A journey of sincere learning, Sonal’s Hindi diary demystifies social work in central India; has significant pedagogic value
by Dr. Piyush Mathur
Koshishon kee diary (A diary of efforts) is a remarkable collection of work-related diary entries written in Hindi by Sonal—a seasoned social worker who goes only by her first name (on the cover, anyway). The author was a recent social science graduate when, through 2001-2005, she wrote almost all of these entries. The book chronicles her experiences exploring central India’s non-governmental, non-profit social work sector and working on watershed development in five drought-stricken villages of the Dewas district of Madhya Pradesh (MP). This watershed project was the author’s first professional assignment after joining Vibhavari—a relatively new grassroots organisation at the time—which is where she has continued to work (its website tells us).
This is a screenshot of Sonal’s book reviewed in this article.
The book has a foreword, dated January 2019, in which the author gives us a quick glimpse into her inner struggle about her decision to publish this book, given that it is based upon her personal notes on the social work she did with various people, including Vibhavari’s core team. Thankfully, she overcame her hesitation and second thoughts regarding this publication—which is not a daily diary, but partially revised memoirs clustered by specific months and years through which the watershed project had unfolded. These memoirs are layered, recursive, and meandering.
The author would ruminate, wander off into giving deep explanations while reporting mundane details (which may also come off as unnecessary sometimes). Overall, the book may seem like a poorly planned yet captivating novel, packed with observations that qualify as excellent cultural ethnography, descriptive geography, and travel writing—and containing detours into philosophy and introspection. Occasionally, one encounters in the book speedy frames of energy, dialogue, and argumentation—as if one were overhearing a radio drama. There are also numerous instances where the author either reminisces verses from famous Urdu, Bangla, or Hindi poets—or throws in playful couplets of street poetry of unknown origin that is otherwise part of the popular idiom in the northern half of India.
But, then, there are also, thrown into the narrative, several verses of author’s very own that have little poetic merit—though they do reinforce a zestful and poignant image of her as a person. While her verses may not read great to experienced readers of high poetry, they may have been successful at introducing poignancy to the friendly contexts in which she verbalised (and perhaps performed) them. The book also ends with the author’s poem—which is a bit better than the rest of hers included in it. And finally, as far as these constructional components go, the book also has many black-and-white photographs relating to the watershed project—and they tend to bring the reader suddenly face to face with some sort of an earthy actuality beyond the words. But the fact that these photographs are not in colour unintentionally makes the author’s account seem quainter than it is. (Coloured versions of some of these photographs are available on Vibhavari’s webpage.)
Personal background
The account suggests that the author—who grew up as a middle-class government employee’s daughter—was culturally groomed to aspire for India’s civil services, but was herself initially looking to join academia, having cleared her National Eligibility Test (NET). However, her academic training in sociology got her in contact with social workers and organisations, and she got curious about those who do ‘meaningful work’ in ‘backward areas’ (9). Then, through her friend’s relative—a senior faculty at an administrative academy—she got to be part of an eight-member field investigation team for a ‘social security’ project in her home state of MP (ibid). This project got her closely acquainted with issues faced by the state’s rural poor, forest dwellers, and labourers—especially within the districts of Gwalior, Chhindwara, and Balaghat—and she decided to stay within the non-profit social sector.
After reading Anupam Mishra’s famous Hindi book on India’s water ponds, she sent him a letter expressing her wish to work with him on water management. Mishra (who was apparently in Rajasthan at the time) advised her, instead, to contact Vibhavari—because it had been addressing water-related issues in her home state itself. At that organisation, she was able to get one Sunil Chaturvedi’s phone number. Chaturvedi (who is the main founder of the organisation, as she would apparently learn later) told her that she was welcome to work with the organisation on a project in the Kannod block of the district of Dewas; however, she sought to check out the area before joining the organisation—and he agreed. All of that, and lots more, is presented within her first core diary entry, dated March 2001; the last entry is dated ‘Post-January 2006’—but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
A bird takes a flight
Sonal describes very vividly her team trip from Kannod to the villages where the project was active—or, rather, was about to get active. These are multidimensional, multifaceted descriptions—which not only include telling portraits of all sorts of new characters (including rural children) but also highly informative sketches of cultural-ethnic-economic groups of people; their foods and clothing; their surroundings; their lingos, mannerisms, interactive behaviours, occupations, spaces, and much else. This pattern of writing holds throughout the book. The reader is likely to feel as if (s)he is yet another passenger in Sonal’s team’s vehicle—parting away ring after ring of newer socio-ecological-economic realities; walking with the team in the villages; attending the meetings; and observing the multifarious interactions unfold against the backdrop of specific surroundings.
