Many worlds, one website

Can a project’s success be judged on the basis of its never being completed?

Yes, if it’s a living archive of the world’s most complex countryside. Rural India is the most diverse part of the planet. Its 833 million people include distinct communities speaking close to 800 languages. This diversity is also seen in the occupations and livelihoods, arts and crafts, culture, literature, legend, transportation, and innumerable other fields that PARI covers.

With the advertising and celebrity-driven ‘mainstream’ media barely covering the countryside – PARI, 25 to 50 years hence, will be the only database, the only archive that Indians can turn to in order to learn or understand anything about how people lived and worked in the rural India of our times. At the same time, it’s a contemporary, living journal covering the everyday stories of everyday people.

The People’s Linguistic Survey of India tells us the country as a whole speaks some 800 languages and uses 86 different scripts. But in terms of provision for schooling up to Class 7, just 4 per cent of those 800 are covered.

The People’s Archive of Rural India presently publishes in 15 languages which are spoken by 1.2 billion Indians and identified by them as their first language.

The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India lists 22 languages whose development the country’s government is obliged to promote. Yet, there are states whose official languages fall outside those 22, like Khasi and Garo of Meghalaya. There are eight Indian languages spoken by 50 million people or more. Three of these are spoken by 80 million or more. One, by close to 500 million. At the other end of the spectrum are unique tribal languages spoken by as few as 4,000 people, some by even less. The eastern state of Odisha alone is home to around 44 tribal languages. The Linguistic Survey reckons that close to 220 languages have died in the past 50 years. Saimar in Tripura is down to its last five speakers.

As the Indian countryside rushes through an extremely painful transformation, many of its unique features disappear, leaving us poorer. There are, for instance, probably more schools and styles of weaving in India than in any other single nation. Many of these traditional weaving communities face real collapse, which will rob the world of some of its greatest gifts. Some unique occupations – professional storytellers, epic poem singers – are also in danger of extinction.

Then there are professions known only to a few nations. Like toddy-tappers who climb 50 palm trees daily, each one thrice, in season. From the sap they make palm jaggery or a fermented liquor called toddy. In peak season, a toddy tapper climbs a height greater than New York’s Empire State Building – every single day. But so many occupations are in collapse. Potters, metal workers and millions of other highly skilled craftspeople are rapidly losing their livelihoods.

Much of what makes the Indian countryside unique could be gone in 20-30 years. Without any systematic record, visual or oral, to educate us – let alone motivate us – to save this incredible diversity. We are losing worlds and voices within rural India of which future generations will know little or nothing. Even as the present one steadily sheds its own links with those worlds.

There is surely much in rural India that should die. Much that is tyrannical, oppressive, regressive and brutal – and which must go. Untouchability, feudalism, bonded labour, extreme caste and gender oppression and exploitation, land grab and more. The tragedy though is that the nature of the transformation underway more often tends to bolster the regressive and the barbaric, while undermining the best and the diverse. Covering that too, is part of PARI’s mandate and will be documented here.

THIS IS WHERE PARI COMES IN

PARI is both a living journal and an archive.

We generate and host reporting on the countryside that is current and contemporary, while also creating a database of already published stories, reports, videos and audios from as many sources as we can. All of PARI’s own content comes under the Creative Commons and the site is free to access. And anyone can contribute to PARI. Write for us, shoot for us, record for us – your material is welcome so long as it meets the standards of this site and falls within our mandate: the everyday lives of everyday people.

.The use of many libraries and museums in India has fallen, more so in the last 20 years. This was once compensated by the fact that what you could find in our museums, you could also find on our streets: the same miniature painting schools, the same traditions of sculpture. Now those too are fading. Library and museum visits amongst the young are more rare than routine. However, there is one place future generations the world over, including Indians, will visit more and more: the Net.

Broadband Internet access among the millions of less privileged, is still low in India, but it is expanding. [The last dial-up connection was switched off in March 2021]. It is the right place to build – as a public resource – a living, breathing journal and an archive aimed at recording people’s lives. The People’s Archive of Rural India. Many worlds, one website. More voices and distinct languages, we hope, than have ever met on one site.

