn the language, I was totally and completely accepted as part of the community. And we weren’t trying to do… It’s not like what it is now, you know, you’ve done a survey and you know what you’re trying to change, there’s a very clear idea of what you want to change, etcetera. We had none of those things we were only talking about doing…
But because of the ACCORD training and the Marxist thing, we did this analysis with the young people of the village and discovered, “What are the things that are causing a problem in the village?” One of them was the markets, because they go to these weekly village markets where they are totally cheated and there was no currency, there was no cash. Everything was paid for in paddy, it was a barter system. And so at the end of it, when the season was over, when summer was over, before the planting season most of the families would run out of paddy. They actually grew… When I looked at it, I found everybody had grown enough and more paddy to feed themselves the whole year and more. But this paddy is leaking out every market day, would get leaked out and go into the hands of these Marwadis.
So two things in the intervention we did – one was to take over the village market, organize all the youngsters to physically stop these Marwadis from grabbing the stuff of the Adivasis and getting the Adivasi women to be able to sit in the market and sell their own produce. And the second thing was borrowing some money from some nuns who knew me and gave me 10,000, which was a huge sum of money in those days, with which we started telling everybody, “Don’t take your paddy to the market, take cash.” So they would bring their paddy, and we started a grain bank where all the paddy was kept in the village and people took cash for it and they went to the market and started trading in cash. So these are the two major things….
Of course, there were other things, fighting with the government on corruption and things like that. We got a school started in our village. They’re all small things, but they were never seen as a project or anything, it just happened naturally, along with the village. These were issues that were identified and the youngsters, we tried to find how we could find solutions for it.
I was just 21, as I said, when I went there. So in a very impressionable age, it had put an indelible stamp on who I was going to be and etcetera. And I thought I would be there the rest of my life. But then the emergency happened, and the emergency was a baptism by fire. To begin with, all these youngsters who were working in the town, the young Adivasis who were working the student movement, all were being hounded by the police and one fine day 14 of them landed up in our village asking for protection. And I said, “We could not… I mean, you are Adivasis yourselves, you are our hosts, you’re all from the same tribe, you talk to the village. Who am I to say, I will give you protection?” I talked to the village, just accepted them and said, “No, no, but all of you stay here, it will be a problem. So we will put you in different villages.” So they divided these young students into different villages, only one or two per village and protected them from being arrested. That time arrested meant just to be beaten up, jailed and kept in jail because it was the Emergency.
So working with these youngsters, with them there and everything like that, it was a very, very powerful period with a lot of tension and everything and emergency really made everything very different. So on one hand, you had the joy of being in a tribal village, on the other hand the politics of the nation was putting a big burden on us and threatening us. And all of us were always looking over our shoulders, you don’t know when you’re going to feel that tap on your shoulder and be arrested. So it was a very tense period. But at the end of it, we had elections like we did today, and to everybody’s surprise the Congress was voted out and that was the end of the Emergency.
But what I didn’t mention was during that period when we decided the elections from our district, Singur district, twelve young tribals stood for elections. And because of JP Narayan, they were given the Janata Party ticket though none of them had ever contested an election before. So that was our exposure to JP Narayan. He was one of the people who influenced a lot of the subsequent, you know, political thinking. So earlier on, you have this more economic kind of thinking based on Marxian analysis and suddenly you understand politics because of somebody like JP Narayan, who I had the fortune of meeting on more than one occasion, and he was a very big influence.
But when the elections happened, these young people were all elected because it was the Janata Party, they all won. And in my naivety and being young, I thought this was the peaceful democratic revolution we all dreamed about, and we had made it happen. Now we have young leaders elected, and I felt all of us were so-called outsiders… This is the Ho tribe H-O. The Hos called us all Dhikus. And it was a matter of pride for me that I was officially declared a non-Dhiku and a member of the tribe. So if anybody said Dhiku, then all of them would say, “No, he’s not a Dhiku, he’s one of us.” So it was a big thing of pride, matter of pride.
But when the elections happened and these youngsters were elected, I felt that all of us outsiders should move out and let a democratically elected leadership take over and have a chance to flourish. I said, “We can all keep coming back.” None of the others agreed with me. By that time our group had spread to many villages, a few more people had joined. And so we were a loose, no organization, we were just a loose group of individuals. All the others felt, no, we had to continue. But I decided to stick to my principles. I felt we should go and I left Bihar. So this was the early stage. But those four years were the most formative years of my life. It was a baptism by fire.