‘A dam is an abuse inflicted upon a river.’
— Sonal, p. 22
While returning from the trip, Sonal realised that Vibhavari suited her; in this, she was influenced by an encounter with an ascetic, Swami Gopal Tirth, whom she and her colleagues visited at his ashram en route. In a diary entry (20–25), she describes being told how the ashram and its surrounding forests and villages were soon to be submerged due to the Sardar Sarovar Dam’s height increase. While deeply disturbed by the ethics of such development, she stops short of condemning it outright—asking rhetorical questions, instead, about whether whatever is lost to the dam’s height increase could ever be restored. Her true feelings about this were reflected in a prior remark (22) in the same entry, after she contemplates the untamed river and the surrounding jungles: ‘A dam is an abuse inflicted upon a river.’
Against this depressive backdrop, Sonal strongly feels her own fascination for renunciation, and seeks Tirth’s advice on whether she should continue to do social work. He tells her that once the thought of renunciation so much as enters a mind, it irreversibly alters its outlook on the world, weakening that person’s material ties; he adds that nobody but an ascetic or renouncer is better suited to do social work—and thus she should persist with it, noting that as social workers she and her colleagues are already renouncers, given what they had given up to do their work. Tirth’s words resonate with Sonal’s standing admiration for Osho’s concept of the neo-sanyasi, and lift up her spirits. Perhaps as a result, she soon tells Chaturvedi her desire to join Vibhavari—as an intern, citing her lack of full understanding of the work. He, however, invites her directly to an upcoming training session, telling her that she would learn the work by doing it.
The origins of Vibhavari
At her request, Vibhavari’s employees shared its history with Sonal. In her account, Chaturvedi, trained as a geologist, got involved with the challenge of water scarcity in the city of Dewas while reporting on it as the bureau chief of Navbharat. Already friends with Aditya Lunavat (an academic), Kuldeep Shrivastawa (a medico), Amar Yevle (an engineer), and Manish Vaidya (a journalist)—all of whom were still with Vibhavari when Sonal wrote this entry—Chaturvedi invented a cheap roof-water harvesting system with the help of his engineering friends. This system would come to be known as the Dewas Roof Water Harvesting Model (DRWHM), and Lunavat would introduce it to the students of the local women’s college.
Some of these students collected data about local homes reliant on tube wells (which were the cause of the area’s groundwater depletion) and persuaded the residents of one home to use the system as a demonstration for other locals. Ultimately, with the help of the administration, DRWHM was installed in 1500 homes of Dewas—and this development was reported on by a major English-language national newspaper, which gave it wider attention. The local administration then advised Chaturvedi to formalise his network into a social service institution, leading to the creation of Vibhavari in 1997. Noting that the Hindi word vibhavari means both the last quarter of the night and a ‘starry night’, Sonal wrote the following in her diary after hearing this history: ‘Vibhavari…Small efforts made in the light of the stars.’
Moving on, learning wholistically
In the summer of 2001, the April entry tells us, Sonal registered as a trainee in the Dewas district’s watershed project. Her narration is candid and empowering in that she anticipates the often-unspoken fears faced by sincere learners navigating cross-disciplinary knowledge and intersectoral skills, using her own transparent journey to demystify the process. While she came to study water management as a graduate of history and sociology, she might as well have come to it through creative writing: She processes locales, incidents, natural phenomena, and even concepts as stories—and people as characters with a story to them. It is thus no surprise that this entry is titled ‘The story of water’—delivering a story that Sonal came to weave after her training, and based upon her experience with watershed development in these villages.
Sonal’s story of water is by default a regional, tropical one—but it is critically relevant to grasping the global urban floods of today. She writes that once people began to use automated technologies to pump out groundwater, the agricultural dependence on rainwater diminished—and so did the necessity of traditional wells, ponds, and other communal forms of rainwater harvest and storage. Gradually, these communal water storage sites began to dry out or fall into disuse; with rapid population growth and urbanization, the farmlands simply assimilated the remaining (and erstwhile) water storage sites as well as the grasslands that had evolved around them. As more and more powerful machines were deployed to access groundwater at deeper and deeper levels, groundwater became increasingly saline or was depleted entirely.
