We're ready to get started.
Welcome to the Women and
Gender Development discussion series.
As I said a few minutes ago, feel free to have
some yummy food from Bollos,
get up silently or take some when you leave.
I'm Maria Elisa Christie, I'm Director of Women and Gender in
International Development at
the Center for International Research,
Education and Development, known as CIRED.
We're part of Outreach in International Affairs.
This is our final discussion
of the discussion series this semester.
We've got some really cool ones lined up in the spring.
I want to thank our sponsors,
Outreach and International Affairs and I'd like
to start by acknowledging the Tutelo/Monacan people
who are the traditional custodians
of the land on which we work and
live and recognize
their continuing connection to the land,
water, and air that Virginia Tech consumes.
We pay respect to the Tutelo/ Monacan nations
and to their elders past, present, and emerging.
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case you didn't sign in when you came in,
please do sign in and if you
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tell us and if you don't, obviously,
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announcements that are specifically
about Gender International Development,
mostly these discussion series.
This presentation will last
30 to 35 minutes more or less and
then we have time for discussion that
we encourage you to engage in.
Going to introduce our speaker,
Pallavi Raonka is a PhD candidate
in the Department of Sociology here at Virginia Tech
[BACKGROUND]
Her research interests are resource extraction,
land grabbing, indigenous communities,
peasant livelihoods, gender development,
and social movements in India.
She's been engaging in the advocacy work on the issues
related to food security with
several subaltern grassroot groups,
specifically, our diversity and
dulling communities in rural India.
Her PhD dissertation,
which we're going to get a little glimpse of today,
analyzes forms of resistance,
engaged by our diversities
in response to corporate land grabs,
specifically in conflicted states of India and
the red corridor, specifically Jharkhand.
Before going to Virginia Tech,
she graduated with a Master in Rural Development from
the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in India.
She's a graduate assistant in
our Women Gender Development program at
CIRED so we are especially
excited to have her here and if you're
an undergrad and you're interested
in the topic of gender and development,
she's going to be teaching a class with me
on gender environment development next semester.
Thank you [APPLAUSE].
Hi everyone, thank you for coming.
Today's presentation is a part
of my dissertation research.
I'm in the phase of data analysis, any comments,
suggestions, feedback would be really good.
The paper I'm presenting today is
about the relationship of
the Adivasi women to land struggles in Jharkhand, India.
[NOISE] The study was
conducted in the Eastern state of Jharkhand in India.
As you see, it's in the Eastern part.
In the year 2000,
Jharkhand achieved its independence from Bihar and
received recognition as a separate indigenous state.
Jharkhand independence was a result of long struggle by
the Adivasi indigenous majority population
and a cause of celebration among progressive activist circles,
of indigenous rights activist and organizations.
They strongly believed that
independence from the Hindu dominated Bihar which
treated Jharkhand as
internal colony would bring solutions
from the chronic under
development and
political instability plaguing the region.
Jharkhand is home to the Munda tribe and
Adivasi community that has
preserved many of the traditions,
religious practices, language,
and self-governing institutions into the present.
They practiced subsistence farming,
which means grow as much as you need.
They heavily depend on fruits,
herbs, vegetable, et cetera,
collected from the forest for both food and livelihood.
They also work as casual labor in the nearby region.
The goal of independence for Jharkhand was
economic and political empowerment of the Munda tribe.
Development that respect indigenous rights and customs,
especially in relation to
autonomy over the land they inhibit.
The region of Jharkhand is currently
undergoing several land struggles.
Land struggles are
ongoing political movement in the region.
The Munda tribe had driven out
several multinational corporation who
were mining bauxite in the region.
These companies include national corporate giants
like the Arslan Metal and Vedanta.
There are also forest mafia timber pirates and
corrupt government official who often
conspire with these corporates.
This is also the basis of
local participation and the Naxalite movement.
Naxalite movement is a 30-year old movement
in India and it has
converted into the Maoist Armed Revolutionary Uprising.
Maoist Movement currently covers
around 25 percent of the entire country of India.
We call this as the red corridor
in India and these are like
the affected areas or
you can say these are the areas which are
undergoing the Maoist insurgency in India.
I lived in Jharkhand for
several years prior to the graduate school,
working with Right to Food movement,
living in rural villages with
the Munda tribe in the mud houses.
I learned the language and became
acquainted with the culture and politics of the region.
Then I returned for dissertation fieldwork in 2017-18,
to study the meaning of land for the Munda community.
