Dalits: Struggle and Caste Liberation (D. Willis)

Last night we talked with Sri Ambuselvam of the Dalit Resource Center in Madurai. A young, handsome man deeply concerned with the terrible impact of caste, especially as it relates to untouchability.

Terminology is of course changing, and Dalit is the word Dalits use for themselves as well as the name most commonly used in Indian society today for those formerly called "untouchables" and, by Mahatma Gandhi, "Harijans" (Children of God). Even Amma, a staunch Gandhian, uses the term Dalits. I have never heard her use the word Harijan. "Dalit" means a scattering or dispersal, but it also implies a liberation from a system. Krishnammal has of course been working closely with Dalits for many years. In many ways, as she will tell you, they are the focus of her efforts.

Ambuselvam tells us that the most important goal in the liberation struggle now is to form an alliance of Dalits, what he calls the "Movement for Integrated Dalit Liberation Rights." There are numerous SC in India, the so-called Scheduled Castes and in India, the term which the government and much of the popular and academic media use for Dalits and which much of the popular and academic media uses as well. SC describes the reservations accorded to government jobs, places in university admissions, and other benefits for Dalits. The number of SC or Dalits in Tamil Nadu alone is 374, when all subcastes and others are included, 110 according to the government which subsumes many categories. So the most urgent need is to unite these various groups against the domination and oppression of other communities as well as historical structural injustice.

The Dalit Resource Center, located at the Tamil Nadu Theological Seminary, where much political activism is taking place, is concerned with learning strategies and legal support as well as cultural activities. They have work in 1700 villages around Madurai. Every year in May they hold a massive arts and music festival with 800 activists that goes on for 24 hours non-stop at TTS. Lots of drumming! The thappu, a large round drum made of cow-skin, is a special symbol of the Dalits and was traditionally used when the village crier, always a Dalit, walked around the village announcing the news. We note, too, a growing concern for gender and women in the Dalit movement in general and certainly in terms of the arts. Women drummers are a new and powerful sight for India. For Ambuselvam, and certainly for Amma, too, the most difficult challenges now are how the Dalits can emerge as a united, large movement.

Perhaps 20-25% of the Indian population is Dalit. If Dalits can overcome their differences (intercaste marriage is still more or less unknown) it will be a force to be reckoned with in Indian society and politics. And two of the most effective groups at the center of this change are Dr. K.S. Krishnasamy and the Pudhia Tamilzakam, the New Tamil Party, and the Dalit Panthers of India (DPI), led by Sri Thirumavalavan (and begun around the same time as the Black Panthers in the United States).

Dalit goals are the annihilation of caste, the promotion of Dalit identity (here, a Tamil nationalist identity), and Dalit integration, as Ambuselvam tells us. Echoing sentiments like those of the DPI, Ambuselvam says, very emphatically, "Dalits are not Hindu! We are Dalits. We have our own religion, our own community."

Thursday is a day of transition, preparing for the journey to Kuthur and LAFTI. I am asked to give a talk on ethnography in India to a group of American college students doing homestays with Indian families. We talk for two hours about caste and many other issues, a primary concern of theirs being gender roles, which are rapidly changing in India. They are a bright and curious group.

Sekar and I head to the northeast bus stand around three, beginning a six-hour journey through the traditional ancient districts of Madurai and Pudukottai to the heartland of Tamil Nadu in the Cauvery River Delta around Tanjore (Thanjavur) and then the coastal district of Nagappatinam where LAFTI is located.

Nagappatinam, mentioned in many ancient chronicles from around Asia, is the fountain-head of a great cultural transmission, one that would forever change the societies of Southeast and East Asia. It is from here, where Amma and Appa have located themselves, too, that so much of the culture and religion, especially Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as the social tructures, social values, and political statecraft of India flowed freely to Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, China, Korea, and Japan.

Learn from the Moment (D. Willis)

When I first met Amma and Appa in late 1977, I had just taken a long dusty bus ride down to the plains from 7,500 feet in the Southern Ghats, from Kodaiakanal International School where I was working teaching Indian history and society. We walked the last kilometer or so into "Gandhigram Deemed Rural University" and found their bungalow, an open breezy space.

Krishnammal warmly greeted my wife and I, asking how the journey had been. I was struck my how typically Tamil she was, a Tamil mother who would take care of anyone in her reach. And that she did. We slept on grass mats with sheets and awakened early, as all people in rural India do. Jagannathan was already spinning, mediating after his early morning yoga. I felt a little sheepish getting up so late. My main goals were simply to get to know Amma and Appa and to learn what they thought of the Sarvodaya movement, the central Gandhian force and movement remaining in India and Sri Lanka.

Jagannathan was, and is, Sarvodaya. This is his legacy from Vinoba Bhave and the Mahatma. I had volunteered to do an article for the Far Eastern Economic Review out of Hong Kong on Sarvodaya. What I came away with, I now realize, went far beyond the straight-forward matter-of-fact information which Americans are always demanding. Amma and Appa in their kind, gentle, Dravidian Tamil way had shown me that change need not be fancy or complex. That we need to get back to some of our roots as human beings together.

Our days in Gandhigram then, and when we visited later, were filled with simple routine, what the Japanese call kata or form. The routines of the day of Amma and Appa were like the asanas of yoga, the exercises designed more for breathing and experiencing our inner selves than for physical effects. What we learned from sitting around the Pongal Harvest Festival circle, waiting for the milk to boil, signaling the presence of spirits and ourselves in a special celebration, the women in their saris with lines and dots of Shiva, Parvati, Vishnu, and Lakshmi on their foreheads ululating a call of ‘here and now,’ was to learn from the moment, reflect upon it, and seek action.

