Mari Marcel Thekaekara is a writer and co-founder of ACCORD – the Action for Community Organisation, Rehabilitation and Development.
Born into a deeply religious family, Mari was brought up with a Jesuit Catholic education that taught her to question all her beliefs and developed a deep sense of empathy within her. She went on to join several institutes that shaped her passion for social action such as the All India Catholic University Federation, or AICUF, and the International Grail which is a socio-cultural movement grounded in Christian faith.
Mari met Stan Thekaekara in 1980, an event that shaped the rest of her life. In 1984, Mari and Stan with their young family moved to the Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu, to work with the tribal communities of Gudalur. Their early work culminated in ACCORD, an organization which today works on multiple aspects of tribal rights and livelihoods.
Mari has written extensively on the issues of Dalit and Adivasi human rights for national and international newspapers and magazines such as The Hindu, Frontline, Economic and Political Weekly, New Internationalist and The Guardian.
Much of her research over the years has been focused on safai karamcharis, or the manual scavenger communities. In 1999, she published a book ‘Endless Filth.’ Her work has received international acclaim, including a piece she wrote for The Hindu on children of sanitation workers that won the Press Club “best article of the month” award in 2004.
At every turning point in her life, Mari Marcel Thekaekara has chosen to lead the way with love and respect for the people around her.
In this episode, Mari 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.
Additional Audio
Malasar Tribe Promised Land Pattas, but Also Asked to Vacate by NewsClickin CC BY 3.0
Gudalur adivasi to vattakalie by Sivaraj Ravi
Gujarat Officials Deny Continuation of Manual Scavenging by VideoVolunteers CC BY 3.0
Outlawed 25 Years Ago, Manual Scavenging Still a Reality in India by VideoVolunteers CC BY 3.0
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.
Mari Marcel Thekaekara is a writer and co-founder of ACCORD – the Action for Community Organisation, Rehabilitation and Development.
Born into a deeply religious family, Mari was brought up with a Jesuit Catholic education that taught her to question all her beliefs and develop a deep sense of empathy for all the work she puts out in the world. She went on to join several institutes that shaped her passion for social action such as the All India Catholic University Federation, or AICUF, and the International Grail which is a socio-cultural movement grounded in Christian faith.
Her meeting with Stan Thekaekara in 1980, would shape the rest of her life. In 1984, Mari and Stan with their young family moved to the Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu, to work with the tribal communities of Gudalur. Their early work culminated in ACCORD, an organization which today works on multiple aspects of tribal rights and livelihoods.
Mari has written extensively on the issues of Dalit and Adivasi human rights for national and international newspapers and magazines such as The Hindu, Frontline, Economic and Political Weekly, New Internationalist and The Guardian. A large focus of her research over the years has been on safai karamcharis, or the manual scavenger communities. In 1999, she published a book ‘Endless Filth.’
Her work has received international acclaim, including a piece she wrote for The Hindu on children of sanitation workers that won the Press Club “best article of the month” award in 2004.
At every turning point in her life, Mari Marcel Thekaekara has chosen to lead the way with love and respect for the people around her.
In this episode, Mari is in conversation with Dr. Roopa Devadasan, a Public Health expert and school teacher. Her association with Mari 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.
This conversation was recorded at the Bangalore International Centre in Bengaluru.
ROOPA
Well, Mari, here we meet again. It’s so nice after a friendship of so many years to be able to do this with you. It’s a strange day to do the recording with the election results being declared. But we are going back in time to a bit of your early life and what prompted you… what were the things that happened around you or influenced you to take this journey less traveled, so to speak.
MARI
Well, Roopa, I’m focusing on things that influenced my thinking from my student days and I would say that coming from your average middle class background… I grew up in Calcutta surrounded by poverty, so you don’t think much about it, it’s there. My mother would always be giving food to beggars and that kind of thing but understanding the reasons behind poverty, etcetera, were things that came to us because of reading we did – (A) working in Marxist Calcutta, Jyoti Basu’s Calcutta, growing up in that, knowing a lot of what was happening. I had my exams disrupted by naxalites, so called naxalites, but they were just students who came and threw bombs in the compound and smashed up, tore up our papers, etcetera. So we grew up far more politically aware than, say, people in other parts of the country, and possibly because of the communist party taking over… the Marxists winning for the first time ever over there. And most people thought it was the end of the world but it was also an education process. We were encouraged to think, because we had these absolutely brilliant Jesuits in our lives who came in when I was in university especially, but in high school…
ROOPA
But I remember, yes, I wanted to ask you about this, because I think the influence was not just at university level, it was a bit earlier.
MARI
Yeah. We had this brilliant Jesuit who in fact taught Stan as well, called Father Worth. And he walked into the classroom, this room full of Catholics sitting there for catechism class, to which everybody said, “Oh no, so boring.” And he walked in with his pile of books like the Bible and all the Gospels and prayer books and the mass book, literally what you would consider ‘sacred books,’ and he said to us, “So you are all Catholics? Who is Catholic?” This is catechism class, only Catholics, so of course, everybody put up their hands with bored looks on their faces. And this man, he swept all those books into the kachre ka dabba, the waste paper basket. Of course, it woke the whole class up with a jolt like you couldn’t believe it, nobody would dream of doing such a thing.
But I’m perennially grateful to that priest because he also made us think. He made us think, he said, “What do you think it means? What does religion mean and what do you think? You think by going to mass every Sunday,” which all Catholics did in our time, “you think that’s enough? Is that what you think? Well, let me tell you, you don’t know anything about your religion.” And it went on from there. It was a shocking kind of introduction to a thinking process which continued, because we then in university had Jesuits who also talked about these things, and we belong to the AICUF.
And in ‘72, I came to this Poonamallee meeting in Chennai, where Stan was one of the organizers. It was called the Know India Project, K-N-O-W, and said, “People like us, you’re living in Calcutta, no doubt, but you’re going to a private school,” which all of us did, anyone who was middle class, “and you are going to the most elite college in the city, so you are privileged, you are elite, you are spoiled brats.” The works, everything was thrown at us, like, making you feel guilty for existing, right? And I mean, I guess some people didn’t take it very seriously, but they kept throwing this fact at us, “Do you realize that of 100 children who should have joined school at five or six or whatever, only 1%, one out of 100 children make it to university, which means that you’re privileged, you’re born with a silver spoon. And now what are you going to do with that education? Are you going to…” It was the fashion then in the seventies, to go off to America or get a scholarship. In fact, my principal was pushing for me to work for a British council scholarship and go and study.