The Munda Adivasi women have been at the forefront of
all Adivasi movements to defend their land
from the neoliberal state and corporate actors.
But for Western feminist epistemology,
a central contradiction remained.
Why are these women in agreement with
Munda fight for communal land rights,
which simultaneously
denies women traditional land rights.
The quest for understanding
this contradiction was the motivation for my research.
I would like to share an anecdote over here.
One morning in 2017,
I was buying a bottle of milk from the dairy store.
When I saw group of Munda who were protesting outside
the police station regarding
the arrest of several Munda villagers.
The arrested had been accused of the murder of
five Hindu men who
owned a stone mining company in the village.
This was a tense situation
but also not uncommon for the area.
This is what one of them said,
''We all as a whole are responsible for killing them,
you can put us all in jail,'' said
the villager as they proudly held up
the bloody weapons that they used to kill five men.
These men had leased land
near the village to stone miners,
forcing the villages to pay
rent on land they collectively own.
Well, investigating the matter with
local police the next day,
I was shocked to see that nearly 200 villagers,
men and women, had gathered at the station shouting,
''Either you can lock us
all up in jail or we all walk free.''
What did I learn from this?
Munda diversity can go to extreme lengths to defend
their land that is under threat by the state.
The government leased the stone mining on
collectively owned Adivasi land to upper class Hindu men.
The state does not recognize
community title of the Munda Adivasi.
Likewise, the Munda do not
recognize the State as a illegitimate sovereign.
When the villagers went to get stones
from the mine to make fences for the houses,
the miners stopped them saying
that they needed permission from the government.
This infuriated the Munda who told them to
leave the land immediately but the miners would not.
The villagers had a meeting and collectively
decided to hunt the miners out of the territory.
They use the word hunt
when they explained me what happened.
This incident is a part of a long history of
the Munda defending the land against the outside forces.
Both women and men
protest and fight for the land together.
The struggles also shows the emphasis on
community solidarity since everyone
in the village agreed with the killing.
They were defiant, the Munda are living on the edge
of survival and for them land is essential to survival.
In my research, I took more
closely at how gender hierarchies with
relation to land access and use are mediated in
everyday life to paying
more complicated picture of women's agency.
Why is the question of agency relevant?
It is important to understand
indigenous women's agency in indigenous movements because
these movements frequently face
charges of gender discrimination from outside forces,
which want to disqualify the collective struggles.
The central question of today's talk is;
Why do Adivasi women defend
land that they cannot own because in Munda villages,
women are not allowed to inherit land.
Indeed, feminists see Adivasi women's inability to
inherit land as evidence of patriarchal dominance,
and the internalization of
the patriarchal dominance by women.
Thus, these feminists question
why Adivasi women even participate in land politics.
How do we understand
the Adivasi women's decision to support
the traditional land regimes
which deny them the inheriting of their land?
There are three important points I want to make here.
Western epistemologies fall short of
understanding the category of the Adivasi women.
Theoretically, frameworks have defined
Adivasi or the category of women,
so there's no category of Adivasi women.
By generous attempts, by giving voice to the voiceless,
we are actually carrying out epistemological violence by
restricting our understanding of these women
to dominate Western theoretical frameworks,
thereby silencing the situated knowledges.
That is also Gayatri Spivak's point.
We should understand Adivasi from
their own discourses and recognize
their epistemologies and way of being.
Only then can we comprehend Adivasi women's identity,
and their motivation to fight for the land.
I'll discuss my methodology now,
but I want to take a moment to acknowledge that
the Adivasi Munda community is
heavily patriarchal in nature,
but less than Hindu upper caste society in India.
For example, the way in which women and men
experience the forest and land is very different.
Domestic violence or other forms of
gender violence aimed at women are common.
Recognizing this, I make this point that I do not
romanticize Munda women's life in the Adivasi community.
In the Adivasi community,
both men and women have access to land and crops,
but the roles in the field do remain gendered.
Men plow the land,
but women are responsible
for the rest of the farm activity,
like sowing, weeding, and harvesting.
Men do help women on the farm,
but the onus of doing
the majority farming activities is on the women.
I'd like to share a anecdote
for the talk about my method.
One day, during the monsoon season, Niti,
who was my sister-host and I were walking back home.
We had just finished transplanting
the rice for 7-8 hours.
It had been raining heavily and we were very tired.
Our hands and feet were dirty with mud,
and I have insect bites on my legs from
standing in the water that was three or four inches deep.
As we walked towards the home on the muddy path,
I happened to notice a plow resting near a tendu tree.