My trip this time is a research trip for a grant I have been kindly given by a research team from Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto as I noted earlier. Professor Lim Bon and Professor Julie Higashi invited me to join their research team, which is studying the recovery and renaissance of ethnic minority communities. This is a wide-ranging project supported by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology. I had originally planned to visit Amma and Appa from last October for the purposes of trying to understand change agents and the many social and cultural issues facing Dalits and other oppressed communities in South India.

And then the tsunami came. I will be sharing with you my continuing thoughts on what is happening in South India, and especially with LAFTI and Amma and Appa, perhaps two or three more times during my stay there. Please do feel free to send me questions to this blog. My main goals are simply to raise consciousness in a continuing way as David and Donatella, perhaps taking a different tack, that of the anthropologist activist.

I am keen to support the efforts of reconstruction and in this spirit encourage all of you who know of Amma and Appa to write letters of support for the Right Livelihood Award that David Albert has initiated for LAFTI and these two great living saints. Recognition is important, but even more, beyond that, are the resources and profile that will come with the award, enabling them and LAFTI to give even more help to those who need it most.

Tomorrow Sekar and I will go to Kuthur and the LAFTI Ashram.

The Other David

Madurai (D. Willis)

The early morning departure area is abuzz even at 5:30 a.m., many flights going all over India. The heat of the day means that most flights in India take off or land as early or as late as possible. The signs of a newly invasive capitalism are everywhere. India like China has chosen to open the flood-gates to a new economics. It is a different India that the one I knew in the 1970s, when it could take up to three hours to get out of the airport. The night before I was out in 50 minutes. Some benefits come with this new wave, but there are many who cannot come close to these benefits.

My flight to Madurai is on a propeller plane, and all I can see is the haze and clouds, the smoke of fires from burning straw, the dust, always the dust. Landing in Madurai, which has a small airport some seven kilometers form the city, I am met by my brother J. Rajasekaran, who will help me with interviews and visits as well as accompany me to Nagapattinam and LAFTI on Thursday after we have done some work in Madurai.

Sekar greets me in Tamil and I reply, my Tamil rusty from so many years away. It is good to see him. Sekar is an anthropologist and fieldworker who was born and brought up in Madurai and who is now the coordinator of the University of Wisconsin program in Madurai along with his wife Vidya, who is the Director. We have known each other 35 years. He is also an impressive vocalist of classical Carnatic music, a collector of folklore and folk-songs, and a rock-and-roll musician famous all over Tamil Nadu.

Madurai is a temple city for the Goddess Meenakshi. Worth looking up on the net, and you will be rewarded if you check for images. A pilgrimage site for people from all over India, Madurai is the home to perhaps 1.6 million people. When I first came to Madurai in 1970, there were 400,000 people. The village I lived in outside the city has now become part of the city. There are people, and there has been development, everywhere. The wild ride into the city, which is one of my three home-towns (the others being in Iowa and Japan), feels comfortable as it is eye-opening. India is full of life everywhere. In the space of a few hundred meters, you will encounter children going to school, cows wandering on the street, grandmas watering down the dust in front of their homes, vendors of numerous goods from bicycles, bullock carts, goats, dogs, water buffalo, cars, trucks, buses, and more. The cacophony, the din, is intense. When you drive in India as our taxi cab driver is doing, you constantly lean on your horn and keep your eyes out everywhere for something or someone darting out in front of you or turning towards you. The rules of the road in India are to follow the flow and be ready for anything.

We go to the apartment Sekar has found for me on the northern edge of the city after crossing over the Vaigai River. I should mention that Madurai has a history that goes back somewhere around four or five thousand years. This is a rich multitude of cultures with Hindu predominating, but many Muslims, Christians, and others as well. After getting me settled and having a talk about our plans coming up, we go the University of Wisconsin program house, where I meet the five American college students, all of whom have interesting projects and speak quite good Tamil. My own Tamil is somewhere in the recesses of my mind, and I feel the lesson of disability that comes with not being able to participate fully in what is going on around me. It is an important lesson for all of us. As the day goes on my Tamil slowly comes back, always in encounters with local folks. It is a fluid language like Japanese that pays more attention to exchanges between people than preciseness about tense, descriptive adjectives.

I hit the ground running with Sekar. He is nothing if not energy, curiosity, and warmth. I am lucky to have a brother like him. Soon after lunch we begin our research forays for interviews, collections of materials, and so on. The first interview is at the Tamil Nadu Theological Seminary (TTS), an activist institution with ties to the activist Christian community in Germany, America, and elsewhere. TTS has both a Social Analysis Center and a Dalit Resource Center. I will spend time during the next two days at these centers interviewing various people, but the first person I want to meet is Gabriele Dietrich, a remarkable Indian scholar-activist.

Garbiele has worked with Krishnammal and Jagannathan, something I only discovered some time after I had found her writings on the internet. You can see an important essay of hers if you type her name or the title of this paper, one among many as she is a prolific scholar, "Inculturation Versus Globalization?" The title says it all, but the depth of theory and the urgent, compelling flow of the writing, impatient at times, is towards an activism expressed in different ways by Amma and Appa.

We enter the compound of TTS after a dusty bike ride through the crowded, dusty, hot, and eye-opening streets of Madurai. Nothing prepares you for India, least of all Madurai. But I am right at home, happy to be dodging bullocks, hearing the loud bulbous honks from trucks equipped with a horn out of the Model T era, watching children coming home from school in their uniforms, smelling the ‘hotels’ cafes with banana-leaf meals. You cannot get bored in India.

I am a little sorry for Gabriele as we are arriving unannounced. I had tried to contact her by an email address I found on the web, but the messages kept getting bounced back. Not suprising, I guess, there being many more important matters than computers in India. Sekar has called ahead to the Social Analysis unit where Gabriele works, or perhaps the Dalit Resource Center, and learned that a good time to catch her is around 3:30 or 4:00 after her mid-day nap, something all sensible Indians have, of course.

