Video | Glimpses of Warli and Konkana oral folklore, myths and legends: An introduction by Tamarind Tree – Maharashtra

Founded in 2007, Tamarind Tree is a registered not for profit organisation. We are committed to building an equitable and just society where individuals and communities can realise their full potential.  We situate ourselves at the juncture of knowledge, media and technology with the belief that they play a significant role in overcoming social exclusion and a lack of voice that are the root problems of poverty.

Tamarind Tree was initiated by a group of media and development professionals, some of whom moved away from the city to farm and contribute to rural society. Working with the marginalised tribes, our mission is towards an ecologically sustainable and culturally sensitive future for tribal communities of Thane district of the Western Indian state of Maharashtra.

Reappropriating knowledge and technology for the use by marginalized communities is a tool to enable us to re-think and transform our social relations. Tamarind Tree through its various ideas and projects has been attempting to demonstrate demonstrate positive alternatives by re-appropriating knowledge and technology for and with communities.

We work in the areas of Education, Environmental Protection and Community Media.

Education

In 2010, we set up Tamarind Tree School. Built on the philosophy of equity, we made a modest beginning in June 2010 with 40 children spread over the Pre Primary section. Designed to be a multi-lingual school we began gently taking the tribal children from their mother stongue Warli to English helping them to realise their full potential. […]

Teachers at Tamarind Tree use a variety of methodologies like arts, crafts and audio visual tools to teach. The curriculum also includes tribal narratives from their oral tradition with a view to creating a balanced individual with a sense of cultural identity. The natural surroundings like forest, animals and rivers are not only a part of fairy tales but they play an important role in experiential learning at the Tamarind Tree. […]

Language learning

It has been an interesting and challenging three years experimenting with being multi-lingual and introducing English to the Warlis. We continue to function in three languages – Warli, Hindi and English with most teachers teaching in all three languages.  […]

Communities

Located in Sogve, a typical tribal settlement of Dahanu, children come to the school mainly from the hamlets of Sogve, nearby villages of Jamshet, Chari, Agwan, Ganjad, Savta and Sarawali. The ethnic composition of children is largely tribal, comprising of the Warli tribe.

Located between the majestic Sahyadaris and the Arabian sea, Dahanu is popular for its chikoo and mango wadis. The tribal community of Warlis, once known as the Kings of the Jungle, reside in scattered villages across the hill range. With the changes in the forest laws and commodification of land along with prejudices and neglect over centuries, the Warli has reduced to a marginalised community. Most of them practice subsistence farming during the monsoons and work as daily wage labourers in fruit orchards, brick kilns and fishing boats for the rest of the year. Trapped in the cycle of economic deprivation with poor levels of literacy and health, the community is today at crossroads – ecologically, culturally, socially and politically. Struggling to survive the onslaughts of a globalised modern world, their rich oral cultural traditions are being subsumed in mindless homogeneity. […]

Sogve village, where the school is located is a typical example of the inadequacies in the education system. The village does have a government run Balwadi, however, in the absence of a dedicated building the Balwadi is run in a veranda of a mud house with the primary purpose of distributing the mandatory mid-day meal. The most impressionistic age of the tribal children is being wasted merely waiting for the mid-day meal while almost nothing is learnt.