I decided to touch it.
"You will get bad omen to the village", Niti shouted.
"All our yield will fail",
and then she added,
"Munda women are not allowed to touch the plow."
I immediately took my hands off the plow.
Niti's reaction really unsettled me.
I kept asking myself why she reacted in such a manner.
I was feeling unsettled not because she shouted at me,
but because I suddenly realized the relationship
Adivasi women share with the plow itself.
I realized that the most crucial tool for farming
was simply inaccessible to Munda Adivasi women,
and because it was inaccessible,
Adivasi women had no option
but to rely on men to do agriculture.
This was my first instinct.
As I indulged in the process of
reflection and analyzed my own position in the field,
I have realized that as
a 3rd world feminist trained in the West,
I was trained to understand that women empowerment is
intertwined with inescapable from land entitlement.
This further compelled me to think about the question,
why did Niti stop me from touching the plow?
What did she mean?
The aspect of sustaining and survival for
Niti is of paramount importance and priority.
She had expressed to me in
her own ways and told me on several locations.
"What if the crop yield goes bad?
What will I do?"
For Niti, the inaccessibility of the plow
for women is more than just a patriarchal practice.
Her faith in the Munda traditional system,
compels her to believe that a woman touching
the plow will affect her crop yield,
and a low crop yield will effect her,
her family, and her village's survival.
Thus, it is a question of survival and sustaining her,
her family, and her village, not just herself.
As Spivak argues in her writing,
French Feminism in an International Frame,
"We only get to truly know women through
their situated knowledges and discourses."
This argument has guided my field work.
Additionally, my active involvement in doing
and practicing things as Niti did in her everyday life;
from helping her in the kitchen and field,
to preparing children for school,
or going to the market to sell or buy produce,
gave me an insight into
not just every day practice of an Adivasi woman,
but it also educated me about her being.
I realized that the more I
acknowledged the difference between myself and her,
the more I could understand her clearly.
I would like to share one more anecdote over here.
It was a market day,
and the local doctor
had finally opened his rather dilapidated clinic.
Niti and I were taking her nephew to the doctor,
since he was feeling quite ill. After the checkup,
the doctor gave Niti's nephew some medicine,
and to my surprise,
all the medicines given by the doctor were expired.
[LAUGHTER] When we returned,
[LAUGHTER] I couldn't help but tell Niti
that I didn't trust the doctor or
his license to practice medicine.
After two days of taking the doctor's medicine
Niti's nephew was still sick with stomach pain and fever.
Niti and I decided to go to
the local Shaman of the village.
The Shaman conducted prayers and gave us a list
of herbs that he wanted us to get from the forest,
so that he could prepare the medicine.
Niti and I then went to the jungle to collect the herbs.
Although I was unable to recognize them,
Niti knew which herbs to look for,
and we took them to the Shaman.
This incident highlighted following things for me.
Due to the failure of
the neo-liberal state to
provide adequate access to healthcare,
Adivasi women are pushed to rely on
traditional knowledge of the forest and forest produce.
But this shows how the Adivasi woman is combating
this structural failure through
reliance on the traditional knowledge systems.
It shows the extent to which these women are
embedded in webs of
patriarchy and anti-Adivasi prejudice.
For example, the bureaucrat
who made the decision not to fund the local clinic,
the fake doctor, and the Shaman,
all are likely to be men.
The first two are likely to be the upper caste Hindu men.
Thirdly, the knowledge that Niti had about herbs,
was from the virtue of the fact that besides trusting
the Shaman to produce safe and effective medicine,
she, as a child,
had been collecting and using these herbs,
fruits, and vegetables from the forest.
The knowledge came to her due to the fact that
she was a part of the tribal Adivasi community.
As men migrate to urban areas for employment,
women are left behind to take care of children,
agriculture work, and kitchen space.
As they turn into heads of the household,
they find themselves with more and more responsibility.
Going back to the central question of this talk: Who
is the Adivasi woman
and what is her relationship to the land?
I want to raise the following questions over here.
The theoretical framework of
intersectionality helps us to
understand the oppression faced by women of color,
in this case, the Adivasi women.
It does not help explain the embodied knowledge and
experience that Adivasi women have of land.
That this knowledge is both an asset as
well as it constitutes their very identity as a subject.
Secondly, land is absolutely
vital to their everyday life and mistreated constantly.
Two, they may see themselves as a part of
collective not primarily as individuals.
Their survival depends on collective defense of
land and this is
also the motivation for defending the lands.