It means an undertaking unprecedented in scale and scope, using myriad forms of media in audio, visual and text platforms. One where the stories, the work, the activity, the histories are narrated, as far as possible, as far as we can manage, by rural Indians themselves. By tea-pickers amidst the fields. By fishermen out at sea. By women paddy transplanters singing at work, or by traditional storytellers. By Khalasi men using centuries-old methods to launch heavy ships to sea without forklifts and cranes. In short, by everyday people speaking about themselves, their labour and their lives – talking to us about a world we mostly fail to see.

On April 25, 2020, the United States Library of Congress recognised the People’s Archive of Rural India as a valuable resource and wrote to us seeking permission to record and archive PARI on their own website and database.

WHAT’S ON PARI

PARI hosts and combines video, photo, audio and text archives. And a contemporary journalism website.

What began as a tiny platform exclusively in English on December 20, 2014, is now a 15-language site gaining millions of page views each year – even though we are not a news site.

Here are some of the unique endeavours PARI has undertaken. The list of 12 is by no means exhaustive or even fully representative of the work PARI is doing, but certainly gives you a flavour of what PARI offers.

CLIMATE CHANGE

PARI’s climate change reporting project comes from multiple agro-ecological zones (and over 30 regions and sub-regions). Well over 30 stories have appeared along this theme since it formally began in late 2020 and PARI has won four awards so far for its Climate series. The difference in our approach is – all our climate stories are based on, foregrounded in the voices, and lived experience of ordinary people. Farmers, labourers, fisherfolk, nomadic pastoralists, seaweed harvesters, honey collectors, insect-trappers, and more. We’ve covered fragile mountainous ecosystems, forests, seas, coastal areas, coral islands, deserts, arid and semi-arid zones.

While foregrounding ordinary voices, science and scientists are also very much there in our stories. India’s top climate scientists often concur with lessons from the lived experience of ordinary people directly in the line of climate impact. One example, the story: Battle of the bugs: on wings of climate change.

In conventional media coverage, mostly too abstract and jargonised, the process seems far removed from readers’ lives. Like, for instance, the melting of the Antarctic sheet, or the gutting of the Amazon forests, or bushfires in Australia. Or in terms of boring inter-governmental meetings. PARI’s climate reporting tries to get audiences to recognise and locate the problem as much closer to their own lives.

LIBRARY

PARI’s Library is unique in that we don’t just lend you books – we give them to you free. We don’t give you links, we give you the full text of every important rural-related report, study, survey, document and book we can find in electronic form or digitise ourselves. Everything in PARI Library is free to download with due acknowledgements and credits.

The Library section is PARI’s effort at building an online repository of such reports and studies. To make navigation of the library easier, each and every report, study or book is accompanied by a carefully summarised ‘Focus and Highlights.’ These are contributed by a growing team of volunteers (over 320 at present, with 40-50 active at any given point).

In PARI's library one can find government surveys, independent NGO reports, historical census reports and imperial gazetteers, draft bills, laws and constitutional amendments, Supreme Court judgements, copyright-free literature (for adults and kids), scanned books and e-books, research papers, magazine issues and more.

FARMERS’ PROTESTS

There are hundreds of stories on PARI relating to the struggles of farmers, the agrarian crisis, and more. Stories on that theme went up from PARI’s very first day. We thought though, that the battles farmers in this country waged against the three farm laws introduced in 2020 deserved a full section to themselves – being the largest, peaceful, constitutional protest demanding justice organised anywhere in the world in years – that too, at the height of the pandemic.

Do look at Protests against farm laws: full coverage. Please do also look at a few stories from earlier protests – like that of the Nashik-Mumbai long march of farmers in 2018.

FACES

This is the first and only mapping of India’s facial diversity ever undertaken in a systematic manner on a nation-wide scale. The FACES project was inspired by the tragic racial attack and beating to death of Nido Tania, a young student from Arunachal Pradesh in Delhi in 2014. His attackers told journalists they beat him because “he looked Chinese.” Which raised the question: so who looks Indian? Is there an ‘Indian look?’

Our journey so far tells us there is such a thing as an ‘Indian look’ – 1.4 billion of them. PARI’s photographers are sending in pictures from every district, every block of the country, that we can access.

LIVELIHOODS UNDER LOCKDOWN

PARI brought to the nation’s notice what actually happened to millions of livelihoods when the Covid-19 pandemic brought about the lockdowns across the entire country. When millions of migrants left the cities to return to their villages in what was termed as a reverse migration – the media were full of wonderment – why are they going back? The more correct question was, as PARI posed it: why did they leave their villages in the first place? And the answer to that was two words: agrarian crisis.