We knock of the door of her bungalow and are greeted in Tamil by a handsome young European-looking young man, apparently her son. After some time Gabriele appears in her sari, a bit groggy and just waking up, peering at us through her glasses. She seems to be in her late 40s or early 50s, but I learn later she has already had a festschrift published, which is usually done when you are 60.

And who are these strangers in my house? All of the initial greetings are in Tamil, mostly by Sekar, with me saying a bit before switching into English. I explain who I am and why I am in India this time for research. She listens quietly, intently. I feel myself being judged, calculations of time and energy and efficiency. Who is this random guy and how quickly, or should, I send him off? But I am intent on my story and my purposes. And her work is elegant, sparse, hard-hitting, and always returns to what use is it, her writing, for the activist works at hand and the needs of the oppressed. There is much I can learn from her, I can tell, just from this essay I have found on the web. Please listen, Gabriele, if you will, to my story.

Gabriele came to India around the same time I did, in the early 1970s. She and her husband stayed, became Indian citizens (she from Germany, he from the Netherlands), and approached the problems of Indian society and the enormous needs that are out there through social democratic and theological approaches. But this is not the time she is going to tell me any of this. "What can I do for you?" is the direct question after my brief introduction (in which I thought I had already told her).

Then I tell her that we are journeying in a few days to Nagappatinam to see Krishnamal and Jagannathan. I can feel a wholesale change in the tenor and atmosphere of the room. Ah, Krishnammal… Coffee appears and we get to the point, how we would like to learn more about her writings and what she sees as her key works. It is rather a cheeky approach of mine, but I am keen to learn from her, as I said.

Gabriele’s scholarship is deep and wide-ranging. And always comes around to the question of how knowledge can be used. I am reminded of my friend and colleague James Banks, the great scholar of multicultural education, who has a similar concern for the construction of knowledge. We have a discussion that goes from Dalits and violence to gender, transgression, transcendence. Post-colonial feminist theory. Women as the last colony? An important and clearly hard-hitting discourse today, but Gabriele thinks we need to realize that it is much more challenging, that what is really happening is a neo-colonization of the spirit and of societies. You don’t need external colonization any longer if you have an effective internal colonization. The question is, is it possible to build alliances between internal colonies? As she notes in her writing, "Production for Life and Livelihood vs. Production for Profit is the sustained focus in the struggles of marginalized women and in the National Alliance of People’s Movements."

Oh, and by the way, can you get me some good pictures of Krishnammal? We need it for an award we are applying for, for her and other activist women…

The Other David

Roots (D. Willis)

On the way from Singapore’s Changi Airport to my friends Paul and Louise yesterday, to their old colonial bungalow on Holland Road, I had a taxi driver who was a Malay Singaporean named Mohammed Ismaili. People, by the way do not appreciate the very deep diversity in Muslim cultures. There are not two or even three dimensions to Muslims. Ismaili, for example: it is worth looking it up to get a glimpse of one particular set of Muslim communities that belie so many of our media stereotypes of Muslims. For the Ismailis belong to what is and has been for centuries really a transnational, transcultural, hybridized, Creolized set of multiple, related cultures.

Anyway, what did my taxi driver friend think of the tsunami? "Ah, I’m fed up with the tsunami," he said, "Too much news about it, la." "Yeah, I said, there has been a lot of news." And then, after some silence he said, "Do you know what was most amazing about the tsunami?" I started to answer, but he immediately spoke, taking the words from my mouth:

"What was most amazing about the tsunami? It was that everybody in the world got it. They all understood what it was about, that we needed to come together, that this affected all of us. And people’s generosity was so great. No more fighting, no more using the military for that. Instead they are where they can really help. And are helping."

For me, this linkage, the bonds like these between people, really began appearing in my landscape when I went to India in 1970. My first visit to Tamil Nadu was in late December of that year, when I arrived after a four-month trek overland from Europe, through the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Northern India. The epic nature of this journey only gradually began to dawn on me during those travels. It was a different era and a different kind of travel, more adventure than tour. We did not know where we were going or staying. There was almost no road map other than word of mouth, which there was a lot of, and certainly no Lonely Planet travel guide. And it was not always very safe. But something was calling me, maybe my pioneer Quaker roots, maybe my ancestors way back wandering on the savannah.

My great-great grandfather Harvey had walked to California from the East Coast. The year was 1849. He found gold. A friend who traveled with him wrote ‘Guide to the Goldfields’ so we know about this, and then Harvey came back to Iowa to found a town with his brother John named Perry (not, thank god, Willisville, which they had first thought of, though the main street still is Willis Avenue). They had been dissenting Quakers, their ancestors going first to Nantucket from England (the New England whaling families, including my relatives the Macy’s, were all Quakers), then the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina, where they founded the Lost Creek Meeting, the first religious body in the South calling for immediate manumission of all slaves. Soon after we find them in Richmond, Indiana, the atmosphere having become a little "hot", I imagine, in the South. So, my pioneer roots are there, I guess, at least partly what compelled me to search and discover new worlds. Only this time it was new worlds in old worlds.

During my life in an Indian village outside of Madurai called Naraynapuram, village of the primeval cosmic man, I met many remarkable people, among them my brother J. Rajasekaran, who will be traveling to LAFTI with me next weekend. And I found my career, anthropology and later education, a love of the life and diversity of peoples. So that is what I do. Being an anthropologist, an educator, and someone who does cultural studies (more an English than the North American approach) has been rewarding and challenging. Working for nearly twenty years in a Japanese Buddhist university in Osaka, I have not been able to forget my other roots in South India.