Watershed development had thus evolved as the solution to the overall problem of water—which included not only its salination and depletion deep underground but also the incremental social failure to store and use rainwater (which, in turn, contributes to fast floods, soil erosion, and other resultant problems). Some of this latter half of water’s story comes up in subsequent diary entries in this book.
Five villages—each with its own challenges
Vibhavari’s project focussed on Kannod’s villages of Panpat, Narainpura, Baijagwada, Jhirniya, and Tipras. Sonal’s descriptions of these villages, their unique challenges and how her organisation met them, constitute the book’s core. These descriptions are ethnographically rich, illuminating—and should be very useful for future researchers.
Since these villages have a significant presence of the traditionally nomadic people called the banjaras, Sonal sought to learn about them. Apparently she did not find any hard, documented answer to the question of how and why the banjaras settled into this area historically—but she does share a credible story about that, which she got from her grandmother, who had heard it from the region’s people. It is a captivating tale, which reveals that two of these villages—Panpat and Narainpura—were banjara settlements from the beginning.
The part that becomes relevant to the watershed project is what happened when their populations grew—and the hills began to lose their green cover, which thinned so much that it could no longer obstruct rainwater. The rainwater began to flow all the way down to Fatehgarh, taking the soil with it and leaving behind a stony hill, weakening the crops downward, and reducing the forest’s own yields for the villagers. The settled vagabonds began to depend increasingly on selling liquor made from mahua; uninterested and uninvested in any collective long-term planning, they themselves also began to drink more frequently and heavily.
Now, this is a diary—not a history research paper—originally written over two decades ago when its author was also very young; but it is important not to ignore here how the colonial British forestry had led to the ecological destruction of British India’s forests and the people who depended on them directly. Post-Independence forest management would legally recognise India’s forest-dependent communities— including these banjaras—only from 2006 onward, via the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act. Sonal’s last diary entry also happens to date to January 2006! The point is that this book understandably overlooks the damaging historical buildup in the area from the British colonial misrule—and its impact on the present ecological state of the area’s settled nomads.
While water scarcity afflicted all these five villages—heavily dependent on agriculture and forest yields—the challenges that they posed to Vibhavari’s plan were not necessarily the same. Sonal provides a granular account of these differences and how her organisation (and she personally) kept moving forward through them—coordinating its strategies with the administration, the locals, and political representatives. The best part about this aspect of the account is that it replays the episodes, scenes, events as they unfolded—with all their surprises, interconnectedness, and, at times, a special novelty for the young learner and discoverer. These replays include clear summary explanations, just the same, of special terms, physical structures, and equipment.
‘In this house, the warmth of affection is felt all the way from the front yard to the kitchen.’
—Sonal, commenting on a villager’s, Hamid, home (51)
Generally, there was not only no enthusiasm initially across the villages for what the organisation had to offer, but there were also misconceptions about its status, scope, and mandate. The organisational representatives were perceived to be either government authorities themselves or monied outsiders who could be begged to provide quick fixes for pressing problems. Patiently and tactically, the representatives had to explain to the villagers that they had a plan and constraints of their own; however, given that the plan required the villagers to do quite a bit of unpaid work and a little bit of land redistribution and alternative usage, they were very nervous about its efficacy.
The villagers were also not used to participatory and democratic ways of doing things. This was reflected in how the women kept themselves on the meetings’ margins initially, and how the bigger landowners (the Jats)—despite their own rivalries—tended to collectively dominate the process, overlooking the needs of the landless and small farmers. The greedy and corrupt tried to hijack the project for its money even before it began—including attempts to bribe Sonal herself (as a village head once did) for a share of funds that hadn’t even been released by the government (60).
Vibhavari faced challenges downstream as well, no pun intended. Only 25 days into the project’s start, the team faced undue pressure from the Dewas District Council, which, citing the new financial year, demanded visible progress within a month. The Council pushed for premature activities like forming self-help groups and starting plantations, while the organisation struggled to create village committees that would exclude corrupt elements while including literate secretaries (given that the local literates had better work options). With looming weather constraints and agricultural cycles limiting access and availability, the team accelerated efforts to form village committees for the project in Panpat, Jhirniya, and Narainpura before the mid-June 2001 deadline.
