Learning from the Grassroots

When I visited villages in Adilabad, I learnt that the Indian samaaj was very different from what I had learnt about Indian society through a Westernised education. I learnt that the larger part of rural Indian society is made up of closely inter-connected producer communities, who though they do not socialise with each other are professionally interdependent. My companions and I learnt about the traditions of village life from Ravindra Sharma of Kala Ashram. We found that Government interventions in local cotton textile production tended to centralize the process and to break traditional relationships among producers. We based our own interventions on our learning.