My life changed then because my dad died in 1974, when I was in second year. But my dad dying like that… I was the oldest, and I just decided that I didn’t want to scrabble around. I did a couple of jobs which were awful.
And so I applied to join Air India, which was like a slap in the face for a lot of people, it was like, “What? We’re talking about reading Paulo Freire, we’re talking about reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed…” We were already working in villages, doing these college projects, and I had already become part of a journalism group which was organized by the AICUF and we had this very brilliant editor, Shadun Banerjee, who was part of the JS. And the JS was iconic in our times because it was new, it was exciting, there was nothing like it before. And that we actually had JS staff, big names to us, coming and talking to us about different aspects of writing, editing, and how you pursue a story – all of that was exciting.
ROOPA
Was it difficult, Mari, to hold this balance between the Air India job and this? I mean, I know you were sort of providing for the family at that point. You had two younger sisters, but how did it feel?
MARI
I had a lot of guilt at the back of my mind but on the other hand, I knew I had to do it and I must say I enjoyed it. Because in the seventies, people didn’t get a chance, like people do now, to go around the world. Nobody did globe trotting at that level in the seventies. But one thing that set my traveling apart was that I had this, I belong to this network of, like, Catholic students and another was The International Grail, a womens’ organization. And so I went to Egypt and the president of Grail lived there, and I saw a totally different from the tourist five star hotel. In Rome I had these two absolutely lovely women who worked for Cardinals and lived in the apartment overlooking The Pope’s windows, and I used to go and stay with them one night. All over the country, all over the world, really, I had people like that from my Grail network.
ROOPA
Amazing.
MARI
So in 1980, I went on a holiday to Brazil and I went to meet some… Well, I was taking a break, I wanted to think about what I wanted to do. And in Brazil, it was like the height of it, you know, because the whole social justice movement, which we had only talked about in university, like social justice and the justice aspect, etcetera, was what differentiated what we wanted to do from Mother Teresa’s charity work.
ROOPA
I’ve seen that constantly part of your, you know, writing… I’ve watched you write over 30 years, and I see that demand you make on yourself to put the material right there and correctly. I mean, I’ve seen you mentor youngsters in writing as well, and I see that, yeah. So what would have been the shift? You’re talking about the seventies now?
MARI
Yeah. So, ‘74, my dad died, end of ‘75, I got into Air India. For eight years I was flying around, and it was seen as a real betrayal by many of the people. As a result, in Australia, I went and met aboriginal people, and I went to a place where they were working with aboriginal people. In Brazil, I wrote some pieces, expecting to get permission, but I did it quietly under a false name… I wrote for a magazine, a newspaper called The Daily in Bombay, and I wrote about these things like they were organizing, which is very interesting and I thought we should really be able to do it with Hinduism, because in Brazil, it was the whole catholic thing, everyone used to pray…
So they would use those readings to make people think about fighting for their rights. So there was a, they called it Lavandera, what we would call dhobis, people who did washing of the clothes, and there was absolute poverty that I saw in Sao Paulo. And one group of people who were sex workers. That was, to most people, very shocking. I was in my twenties then, 1980 I was 25, and I went into all these strange kinds of places because of this connection to AICUF and they have international students who have gone all over the world.
So I met somebody in Sao Paulo who was working with these communities, and I did a lot of that before I ever thought of… I don’t think on my own I would have been able to settle in Gudlur and work with Adivasis, definitely. I would have just been a journalist, not beyond that. But Stan and I had met in ‘72 at this Poonamallee conference, where the whole emphasis was on social justice and what you’re going to do with your education, etcetera. And then we met up again in 1980, and that’s how, well, we ended up getting married in ‘82. And his whole background had been working with Adivasis in Bihar.
ROOPA
Correct.
MARI
For me, I would have worked with any poor people if it was up to me. But the Adivasi thing was particularly his thing, because he’d already worked in Jharkhand and so that’s how we ended up. And of course, everyone thought I was completely mad because my family and all were quite liberal and progressive, etcetera, but they were like, “How on earth can you, after eight years of Air India,”-
ROOPA
Go and settle in a small-
MARI
“- all that, go and live in the back of beyond?” Even Bangalore was back of beyond for everyone. In those days, you couldn’t get an auto in Bangalore. It was such a one house town. “Are you mad? How can you live in Bangalore?” So by the time I said, “I’m going to live in some remote place in the Nilgiris,” everyone had given up. But that was how it happened.
ROOPA
But life took a different turn when it became Gudlur?
MARI
Yeah, so when we went to Gudlur, yeah, that was part of… At the back of our minds, we’d always talked about social justice and this was the only way we could see ourselves actually doing that.
ROOPA
Yeah, I think part of Stan’s story is the whole experience in Jharkhand. But when I met you, which was in 1987, you were already married, you had been in Gudlur for a number of years, and Tarik, your youngest, was ten days old, right?
MARI
Right.
ROOPA
You had just come back from the hospital and you had this little baby, and there were two with large eyes peeping behind you, I remember very clearly. We waited on the curve of that Banaswadi turning for the sound of the bullet to come and Stani arrived. I mean, that’s my very vivid memory of meeting you with Deva in ‘87. So by then you would have already had some experiences in Gudlur, do you want to talk about that?
MARI
I would say that I didn’t have any experience of living with a local community. I had zero vocabulary as far as Malayalam and Tamil was concerned, I came from West Bengal. And so the initial… while we thought about things a lot, Stan was the one who had the experience of doing this kind of work and the language. So basically, we came to the Nilgiris in ‘84 as part of another group. We joined NAWA because we had two kids and we needed some sort of income, whereas he’d lived in Bihar with very erratic, if at all, any income.
So we joined this, we lived on peanuts, and those initial years, well… When we arrived, I was expecting Tarash, and I had a bad pregnancy, so I had to be at home for all of that pregnancy, so it was basically Stan working.
