A Group is Born – The First Meeting

Twenty women, twenty lives and twenty stories-together they begin the journey of transforming their own lives and building new stories and dimensions for themselves

T hey flowed like a river down the road. Women holding banners marched in line as far as the eye could see. The morning air reverberated with a slogan that had first been heard in Mumbai’s streets in the 1980s: “Hum Bharat ke nari hain. Phool nahi, chingari hain! (We are women of India. Not flowers, but flames).”

My first visit to Dokrichua was on a crisp monsoon day a few months ago. The sky was dark with clouds and yet the sun’s golden rays were shining through, flirting lazily with a playful and gentle drizzle. Dokrichua is a small, neatly organized hamlet, with about 50 houses, made of flat slabs of stone, neatly packed with mud and smeared with red earth.

That day the hamlet wore a deserted look. The woven bamboo doors of the houses seemed to tell me, “They left for the khet side, with four jangaams (the indigenous bottles made of dried bottle gourds) of pej (rice porridge). They will return in the evening.”

Dokrichua was different from the other hamlets I had visited so far. The land in other hamlets in Bastar is lush green, with two-feet-high maize crops. In Dokrichua, there was very little maize. Instead, paddy crop was favoured by the people. Was it because of smaller landholdings? Or was it because of greater food insecurity? Or was it just different food habits? With all these questions and thoughts in my mind, I rode away from the village, planning to re-visit at a later time.

I next visited Dokrichua seven months later. The people of the village had heard about and were acquainted with the concept of women’s Self Help Groups (SHGs). They were eager to form their own group, and I was going to help them do so.