PARI’s network of journalists did not stop with escorting the returning migrants till the borders of the cities. We visited the villages the migrants had returned to, and tried to place this greatest human exodus in living memory in a context that would help the migrants, larger society, and policy makers.

The result: PARI carried well over 200 stories on just the theme of Livelihoods under Lockdown, that is central to Covering the human cost of Covid-19. Importantly, in the whole process, some of the migrants themselves tried their hand at journalism and storytelling.

STORIES ON ART, ARTISTS, ARTISANS & CRAFTS

The incredible diversity and multiplicity of the cultures of India is special to PARI and we have many sections and ongoing reporting projects on these.

You can look at our work on The singers and poets of rural India, or the many brilliant forms of pottery now, alas, in decline. Or enter Into the precarious world of Indian Weavers. We even have a special section on The drumbeats of rural India that explores the world of those who keep alive the country’s extraordinary percussion instrument traditions – while some of them also use their drums and skills to challenge the barriers of caste and gender that confront them.

Whether leather workers or puppeteers, wood workers or conch artisans, PARI has built a giant repository of stories, photos and videos on these subjects.

GRINDMILL SONGS PROJECT AND KUTCHI SONGS

To give you a sense of the scale, scope and complexity of what we’re doing in these fields, we’d ask you to look at two ongoing endeavours that are perhaps unique to any journalistic website. And we plan to add many more like the two below, from different cultures and different parts of the country:

The Grindmill Songs Project on PARI represents the largest ever collection in any one language of songs composed and sung by poor village women. It is a unique storehouse of over 100,000 ovi – couplets sung by women in rural Maharashtra – with recordings, videos, transcripts, translations and stories. This collection speaks to the diversity and depth of this form, through which the women sing of everyday life, patriarchy, caste, poet-saints, historical events, Babasaheb Ambedkar and more.

Songs of the Rann: archive of Kutchi folk songs is a multimedia archive on PARI and hosts a rich collection of folk music from Kachchh. The 341 songs reflect themes of love, longing, loss, marriage, devotion, motherland, gender awareness, democratic rights and present the abundant diversity of the region through their images, languages and music. An informal collective of 305 percussionists, singers and instrumentalists from Gujarat play a variety of musical forms and bring to life the once thriving oral traditions of Kachchh which are in decline. It becomes especially important to preserve them, as their sounds slowly fade across the desert sands.

THE ARCHIVE OF ADIVASI CHILDREN’S ART

This is the first-ever archive of its kind, one that allows you to look at The World Through the Art of Adivasi Children. In it, PARI brings you the first ever archive of paintings by young Adivasi schoolkids. The work recorded and documented here is from students in Classes 3 to 9 in schools in Jajapur and Kendujhar districts of Odisha. The children did these paintings in response to their teachers reading aloud eight PARI stories on themes of Adivasi culture, village life and communities, environment and climate change.

We have 111 paintings by 98 Adivasi schoolchildren from 57 schools in this first collection from Odisha. The children are in the age group 9 to 15 and studying in Classes 3 to 9. Within the young artists, girls outnumber boys 68 to 30. Each painting is accompanied by a 20-30 second video where the young artist introduces herself/himself and their work. Most have spoken in Odia, but a few have also recorded their videos in Adivasi languages including Ho, Munda and Birhor.

The 12 tribes the children belong to are: Bathudi, Bhuiya, Bhumij, Gandia, Gond, Ho, Kolha, Mankirdia (also spelt as Mankidia – an offshoot of the Birhor tribe), Munda, Samti, Santal and Sounti. Some of these are classified as Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups.

Sure, this is the first-ever, but it won’t be the last. The People’s Archive of Rural India intends to create similar archives of the art of Adivasi children from every part of the country.

PARI SERIES ON WOMEN’S HEALTH

This is the first and only journalistic survey ever, across the country, looking at the reproductive health rights of – particularly rural – Indian women. And which foreground and are driven by the voices and lived experiences of women and adolescent girls in the countryside.

