I spent August 15th at a village called Alangadu in Sirkazhi, a town in Nagapattinam district in Tamil Nadu in the south of India. It was my first visit to a village and I went there with a family friend and my mother. Sowmya, the family friend, hails from this village and has been supporting several village activities focused on improving the lives of the village folk, especially the women and other under-privileged residents. An important local partner in these activities is an organization called CIKS (http://www.ciks.org) so the local CIKS anchor, Shuba, accompanied us to the village.

The visit was truly a remarkable experience for me and I’m still percolating impressions and conversations. Like anyplace I go to, the trees, plants, birds and animals (humans included) were a source of much wonder. The village name ‘Alangadu’ translates to a ‘Forest of Banyan trees’ but needless to say, there’s no Banyan forest there today. We saw some magnificent Banyan trees bordering the roads on our drive over but no noteworthy specimens within the village. The village does have some lovely trees thankfully – the Poovarasu/Peepal ki behen (Thespesia populnea), Nuna (Morinda pubescens), Vepam/Neem (Azadirachta indica), Sarakonnai/Amaltas (Cassia fistula), Murungai/Drumstick (Moringa oleifera), Narthangai/Citron (Citrus medica), Tamarind (Tamarindus indica) and Azhinji (Alangium salvifolium) come to mind. I also met a very smart, humble lady called Amutha from the SC/ST community who heads a local women’s self-help-group in the village and who told me a lot about the herbs that were growing wild there and their various medicinal properties.

One of the purposes of our visit was to nurture a native tree-planting initiative, specifically surrounding 2 new water tanks that are being dug in the village to conserve rainwater and serve as groundwater recharge pits. Amutha is keen to participate and take care of the trees but the village panchayat is uncomfortable with allowing more women-led initiatives. The project has been stalling for a while now partly because of this, and persuasion strategies were discussed to move it forward. Witnessing patriarchy at work would have made me really angry in the past but this time, I just listened as the brainstorming progressed, aware of how little I actually understood of ground realities. Those in power do not cede power easily. And those at the bottom need to use words and actions skillfully, to move forward. Especially since they live in that community and can’t afford to leave in a huff. I definitely felt a little helpless to hear conversations such as “What is the worst that can happen? Will they chase you out of the village?” during the brainstorming. To see Amutha look a little miserable about having to engage in this confrontation but also resolute that it had to be done, was both humbling and a sign of hope.

There was also the casual mention of her alcoholic husband who drinks away half his measly wages regularly and the statistic thrown around that this was true, for close to 90% of the husbands in the village! I can’t begin to imagine what her life feels like. Witnessing that she is resource-poor in the sense of being poor financially and poor in terms of not having a stable family life (due to the drunkard husband), I tried to see all the ways in which she was resource-rich. Her knowledge of herbs and their medicinal properties was a big richness. And she shared that knowledge so generously! I learnt about and saw so many new herbs that don’t grow as easily in our urban city gardens. One of my suggestions to her was that she could possibly sell these herbs in city exhibitions that urban gardeners go to when they are keen to expand their own medicinal herb collection, and she seemed willing to try that. We have to see how this can be facilitated…

We spent the morning with the village children who had put together a program of recitations, songs and dance to celebrate the 70th year of Indian independence. Thirukkural (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tirukku%E1%B9%9Ba%E1%B8%B7) and Aathichoodi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aathichoodi) were recited; speeches were made about Ambedkar, Kamaraj, Subash Chandra Bose and Abdul Kalam. A hilarious moment was when one of the girls making a speech stammered mid-way through her speech that there was a snake on the rafters and her teacher scolded her saying, “Really? What’s special about that to you? You’ve seen snakes before. Continue.” We visitors from the ‘big’ city, however, jumped up and began to look for the snake, slightly scared of what it was going to do. After spotting a thin, short snake poke its head around the rafters, a stick was found and the banging convinced the snake to slither out back to the garden nearby!

We next visited a group of women in another village nearby who were weaving baskets, pouches and flowers from dyed palm leaves (see pic above). As their fingers deftly wove the palm leaf strips, they casually mentioned their drunkard husbands and their hopes for their children. Some of them were sending their kids to private English medium schools paying astronomical sums for what did not seem to be worthwhile education quality. We listened to their stories and I tried once again to have a context for suffering, to make sense of why these women with bright, sunny smiles, creative hands, skinny, malnourished bodies and drunkard husbands had these life circumstances…

No visit to a town in Tamil Nadu is complete without a visit to the local temples to see the architecture and pray to the Gods for peace and happiness for all beings. So the day concluded with a visit to the temples in Aachalapuram and Sirkazhi that are ‘paadal petra sthalam’, which translates to “holy places glorified in song” -- songs sung in the 7th century AD by a Saivite devotee Thiru-gnana-sambandar (one of the 63 famous Nayanmars or Siva-bhaktas). As we walked the enormous temple courtyards and were told that they sheltered people fleeing the ravages of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, we met a temple priest (were accosted more like) who decided to tell us the story associated with this particular temple (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sattainathar_Temple,_Sirkazhi). Though I was aware that the story was a man-made legend, as he narrated the legend of Siva as Thoniappar in his sonorous, musical Tamil, I swear I believed every word he uttered, for that moment. Such is the power of fantasy when coupled with strong oratorical skills and deep faith in one’s narrative :) As we moved away and reflected on his ability to tell this story of doom and salvation with perfect confidence, here we thought was what the village children needed to learn – these communication skills and this confidence. Their recitations earlier in the day were full of diffidence and high-speed mumbling. We’d been discussing a plan to engage them with theatre but realized that first, they could visit the nearby temple and hear the priest with powerful oratorical skills and reflect on what was so effective about his delivery. A temple clearly has the potential to deliver more than one kind of salvation :)