But that was our first, his and my first encounter with the Paniyar tribe, which is the largest tribe in the Nilgiris. And I think a lot we got out of the fact that we were living there on that project and saw people like that on our doorstep every day and understood a lot of things. And I think one of the key people who we got to know and whom we dearly loved was Chati. You also know what a character he was, who came then at that point when I was pregnant, etcetera, and asked if I could teach him English. So then I had a little English class there.
ROOPA
I didn’t know that.
MARI
In those days.
ROOPA
Yeah.
MARI
And they used to come every evening, and I was just doing this, teaching them English, and Stan was doing the work. And actually we wanted to do more than what-
ROOPA
NAWA was looking at?
MARI
Yes, the NAWA remit, because they had this lady who was there. She was English, and she was always afraid of, you know, stepping on the toes of government people, etcetera, they could throw her out etc.
ROOPA
And it was really a sort of rehabilitation for just a few families, but I think by then you all had realized…
MARI
This whole idea of social justice and change and asking these people to question why people were grabbing their land came from the two years in NAWA ‘84 to ‘86, where we heard about Paniyars all over the place having their lands stolen from them because they would be given alcohol as payment. Then they would owe ₹100, ₹200 and the interest would make that thing shoot up. There’s no way they would ever be able to repay it. In those days, people’s salary for the month was ₹300, we were on a salary of ₹800 for the month. And it was shocking. These people would take their thumb impression and they would put their thumb impressions on things they had no clue what was written on the paper, and they would be cheated.
So that was how, for Stan it became that we have to intervene to get the local people, the tribals, to not allow other people to cheat them, to learn how to stand up for their rights, to understand what’s happening to them, to understand that people are cheating them off their land, and to understand that they had always been the first people. What is the meaning of ‘Adivasi’? We didn’t invent the word. ‘Adivasi’ is there from the time of independence. And he used to say these funny things like, “Okay, so you know that we’re working here, other people are coming in and just taking your land. It’s your land, your great grandfather also lived over here. But still these people, mainly from Kerala, are coming in here and taking your land. Let me ask you this – see those dogs over there? They belong to this party. Do they ever allow other dogs to come in? Do they bark?” “Ah, of course.” “What else do they do? They will fight to keep their land.”
ROOPA
Correct.
MARI
“So why do you just sit here and let people come and take your land?” So for me, it was all quite new to actually be there and listen to this. I couldn’t do it, only Stan could do it, and he had this knack of telling stories, etcetera. I would say you, Deva and me and Stan used to sit together and talk about how to go about things and plan for the future and what was needed, etcetera., but that kind of community organizing that he did was, I think, a thing that’s in him.
ROOPA
But, you know, there’s something you always underplay, Mari. You said, just living there and having them at your doorstep all the time, it was so important because you… And I think for Deva and me also, when we came in later, it was delivering tea saplings on the tea truck that made all the difference to us as doctors from all the other doctors, because we never, we always saw it from the point of view of the people.
And I remember Stan in particular, he would keep saying, “Our people.” This our people was a very important phrase which has stayed with me throughout. But what I want to remind you of is you used to tell me how you would cook these vast amounts of rice and food and because the Paniyars would eat and I remember being shocked by the equation. You said, “One kilo of rice, four of them will finish off.” And in my mind, one kilo fed 20 people. But this is how they would eat. And I think your presence and just having you there with the children and as a family, I suspect there was a lot of trust that the people had in you as a family who were just sort of there with them. I think you often underplay that.
MARI
I think those two years were very important because we were right up there next to them and people would be coming every day and we would really hear their stories and know what was happening, etcetera, so that was important, and to get to know how they thought and lots of things, lots of things.
Starting off, it shocked me tremendously because I’m expecting a child and I hear about three girls who died, 16-17 year olds. I’d seen them, next time I saw them, they’re pregnant. These very young girls, enormous stomachs. And this was my first encounter with eclampsia deaths. It shocked the hell out of me, partly because I’d never heard of it, none of us who come from a city would hear about it. And it shocked me beyond words that one katori of dal would have saved those girls’ lives.
We had a book called Where There is No Doctor, which we gave up when they came… Yeah, when you came that was when I put that book away because we used to literally look up what to do for people.
ROOPA
And I remember even in the early years, Stan described this thing of how he would spend half his time just taking patients to hospital.
MARI
To the hospital in Gudalur where nobody would look at them. It was horrible.
ROOPA
True.
MARI
When Deva first arrived, he spent a month… And we found this little boy in Theppakadu and discovered that he had meningitis. Deva discovered, we just saw this little sick boy and Deva said, “No, no, he has to go to hospital immediately.” And I remember Deva spending all day and all night and sleeping next to the boy in the hospital. And then after two days, when the boy was getting better, a senior doctor walked in, and they were in their twenties – you and Deva were in your twenties, so when the senior doctor walked in, Deva was all, “Yes, sir, no, sir,” because he was a senior resident or whatever. And then he just said to Deva, “Why are you sitting here? We’ve got a huge hospital, we’ve got a huge staff…” They had the staff all on the books, but actually, only two people of 20 or something were present. They were all over the place, nobody was physically present. They changed the medication for the child, and the child died. When Deva went to hospital… That sturdy little, tagda little boy, I remembered, and it was really heartbreaking. But those were the early experiences. We never wanted to build and build and build, and become huge and start an empire like a lot of NGOs do. And we said, “That’s one thing we’re never going to do,” which is why we kept ACCORD small and didn’t expand into Kerala and Karnataka, as many people suggested we do.
ROOPA
When you talked about the land being taken away from them and then seeing these people die in front of you, it was always about what the people were facing and what they needed and because you kind of lived there with the community, you saw it directly. There was no sort of analysis, it was just responding to what was needed. Which is probably why you were not thinking about institution building and stuff like that, that came much later. But during that time, what Stan would talk about a lot, and what you would also talk about at times, was the fact that this community was very, very shy, very often they would not meet your eye. And somehow, historically, they had been placed in a situation where they thought nothing of themselves. They had really very, very poor self esteem.
ROOPA
I remember this very well because when our first batch of health workers, Paniyar health workers, didn’t know how to manage currency. They had never worked with money because they received their food and their one set of clothing for the year. So, yeah, bonded labor was definitely there. There were the Chettiyars and the Paniyars.