Lastly, women are not restricted from land by men,
they access it and use it.
They do not view themselves as restricted from land but
as a part of a collecting
that accesses land collectively.
They do not see themselves as victims of
the men in the communities,
[NOISE] they see themselves as confronting outsiders,
businesses, and the corrupt state.
I would like to conclude here by making these two points.
Firstly, that the land and the forest for
these Adivasi women did not
just hold traditional sentimental values but
it also had materialistic meanings
for their sustenance and their survival
and thus the politics of
these women were a culmination of all these factors.
Lastly, 40 years on from now
Gayatri Spivak called us to
see the women. We are struggling.
We are still struggling.
I believe the correct methodology, speech, observation,
and practice allows us to go to
get an answer closer to the question of who is the women?
In this case, who is the Adivasi women?
I'd like to show you some pictures now.
The first pictures is where they're getting to
the land ready for sowing the seeds, they're plowing.
The second picture we're transplanting the rice saplings.
The third picture we're weeding.
The fourth picture this lady is from the village that I
stayed in and she's selling bay leaves in the market.
This next picture, the first picture
is these women already they were going
to market with their children tied up on their backs.
In the second picture
where you see women dress up they're dressed
like this is a festival that
the Adivasi Munda community celebrates
once in seven years where women dress
up as men and they go out for hunting.
They usually go out for hunting anyway,
but this is a special thing that they
would stop men coming from outside
in the region and ask them for money
to enter the villages in general.
In the top picture,
people who are familiar with
the Indian landscape would know that women
painting their houses is not
something which is acceptable traditionally,
but Adivasi woman do paint and take care of their houses.
The picture in the middle where you see this woman on
the tree she was again my friend
and we were just walking into.
Let me get you a guava and she climbed the tree and I was
like who says only men can [LAUGHTER] climb trees.
Yeah, and on the corner picture
they're just celebrating a festival in
the village that all the women
together are dressed up and are dancing.
Yeah. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Did you manage the questions?
Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Any questions? Yeah.
How common is it for someone to go
into that community to learn their local language,
and how did that help you? How were you received?
The language spoken by the Munda tribe it's known as
Mundari and it's recognized by the state as the language.
They're proper college degrees people have in Mundari.
I hired instructor to
learn Mundari and it did help me a lot.
I wasn't super fluent but
the fact that I knew Mundari and understood
culture that deeply helped me
to I won't say I
was like completely as a part of
the community but just to be there and do field work.
The fact that I could speak and
understand the language I was
once introduced by one of
the activists in the region who was like,
"She's one of us."
It was a great honor but also the fact that
they accepted me within the community.
Maybe. One, of course I like the fact that you questioned
western feminist perspective and that you said that
they define their own agency and they
define their own identity and validates, right?
Yeah.
Just let you know that I like the fact that
you talked about situated knowledge,
which gives them the unity.
The other point I want to make was that you
are really talking about to
my knowledge of the individuals of community including
in the US by Native Americans for example,
where there is a much greater sense of
complementarity between male and female.
Yeah.
Their approach to the land was not who
owns what and my good question was,
you talked about ownership
and inheritance of land. [OVERLAPPING]
Yeah.
Where the Munda woman marries in what you're
saying is patriarchal society,
which also came into question for me after what you said.
When she marries, does she have
access to her father's lands?
Good question. After she gets married,
as long as she wants or
her husband and her family wants they can
work on her father's land as long as
the father is alive then she can work there.
After the jungle hits the owner is the brother but she
can live and do work on it as long as she wants.
The produce from that land she can use or [OVERLAPPING] -
Yes.
- it goes to the family?
The produce is what she uses for the family.
In the case of single women since
I said that the plow is not something that women can use.
What they do in the community is
any other men not the community will help them by
plowing and they would give
some portion of the produce to the men
as just to pay for his labor.
[OVERLAPPING]
Is going to [LAUGHTER] -
Sure, you can raise them.
- What is the number of
illiteracy and in what language, schools?
Yeah. Unfortunately the school they teach in Hindi,
they don't teach in Mundari
and I said unfortunately because that means
that within the community for survival you have to
speak Mundari but outside you have to speak Hindi.
That puts the student
or the child in a situation where they're neither
here nor there but then the level of education,
actually because it's also
the region where there are a lot
of missionaries and they've
been historically there, it's pretty good.
The woman whose picture I showed was on the tree,
she had completed an undergraduate degree.
Women are educated and they
would do programs like nursing and
etc but not necessarily
that everyone who's educated
gets a job. That's the question.