Three of the most remarkable people I have ever met were Dick Keithan, Krishnammal, and Jagannathan. Keithanji had been an American missionary who had worked with Mahatma Gandhi and was thrown out of his mission for this revolutionary activity. He became an Indian citizen and walked the walk, and talked the talk, with the Gandhians, becoming one himself along with his friends Krishnammal and Jagannathan. I met Dick in Kodaikanal in 1976, where I had gone to teach in a mission school in the process of becoming international. He and I spent hours in his bungalow up on the road to Pillar Rocks talking about social change and the Gandhian movement. Of course, the Mahatma himself. And Krishnammal and Jagannathan, his friends down on the plains.

Dick encouraged me to meet them. Not long after that, my friend David Albert, who was in India for a conference, let me know that he was going to Gandhigram to stay with new friends he had met, and would I like to join him. Their names were Krishnammal and Jagannathan.

OM SHANTI OM,

The Other David

The Other David (D. Willis)

Osaka-Singapore - En Route

From Japan in winter to the tropics is a welcome change. To go back to my home, one of my homes, in Madurai, South India, is special indeed. This may be a somewhat different contribution, coming as it does from an Iowan from Japan, an American who lived five years in Dravidian India, an anthropologist who is also an educator.

Thank you first of all to my sponsors for this research trip, Professor Lim Bon and Professor Julie Higashi of Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan, as well as the Study Group for the Recovery and Rennaissance of Ethnic Community and Japan’s Ministry of Education for their support. I had originally planned this research trip last fall to visit Madurai, then Krishnammal and Jagannathan with my research project concerning Dalits, the untouchables of India, and change-makers in their communities and others in mind. The tsunami disaster has made work like ours even more important, and this visit is also an opportunity to share with LAFTI the generosity of people in Japan and the outpouring of support.

A special thank you, of course, to David and Aliyah and Donatella for their writings, their reflections, their warmth, and their passion for India, and for sharing with us news of our brothers and sisters in Nagapattinam and environs. And most of all for a deeper understanding of the works and lives of Krishnammal and Jagannathan, two veritable saints of our time who have opened our hearts to some of what is happening in deep India. They are two living giants who have given us pause to consider the larger picture of where our lives co-mingle with those affected by the tsunami, by haves and have-nots, by class, by caste, by the oppression of an economic and social system that upholds tradition in the service of, let us be very open about this, apartheid.

An apartheid of the society and the spirit, it also an apartheid of our spirit as humans, as our actions cleave us off from our environment. Nature has been literally torn asunder from us, the prawn farms of coastal Asia, wreaking havoc on what had been more or less balanced eco-systems, being just one example. The ripping apart of local cultural fabrics that has ensued cannot be underestimated.

It is easy to think otherwise, however, when we look upon some new scene for the first time, imagining that it has always been that way. Journalists are like that, reporting only on the thin layers of cultures and histories. Those of us with the perspective of time on a particular environment are drawn in, on the other hand, to the enormous meddling with the environment which is going on these days. Of course, humankind has always manipulated environments, the pristine natural environments of North America or even the African savannah prior to the coming of the Europeans, having been shown to have the deep imprint of man shaping his environment. Often in the past, though, our ancestors also demonstrated wisdom and balance, a sensitivity when approaching the environment, which was often honored and held sacred as a trust for all the community and all sentient beings. But it is different today.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I am ‘the Other David,’ a name which suits me fine as I have been that ‘Other’ for most of my life. I come to this place through a serendipitous path. David Albert and I were fellow travelers, as the old and apt expression goes, back in the early 1970s in Chicago. We were both students at the university there, David in Social Thought (the name always bemused me) and myself in another transdisciplinary melding, of anthropology, history, political science, geography, and, above all, South Asia. David had come to the University of Chicago because it offered the best in contemporary philosophy with a social praxis; I because it was the best place to study South Asia in the world. What we were really studying was the street and life in Chicago, watching the world, readying ourselves for the plunge.

We had some memorable times together, working with the FOR (Fellowship of Reconciliation), the AFSC (American Friends Service Committee), and in general stirring up trouble when it was necessary and called for in the society. The Vietnam War was raging and there was much work to do: of course protesting the war that had killed our friends and so many others, the B1 bomber, nuclear weapons and nuclear power, environmental disasters. At the same time supporting movements for racial reconciliation, Amerasian orphans in Saigon, racial and economic justice in our own country. We hung out in the blues clubs of the South Side on the weekends, and in the early hours of Sunday morning were on funky Maxwell Street. Much of the rest of the week, we could be found in the Regenstein Library, that fortress of academia on the site of the first sustained atomic chain reaction, commemorated by a large Henry Moore sculpture in brass that could be interpreted variously as a mushroom cloud, a skull, or the beginning (and end) of us all.

But let’s get back to where we are now, in 2005, at the beginning of a new year, only a week old on the Chinese lunar calendar, a year that we hope and pray is better than the last one. The tsunami and its aftermath have been present in so many ways this past month for me, even in snowy Japan. I knew when the first reports came to the Japanese media that this was not a typical tsunami. The range was too great, the devastation likely huge. Those of us who live in coastal Japan knew this immediately. Tsunamis are part of life in Japan, and occasionally they deal a blow so devastating that the terror of that event is deeply, indelibly etched in our minds. The terror is palpable.

Those of us who live in Japan are thus hyper-vigilant, and especially those of us who live in Kobe, at the least sign of shaking in our natural environment. Earthquake reports flash across the top of our TV screens in a matter of minutes, literally two or three minutes after they have happened, with an audible beep-beep alarm. Tsunami warnings follow very quickly (the word is, as some people in the Great Tsunami seem to have already forgotten, Japanese).

Soon after any earthquake above a 4 or 5 on the Richter Scale there is on everyone’s mind, the question: Will there be a tsunami? If there is one coming, and that does happen often, will it be like the common storm surge, maybe a meter (two to three feet)? Or will it be something far worse? We cannot take chances.