MARI
They used to be paid a measure of rice and no cash and that led to… I think the same thing happened with slaves in America, that when they were released, they really didn’t know how to handle that freedom. They never handled cash. They became, in a way, bonded to little shopkeepers. They’ll go and take one kilo of rice, they drink a coffee… And to me, this was my first experience of translating what you read into actually seeing it happen. It was a huge experience for me, because I used to read a lot. So here we had people who go to the shop in the morning. We had a salary of ₹800, our milk bill was ₹250 because we had a one year old child. I’m expecting the second, so I’m drinking milk every day. And that ₹800 was so hard for us to manage on.
We ate ration rice, which was terrible in those days. My dad’s sister came to see me, she actually started crying and said, “What would your father say if he saw you? How can you eat this rice? We keep this kind of rice for the dog.” We lived on that. And I wouldn’t dream of borrowing money because I can’t bear to be in debt.
But these people would go to the shop every day and they would have tea and they would have, kadi, they called it, it was like having a bite. It would be a bun, mostly a bun, not at all nutritious. So all of these people were having a mountain of rice twice a day, and in the morning, this tea and a bun. And that’s why most of the women were anemic, which, I mean, Indian women are anemic anyway, even when they are quite well fed at home. But these people would go into this…
ROOPA
Absolute protein deficient diets, unimaginable. And, I mean, whenever we thought about it, we thought, “Oh, in the old days, they probably hunted and all,” but that was a long, long time ago. And only some of the tribes, you know, who either trapped or actually hunted for the Paniyars, I think for many years it had been like this and, you know, bonded with…
MARI
And so that level of malnutrition I’d only seen in films, you know, when you see the Bihar famine or whatever. So it was shocking. So the idea of then at that time, more and more Stan was talking about how we have to get their land back. Because if we don’t get their land back, they are going to be completely landless, bonded labor or worse. And they always ran up debts because they had no concept of money. They would go and buy everything from the shop, the man would happily give them, they had no clue what they were spending. So one day Stan said, “How do you know how much you owe that man? He doesn’t take money from you till Saturday when you get your wages, but how do you know how much you spend? You’re not writing it anywhere.” They had no clue that one tea and one bun that they ate maybe once a day, twice a day, sometimes the kids would come with them. I can’t afford to do that on my ₹800, these people are earning something like ₹300 a month, and what are they doing? This fellow would just tell them whatever he knew, how many days that fellow went for work and the tea shop man who is giving them tea and this bun would just tell them any figure and they would say they owe it.
ROOPA
Trust. Yeah, it was total trust. I mean, there was no question of… You said something about being lucky with the people we got, and that’s something I experienced enormously working in the team, this feeling of having people with different skills who worked very closely together, but with the community at the center. So could you describe those beginning years of ACCORD and how did you see it?
MARI
Also, I think from some friends that I, people I visited or heard about, I always used to say that one thing we have to avoid is to become like little kingdoms, you know, where you reign over there as though you are the Raja or Maharaja or whatever, and then everyone is controlled. That I remember very clearly once being in a meeting with Deva. So we were very clear, if you’re coming in to do health, it’s your thing and we work to support you, but we don’t try to call the shots. But in many NGOs, the CEO, those days, they didn’t call anybody a CEO, the founders, etcetera, would crack the whip, and why should I crack the whip when I have a doctor who’s a professional, who’s doing a job that I don’t know much about, why would I think about giving orders or saying that this is how you have to proceed.
So when you all came, we were very clear about that.
People who had run away when we first went on those trips, you know, they would see somebody wearing a shirt and pants like some aliens, people would run away, children are running and hiding in the trees as if we are literally aliens, you know?
ROOPA
Yes, it used to be like that. I mean, a jeep would arrive and the village would empty. It was literally like that. It was quite something.
MARI
And in those days you only wore sari. I was expecting my child and I was wearing salwar thingy in the house, a loose thing, and people would come to giggle at me. Both of us were the first two people in Gudlur who walked down the street wearing salwar kameez. It was like, “Haha, what funny people these are.” So that’s how different it was, so cut off from… For that matter, in south India, you didn’t see that many salwars and all in the early eighties and all. So I think the fact that you both, Roopa and Deva were so warm and absolutely loved those people, they knew it. So they built trust very fast. And then that first team of health workers and those training…
ROOPA
Yeah, yeah.
MARI
And the way the health team slowly took over and that epic time that we were all walking outside that woman’s hut in Theppakadu, who was expecting a child and they wouldn’t allow the doctor in, because they felt that it would bring in the wrath of their gods or the gods would frown on this, that you’re bringing this outsider in. This one tribe, the Betta Kurubas, really didn’t allow people to come inside, like random people. They knew Roopa very well-
ROOPA
No, it was quite a story because we had trained Badchi and Kali from that village, they were the health workers. And we were monitoring this girl very carefully, her name was also Badchi. They knew that her blood pressure was very high, we were expecting fits, eclamptic fits. So we were in Dewala, 15 km away. These two girls took a bus all the way to come and say, “Look, she’s gone into labor.”
MARI
And that was a triumph, that two health workers came to say, “The girl needs monitoring,” is a huge victory, like wow, it’s actually working.
ROOPA
And then on that day, we had a classmate who was doing surgery in Mysore. He was visiting Gurlur, so he was also there. Anyway, I left, then I think that night we had Subhash, who’s our colleague, a doctor, we had Stan, you, Deva, myself. We waited till 3AM the next morning when she finally delivered in the village. I think the gods just smiled, because she had a healthy baby and she didn’t have fits.
But I think those were the kind of stories and the kind of experiences we shared. When you said the health team was working so well, what I remember which was so important was, it never kind of took off on its own, there were always the animators with the land rights. So in every village, everyone kind of knew about everything that was happening. And that made a huge difference, because when you have people working in silos, it doesn’t work, that magic doesn’t happen.
MARI
I wrote a story called Incredible Odds Fighting the Gods, about that thing. And we published it in several places. I would also say that a lot of, when I’m thinking of the story I wrote, I had some incredible luck as well, because I was tied up with two little children, I hadn’t done major writing till I even… I had written bits and pieces when I was in Bombay and shouldn’t have been writing but when we were organizing the people here, I was so cut off, Gudlur was back of beyond. In those days there was only fax and we had to drive to Mysore or to Ooty to send the fax. So two hours drive to Ooty, and out of the blue a photographer came who was taking pictures for ActionAid. I had written something in great anger and disgust about funding and donors and all of that, it was scribbled off in a kind of fury. She said she was going to The New Internationalist, which was a magazine in Oxford which I had visited before. I said, “Could you take this to the editor and see if they could use it?” It was just luck.
