Story #2: Learning about Culture in Gramya Manthan

Seeing villages as a cultural reality and not just an infrastructural setup is the foundation of Gramya Manthan.

The first thing most participants notice is the ‘lack’ - lack of toilets, lack of roads, lack of hygiene. Only gradually the abundance seeps in - richness of culture in the village.

When the participants interacted with the culture of the villages, they by default connected with their own culture. 3 of the participants shared that while they served friends from the village during Daawat, they remembered how they organised and served at community events in Kerela or in Gurudwara in Punjab. Yash, one of the participants remembered how he missed the sparrows in his balcony in Delhi. Every participant came back feeling warmth and love from the way they were hosted in the villages - more than the discomfort of lack of facilities. The question we held was - ‘Will I be able to host the friends from the village in the city, in the same way they hosted me?’ With dismantling of communities across, the culture of togetherness is breaking down.

The first step of cultural revitalisation is to build the capacity to acknowledge the culture of a place and people. Today, we need to make the culture not just a domain of markets or museums but actively created by communities.

The idea is not to glorify the village. Village as much as the city is seeing erosion of communities, oppression by gender and caste or transactional relationships. However, some gifts of lived culture are more accessible in the village than in the city - it is really important to learn from them.

GM is not about doing or thinking, it is about a way of seeing and way of being.