Farman

Life Beyond the Tourism Brochure

by Charumathi Supraja

The sight of Lambada women seated on pavements and working away at their embroidery is not uncommon in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. As their nimble fingers fly on fabric surfaces, the plain cloths are transformed - sprinkled with mirrors. Ordinary saris, kurtas, blouses, cushion covers, bed covers or lehengas - they all turn into chic ethnic ware that make their way as far as California and Dubai.

These mirror-craft artists sit in small groups on the footpath, near the bus stop, outside a community park or an apartment complex. Needle in hand and head bent to their work, somehow these women never miss a new face. If you stop to look, they will promptly offer: "Rs 40 (US$1=Rs 45) for 100 mirrors, amma!" They switch easily between Telugu and Hyderabadi Hindi. Their own dialect, Goarr (also the name of their root tribe, which has branches in almost all the Indian states) is heavily laced with Telugu, indicating their long association with Andhra Pradesh.

The Tribal Welfare Department, Hyderabad estimates that the Lambadas, also known as Banjaras or Sugalis, are the largest tribal group in Andhra Pradesh. The 1991 Census recorded their population in Andhra Pradesh at 1,641,897, of which 792,738 are female (individual tribe figures from 2001 census have not yet been compiled).

They were originally expert cattle breeders, who sold milk and milk products for a living. Particular about their customs and way of life, Lambadas in rural areas live in colonies of their own, called Tandas, outside the main village - which has often led to their exclusion from development benefits that the main village receives. Lambadas later took to agriculture, but when their lands became uncultivable, abject poverty forced large groups to migrate to cities in search of a living.

Removed from their traditional occupations, Lambada men become daily wage earners or auto drivers, and the women take to embroidery or domestic work.Like the other urban poor, they too would have been quite invisible, had it not been for their bright costumes and chunky silver jewellery. No glossy tourism brochure or advertisement on Andhra Pradesh is complete without Lambada photographs - pictures that conceal the real story, the low literacy levels, for example. The 1961 census estimated that the literacy rate among Lambada men in Andhra Pradesh was 7.6 per cent and among women 1.61 per cent. Thirty years later, the 1991 Census had these literacy rate figures: 24.07 per cent for males and 5.68 per cent for females.

"They've put our photos everywhere and they are all making money. Hum ko kya mila, amma (what did we get)?" asks Rukmini, who has been sewing mirrors on the pavement outside St Anne's College, Mehdipatnam for the last 35 years. She came to Hyderabad as a young bride, about 40 years ago. She used to charge Rs 4 for 100 mirrors when she started off. "I barely had time to eat. My husband never worked and would come home drunk and beat me."

She has two daughters, both married, and two sons. One is "a wastrel, like his father" and the other works in a hotel. "We suffer in the sun, get wet during the monsoon and shiver in the winter on this footpath. My oldest customers are now grandmothers. Some are in Dubai or America, and where are we? In the same place," says a bitter Rukmini, whose left wrist is permanently swollen from sewing.

On an average, Rukmini gets to take home Rs 40-60 everyday. Fifteen members of her family sew and earn at different locations in Mehdipatnam. During the rains, Rukmini's group has permission to work from the portico of a nearby school. Her ambition is to get a loan and put up a small pavement shop where she can expand her work.

Under the Central government's Adivasi Mahila Sashaktikaran Yojana (Empowerment of Tribal Women Programme), Scheduled Tribe women are entitled to individual or group loans on submission of caste and income certificates. "Though these certificates are easy to get, the women are discouraged by their own people from applying. They are told not to get into trouble by stepping into big offices," says I Sujatha, Senior Inspector, Tricor (Tribal Corporation), Hyderabad.

But do the Lambada women even know about these schemes? "The Urban Community Development (UCD) wing of the Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad (MCH) sends out its Community Officers to make people aware of these schemes," she says.

A loan is just what Sonee, a second-generation Lambada craftsperson, needs to ensure a better future for her children. She belongs to a Lambada family that did fairly well for some years after starting a Banjara Garments business. Her mother-in-law, Jhamku Bai, set the business rolling when she began making mirror-crafted cloths for the elite Hyderabadi families in the 1950s. A native of Nanded, Maharashtra, Jhamku Bai put the embroidery skills she had picked up from her Naani-Maasi (foremothers) to good use when she came to Hyderabad after marriage.

"Business was so good those days, we could sell at double the cost price. Now we hardly get five to ten per cent profit and even that has to be shared," Jhamku says. "Everybody in my family jumped into my business. My 11 children also helped with the work, so they hardly studied. I used to visit about 100 to 200 houses a month and sell my wares. I got many customers through word of mouth. I visited Russia, Mysore, Bangalore and Ooty during Government-sponsored sales. But now the competition is too much. We barely make enough to eat. Our work is poorer because we need to produce more in lesser time. We sometimes buy printed bed sheets and bedcovers and run a few stitches around the prints."