They were producing an issue about so many decades of development, and it fitted in. So they published me in The New Internationalist. They paid me what was more than three months’ salary, the 100 pounds or whatever they paid, we were on ₹800, so it was like three times my salary. And then I got a letter saying, would I consider writing a column? So out of the blue, this landed in my lap because of this really random kind of, one British photographer is here, and I sent it by hand to Oxford.
So then when I got that New Internationalist Column and I started doing that writing, that was ‘90. So because of the writing in Bombay… In the seventies, editors and all were much more welcoming and down to earth and happy to meet people and to meet ordinary journalists. So I remember going into the Times of India and meeting Daryl Dumonty, who was resident editor of both Express and Times of India at various times. So welcoming, so friendly, so warm. He, in fact, connected me to some person in Brazil and all of that. And so I did these bits of writing for Times of India and Indian Express. After we had this big demonstration.
ROOPA
We haven’t come to that yet.
MARI
Yes, that actually, we haven’t come to that. All these incidents of people’s land being stolen led us to thinking that we have to do something about it. And so Stan had spent all his time going around all these villages, looking at how many people have lost their land and talking to the people about how you can’t just sit there because your children will be beggars, two generations later, all your land will be gone and your children will be beggars. And that was how the idea came about – planting their land with a permanent crop. So there was a divide, even though environmental things were not as big then as they are now, the question was – are we going to do this?
I did so much reading that it was like, you know, it’s going to bring an income to them, but those kinds of crops are not what’s desirable, although we didn’t know as much as we know now. Anyway, at the end of the day, saving their land and giving them an income, we started this huge giving tea plants to people and all that. Stan had actually started this tea planting in ‘86. The idea of the tea planting was if they have a permanent crop on their land, they can prove ownership. They all had the land, but they didn’t have what is called a patta document, a title deed, to show their possession. So it is very easy for someone to cheat them.
ARCHIVAL AUDIO
Woman talks about being denied land rights by forest department-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4rWQB-Lyps
MARI
So that was how this entire land movement grew and grew and grew, and this team of animators grew. People who would go around and work with people, give them the courage to stand up, to fight for their rights, to prevent people from taking their land, to prevent people from cheating them, to prevent people from getting that false thumb impression on a blank sheet of paper, which was the norm. And slowly, this whole thing about a land demonstration grew. And so the demonstration, this was right through ‘87. We came there in March ‘86, it was 86, 87 and 88. The idea came that we would have a demonstration for land, and honestly speaking, we didn’t have a..
It had never happened before and Adivasis, they were very timid, they were afraid of the outside world. The bulk of the people, the Paniyars and even the others, would always hang back. So, of the four tribes, the only people who had a fair amount of literacy and some education were the Mulla Kuruba tribes, whereas the biggest majority were the Paniyars.
And it was in ‘88, in ‘88 December 5, it’s now marked as Adivasi Day by all the tribals, the day they had the demonstration. And so there we were, Roopa, Deva, me, and Stan anxiously looking out to see, is anyone going to come? And people were arriving, and suddenly huge numbers of people were coming off buses, and we were really zapped. We couldn’t believe that it was actually happening.
ROOPA
Yeah, I think the expectation was like maybe 1000 or 2000 might turn up. I mean, knowing how shy they were and unwilling to come out like that, but…
MARI
At the end of the day, there were 10,000 Adivasis on the street. When the animators had gone to get permission, because if you’re having a demonstration, you have to get permission, police laughed and said, “What, Adivasis? Are you joking? Even if you give them money to come, they won’t come. Haha.if you think a few hundred will come, good luck to you.” And they didn’t even bother. And all of a sudden there were 10,000 people. Gudlur was blocked. And why it made a big impact was because the Ooty buses had to all come to a stop. And this is like a tri-junction. So buses to Kerala and buses to Ooty, buses to Bangalore, everything came to a stop. We couldn’t believe it. And it was a peaceful thing.
And this was the work of a small team, very small. That time there were twelve animators. Very small team of people have mobilized 10,000 people. So that was like unbelievable-
ROOPA
And you wrote about it.
MARI
That was the thing. Because a local reporter gave it a tiny couple of inches, and I was so indignant. I wrote this huge article. And he used to take pictures with good camera slides in those days, Frontline used slides. And I went off to Chennai, literally took a bus to Bangalore, a train to Chennai, and went to The Hindu office. I didn’t know anyone there, but I knew this Times of India resident editor who was a very nice person. And I marched into Enraam’s office and I said that the Times of India editor has suggested I meet you. And he called me in, out of courtesy to the Times of India. And he was very, he just went through it and he said, “Yeah, we’ll use it.” That was it. And I said, “I got slides.” And he called somebody, pressed a button, somebody came, took the slides. And the next thing is this three, four, five pages, I don’t know, it came in Frontline. Even I couldn’t believe it because it was quite an achievement in those days. And then I started writing for Frontline regularly. So these tribal issues, because Frontline also gets seen in Chennai, in the assembly, etcetera.
So from ignoring the existence of these tribals, it coming in Frontline was what made a big impact and the local collector was livid, etcetera that such a thing had happened. I mean, it’s not a… they were just demanding their rights, you know? But one thing I shouldn’t forget, although I’m going on this track of the land thing, we also were very aware of the fact that people were losing their culture, that the youngsters, if anyone went to school, they became ashamed of being Adivasi because there was such a put down in schools. The teachers, everybody would, I don’t know what, discriminate, but definitely treat them differently.
ROOPA
Why, they change their names, Mari-
MARI
-and change their names, yeah. First of all, they would say, “Is that a name?” You know, because they would have names like Badchi, Kali.
ROOPA
Actually, basically the Betta Kurubas had like ten male and ten female names.
