In the forests of Tripura lives an elderly man with wheatish skin and a few missing teeth, who holds within his aging head the coveted wisdom of the forests’ medicinal secrets from several generations before him: Sukurthang Saimar. However, as he looks into a camera, and words about his life pour forth, there are exactly six other people in the world who can understand him, for among the 200-strong Saimar community, their language remains preserved only by seven.
Incredulous gems such as these populate the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) that veteran journalist P. Sainath has fore fronted, and briefly introduced to audiences at his session ‘This Land, Our Country’.
“There’s a continent within our subcontinent,” said Sainath, “and that’s the 833 million people of rural India who speak 780 languages, six of them spoken only by 50 million, three by 80 million and one by 500 million, and there isn’t a single platform today that captures this incredible diversity.” PARI fills that gap with its archives that span audio, video and text. These are crowdsourced, yet editorially monitored, by an 800-strong team of volunteers that includes veteran and rookie journalists nationwide, often contributing stories that mainstream media won’t accept.
As fluent as Sainath is with the numbers that trace the “ugly, regressive and barbaric” in rural India (of mass migrations to urban lands, of colossal falls among the nation’s full-status farmers, of mass suicides), he overflows with all that’s incredibly beautiful too.
From the story of a fisherman-poet protesting POSCO in Odisha, to a 73-year-old librarian with 160 books and a tea shop in the elephant-crossing zones of Kerala’s lowest-literate panchayat Edamalakudy, to a toddy-tapper who scales almost twice the height of the Empire State Building each day, to the lives of the last four Nadaswaram craftsmen families in Tamil Nadu, and the life story of a young Bharatanatyam dancer, Kali from Kovalam village, who is also proficient in three folk dances, PARI hosts a wealth of information about the linguistic, cultural, and occupational diversity of rural India. Its ongoing projects include a facial diversity documentation of one male and one female photograph from each of India’s 629 districts, besides a fast-expanding online research library.
In its telling of “everyday lives of everyday people”, PARI is about something that’s lost in journalism today, said Sainath: “the art of storytelling”.