These are 50 PARI stories from across India, a series that covers the wide arc of women’s reproductive health – the stigma around infertility, the emphasis on female sterilisation, the lack of ‘male engagement’ in family planning, inadequate rural healthcare systems which are out of reach for many, and the problem of unqualified medical practitioners. And also stories of dangerous childbirths, discrimination due to menstruation, the preference for sons – and more. Stories that speak of a wide range of health-related prejudices and practices, people and communities, gender and rights, and the everyday struggles and occasional small victories of women in rural India.

VISIBLE WORK, INVISIBLE WOMEN

Visible Work, Invisible Women is the first fully digitised, curated, still-photo exhibition of its kind, in that it takes a physical exhibition (which has quite a bit of text and very large photographs) and presents it creatively online. Each panel has its own video of between 2-3 minutes on average. The final panel that wraps up the show is around 7 minutes.

All the photographs were shot by PARI Founder Editor P. Sainath across ten Indian states between 1993 and 2002, covering close to 100,000 kilometres. These roughly span the first decade of the economic reforms, and end two years before the launch of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.

The display venues of the original physical version of the exhibition have included bus and railway stations, factory gates, mass rallies of agricultural and other labourers, schools, colleges and universities. The entire body of work is now placed online for the first time on this site.

FREEDOM FIGHTERS’ GALLERY

In a few years, not one of those who fought for India’s freedom and independence will be left alive. Future generations of Indians will never get the chance to meet, speak to, listen to, or in any way engage with those who fought to make their nation a reality. The Freedom Fighters’ Gallery is an effort to give those generations – and indeed, our own as well, a bridge that allows them to make a connection with that Golden Generation.

Here, you can not only see photos of several freedom fighters, but also watch and listen to some of them speak in videos that do not exist anywhere else. You can also see photos of their families/ descendants, homes and villages.

Launched on August 15, 2022, in the 75^th year of India’s Independence, this gallery is home to photos and videos of India's little-known foot soldiers of freedom. Some of their stories already appear elsewhere in PARI. But there are many that don't, and this collection could keep growing – both in terms of pictures and videos – and also in that we will add more freedom fighters to the gallery.

PARI IN CLASSROOMS

In today’s curriculum and classrooms, rural India is conspicuous only by its absence. Where it does appear, it’s wrapped in popular stereotypes. A generation of young people are growing up as foreigners in their own country. With PARI Education, we try to change this. By launching them on journeys to explore and engage with our many Indias – starting in classrooms, workshops and internships. But also by having them do stories first-hand from the field.

You will find on PARI many stories done by young school, college and university students from both urban and rural areas. Also, by youngsters no longer in school but keen on recording their regions, cultures and histories. Close to 150 schools, colleges and universities have engaged with PARI Education and that number is rapidly growing. It could expand even faster if we had the resources and personnel we need.

PARI NEEDS YOUR PARTICIPATION AND HELP

While we constantly try to build and expand our gene pool of contributors, we do exercise editorial selection and quality control. The use of experienced contributors with a credible record is important to this work, of course. Most of these will be journalists, writers and authors. But not all. Anyone who is interested can participate, write for us, or shoot even on cell phones with decent video quality – if the material falls within the mandate of the archive. You need not be a professional journalist.

Remember, the narratives that make up the overwhelming share of PARI come from rural Indians themselves, not from the professional media persons who help record their story. Some of those rural Indians will shoot their own stories. And their stories will be reported — as long as there is a countryside.

Public access to PARI is free. The site is run by the CounterMedia Trust. An informal network supports and funds the trust and its primary activities through volunteer work, donations and direct personal contributions. This voluntary network of reporters, professional filmmakers, film editors, photographers, documentary filmmakers and journalists (television, online and print), represents PARI's biggest asset. Besides, academics, teachers, researchers, techies and professionals from many other fields have also donated their expertise to design the site and establish PARI.

PARI needs money to create content beyond what volunteers do for us, and that requires we generate the resources it takes to keep this massive endeavour growing and thriving. PARI does not seek or accept direct government grants or corporate funds. Nor do we carry any advertising as we believe young people are already the main targets of a surfeit of advertisements. You can see why and how much we need your help.

Though our call for donations is titled ‘Cover your country’, rural India can never be fully 'covered' and the content on this site consists of fragments of many giant realities. We can expand our coverage of those many worlds only with the widest possible public participation. Please donate generously to PARI.