MARI
Boman is a common name, Boman and Badchi. And teachers say, “That’s not a name,” and you become Ram, Sita, Lakshman, whatever, it’s just a norm, it was. And then we started insisting that, “Your name is your name.” The teacher can’t change your name, can’t just say, what rubbish, that’s not a name, and write whatever they want in the book. So a lot of little inputs like that, this is your culture and you have to be proud of it. But they didn’t think they had to be proud of it. All their lives they’ve been denigrated, Adivasi means something lower, you know. So there was a lot of emphasis on culture and on being proud of who you are, etcetera, in many, many ways. And the culmination of that whole campaign of – be proud of being Adivasi, use that Adivasi term and say, “I am Adivasi,” that was a sustained campaign that we had. And then in ‘87 Jan, we had this cultural festival. Was it December or Jan?
ROOPA
I can’t remember.
MARI
Anyway, we had the cultural-
ROOPA
The first time all the tribes came together.
MARI
All the tribes came together, and it was a huge thing. And people enjoyed themselves. And they had a local kind of theater thing that this one animator, Chati, was extremely good at. He’d be the clown and make everybody laugh, the whole crowd would be rolling on the ground laughing because of Chati’s jokes, etcetera. So it was that, and it was each tribe dancing, because the youngsters would be ashamed to dance. And we call it, Today We Dance for Ourselves. I made a film about that, and it was singing, dancing, whatever you do, like to celebrate anything, we should do it here so that the youngsters learn about it and also that they become proud of who they are.
ARCHIVAL AUDIO
The Paniyars performing Vattakali- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cF0FQEoUws
ROOPA
The other thing about that festival that I remember, Mari, was that because they would dance and they would do everything in their own villages, I think it was the first time that they actually saw the other tribes. And it was interesting because they had different names in their tribal language for the other tribe, they would refer to them in a different way. It was quite fascinating to see them all in different groups on that huge ground, dancing and playing the drums and playing this thing.
So you were talking about, you know, writing and then Frontline and this thing. Do you want to sort of go a little down that… You also mentioned the fellowship and the…
MARI
So one of the interesting things was because of the amount of writing I did on this Gudlur issue in Frontline and then later on in The Hindu, I was offered a fellowship to Washington, DC, to the Advocacy Institute. Advocacy was quite a new term in ‘91. It was quite a new term. We didn’t call it by the term advocacy. All this writing in newspapers, going to meet ministers, pushing the scores, etcetera, all of it was very definitely part of advocacy work, but we hadn’t labeled it. And I was not sure whether this was a good idea because… But anyway, I accepted it and I went to the US for the six week course, which I thought was very… It puts some things in perspective. You’re doing all this work, but a lot of things become, you get some clarity about different things. So that was very useful and I continued writing a lot after that, a lot more, basically. I also found what was very interesting was that I met… We didn’t travel out that much, I mean, we never went up to Delhi and all, very often all over the country, we were so focused on Gudlur going to this thing in Washington DC, I met people who had got this fellowship who were working with Dalits, who were working with farmers, who were working with all sorts of people. And a lot of those issues I thought about for the first time, that was quite interesting. Someone in Punjab, there was one guy in Punjab working with farmers, somebody else, a lot of people, three, four people working with Dalit, somebody from Orissa. So that was very interesting and I think it sharpened some of your thinking, in a way.
ROOPA
I remember you mentioning, you know, often we say the Dalits and then we look at Adivasis. But it’s very different.
MARI
It’s very different.
I went to this advocacy course in ‘91. And a couple of years later, I was… One of the Dalit leaders, who was a Dalit himself, made a speech in Delhi. It was just before 50 years of independence, just before ‘97, that, “In this day and age, I’m a Dalit speaking on behalf of Dalits, working for so many years with Dalits and I didn’t know that my people are carrying shit on their heads.” And I thought, “Oh, God, here it goes, it’s just some exaggeration.” Many people, to make a point, will exaggerate and say things in the most dramatic fashion. But I decided to go there and do this writing, I mean, go there and see what he meant by it. And I must say I was shocked out of my life because I went to these public toilets all over Gujarat and actually saw the state of those toilets and those women sweeping drains of liquid shit and literally putting it in baskets. And if not on their heads, carrying it physically, it would be on their hands, et cetera. And the women said things to me like, “I can’t eat dal, I feel sick if I see dal because it reminds me of my work.” They’re just so dignified. I remember following this lady, who was this woman, early at 6 o’clock in the morning, going to the toilet to clean the toilets. Spotlessly clean, flowers in her hair with that jhadu, that broom. It was the most revolting thing I had ever seen in my life.
So I’ve written about that a lot, I became slightly obsessive about it. And then at one point, I even went to a place where children were cleaning toilets. Mostly it had been the mothers, there were even kids doing it. And that was published in Hindu, and it got an award, etcetera. But it took me onto this Dalit trajectory, which I hadn’t given much thought to. Also we were very busy here and at that point in ‘95, we had a very brilliant young man who joined us, who took over a lot of the writing that I used to do for ACCORD, because I used to write like, my reports were long and like, all the stories that we thought were interesting.
And at that point, about like ‘95, ‘96, all donors were saying they didn’t want to read the stories, and they would rather have facts and figures and graphs and percentages and charts, etcetera, which is not my strong point at all. At that point, Manoran joined us, who was this brilliant chap from IRMA, and he took over all that reporting and those formats, etcetera, and all those storytelling things that I used to do more or less stopped.
So I also had the time to then just go off to Gujarat, and I went all over India, actually, because after this… Frontline published what I wrote, this report went all over, ActionAid used it, Harsh Mander was the head of ActionAid, he took it up as a national program that everywhere we should be working on the question of safai karamcharis and why is it still happening when it’s been abolished long ago by law. There’s an Abolition of Manual Scavenging Act, 1993, and after that, and after that, and after that, many, many acts, but nothing changes.
AUDIO ARCHIVAL
Gujarat’s still prevalent safai karamcharis– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5QYE_fqIzM
ROOPA
And it comes from, you know, it’s a family thing. I mean, we’ve heard the youngsters talk about how difficult it is to step out of that and get to school and move out of that tradition of what is considered… So a farmer’s child is a farmer, but…
MARI
And to be constantly stigmatized, children are abused and shouted at. Kids would say that in school somebody said, “Hey, bhangi, don’t sit near me,” that kind of thing.