ROOPA
Then you wound your way back to Bangalore?
STAN
Bangalore. Because Bangalore was home and that’s a big privilege that you always had a place that you could come back to. And a family who, like my mother, in a way she was very relieved that I came back, because she totally disagreed with what I was doing. So I could always come back, that security was there. But I kept looking for something to do, couldn’t find anything, and then the Andhra cyclone happened, ‘77 tidal wave and cyclone. And a lot of friends called me up just assuming that since I was this mad chap who goes, lives in villages I would know what to do. I had no idea what to do in a disaster situation. And so I said, “Listen, we’ll go there and find out.” So one, two more friends joined, we took two motorcycles and we drove off to Vijayawada and discovered that the sub collector of Vijayawada was a classmate of a classmate.
ROOPA
Okay.
STAN
So she became our point of contact. One of the great things in AICUF that we learned was if you want to go into something, you have to have a point of entry which is trusted and which you can… So what was our point of entry?
I had a friend in All India Radio and I said, “Hey, I’ll do a radio program on the tidal wave.” So she said fine, gave me a tape recorder with an official letter from All India Radio that we are doing nothing (untoward) and that became our point of entry. The official point of entry into this thing gave us a chance to move around in villages and find out… And of course the radio program was an incidental kind of thing, our main purpose was to find out what was happening. And that was when we uncovered the story of this village called Hamsaladeevi. Nobody knew about this village. We found this village where the entire village had been razed to the ground except that temple which was made of huge stone blocks. And everybody went into the temple for shelter and were saved even though the temple was submerged under 20ft of water, hardly 1ft of water came into the temple. The village refused to relocate to the relief centers. So every day they would trek these five-six relief centers, pick up the rations and trek back to the village. And we found them on this trek and discussed. So I did the story, it got picked up and then we decided that we would raise some funds and come back and work in this area.
So we went back to Bangalore and did the radio program, press and everything. And we got different friends to contribute money. By the time we came back every man and his dog was working in Hamsaladeevi. Everybody had reached there. And the district collector, thanks to us, I suppose, was an incredible chap. CS Rao, I still remember him. He called me and said, “Listen, you know, you have so much energy and… are you willing to go somewhere where nobody else is willing to go?” And, you know, those were days when we were caught up with Star Trek and all that no one has gone before. I said, “Of course I will be more than happy.” And this was the island of Edurumondi.
Nobody wanted to go because you had to take a boat to get across and once you got across there was nothing there. So we went to all the different villages of Edurumondi and finally landed up in this small village called Zinkalapalem where to our surprise nobody even turned around and looked at us, because by that time relief had started flooding. Everyone is trying to seduce one of the organizations coming because they know all the goodies that will come with it. There’s no food but this one village actually managed to cook us some chicken and prawns and all that, a whole meal for us. But Zinkalapalem, nobody, everybody is going about their business, no one turned around and looked at us, and when we actually asked a couple of questions they were a bit rude in answering. So immediately I decided this is the place to be.
So we managed to gather a few people to talk and all that. A friend of mine from my AICUF days asked me whether I would train some young people in community work or whatever, I don’t know what we called it then. So I said, “Yeah, I need some people to work with me.” These friends who came from Bangalore were just to help with setting up the funding. So six young people from Andhra joined us and the village built us a little tent kind of hut. We lived over there with them and started working there. Again not very clear what we will do, and I won’t go into the details, but there are some interesting stories that come out of that period. One of the stories was… because this is my introduction to NGOs, that you need to be an organization and that there is somebody willing to pay you to do this work. I had no idea. I always felt that you had to find somebody to support yourself.
So it was again by accident, somebody from Bangalore sent me a parcel to give to some person who’s working in Oxfam, one Sujatha Dimagiri. Her family sent this parcel for me. So when I went into the Oxfam office, I didn’t know what Oxfam was or anything like that, I went over there, gave this parcel. And then immediately everybody just turned around and said, “Oh, who are you? What are you doing?” And before I knew what happened, a formal meeting was taking place. They wanted to know what we’re trying to do. And Srikant, who was then the head of Oxfam, said, “We are looking to support people like you, is there anything you need for the work that you are doing?”
ROOPA
Okay.