Making progress—and adjustments
Sonal reached out to Panpat’s women—befriending them, and ultimately succeeding in getting the whole village to elect, via a voice vote, an all-women committee, supported by a 19-year old literate male record-keeper and secretary. The women were prompted to get into this committee after hearing Sonal tell them about the village head’s attempt to bribe her—something that even his sister disliked. Of these 11 or 12 women (the book cites both the numbers), only five were capable of signing their names (others depended on thumb prints); however, Sonal notes, they had all sorts of questions about how the work could even start, given the challenges (and their own lack of experience).
To help them out, Chaturvedi spread out a map of Panpat and showed everybody how water flows down from the forest, ruining the crops before getting into the main drain. His aimed to reduce water’s speed by laying down rocky dams, which would make the water go into the ground. As for the fields, their slopes were to be intercepted by appropriately sized trenches, meant to store some of the flowing water and grab the wasting mud. Wherever possible, some ponds were also to be dug up in the farms themselves.
Marking an area in the map where a huge natural drain of water took its fall, Chaturvedi suggested that a pond could be built there early on—as it would arrest the flow and store the water to its capacity within a year, raising the water table. However, Panpat itself had practically no public land—and the private landholdings were no more than 3 acres per head; the forest itself was governed by very different, restrictive laws. Noting that the villagers won’t grant spaces for the ponds and trenches, the Committee doubted the plan—and insisted on getting some tube wells, instead.
Sonal told the District Collector the villagers’ preference for tube wells, for which the scheme had no financial allocation; he told her that the scheme’s parameters would be relaxed as the government had been spending a lot of money anyway on transporting potable water to this official draught area. A boring machine was then sent to Panpat—and it drilled up to 400 feet at three different spots overnight, but no water was found even at those depths!
The all-women village committee then turned back around to Vibhavari, telling it that the village had no option but to accept its watershed proposal. The villagers even agreed to prepare the main pond for free to make up for the money spent on the failed drilling. ‘This way,’ Sonal points out, ‘a new dawn broke in the last quarter of the night in the village of Panpat’ (71).
Additional work was done from November 2001 onward—aided by the fact that village committee got its bank account opened.
Jhirniya
Jhirniya was more difficult to come around. Even after the project was accepted in principle by the villagers, it was a struggle to form its project committee—whose top two posts went to two dominant ethnic groups of the area: the Naths and the Jats. Ultimately, three women were also selected for the committee—but by asking only the women present in the village meeting to name their representatives.
This committee decided to build a road first, as part of the preparatory, trust-building phase (which had a separate fund). Sonal reports here the local approach to breaking down the huge boulders that covered the area where the road had to be built. Essentially, the villagers would burn fires all night on the rocks, and pour cold water on them in the morning. This quick contrast in the rocks’ surface temperatures would cause them to crack a bit, and the workers would then insert steel rods into those cracks and break open the rocks.
When the main project did start in Jhirniya in late 2003, the original plan to build a gabion had to be shelved because the committee feared that the people would end up stealing the metal net that holds a gabion, letting the stones inside it flow away with the water—failing the whole plan. The committee wanted to build a concrete stop dam, instead—except that it was more expensive to build and had no approved budget. Vibhavari went with the committees’ preference anyway but had to use the villagers’ free labour, to which they consented, to make up for the extra cost of building a stop dam (141).
Seeing success, confronting newer challenges
By December 2002, Vibhavari had the project committees established for all the five villages, and it also had their detailed reports; now it had to wait for the end of the harvest season to start the physical work. By April 2003, the project work had intensified in all the villages, prompting the organisation to set up field offices where most bureaucratic tasks were now handled. Though Sonal was initially wary of the Forest Department, it ultimately cooperated with her and Vibhavari.
The project stipulated that each facility it establishes should be assigned a ‘user group’; Vibhavari, however, decided to change the term ‘user group’ to ‘water family’, convinced that the original term highlighted usage without incorporating the sentiment or ethic of care toward the facilities (145). The idea here was that the users would work together as a family to take care of their facility, and not abuse it. There should be some truth to the intended effect of this rewording—and the associated reframing of a concept; however, this attempt also remains naive about the reality that a ‘family’ is also not immune to internal abuse.