The Lambada women haven't received the necessary attention, even from the voluntary or NGO sectors. They are often at the mercy of middlemen who promise them loans and disappear with their paltry earnings. Beeramlamma's family recently paid Rs 850 to a person who promised to get her a loan of Rs 1 lakh to put up a shop. They never saw him again.

Ironically, Government sources believe that the Lambadas have not done badly for themselves. They also claim that the Lambadas in urban districts are a very small group. Janardhana Reddy, Deputy Project Officer, UCD, says that two housing colonies were built for the Lambadas in Ravindranagar and Nayaknagar. "They are aware and 90 per cent of them have availed of Government incentives," he asserts.

Officers in the Tribal Welfare Department point out there are schemes aplenty for ST women. There are free hostels for tribal girls from Class 3 to college level, where they are provided free notebooks and Rs 25 per month, as "cosmetic charges, to encourage them to maintain good personal hygiene".

As if belying these claims, Rukmini and Jhamku work swiftly, hoping that, one day, their own lives will shine like the mirrors in their hands.

July 9, 2006

By arrangement with Women's Feature Service

A community's plight

A Lambada woman receives training in sewing work.

W. CHANDRAKANTH in Hyderabad

Frontline

Volume 16 - Issue 9, Apr. 24 - May. 07, 1999

India's National Magazine from the publishers of THE HINDU

PEOPLE of the Lambada tribe lead peripheral lives in thandas (hamlets) sprinkled across Andhra Pradesh. Some of them still follow a nomadic lifestyle. But whether they are on the move or settled in a hamlet in the poverty-ridden Telengana region, life has always been harsh for them.

Lambadas hardly own anything in terms of land or property. Their culture is different from the mainstream cultures. Lambada rituals have nothing in common with the rituals of the plains people. Traditionally, Lambadas or Banjaras have moved in groups.

Community celebrations were in vogue. Hardworking and sincere, they depended on forest produce and odd jobs for a living. Work was equally shared between husband and wife. A strong family bond and a strong thanda bond were the hallmarks of Lambada life.

Oli or bride fee was prevalent in the earlier days. Each Banjara youth had to pay both in cash and in kind to secure the hand of a girl. A couple of milch animals often served as bride fee.

All this changed in the last decade when thousands of Lambada families transformed themselves into agricultural workers and adopted the ways of the mainstream population. Lambada labour comes cheap and they never shy away from work. Often they take up annual contracts at low rates. Landowners find in them a hardworking and undemanding workforce.

A Lambada employed as a farmhand earns less than Rs.3,000 a year. A little paddy, maize or jowar and a set of new clothes once or twice a year are enough to make a Lambada worker content. Lambada women supplement the family income by working in fields and as domestic help. Illiteracy and ignorance about family planning practices among the Lambadas result in large families. Curiously, most of them have female children. The anaemic and ailing mothers find it difficult to take care of their children. Infanticide was known to be practised by members of the tribal group.

The Lambadas have benefited from very few welfare programmes implemented by the government. Neither social workers nor non-governmental organisations (NGOs) paid attention to their plight until recently. The literacy rate is an abysmal 1.8 per cent among females; among males it is at best five times that figure. Teachers absent themselves from schools for Lambadas, ration cards are not issued to them (even if they are issued, local merchants appropriate them for a paltry sum) and health workers rarely work with them.

Living in remote rural areas - Katravat thanda, Palepalli thanda, Peddamungala thanda, Kuralakshmi thanda, Dubba thanda and so on - the Lambadas of Devarakonda, Dindi and Chandampet mandals of Nalgonda district have not gained from the community welfare programmes that have been launched in the past 50 years.

Hundreds of Lambada families, which settled down in these areas after the completion of the Nagarjunasagar project, were promised that they would be rehabilitated by the State Government. But so far nothing has come of the rehabilitation package.

Efforts to attain social acceptability began after the Lambadas settled down in Nalgonda district. Tribal culture and rituals gave way to non-tribal and brahminical rituals and along with this came financial burdens. The oli system gave way to dowry and the demand for boys, who were far outnumbered by girls, rose steeply. A dowry of Rs.30,000 and more is in vogue now. Educated Lambadas turn away from the lifestyle of their families and seek respectability elsewhere.

The girl child soon became an expendable commodity and the arrival of racketeers doubling as social workers began around the same time. Adoption agencies, which needed little by way of investment, mushroomed in the region. All that they needed was a few social workers to go about the thandas convincing Lambadas to sell their infants. The offers constituted a source of income for the poverty-stricken community, and many parents struck deals with the agencies. Children became commodities to be booked in the womb.

