Nandalal Bose painting “Village Huts” – National Gallery of Modern Art (New Delhi)

Bengali literature celebrated the natural, healthy Santal way of living, the black lissome Santal women providing a counterpoint to the pale cloistered ladies of urban Calcutta. Source: Partha Mitter. The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922–1947, p. 29

The Great Story-Wall Project – storytelling tour across India

There is a need to reclaim descriptions of the tribes; the onus must reside with the tribes themselves, since they have endured these portrayals for far too long. Richard Kamei in “Uncivilising the Mind: How anthropology shaped the discourse on tribes in India” (Caravan Magazine, 1 March 2021) The Great Story-Wall is a 100 metre … Read more

eBook | The No-Nonsense Guide to Indigenous Peoples

This guide looks beyond the exotic images tracing the story of different indigenous people from their first contact with explorers and colonizers to the present day. Much of this story is told by the indigenous people themselves and they present the issues behind the challenge to give them their own space in their own lands … Read more

“His significant legacy lives on”: Remembering Birsa Munda, the charismatic tribal leader who shook the British Empire – Jharkhand

Now fondly known as Mr Jharkhand, Munda died at the age of 25 more than a century ago, but his significant legacy lives on. […] A century after his death, Jharkhand was carved out of Bihar on his birth anniversary on November 15, 2000, and he is today fondly referred to as “Mr Jharkhand.” […] … Read more

“Fire in our Hearts”: Award winning tribal documentary – Thane/New York

A documentary film made by fifteen year-old Jayshree Janu Kharpade, a tribal girl from Wada taluka of Thane district, has won an award in the Asian American Film Festival held in New York recently [in 2012]. Jayashree, who studies in Eklavya Parivartan Vidyalaya here, made the 27-minute-long documentary- ‘Fire in our Hearts’ on the lives … Read more