STAN
And I am scratching my head. I had no idea what all you could ask for, how much you could ask. So very hesitantly I said, “This Edurumondi island is about 11km across. So we’re doing a lot of walking and it’s quite hot. Any chance of getting a bicycle that we could use?” So he said, “Yeah, sure, of course. How many do you want?” I said, “No, one will be enough, we’ll manage it.” He said, “No, but how many are you?” I said, “Six.” Then he said, “Take six bicycles. What are you doing with one bicycle for six of you? Buy six bicycles!” So I said, “Okay, if you’ll do that.” And then he said, “Yeah, sure. So when do you want?” I said, “Whenever.” He said, “No, go tomorrow and buy it.” And I couldn’t believe this, that, you know, we could just get money to buy six bicycles overnight.
So I went to this friend who is a sub-collector, and said, “Shame on your fellows, government and all that. Look at this organization from England, they gave us six cycles, can’t you all do something?” So she said, “Okay, let me see what I can do.” So she phoned up and told me that the duty or some excise or some tax on the cycles will be exempt. So I went and bought these six cycles, and I got it much cheaper, and I was very proud of it. And actually, in the Oxfam scale of things, it meant nothing.
ROOPA
Nothing.
STAN
Because then I came to know that everybody is asking for Land Rovers and Jeeps, boats without boat motors, and one person even made a request for a helicopter, and here I am asking for bicycles. So it became a bit of an Oxfam legend and joke about this character who came asking for cycles.
The other interesting story from that period and why I’m emphasizing this is, which is disappearing from our sector, is the question of trusting people. In one of the villages in our island were all shepherds, their sheep had all been washed away with the tidal wave. And they’re a very dignified group of people. And when I had a meeting there in the village, asking them, they said, “We don’t want anything, just give us our sheep. And we will pay for the sheep also, you know, in time. Give us time, we will pay for the sheep. We don’t need anything else, we know how to live from our sheep.”
So I took them to the bank to try and get a loan from the bank, and the bank manager was very sympathetic. But these people didn’t have one naya paisa as collateral. No land, no proper house, nothing they could offer as collateral for the sheep. They needed – still I remember that figure, because that was an unimaginable figure – they needed three lakhs for the entire village to have sheep.
Manager was very sympathetic and he was determined to find a way. Then finally he said, “If you know anybody who will make a fixed deposit of three lakhs, I’ll give them a loan with that fixed deposit as security since they have no collateral.” So from there, from Avanigadda, I phoned the Oxfam office, I phoned Srikant. I said, Shrikant, “This is the situation. Can Oxfam, some of the money that you’ll have lying in all the banks, put three lakhs of it in this bank so these fellows can get a loan?” And as usual, Shrikant said, “Yes.” He said, “When do you want?” And this is a Friday. Shrikant said, “Okay, come on Monday.” So Monday I went back to Vijayawada, collected a cheque for three lakhs deposited in the bank in Oxfam’s name, they got their loan – that was a collateral. They got the loan and they bought their sheep. As simple as that. No proposal writing, no metrics, no outcome indicators, output indicators, nothing like that. Just trust. These people got it and they got back on their feet.
Funny side to this anecdote is that many years later I got a phone call. I’m talking about 10-15 years ago, so about 20-30 years from then. I got a phone call from this branch in Avanigadda, this bank IoB saying that, “Excuse me, your name is on one deposit over here. It is the name of Oxfam.” And at the same time Oxfam also called and said, “We got a call from this bank saying that there’s a deposit of three lakhs. Do you know anything about it?”
ROOPA
How many years later was this?
STAN
This was maybe about 10 years later. 10 or 15 years after this. Because everybody forgot about it, Oxfam forgot. For them they had written it off as an expenditure. And I said, “Kindly, please, just distribute it to the people. Whoever took the loan, underwrite their loan or whatever and give it back to the people and close the story.” And that’s what happened. Reason I’m mentioning this, I didn’t intend to talk about it earlier, but just while we are talking, I think these are very interesting stories which say what is possible if you take different approaches.
And this is a whole period where it’s still not become a sector. It’s the post Andhra period where we became a sector, because all these organizations from all over the world ended up here because of the Andhra cyclone and then they set up shop and they had to continue. So they started hiring people to run their organization. So suddenly everybody started looking for professionalism. They wanted the professional, you know… because people like us, what do we know about management and things like that, you know?
ROOPA
So I find this story fascinating because you said they knew what they wanted, they were so clear, and there was trust on this side. And that’s all that was needed, really, for the deal to be sealed.