It's clear on that.
They rely on the land. Yeah.
I know that we wouldn't use this from
a gender-based violence when it does happen,
domestic violence or sexual assault.
I guess one, how do they talk about it
as a community and two how do they deal with it?
Is it considered as a private matter
or as they considered as
a public matter for the whole community
to talk about and deal with?
It's actually a very good question.
If a woman reports of
domestic violence or even her
neighbors report of domestic violence,
they have these weekly meetings which
are every Tuesday morning 6:00 a.m. in
every single Munda village of the region where they
would just come together under
tamarind tree and talk about village issues.
Those issues are brought up there and
as the villagers collectively they decide.
The men who is doing it is given
warnings or is heavily fined by the clans
and power rituals to begin with what the
powerless the weekly meetings as grounds
above for if he keeps on doing that.
There's also a lot of community pressure of not doing it.
You were talking about how because of
migratory labor that women are having more agency
in their homes and can you talk more about
that use basis for
women's agency like they're
taking their full responsibilities.
Is there any kind of discourse
about either women that are being educated in college,
is there in the discourse that would be
like a local version maybe they're
representing feminism but is there
any discourse about women can do
these things or they can have the abilities
or is there anything emerging on this?
Yeah. I saw the strong opposition to
alcohol because usually alcohol within
the Munda tribe and especially scholars coming
up from outside always remain
to side the local alcohol made by
the community which is called the rice beer Haria.
These women in the village I saw that they got together,
went to the weekly meeting and said,
"We will not allow
production and sale of alcohol in our village.
If you want to drink,
go to the local market which is once
a week and you can do it but you
cannot produce or sell alcohol in the region."
They really pushed it
in the village and they were like no,
because they thought that and it's just true to
that if the alcohol is produced
in the village then that means that men are going to
drink more and there will be
more domestic violence in the village.
That was a sign of where women exercise their agency.
Could speak more about your experience of field work?
Conducting fieldwork?
How did you interact with
this women? How did you have conversations with them?
Yeah. For -
For the dissertation field work because I
was already going to this region so I was
acquainted but not specifically the villagers
of this particular village I stayed in know me.
Firstly, I was super honest about my work.
If I was writing, I was writing in front of them.
I'm not used to hide and
write but the second thing was also that
I recognized I used to
say things that I
couldn't do, for instance transplanting.
I can't do for seven eight hours
I would do for a few ones.
They started appreciating that part
that I was taking initiatives doing and
engaging but I was also saying
these are my limitations but at the same time,
I did things like I taught in the school of the village.
So that's how I became friends with
them and I used to just spend time
with the women in the kitchen
and help them and then they were
cooking that's when I used to have
those conversations with them.
You just mentioned that you examined
one village but when you think about research,
it has the broader implications and applications.
Yeah.
Do you feel that your research is indicative of
most communities like in the state, in the country.
You see what I'm saying?
Where [inaudible] important for you?
Yeah. Firstly, since it was, again,
a very in-depth research for
me to study these phenomenons,
I had to base myself in a village.
Going inside 20 villages
and was really difficult to understand
these questions really in
depth but then because I've been
acquainted with the region and it's
been like now 10 years for me.
I've been going to different villages and
working in that region so I'm acquainted with that.
I don't know about the application apart from
their indigenous communities in India but theoretically,
I do know that these questions have a lot of
importance specifically
when the questions of indigeneity spoken.
When we talk about policies for indigenous communities,
what are we talking about?
Also as for the feminist literature I feel because,
as I said, what we have
is category of either women or Adivasi.
This is no category of Adivasi women.
So when I started writing this,
I couldn't find anything.
This is very unfortunate.
There's a lot of literature from
Indian Dalit women but there's
nothing on Adivasi women.
Can you talk more a little bit
about you said that [inaudible] Rao is
a Hindu feminist and she's writing about women's land,
she's writing about these practices.
Is this part of the way that Adivasi people are
framed and how does the general population,
the Hindu population of India,
look to and understand Adivasi people?
What do they see them as?
They see them as indigenous but is that a good thing?
Yeah. The general perception
about and how that upper caste Hindu people have is,
of course, that they're barbaric, they're savages.
Thanks to the British anthropologist which
conflated the lower caste and tribes together
so the upper castes would treat them as untouchables
and ask for them for lowest in the caste,
strata and the way upper caste Hindus would
talk is like they do know what they are doing.
There's this constant rhetoric
that you hear from the upper caste people.