I live on an island off the port of Kobe in western Japan, knowing that the second floor where my apartment is located is not going to be of much help when something happens out in the water in Osaka Bay. Even Osaka Bay has been visited by tsunami in the recent past. During the past three hundred years there have been five tsunamis here, three of them involving significant casualties and loss of life. Most folks do not know this, assuming we are free from such calamities. I learned about it after reading histories of the Kansai some years ago, information buried in arcane books but made all the more real now by what has happened off Sumatra. Still, we know tsunami well in Japan.

But there has never been a tsunami in Japan like the Great Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004.

Slow Food

Thanks to Donatella. She is completing her stint with LAFTI now, and is headed back to Italy, with our sincere appreciation.

Meanwhile, things continue apace. The blog will soon be taken up by my friend Dr. David Willis of Soai University. David met Amma and Appa for the first time approximately three days after I first got to their home – Christmas Day, 1977. And he speaks fluent Tamil (and Japanese, of course), and so this is always an opportunity to get questions answered that I haven’t managed yet!

After meeting with Krishnammal, Vandana Shiva returned to Italy. There was a large public meeting at the University of Turin (500 people or so.) At the end of the meeting, Carlo Petrini, the head of the international Slow Foods movement (www.slowfood.com), announced that they are going to help spearhead an effort to boycott "industrial shrimp" from the Third World. This should be a big boost to all of our efforts. If you don’t know about "slow foods", this is a good opportunity to find out!

I am pleased to note that I have heard of several study groups sprouting up around the English edition of "The Color of Freedom". If any of you need any help getting books in bulk, just let me know. All proceeds (not profits, but proceeds) from the sale of the book go directly to LAFTI – since I pay half-price for the books, it means I donate a dollar for every dollar you spend on them. Don’t know how long that will last, but it would be nice to find out!

Also, we received two wonderful reviews of the book, from Joanna Rogers Macy and John Taylor Gatto:

"The Color of Freedom is TERRIFIC! I read it with breathless attention and shouts of joy! This is exactly the kind of book we need: a real-life story with real-life heroes whose travails and triumphs enrich our own experience, seeding new possibilities. In this dark time, this book is both spiritually satisfying and strategically invigorating. These people are moral giants, in comparison with whom we are like pygmies. After the strong review of multinational shrimp farming, I think that I have eaten my last prawn!"

-- Joanna Rogers Macy, author,
Widening Circles and Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World

"Be forewarned: this is a provocative and dangerous book. The Color of Freedom is seemingly an account of the marvelous passion of a man and a woman, but make no mistake: it is really about you and the hidden strength which you have yet to draw upon."

-- John Taylor Gatto, former New York State Teacher of the Year, and author,
The Underground History of American Education

Finally, I am going out speaking again. Mostly in the homeschooling world, where I am best known of course. But I am happy to combine trips with talks about the tsunami, Amma and Appa, and the prawn atrocities – just send me an e-mail and we can kibbitz!

Best wishes –

David

Wasteland

I'm still struggling to get my last bit of sleep despite the voices in the courtyard , the roaring engine of the truck and the barking dogs, when I hear the door of my room shake under the powerful banging of the typical Tamil-style wake-up call. T. Muttakumar informs me that the car is ready, waiting to take me to the famous (mangrove) lagoon, as organized and arranged by Krishnammal. so that I have something to do while she's away in Chennai.

By now I've learnt to ask the key question, that is, whether I have to be ready "immediately" and "immediately" I'm reassured that I don't need to be "immediately" ready. The term itself, although so much used and abused in India, should indeed be cancelled from the Anglo-Indian vocabulary as its meaning very rarely has any basis in the real world.

It's a wonderful, old Ambassador that is waiting for me in front of the LAFTI office, already blessed and perfumed by the burning joss-stick stuck in the dashboard. On board there's me, the driver, a LAFTI worker whose name I can't understand as he seems to be able to produce a single sound, some sort of a syllable-less vibration to answer any question I ask him, so I give up and decide to call him simply "trrtrtrrrtr" to make things easier; and Mariputhu, who is the most fluent in English.

After the indispensable stop at a chai shop just outside Thiruvarur, we drive across the gorgeous and by now familiar Tamil Nadu countryside, passing by small rural villages, huge and shady trees and rows and rows of tall and slender palms. It looks ever more beautiful when contemplated from the window of the comfortable Ambassador where I sit back and relax, happily exempted from the lively Tamil conversation that goes on among my three companions.

After some hesitations, a couple of wrong turns and some information gathered from meditative peasants, we get onto a bumpy direct road that from the green paddy-fields takes us out into a wide expanse of barren and cracked land that vanishes into the flat horizon where something is shimmering, like water, the lagoon perhaps or a mirage maybe.

We stop again and while the sun is rising higher and higher in the sky and the wind keeps on blowing, a long conversation/negotiation takes place with a man who appears from nowhere, looks a bit like a sadhu but is equipped with ropes, a sickle, and a water jar and goes on talking and talking and giggling from time to time.

Then a boy on a bicycle comes and leaves and, finally, I'm given a short summary of what has been discussed so far: first that we'll have to walk about four miles under the sun to reach the lagoon; then that a boat is being arranged to take us there and, finally, as the boat is not available, Marimuthu in his very concise English, gives me a very short description of what a lagoon is -water! - and invites me to use my imagination to visualize it as there's no way to get to the real one.

Then a third character materializes in front of us: a short and stout man on a motorbike who turns out to be in charge of one of those pumps that draws water from the canal and pours it into the wasteland to make salt - if I understand correctly what Marimuthu tells me in his minimal English.

For a second, the "imagination" option is considered again, but the next minute, there are three of us (the pump-guardian, Marimuthu, and myself) riding the motorbike to reach the mangroves.

