I belong to the Santal indigenous community (as much as possible, I try to not use the word “tribe” for an “indigenous community”), from Pu...
I belong to the Santal indigenous community (as much as possible, I try to not use the word “tribe” for an “indigenous community”), from Purbi Singhbhum district in Jharkhand. I grew up in Moubhandar, in a semi-urban set-up, in the township of a central government enterprise engaged in mining, primarily, copper.
From childhood, I had been made aware by my family of my position as an Adivasi and how we Adivasis differ from those from the mainstream non-Adivasis, whom we called diku. My family made sure that I had learnt to speak Santali as my first language – which I did, alongside Hindi (from people and film songs), English (from school) and Bengali (from people and Bengali papers and magazines).
During long school holidays, I was taken to our ancestral house nearly 40 km away in a village in Chakulia, just a hop from the West Bengal border. There, in our predominantly Santal village, a space we shared with two other major communities, the Kamar (the blacksmith caste) and the Kunkal (the potter caste), I spent my holidays happily.
From my childhood in the mid-1980s till my pre-employment adulthood in the late-2000s, I saw our village home as a traditional, sturdy Santal house,...