They're like "We don't know what they're doing," like
the fact that the kill the people over there.
The upper caste Hindu men couldn't
understand or just state that what
these Adivasis are trying to say over
here. That's first thing.
But about the Adivasi women,
this is a constant thing in
the literature in India or even the feminist
movements that they would say that Adivasi women do not
claim for the land rights is
because between the ethnic identity
and the gender identity,
the gender identity supersedes the ethnic identity.
So that's what they say.
That was also the question for this research too.
Can you just respond to the next question?
I believe you know more about this
but the indigenous people,
the tribal people [inaudible].
One to my knowledge there was
an upward mobility that ended up with
mobility by basically claiming caste that is,
they're still on the lower end of the caste ranking.
The other thing is that since independence,
there is also affirmative action of
protection for what I call
[inaudible] and other backward classes.
To my knowledge, the tribal folks have been
included in that roster
of who are within
the category of backward classes, right?
Yeah.
So if you know more about that [OVERLAPPING].
Yeah. That's a great point.
In India, the Indian state recognizes,
as they say in the constitution,
that schedule tribe and they're
given special provisions, and education,
and government jobs, and other forms of
welfare stuff like food etc.
by the government.
At one end it looks very good but
what we've seen last 10 15 years is
although these welfare schemes are in place but then
government is defunding these schemes.
You have the food and ration things
which gives 30kgs of ration
per month to these families
but then the government is not funding it.
So it's there but it's not there.
I think that's also a way where you want to
not support your marginalized communities in the state.
There is a saying that
the upper caste Hindu would not marry.
Yeah.
Dumb.
Right. Enable one implication of
your research here what you're saying would
be a response like
this upper caste Hindu feminist discourse,
which is very much a very rural kind
of Western for me, this is, of course,
in many ways, is a way of
marginalizing these communities more
or treating them as backwards.
Another example of their backwardness or their savagery
is the women are dominated with disabilities.
Yeah.
One of the implications of this project would be to say
that discourse actually a bit harmful.
Yeah.
Because that just qualifies you
have these struggles for land,
[OVERLAPPING] but one of the biggest problems with
these struggles for land is that they need
to be seen as legitimate and, of course,
already they're very uphill,
they're facing an uphill battle but now,
there's a dominant frame that these communities are
also sexist and, of course,
there's patriarchy there but
this argument about when it's access
to land is more complicated
than those discourses you let us believe.
This is an indication.
Yeah.
You're speaking back to a discourse
that disqualifies these land struggles.
That's a very good point.
Instead of empowering these struggles,
the feminist movements are actually
supporting the very agenda of how it's a feminism.
I think I'm wanting to know about
the knowledge that the women have.
The knowledge about [NOISE] the products for example.
That is something that is immensely valuable and I mean
I do think you're going
it needs to be recognized.
Yeah. But then there has to be a distinction
between the Adivasi knowledge in
the Hindu women's knowledge
because Hindu women's knowledge is
also very way big and
[inaudible] in nature which is also,
again, an oppressing system.
What this is way big knowledge, the religious knowledge.
Yeah. Would the Hindu women go into the jungle and be
able to identify the nodes that the Munda women are?
No. But then, again, they do.
Yeah. They don't go to
jungles but then they have the [OVERLAPPING] [inaudible].
No I understand.
[LAUGHTER] Those of you guys in
the position of saying this is [OVERLAPPING].
Yeah. I agree with you.
I'm just saying to be a little careful in making
the distinction between Adivasi and common women.
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. One has
the louder voice through establish dominance, right?
Yeah.
Very quickly. Why did she choose to
go to the local doctor,
of course, the clinic rather than first in shaman?
That's a very good question [LAUGHTER] and
I have thought about it a lot
and maybe she thought that the doctor could help them
before the shaman but
the doctor failed so that's the reason.
The surprising part is the shaman live
like two houses away from her house.
For the doctor, we had to go all the way to
the market but she
believe that the doctor's going to help the child.
You didn't tell us about the impact and
reserves that those shaman prepared.
[LAUGHTER] Was the child well by then?
Did she get well after that?
Yeah. The child was
well but I think the child was lying too.
Child wasn't sick. [LAUGHTER]. He didn't
want to go to the school.
So that was the whole, again,
another story going on but the
religious really trusted local shaman a lot
for even really big medical issues,
they used to go to the shaman.
Do you have any last questions? Let's wrap up.
Okay. Thank you so much, Pallavi.
[APPLAUSE] Thank you all for coming.