Beside an imaginary line that marks the border of the wasteland starts the reforestation area where small mangroves are starting to grow along the narrow canals dug by the local Forestry Board. We leave the bike and proceed on foot through the low bushes until we reach the border of the mythical lagoon. We are five kilometers away from the ocean and 15 kilometers from Sri Lanka, I'm told. The sun is high in the sky now and beats fiercely on us but the wind is still blowing and now I can feel the distant smell of the sea in it and make out tiny seashells in the mud, and using my "imagination", I can see the coast and the nearby island, devastated by war and tsunami. A heron stands hesitantly on one leg, a worn-out boat is abandoned on the shore, some birds set off flying, all around us there is water, sky and the low skyline of the mangrove forest vanishing at the horizon.

Behind us, instead, beyond that imaginary line, which I fear the economic interests of a few will try to push further and further ahead, is the dried-up, gray, and cracked land destined to produce salt and breed the infamous prawns.

Just a visual consideration would be enough to condemn this environmental crime but unfortunately this is not purely an aesthetic concern. The damage is subtle and unstoppable, it seeps into the ground, kills fertility and vegetation, opens up the way to floods and consequent misery. And the old beat goes on: a few get richer and richer whilst India and its people are left with neither profits, nor jobs … nor prawns (!!!) but a sad expanse of wasteland.

Up at 2!

"The brick-making program is proceeding full-speed!" Krishnammal tell me, shining with joy. So now I understand what has been going on in the last couple of days very early in the morning in LAFTI’s courtyard. The Army of Compassion is made up by an ever-increasing number of volounteers coming from different village. They are given food under the large, shady shed in LAFTI’s courtyard. and the women in the kitchen are working incessantly to cook mountains of rice and fill buckets and buckets with sambar and vegetables, as well as producing hundreds and hundreds of idlis (steamed rice and lentil cakes) in the morning, whilst lodging is provided in the adjacent workers' house.

Immediately after sunrise, the Army corps members board the truck that takes them to the brick-making site. They will return only after sunset, when tasty and abundant meals will again be served to them by those kitchen angels that never seem to get tired of working. I woke up today to the workers' voices, getting ready to board the truck, and found out that Amma had been out at the villages since 4 o' clock in the morning. Now that she's back, I sit with her in the breezy verandah in front of her house to listen to all that she has been living, experiencing, and doing since last night.

Sometime before 2 a.m. she woke up and couldn't possibly go back to sleep . So she prayed God and asked Him what was there so urgent He wanted to tell her to prevent her from sleeping. She sat thinking and praying and meditating for a while until finally at 4 o' clock she decided to go to Palankallinedu, where LAFTI has organised a brick-making unit. When she got there, she found out they were waiting for her to help them solve the fuel problem: what could they fire the bricks with?

Just then, Natraj turned up from a nearby village, bringing the good news that the Sub-Collector is giving them a large piece of bushland to be cleared, so that there will be wood for them to bake the bricks. Krishnammal had visited the Sub-Collector a couple of days ago and he had indeed mentioned the piece of land he intended to give her to get wood, but she hadn't yet been informed that this had actually happened. So there is she, arriving at the brick-making site just at the right moment to announce the good news and give the people powerful motivation and inspiration to carry on with the job so that, with LAFTI’s support and God’s blessing, they will soon be able to live in decent and solid homes.

"You see," she says, smiling with joy, "I've always sought divine guidance in my work and always believed that nothing is impossible. Anything is possible as long as you have faith!"

But her faith is proactive in nature. She is definitely not sitting and waiting for miracles to happen and for gifts to be dropped from heaven. She is taking the challenge, constantly, daily, unshakably with the amazing energy and determination which are indeed the gifts God provided her with. And, in days like this, she feels and is indeed rewarded and once again confirmed in that radiant and inspiring faith that keeps her "running, running, organizing, organizing" non-stop, every day and night, all along her generous life which we all wish will go on forever!

Donatella

(maybe a little bit of it could rub off on the rest of us? David)

Chai

Buongiorno! Krishnammal's deep and warm voice awakens me up at 5.30 a.m., as it was decided last night "to go to the villages" and to see what the tsunami really meant to them. The huge starry sky of Tamil Nadu is still dark, the air is still cool and pleasant as the LAFTI courtyard comes alives and the muezzin from the nearby mosque is chanting his first call to prayer. I sleepwalk onto the jeep and sit next to Krishnammal , who has been up and awake since 4 o'clock and is now repeating some Italian words to me, as we have decided to have a short lesson every day. She's a really clever pupil, with an amazing memory and a stunning talent for pronunciation.

By now everybody at LAFTI knows that I am totally chai-addicted and they amusedly let me indulge my addiction. So the first stop is at Kilvelur, stirring with life at 6 o’ clock in the morning, where I drink up two delicious chais; they an the beauty of the countryside at sunrise make me forget about my sleepiness .

Our jeep proceeds slowly along the bumpy, narrow, dirt street running across paddy-fields lined with coconut-trees and dotted with lovely ponds covered with lotus flowers. There is lively, non- stop Tamil conversation on board of the jeep; I don't understand a single word of it, of course, but I let myself be carried away by those rounded, rhythmical and, to me, mysterious sounds, and by the beauty of the landscape.

We stop at a tiny village where a small crowd immediately gathers around Amma. Shining eyes, swinging heads, they all listen to her as she apparently scolds a young woman - but gently and with some humour too, as it seems. Back on the road, I ask her what the problem was. She tells me that the young woman lost her mother in the tsunami and went straight to Krishnammal to seek relief without bothering to go to the Collector and get what she was entitled to. Krishnammal smiles and concludes: "These people are so lazy!" And that's why her role and her constant presence here are so important, valuable, and irreplaceable.

