It began in 1989 with my first job. It was in Kutch. It was the setting up of a non-governmental organization looking into the problems of the women artisans of the district. Kutch has its own geo-socio-economic-political configurations of course, but it remains a microcosm of what India has been. What rural India still is and how small town India functions.

I was a city girl with a degree and a cultivated sense of ennui. Taking up the project itself was an attempt at doing something new and different. I stayed on a full 3 years and it was a time that challenged, stimulated, frustrated and made me cry.

Anyone who has learnt to live in a desert has a certain edge, a hardiness that creeps into her/his personality. There is also pride at having survived. And a sense of humour that laughs with the winds. The desert brings with it a sense of vastness; limitless stretches of sand and time. It was this vastness that I glimpsed amongst the innumerable communities living there. There were the Harijans, the Sammas, the Ahirs, the Sodhas, the Jats, the Bhanushalis, the Luanas, the Raisiputras, the Haleputras, a few Pathans even…..the vastness lay in the capacity for variety. Each community had its own dressing, its colours, its ingenious embroidery, its particular food preferences, dialect inflections, mode of dwelling etc. So the Banni Harijans preferred ‘Bhungas’( circular mud huts), while the Paccham Harijans preferred normal rectangular homes with courtyards. It had to do with the quality of the sand in Banni among other factors. Even the dressing of the Harijans in Banni and Paccham differed. It was as if the human spirit was defying the uniformity of the desert….like an impudent child it was sticking out its tongue and saying, “Match that”.

And that impudence was also petty….for the Nodha Muslims thought that the Sammas were characterless and the Sodhas would not deign to mix with other castes, the Harijans were unanimously disliked yet accommodated as they were an integral part in the scheme of things. They embroidered clothes for marriages, ate the carcasses of dead cattle and were skilled in the manufacture of furniture, shoes and other utilities.
“Don’t trust so and so,” we were told to an extent that left us with no choice but to trust only the one warning us. “I understand, but others don’t” was a common and much used refrain. We groped through all these niceties and understood basic norms that had preserved these societies through the ages. In retrospect, a lot of the prejudices were safeguards devised by communities for self-protection. Some may have had historical reasons, some were based on observations of general characteristics but mostly they were inevitable. The need for man to slot, label and judge is as basic as the need for food.

As our work progressed, some age-old customs quietly disappeared. At the womens’ meetings, women from all castes and religions started eating and drinking from the same plates and cups. Muslim women came out of purdah to our meetings in ‘faraway’ Bhuj. Men, who had treated us with suspicion, indulgently joked about the Mahila Mandals.
And slowly people who had thought of themselves only as Kutchchi began considering another identity of being also Gujarati. Their openness to change stemmed from a deep desire for a better life.
For a city born and bred person, I began to get a sense of community for the first time in my life. The total and unquestioning sense of belonging to a larger group, the security that came from eating and dressing alike and sharing the daily business of life without ambiguity brought a sense of release from the individual self.
I lived there among the various communities, sharing their idioms, their stories, their sharp humour, sensing a sort of raw intelligence born out of the experience of life, not books. And there was also the wisdom of ages.
Of course there were also corruptions and self-seeking and quarreling. There were communities more closed and inscrutable than others. But those who lived there had managed to work out their equations with each other. There was never the feeling “why are they different” but rather, “they are like that”. One night sitting with the women in a village courtyard during a “reyan” (a sort of ‘time out’ concept), chatting joking, dialoguing; feeling the calm night above us and the spread of the stars and the desert, I realized that my ennui had gone.

But the individual self is strong even when it has had lofty insights. I left Kutch eventually. I was missing the city. This was in 1993. I moved cities, did business, consultancies and thought I had got on.
It was 2006 and I was back in Kutch. I live there now and I will be…for awhile.
But what I am doing here now has changed. A lot more has changed.
This post is a beginning.