Youth Eco-Feminist Community Action Course
Ice Breaking
The youth course commenced with ice breaking sessions and introductions, followed by laying out the guidelines and mapping the expectations of participants. The sessions consisted of Adivasi dance and songs, and games that built trust and provided an initiation to the vast syllabus lined up for the coming weeks.
International Day of the Indigenous Peoples
The youth celebrated the International Day of Indigenous Peoples on August 9 with a discussion on Adivasi history and their perspective on their identity, rights and marginalisation. It was followed by a visit to the Nehru Centenary Tribal Museum where the participants viewed and discussed the various displays on Adivasi tools, homes, culture and lifestyle. They also visited the historic Charminar as part of their local visits in Hyderabad.
Theatre Workshop
A three-day workshop on the Theatre of the Oppressed was facilitated by theatre practitioner Avijit Solanki. It introduced the participants to appreciate the synergy between the body and mind, the innateness of performance in human society and centrality of the intervention of the audience in a non-sermonizing form of theatre that helps the audience identify social issues which form their lived realities and nudge them to change it, thus acting as a catalyst in revolution. The workshop involved a range of movement-based games, activities that required them to imagine, enact and observe themselves in a situation, and culminated in a short performance directed and staged by the participants with oppression at the heart of the discourse.
Laws and Governance
The participants were introduced to systems of local governance and laws that pertain to administration in scheduled areas. It included group discussions on the functioning of panchayats in scheduled and non-scheduled areas, customary laws regarding marriage, and land inheritance. A session on inheritance of property under the Hindu Succession Act (HSA), Muslim and Christian Personal Laws on inheritance was held to understand the position of scheduled tribes in the crossroads between their customary laws and the HSA.