STAN
Yeah, so a lot of the things we got done, many other things we got done in Andhra and a lot had to do with trust, you know, even from the district administration, like the collector. When we were trying to build 18 houses, he just gave me a letter to all the tehsildars that any resource we needed, trucks, anything, should be made available to us. Who was I? Nobody, you know. At many levels, there was trust. And therefore we were able to do a lot.
This lack of trust and an introduction of bureaucracy, you know, checks and balances, as they call it. There’s lots of checks and no balance. You know, you just completely lose sight of any kind of sense of balance. So Andhra was again a very defining period. And then I thought, “Okay, now this is what I’m going to do the rest of my life. I’m going to be a fisherman.” Because then fishing slowly we rebuilt boats and fishing restarted and had the amazing experience of going fishing on an open sea, which I’d never done before, in a sailboat with the fishermen. And I thought, okay, this is what.
And then there’s this incredible Deputy Director of Fisheries who refused to take promotions because he wanted to be with this community, and had become very close. And then he was talking to me and said, “No, we’ll set up a cold storage unit here because that’s where they get cheated because these trawlers with ice go and buy their fish at no cost on the sea. So let’s set up a….”
So I had all these visions and all that, but unfortunately, I had a bad motorcycle accident where I needed a lot of care because I couldn’t manage on my own. I fractured the base of my spine. So it was very… So I had to come back home. So back again to Bangalore, things like that. And Andhra became a closed chapter in that sense.
But in Bangalore, again with my brother, he always wanted to farm. We started farming, but already this DNA had crept into my blood. I didn’t know how to make money and I didn’t want a life where making money… and my brother was similar. So we want to use our farm as some kind of a base to bring in modern agriculture, if you like, which again, didn’t work because we couldn’t make any money from the farm to be a model farm, anything. But again, through an accident, we opened out our farm for people with alcohol-
ROOPA
Halfway home-
STAN
Yeah, halfway home for people with alcohol and drug problems. That was before it became such a big issue. And we were very successful with all the young people with us, we had quite a few. So then this seemed to be the new life, you know, the farming and halfway home and things like that. And at that point is when Mari and I got in touch with each other after many years. We first met in ‘72. And suddenly we decided… I won’t go into the long romantic story of how we decided to get married, but Mari was coming to Bangalore and I kind of hijacked her to the farm at the end of which we decided to get married.
ROOPA
What God has put together, let the man put asunder.
STAN
So which everybody considered mad because here she was, flying with Air India, and I’ve always lived in a village and now farming, you know, milking cows. I mean, actually farming, we are milking cows and plowing with a tractor and everything like that. How are these two going to fit in? But when we got married, a year or two into our marriage, a little after our daughter was born, Mari kept insisting, saying that, “Clearly your heart is not here.” She has been to Bihar, she had seen what I was doing in Bihar and so on. She said, “Your heart is with Adivasis, let’s go back to working with Adivasis.” She said, “Bangalore is not the place for you and this is not the life, and you’re just putting up with it because it’s there.” So she kind of convinced me. And so then we started looking, but now I was not confident of doing what I did in Bihar and Andhra, which was to just go and then figure out a way to support myself, because I had “responsibilities.” I’m with a small daughter. So we started looking for jobs.
HOST
In 1984, Stan, Mari and their infant daughter moved to the Nilgiri hills in south India. They lived with the adivasi communities near the town of Gudalur, and initially worked for the NGO NAWA, the Nilgiri Adivasi Welfare Association. They would co-found ACCORD, two years later, in 1986.
STAN
Until now in my life, I had not had a job. Nobody who paid me gave me a cheque at the end of the month or anything like that, I had no idea. And so finally again, the same Sujatha Dimagiri who started off this journey with Oxfam, we asked her because she was doing some work on healthcare and she knew some… So she said, “There is an organization in the Nilgiris, called NAWA.” Now, we’d talked to two or three organizations, just didn’t fit, there was no fit over there. So she said, “Why don’t you go to Nawa, talk to them?” So we went to NAWA and we agreed to work with them. Again, it’s a long story, but we agreed to take over this hundred acre farm for 25 families who’d been released from bonded labour. They said, “We can’t afford to take both of you, so we’ll pay only one salary.” A very smart English woman, old woman, very shrewd, nice person. We got along very well with her. And so she made sure she got two for the price of one. And so for the princely sum of ₹800, we agreed to go and join there.