AUDIO ARCHIVAL
Woman talks about discrimination faced by children of manual scavengers-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEypSocLW7k&t=87s
MARI
I think Adivasis, however much the poverty is there, they managed to have some dignity. It always strikes you how dignified they are, whereas these people have been so put down, so despised, so finished off, that it’s really an entirely different ball game to see what has to be done. Adivasis have always managed to have that dignity because they’re away from, fortunately for them, they’re away from our mainstream, so they haven’t had that dumped on their heads, you know?
ROOPA
Mari, if there was something, suppose you could go back in time and look at this journey, you know, from the eighties, do you think there’s anything you might have done differently?
MARI
In Gudlur I think we used to always look at it as… Adivasi women are not as put down. That’s true, because even when we came there in ‘84, the women… On a Saturday, the men would drink and fight and beat them up and all, but the women kept their own money, which would never happen in any dominant society groups. The women had that sort of independence and dignity, etcetera, and they had their own space. But at the same time, I wish we could have done something to stop the drinking. Lots of things have been tried, but really, I don’t know if anyone has ever succeeded in breaking alcoholism anywhere.
And we have the very strong influence of film from Kerala. Kerala and Tamil film is. People speak Malayalam and Tamil, and they see the films from both sections, and that macho male is there and everything, and this drinking, the alcoholism, that happens, even if it’s weekends, it’s money…
Now, see, in Tamil Nadu, people don’t starve anymore. I don’t think we ever see that level of malnutrition as when you started, because now the government gives free rice and some amount of dal also free to below poverty people, you know? And in Tamil Nadu, more or less all people have a house. The Government keeps on giving houses and I wonder why, after all these years, we haven’t solved that one. And the violence against women thing also, yeah, I feel that we never, ever focused on the women thing because we said these women are much stronger, etcetera.
ROOPA
Yeah, I remember you talking about it even through the years, every now and then it would sort of come up, but something else would take over. The land issue would be more pressing, or, you know, the individual health issue would be more pressing and education was something that I remember you constantly sort of pushing, pushing, saying, until you have a generation of…
MARI
Education has done quite well, I would say, because there’s hardly any kid who doesn’t go to school now, and the schools are not as bad as all that.
ROOPA
Mari, I would say you’ve done an amazing job of, I mean, Father Rob and father Worth would have been proud of you, the privileges have been used. No, it’s quite remarkable because I think every time you did something, that core value was there and it just broadened your perspectives, it made things sharper, clearer – those are the words you’ve used. Given that things have changed so much, what do you think is in store for the future? Not just locally, because you’ve traveled the world, really, and your understanding is way beyond Gudlur, but your lived experience is in the context of Gudlur, what would you say are the kind of challenges that face our leaders and our country today? What do you feel, like, where are we headed?
MARI
We are very lucky because, as you mentioned, Radhakrishnan, we had some absolutely wonderful Adivasi individuals who touched our lives and who affected us and our thinking, etcetera, in a way that is difficult to even describe because they were such amazing individuals. I don’t like to use words like ‘amazing’ or ‘cool’ or all of those kinds of words, they’re not my words, but they’re really special. And they gave their whole lives, they struggled with family and with alcohol and all kinds of things but they were absolutely the key people who made this transition for their people possible. From taking people out of poverty…
In the early days when that demonstration was happening, every day they used to go to all the villages, they used to walk, they used to walk in the nights, they used to go without food because nobody had food. And the way they worked, that was something that’s very difficult to describe, the passion and commitment with which they worked. Not very educated or anything, they barely passed school, they’re just about literate mostly, nobody had gone to university or anything in those days. I’m saying like ‘86, ‘87, ‘88 those days. But the team was absolutely amazing and we learned so much from them.
ROOPA
Yeah, I think they were very wise. Even for myself personally, I remember going to, when I did my MPH in Belgium, and they were talking about empathy for patients, and they said, they were describing this whole thing of empathy and I said, “What about families of patients who show empathy to the doctor?” And they just wrote it off, they said, “It’s not possible.” I said, “How can you say that? I’ve experienced it.” Because that story of that little boy, Madan, who died of meningitis, I remember Deva, because he wrote me a long two page letter, I hadn’t reached Gudlur then, describing how one of the elders just put his hand on his shoulder and said, “It’s alright.” The fact that you come with the dead body to the village, that means everything, that is enough.
MARI
Yeah. And for us, I think, how they affected us. I have this memory in our office, we didn’t have a hospital, we didn’t want a hospital because for them and for us, we knew that it, that means a lifetime thing of raising funds, etcetera. And we didn’t want to do these huge institutional things. And we were in the office and they brought a girl in. Roopa, you were there, I mean, you handled it. And Roopa just said, “Oh, my God, she’s as white as a sheet, she’s terribly anemic.” You pricked the finger and the blood was pink. I’d never in my life seen anyone’s blood pink. And you did the test. She died, she died while you were holding her in front of us in the office, typewriters clacking in the background. So those kinds of things, the jolt that it gives you and the shock, that you actually see people dying in front of you, that kind of thing would sort of, just, gut wrenching. And nothing can describe the experiences that we had, we can’t even remember, or not remember, but we haven’t recorded, because they were just-
ROOPA
Everyday, it was happening all the time.
MARI
So, I mean, that affected us as much as wanting to do something about that. And one can at least be thankful that one has done things to a point that people are not really starving anymore but the same time you wonder about the future, what can one say? Because this is very complex, you know, you don’t, you can’t keep people where they were 25 years ago. I remember, and this is not… I remember going back to Calcutta, to my old school. There was a very visionary nun there in charge who did tremendous things, Sister Sil, and I used to go and talk to the kids and the whole class… “What is Adivasi?” because I’m working there with Adivasi children. A whole class of 13 year olds, 14 year olds, “Wild people,” “dirty people,” “black people,” “junglee people.” So that’s the kind of thing that I don’t know how you can fight. Some more people have to make films which will affect people because writing isn’t enough.
ROOPA
You know, my MPH thesis, which my guides did not want me to write, was called ‘The synergy of intersectional collaboration with community participation.’ That was it. I mean, literally what you’re describing was what I wrote. And I remember writing it, it was 30 pages, I didn’t pause, I just wrote it nonstop, and then there were the annexures and all. When I was questioned, they said, “How did you have the courage to write this?” I said, “What is there to be courageous about something you lived through and you saw?” Right? So I think that was very central.