The business flourished and kept both sides happy. But for the Lambada girl child, it was a choice between going from her mother's lap to the cradle of the NGO or to the grave.

Kite Aerial Photography

Kite Aerial Photography (KAP) is a hobby and a type of photography. A small camera is suspended from a kite on a Picavet and is used to take aerial photographs. The camera rigs can range from the extremely simple, consisting of a trigger mechanism with a disposable camera, to complex apparatuses using radio control and digital cameras. On some occasions it can be a good alternative (in many ways) to any other form of aerial photography.

The example image of San Francisco after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake was taken by an early pioneer in KAP, George Lawrence using a large panoramic camera and stabilizing rig he designed.

The first kite aerial photograph was taken by Arthur Batut in Labruguière (France) in 1888.

The Weight Of Wings -- Azim H. Premji

We need a revamp -- to create free thinkers, not compulsive learners

-- Azim H. Premji

(The author is chairman and CEO, Wipro Technologies)

http://www.wipro.com/

Often we adults talk about the incessant questioning children subject us to. We either react in jest to the impossibility of some of the questions or in mock frustration at the insatiable curiosity of the child. But either way, it is in some form of indulgent pride. During one of my journeys, I remember a 6-year-old looked around and asked her father, "How many seats are there in the plane?" The father indulgently told her the total number of rows and asked her to calculate, and she promptly did. Not satisfied with this, she started calculating the number of seats in 2 planes and then 5 and then 10 and 20.

She went on until she reached 100 planes. This led to a discussion on how she was doing the arithmetic and she kept discovering easier methods to play with numbers, techniques making multiplication easy, that multiplication was in fact successive addition. The sparkle in her eyes was moving. She had stumbled upon a new world. Mathematics for her would never be the same as before.

But the child doesn't see all this as 'mathematics' or 'arithmetic'. It is just an interesting exercise for her driven by curiosity. Contrast this with conversations we hear 12-13-year-olds having. It typically revolves around 'subjects'. Which subject is easy, which one is tough. What questions are most likely to be asked in examinations? Learning eventually becomes an activity that has to be dealt with; it becomes focused on negotiating the prescribed curriculum and the purpose of learning becomes restricted to doing well in exams. It's likely the child we met on the plane will grow up to become like this too. Why does this happen?

During childhood and schooling, children become victims of constraints, regulation, discipline and regimen. Times during which children don't study but just talk, interact with each other, play, draw, dismantle toys or just have fun is considered a waste of study time. We seem to have designed a schooling system which in trying to encourage learning seems to do the opposite. Children start feeling guilty about wanting to do anything other than "studying". Learning restricts itself to the textbooks and curriculum-prescribed subjects. Marks in exams are the only means for a child to demonstrate her learning capabilities. The few extra-curricular activities encouraged by schools are not assessed as rigorously as the main subjects so in a way we discourage children from spending too much time in those activities.

I think we miss out numerous opportunities for children to correlate, link and understand concepts. We encourage distinction between various learning experiences and over time children learn to dislike certain experiences and like some other. This gradually erodes the quality of learning itself. I think children learn at different times and in different ways. It is the responsibility of a school, teachers and parents to understand this, and we should not stifle any effort made by children to make this leap into the enchanting world of learning. The focus of the schooling systems needs to be not only on content and information but on the learning process.

Our curriculum framework advocates the need for integration of subjects, link topics to real life, encourage observation and experimentation. Connections of these subjects to daily events make learning so much deeper and interesting. We should use textbooks, computers and other tools for information dissemination and as triggers for thought. We need to allow the child to be an independent thinker. And see the larger aim of education: influencing the child to become a motivated learner.

In India now, there is the growing realisation of the need for change. We have begun to realise that our children don't seem to learn how to learn; numerous studies have proven this.We have made the transition from concern for just basic literacy to quality education. We need to progress from a compulsion to mass-produce stereotypes to creating independent thinkers and active learners.

We need to revamp the system that compels children to become mechanical learners. Let us not ourselves stifle the child's mind with archaic definitions of rigidity, rigour and discipline. Let us create an environment that allows the child's mind to blossom. Let us open our schools to the world of learning. We need to take this step and launch ourselves into this new paradigm—of autonomous learning. Only then will we progress towards becoming a learning nation!

http://www.outlookindia.com

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we don’t live here anymore

Jack and Terry, Hank and Edith, married couples, best friends and have so much in common. Jack and Hank are professors at Cedar County College, Terry and Edith are stay-at-home moms. Yet, the Evanses and Lindens are not the happy couples; they seem to be the loving parents determined to save marriages they secretly long to escape, as they struggle through their emotional and sexual entanglement. The story captures the fearless exploration of marriages on the edge, and reveals the perverse logic of infidelity, and the complicity, denial and occasional cruelty that can accompany it.

"You gotta admit... even adultery has morality to it."