So it was a very difficult, but again, quite an enjoyable period. But it was during the two years we were with NAWA, we discovered the fact that the Adivasis were being dispossessed of their land. And we got involved in one case of a sacred grove where they had been dispossessed and with the support of the district collector, we took that land back. And that was a huge political issue. And then, as soon as that happened, within that week, Mari and I opened our door to find six Betta Kurubas sitting over there saying that, “Our burial ground has been taken over by some non-tribal farmer, can you come and help us to get it back?” And off I went.
Came back two days later from another village. Something else happened. Then one person said, “My father had two acres of land that is gone.” And suddenly we realized, like headless chickens, we are running around trying to sort out these land issues.
ROOPA
This is still in NAWA?
STAN
Based in NAWA. And the thing is, Subramani, who was the first Adivasi I met in Gudalur, when Mari and I first went there to explore the possibilities of working with NAWA. He was hitching a ride on this NAWA jeep. And so he and I sat at the back of the jeep and had this big conversation. From that day till today, he is my tutor. He is the one who taught me all about Adivasis, explained everything, and so on.
And so with Subramani in the lead, we got a group of young Adivasis to go around to a lot of villages to find out what the land situation was. And we discovered that this was an oft repeated story and the Paniyars had completely lost all their land. The Mullu Kurubas had, most of them still had their land. Kattunayakans had no land at all. And Betta Kuruba is a bit of a mix but nearly all had lost their land.
And so with these youngsters, again, the old AICUF social analysis kicked in. We did a whole analysis of the causes of poverty, the cause of things… and realized land is the key issue. We should take land back. But then NAWA said, “No, we don’t want you to do any of this. This is all political work, we don’t want to get involved in this. We are here for welfare, you look after these 25 families and that’s all we are going to do.”
The District Collector, Gupta, said the opposite. He said, “Listen, with your background, your education and all your experience, what are you doing looking after 25 families? At least take one block because that’s the minimum unit of the government. At least take one block and do something.” And he said, “I’ll support you. He said I’ll support you with any government thing that you need.: And with that and with support from Father Claude, who has been our mentor right through AICUF and everything, we took a leap of faith and Subramani then came to us and said, “See if you’re starting a new organization, can I join you?” Because he was looking for government jobs everywhere and it had not worked out. So he said, “I’d like to work with this,” because he’d already been doing this on his own.
So Subramani joined Mari and me and we set up ACCORD and that became another chapter. So I never changed course, but there were lots of twists and turns and each twist or each turn brought something new.
So when we went to Nilgiris and especially when we decided to start ACCORD, Mari especially was very, very clear. She said, “We can’t live as a tribe. I would have done it if we didn’t have children. With our children we can’t live a life of absolute poverty like you did in Bihar and say, ‘I don’t care about tomorrow, doesn’t matter what happens.’” And in Bihar I’ve gone through days of not having food.
Literally. I mean, for the first time in my life I knew what hunger meant. You know, when we say hunger, we think it’s just that I missed a meal and I’m feeling hungry. There’s a big difference between feeling hungry and experiencing hunger. Hunger is when you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, or when it will come. Hungry is when you are just hungry for a while. So Mari said, “We can’t do that.” And also she brought in this thing of we have to be honest to who we are and we shouldn’t pretend to be Adivasis. We are not Adivasis, we can’t pretend to be.
And this coupled with my experience of Andhra where I used my privileged background to get a lot of doors open, instead of denying my privilege… In Bihar I never spoke English, I pretended to be tribal, I only spoke the tribal language. Even when you’re dealing with a government officer or anything like that. Here in Andhra, it was different, I was using my privilege shamelessly to get a lot of doors open. So we suddenly thought, if we are in Gudalur, we should use that, we should use our privilege. Is not something to be ashamed of or something to turn our back on or something to be guilty of. We are born with that privilege, we may as well use it. So that’s how when we set up ACCORD, we set it up differently with Subramani and a lot of youngsters. And that became another new chapter in our life. In 1986. ‘84, we went to the Nilgiris, in ‘86 we started ACCORD.
HOST
Grassroots Nation will be back shortly with part two, where we follow Stan and his co-founders on their journey of setting up ACCORD, and we learn about how the organization has evolved since then.
[THEME]
HOST
Grassroots Nation is a podcast from Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies. For more information go to rohini nilekani philanthropies dot org or join the conversation on social media at RNP underscore foundation.
Stay tuned for our next episode.
Thank you for listening to Grassroots Nation.