By August 2003, all these villages had plenty of water, and the villagers were happier, relaxed. The villagers’ incomes had also increased owing to the paid part of the project work. Sonal herself had also had some success in promoting literacy and schooling among Narainpura’s girls—and likewise in fighting sexism, health-related misconceptions, and providing medical assistance to mentally or intellectually challenged children in the area. However, by 2004, there had been a resurgence in the demand for tube wells in Panpat; at the same time, by April 2005—which was also the last year of the project—the village had become so much greener that when the traditional geneaologist of the Banjara community visited it, he struggled to locate, recognise it.
Concluding remarks
This is not an account for somebody who won’t pause to picture, truly engage with the written descriptions—of places, pathways, people, mannerisms, objects, the natural world, foods, emotions, argumentation, and analysis. This is also a sincere learner’s diary: The author always embraces her vulnerability when faced with the unknown. The book should be extremely helpful to people (especially introverts) awed by the notion of social work, wondering how it could function at all—or those trying to get into India’s grassroots non-profit sector and not knowing where to start. For the latter type of people, an early unwitting signal from Sonal is that it is critical to know somebody in the sector if one hopes to join it—because her first tip off to it, her account reveals, was from a relative.
There is a dimension to this book (and similar such books, as few as they might be) that remains outside the covers—and even there, unacknowledged—but gives it tremendous extra value. This is the linguistic dimension. It is unusual to find an India-published book that provides original explanations of contemporary concepts, demystifies socio-technical operations, in Indian languages other than English and Bangla. English has been made to dominate, even monopolize, expert discourse and formal communication outside the realm of politics in India. It thus takes a lot of courage to write truly illuminating accounts in other languages, especially Hindi—which dominates North Indian politics but is consistently excluded from posh, polite spaces and is frequently distrusted, ridiculed (even by Hindi users themselves) as a language of verifiable knowledge.
Sonal shows that courage—and her book enriches the Hindi corpus; it will directly benefit those who only know Hindi or who are comfortable with it. But Sonal herself is also not always alert about her own hidden biases privileging English; for instance, she calls her version of ‘watershed terminology’ non-technical—when in fact her version is simply an excellent Hindi rendition of it: It is not any the less technical (53-54). There are other places also in the book where Sonal calls English-language expressions, specifically, as ‘technical’ or ‘scientific’ (151).
But this book is also about a generational change or two in the non-profit organisational sector itself—both globally and in India. When Sonal wrote this diary, the non-profit, non-governmental sector—especially in India—had just about peaked in its respectability, which depended upon its grassroots idealism and methodological wholism. Corporate managerialism, which had begun to shape the sector in the UK and US through the 1970s-1980s, would expand through the 1990s-early 2000s, peaking through 2005-2015. This latter trend affected India, of course, via international financing channels and changing work culture—and an organisation like Vibhavari would have had (and likely still does) a very different outlook and notion of service by comparison (which is obvious from Sonal’s account).
Ergo, Sonal’s following statement, which I have translated from the original Hindi into English, has a great poignancy to it—and it is one of the closing statements:
A new challenge confronts us now. We have to go to newer villages. There is a lot of work, but we have to look for opportunities of economic assistance. Getting into the formal world for that scares us a little bit. Those working in the social sector have a specific lingo, which we have not learnt adequately. The agencies have voluminous reports, data-driven presentations. What we have is stories. The story of Shanta’s tube well. The story of the watermelon that grew in the farm of Suresh. The story of Sharadabai’s school. We listen quietly. What and how can we—the backward, dust-wrapped people from the agricultural fields—speak in front of the ‘advanced NGOs’ sitting in Delhi or Bhopal, working at the level of policy? Sometimes it seems that there is plenty of inequality in the NGO brotherhood that dreams of establishing an equitable society. (196)
You can imagine that the author of that passage can’t be a passionate pro-development advocate—and you won’t be wrong! In her concluding statements, Sonal confides with the reader her lack of trust in the notion that ‘external circumstantial changes can make the lives of humans and other earthly creatures happy’; she insists that only ‘sensitivity’ could create a better world (200).
Work cited
Sonal (2019) कोशिशों की डायरी (NeoLit Publication: Indore, India) ASIN: B08FSWZ2V4; ISBN: 978-81-941701-1-2 (Price: INR 196)
An internationally experienced transdisciplinary academic, Dr. Piyush Mathur is the author of Technological Forms and Ecological Communication: A Theoretical Heuristic (Lexington Books, 2017).
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