As we drive on, I start thinking that, besides being such a wonderful person, Krishnammal should also be a seed to be sown into Tamil Nadu fields (those that are still fertile and not yet salinised by prawn-farming) so that many more people like her may grow, gifted with that same blend of determination and energy, kindliness, deep faith, and compassion that makes her so special.

We drive on, and the countryside gets sadder and sadder and turns into some sort of a wasteland because now there are large rectangles of arid and cracked land along the road, some already filled with seawater to breed the infamous prawns. Just before reaching Nagapattinam, we stop to visit a dalit community that lives some hundreds meters from the coast ,but doesn't belong to the fishermen community and therefore is not eligible for tsunami relief. They are now surrounded by barren fields no longer cropped, but used for prawn farming that expose their wretched village to devastating floods. Out of the mudhuts come women, men, and children. They surround
Krishnammal and tell her about their misery. Because of the prawn farms, they lost their jobs as laborers in the fields, and during last season torrential rainfalls their miserable village was flooded with seawater. LAFTI helped them out with rice, fabric, and sambar powder, but Ama reassures them and promises that she won't let them down and will find the means to alleviate their poverty and hasten them to join the protest against prawn farming.

We finally get to Nagapattinam where I can see what I saw on TV back home and filled me with horror, pain, and compassion. Life has picked up again and goes on almost as usual, one would say: much of the wreckage has been removed, but there is still much left and I see people walking around and filling their baskets with scraps, bits of wood, objects, and whatever else they find. The Central Government built some temporary sheds. "How long will the people live in these?" I ask Krishnammal. Three months at least, she answers me. I try to believe her but I'm not convinced.

There are no boats at sea, nor fishing nets on the beach. People read the newspaper while watching a bulldozer removing wreckage; the children are back at school and a crowded train slowly goes by amid overthrown boats, badly damaged houses, and uprooted bushes. Under such a blue sky and in such bright sunshine, the whole scene looks almost unreal and it's hardly possible for me to even imagine the shock of the sudden tragedy.

I treat myself to yet another chai before leaving Nagapattinam while Krishnammal is browsing the paper and showing me the picture of herself and Jagannathan facing the crowd that came to attend the conference they called to protest against prawn farming a few days ago. It's 10 o'clock, and on the way back to Kuthur, Amma holds my hand in hers and yawning tells me that she's hungry now; then she leans her head onto my shoulder and takes one of her micro-naps .She'll wake up 10 minutes later as we stop in front of LFTI office, fresh and awake and ready to tackle a whole series of activities and people awaiting her as the day has just started - although she's been up and around for 6 hours already.

The Brickmaking Site

Today Amma, Appa, some LAFTI workers and I drove to the place where a large brick-making unit, organized by LAFTI , will start operating very soon.

On a bumpy road across the paddy-fields we reached a large area very close to the river Cauvery - a very peaceful and beautiful site indeed, where Krishnammal used to come to sit and meditate as she told me. Some 100 people from 3 villages were clearing the ground of bushes to make room for brickmaking. Water will be pumped from the close-by river and taken to the site through a pipeline.

After some cheerful singing accompanied by hand-clapping, first Amma and then Appa - who in the meanwhile had been sitting on a mat spinning - gave speeches to encourage all the people, men and women alike, to join forces and make bricks that they will use to build better and more solid houses for themselves and their families.

In every village, Krishnammal told me, here are many different political parties, each one of them trying to attract people with various programs and promises, thus dividing them without bringing any real development. LAFTI's project intends to unite the village people by giving them a program and an objective as well as a job during the summer months when there is no work in the fields - all the while encouraging their sense of self-esteem and responsibility for their own futures.

LAFTI is also encouraging the people to join the "Army of Compassion" by providing them with a uniform that they will wear possibly while working and definitely while marching to the brickmaking site as a way to identify with their job and mission as well, as to inspire more people to join them

Tonight, people from other villages are expected to turn up at the LAFTI office to receive instructions and be enrolled in the Army of Compassion . In a couple of days, once the area is properly cleaned and the water supply is arranged , the "Army" will start making bricks that the youths will then take to the villages to build houses.

After Amma's and Appa's long and passionate speeches, a pooja ritual was performed and we all pronounced prayers and shared the ritual offerings. Then mats were rolled up, and everybody stood up to go back to work, while Amma, Appa and Iwent back to Vinoba Ashram. In the next days we'll visit the brickmaking unit again - which will receive people from more and more villages - to support their good-will and encourage them to carry on with the project for their own sake and improvement of their living conditions.

The "Army of Compassion", a community-based project, has one aim: that the toiling masses should no longer live in wretched mud-huts. We thank you for your continuing support.

--
Jagannathan wrote two letters today, one to the District Collector, and one to "Benefactors" (that means us!) Here they are:

To
The District Collector
District Collector's Office
Nagapattinam.

Dear Sir,

The Tsunami is a curse to mankind but at the same time by God's grace human love crosses all physical boundaries and from far and wide, irrespective of nationality, caste and greed, brings support and co-operation and we were able to experience this human love of sharing with the suffering people.

But at the same time we are also experiencing the human weaknesses of selfishness and greed: the prawn company magnets do not yet realise the horrors of prawn culture, one of the main causes for this tragedy. Prawn farming not only contaminates our Mother Earth and pollutes drinking water but it also pollutes the seawater by its daily outflow of poisonous chemical fluids into the sea. We read in the press your declaration that Nagapattinam District should be free from prawn farming. I understand that in many coastal areas the prawn magnets are greedy and preparing to start prawn culture again. Prawn culture is an evil factor in human society.

May I appeal to you to prohibit prawn culture in the coastal areas of Nagapattinam District. This ban should be immediately issued so that the prawn magnets do not start this poisonous venture again.