When I think back, Stan always used the word “our people.” Mari never distinguished between an Adivasi or a professional coming from outside. That respect was not just for the professionals, it was for the Adivasis, it was for the leaders. We were all equal, really, we were equal. So when you have a culture like that, it fosters community participation. There’s no… I mean, people write poems about it and they try to work it in silos through theory, but that’s not it. It’s just giving the due respect and listening carefully to what someone has to say, and I think that’s what allowed for all of us to flower.
For me, what was amazing is if you look at all of us who worked at that time in Gudlur, we have all gone out of. I mean, that’s the extended legacy of Stan and Mari’s involvement and done things in our professional capacity, but using the learnings from Gudlur, that culture.
MARI
We had seen a certain dissatisfaction in many people who’ve worked with what they called NGOs and had the NGO leaders dictating to them and saying, “This is what you have to do.” And for us, it was always a question of when we are getting people like this, who are absolutely wonderful from all aspects, not just professionally wonderful, you have to have the capacity to understand the ethos of the Adivasis, not many people do. People would come and be like superior, talking down, like, we’ve come to uplift people. I couldn’t bear those terms. “We have come to uplift somebody,” excuse me? You have such a lot to learn from them, but you can’t see it.
ROOPA
When you said this, it just sparked something for me. You said, “Life is far more transactional today.” I think the identity of the self is huge in today’s generation, right? And without bringing morality into it, this shared sense of where the ‘I’ is diminished in the whole group is something that you saw in the Adivasis all the time. In Hindu philosophy, they talk about the ‘one,’ right? Adivasis will not talk about it, but for them, everything is ‘one,’ and they live it that way, whether it’s the forest or the spirit or whatever. Now, that sense of community where the self is not put on a pedestal, that’s why it’s not transactional, and that’s why we learned from them as well. It was a shared value between the community and us. And I think words are very important. So this thing of ‘our people…’ It’s strange because the Adivasis themselves will refer to them as ‘the people,’ ‘the people’ being the animals, the deer, the elephant, the hog, so it’s like one of many on the planet. But when we say our people, we are talking about a community, and I think that is what removes the transactional nature of it.
MARI
And somebody who influenced all of us a lot was this person, Father Claude. He was the president of ACCORD, and he’s the one who gave us ₹800 to come there to Gudlur and influenced us a lot when we decided to create ACCORD. He was a person who was very simple, believed in simplicity, but never showed it. Apparently he owned three shirts and he would carefully switch the shirt. Coming from an affluent family but he really believed in simplicity. And a lot of his thinking also influenced us. We’d go back and meet him and be advised, he was the father figure.
But this question of sharing, which we talked about a lot in AICUF, etcetera, I have this, such a clear memory. Some German students came to work in the hospital and to just get firsthand knowledge. When they came to Gudlur, they asked one of the people who formed ACCORD with Stan and I, a person called Subramani. He was like 20 or something when we first met him, or 18 or so. And the three of us created, whatever, ACCORD and came and started up in Gudlur in ‘86. And they asked Subramani and he was puzzled about it, he said, “Sharing? We don’t talk about it, we just do it.” It was so puzzling to the Adivasis. This Subramani and this chap called Chathi, absolutely lovely person and somebody called Boman from the different tribes, and they all were like, “Why they talk about sharing, we just do it, no?” They couldn’t even conceive of making this into something about philosophy, it’s just natural for them.
ROOPA
You know, you talked about… Once Manohar came, you were kind of freed from writing the reports and you were able to travel, and that’s when you met people in the Dalit sector, or I don’t know what to call it, but you met people who strongly made you want to explore that space further, you traveled around, you went with Stan and the kids. You said it became a bit of an obsession – you actually used those words. Can you describe a bit more about that? And also some of the work that you have written, the books, can you talk a bit about it?
MARI
I think that’s the main thing, was, as I said, working with Adivasi people, no doubt the poverty shocked us, having a girl die in your arms while the typewriter is in the background clacking… But nothing prepared me for the sight of those Dalit women…
You’ve read Hajar stories about caste, and this was really shocking to see it firsthand. Literally, when that woman said that we carry shit on our heads, I didn’t believe her and then when I went to those public toilets, which were large open drains, they just swept the liquid… I edited a whole magazine for NI on that, on the Dalit issue, and on the cover they used this picture of the woman sweeping this river of shit, which even Frontline didn’t use, because they said, “Nobody wants to see a photograph like that.” It’s terrible. That 50 years of independence… When I wrote my first really major article in Frontline, just before independence, it was very shocking.
I wrote a lot of pieces. I wrote in Frontline and in The Hindu, a lot. And then Michael Norton, who was a publisher who published books for change in India, which ActionAid had… He said, “Why don’t you write a book?” And so I did, and that book was called ‘Endless Filth,’ and it came out published by Books for Change, which was part of ActionAid. And after that book came out, I also wrote for NI, major articles on it, NI goes all over the world.
ROOPA
ACCORD’s work, it might feel in the larger context like a drop in the ocean, but the ripple effect is, is there and I think each of these things add up. Okay, so to round up, what would you like to give our listeners in terms of looking forward, what would you say?
MARI
I would say that we’ve done our time, I’m creeping into my 70th year at the end of this year, we’ve lived in Gudlur for 40 years, we’ve continued working there, I’ve done my bits of writing all over the country. Now I think, how much time do I have left and what could I achieve? And I would just say to people who listen to this, if there’s anything you can do… Not everyone can go and live in a rural area, not everyone can take up a thing to work with Dalits in the long term, but everyone can do something. Everyone in this entire country who’s listening to this, who is listening to a podcast, however elite they are, they have people working in their homes, they have sweepers sweeping their homes, check on how their kids are. Can you give a leg up to a sweeper’s child? Can you do your bit wherever you are in whichever way possible? I mean, I think most people who may be working, listening to a podcast like this, definitely can educate a couple of kids so that they don’t have to follow in the footsteps of their parents and grandparents.
ROOPA
Thank you, Mari. That was indeed something that everyone could act on.
MARI
Thank you.
HOST
Grassroots Nation is a podcast from Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies. For more information go to rohininilekaniphilanthropies.org or join the conversation on social media at RNP_Foundation.
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