Yours sincerely,

(S. Jagannathan)
--


All the Tsunami Benefactors:

Dear Friends,

This Tsunami calamity was not only s disastrous, but at the same time by God's grace human hearts from many part of the Worlds are hastening to help the Tsunami victims, hardworking peasants and fishermen. Many of the poor families lost their children and earning members and they are very grateful that you are rushing forward to help them with temporary and permanent measures and solid living quarters with sanitary facilities. Sarvodaya workers feel proud cooperating with you so that your help reaches the poorest and the most needy people.

We know that the prawn magnets are also appealing to the World Bank and other benefactors to get compensation for their loss due to the Tsunami. As you know the prawn magnets hail from well-to-do rich people and they have reaped heavy profits during all these years by prawn culture to the detriment of the economic and health conditions of the poor peasants and fishermen. They are not only polluting their soil and drinking water and destroying trees and mangroves. But they also pollute the seawater by the daily flow of poisonous fluids from the prawn tanks into the sea.

I hope:

(1) benefactors will give their contribution to the suffering population.

(2) benefactors will not only help restoring safe and healthy housing conditions but they will also contribute to safeguard the coastal area with a green belt of mangroves, trees and other bushes, as a permanent safety measure against floods and cyclones. This permanent measure is as important as providing healthy living conditions to the poor peasants and fishermen.

Yours sincerely,

(S. Jagannathan)

Arrival!

Here I am at LAFTI again. After a rather long journey - by air, by train and finally on board of a LAFTI jeep, kindly escorted by smiling Jagadheesan - I finally arrive in front of the LAFTI office where they are all waiting for me. Krishnammal welcomes me with her usual grace and warm smile, but tonight she is particularly shining with inspiration.

I understand that I've arrived on a very special day.

It all started on January 30th, known as Martyr Day. On that day, Gandhi was killed by a religious fanatic. LAFTI celebrates that day with prayer and by observing a fast. In Tiruvarur, they organized a rally that reached the riverside where there was a stone pillar indicating that, on 1948. Jagannathan dissolved the ashes of Gandhi in the river water. Every year, LAFTI folks hold a big rally and celebrate this day with prayer and fasting, and take oath to dedicate their lives to the country. This year the police refused to give permission for a big rally because of the tsunami. So they held a smaller rally, but the solemn prayer and collective oath to struggle for a better society have been pronounced again.

Immediately after that, LAFTI workers went to one area, Thalainayar, to participate in community work. During the time of the floods, the whole area was damaged by saltwater from the prawn farms. The prawn farm owners used to bring saltwater to cultivate the prawns. The saltwater reached the villages and standing crops were submerged under water. People from 17 villages, men and women gathered in that particular area and decided to build a wall to prevent the penetration of seawater. They started early in the morning, but were obstructed by the police. The whole crowd was waiting for LAFTI workers to come and start the work again. So it happened successfully and the wall was built.

But two days ago Krishnammal went to Thalainayar area again only to discover that the prawn farms are being restored , despite their catastrophic impact on the environment and the subsistence of so many people. Furthermore the landless poor who joined in building the wall were threatened that they would lose their harvesting jobs. So immediately, LAFTI organized a conference that has taken place today, February 5th.

Despite the short notice, a huge crowd came to attend the conference, denouncing the restoration of prawn farms despite the severe damage they cause to the environment and the people. For a whole day men and women sat and listened to Krishnammal and Jagannathan's inspiring words, confirming their determination to continue the struggle to stop the prawn farms along the coast of Tamil Nadu and restore the natural habitat.

Today with Krishnammal and some LAFTI workers I went to Porgalakudi, the village where I spent a month in 1992, when I visited LAFTI for the first time.

This is where LAFTI has started a hollow brick-making (cinderblock) unit. The project launched by LAFTI consists in the following: those in need of a house are encouraged to give their labor to make the 15,000 bricks and 350 cement blocks needed to build one house. LAFTI will contribute not only in the organiation, but also supplying each house with 35 bags of cement - worth 5,600 Rupees (roughly $125 U.S.), and 3 window-frames and 2 doors.

Thanks to the project it will be possible to build houses making use of manpower from the village during the summer months when there is little to do in the fields and people spend most of their time in social functions and festivals.

Today's visit was meant to encourage people to join in the project so that with their labour and LAFTI’s generous help and coordination they can afford to have a solid and decent house and therefore improve their living conditions.

LAFTI means your generous heart!

Donatella

Today, the visiting Indian ecology Dr. Vandana Shiva and Krishnammal issued the following letter:

Dear friends of the tsunami victims,

The tsunami brought a wave of devastation - but it has also unleashed a wave of compassion to which you have generously contributed.

However, aid for rehabilitation is being used to evict the coastal communities from their houses, land & livelihoods. While people are being forcefully evicted in the name of vulnerabity, prawn farms, which contributed to the disaster by destroying mangroves & forest shelter belts are being rebuilt with money meant to rehabilitate the people.

You want to help the victims of the tsunami to rebuild their lives. Please join us in ensuring that :

a) Victims are not evicted from their homes;

b) Prawn farms which the Supreme Court ordered to be closed but which continue to operate illegally are shut down permanently. No compensation should go to them from rehabilitation money

c) Livelihood security of coastal communities, fisher folk, farmers, small traders are rebuilt through ecologically sustainable system

d) Mangroves and shelter belts must be immediately planted to protect the coastal communities. Wherever such biological shelters were not destroyed, people were protected.

Please write to the Prime Minister Sri. Manmohan Singh, & Chief Minister of Tamilnadu, Smt. Jayalaleetha, to ensure your generosity is not misused by vested interests who are trying to use the tsunami tragedy for their personal greed.

Dr. Vandana Shiva
Krishnammal Jagannatha