In 2019, I was on a field trip to Jharkhand, a state in eastern India, to collect data for a project on civil society dynamics in the state. I traveled to a village near Jamshedpur, one of the main cities of Jharkhand. It was around 12:30 in the afternoon, and I was waiting for my interlocutor while sitting under a huge mahua tree. I saw two women (ones in the picture) sitting at a small distance and eating a fruit that looked like unripe small-sized guava. I greeted them with juhar. The word juhar means Hello. The women smiled at me and offered me the fruit.

Although I could not communicate with them verbally as I did not speak their dialect, I showed them that I was carrying a lunchbox with me. But the lady came and insisted that I taste the fruit and gave me a few. I relished the fruits. When my translator cum interlocutor arrived, I told him to thank them on my behalf and asked him about the fruit. He talked to those women and passed me the information about the fruit: it soothes the digestion system and helps to retain energy. Since the men and women from that local tribal community start their day very early, and this fruit is easily found in the jungle, people find the fruit very helpful. Out of curiosity, I asked about their knowledge of different plants in the wilderness. I was told that the people from the local community could identify several medicinal plants and regularly use those plants to treat themselves. People from the community know what part of a plant to be used so that it does not hamper the plant’s growth, and, at the same time, people get what they want for sustenance without destroying the source. For example, different parts of the mahua tree are used for various purposes. The bark of tree is used for its medicinal values, the fruit is consumed as food, and the flowers are used to brew a type of hooch, enjoyed widely by the community people. Their vast knowledge of local flora and fauna only reaffirmed the fact that the wealth of knowledge these tribal communities have acquired over the generations is invaluable. 

The general notions associated with tribal communities are of poverty, marginalization, and lacking ‘skills.’ While these factors may inform the social indices developed for measuring the progress of that society, these notions discount the indigenous knowledge these communities hold, their integration into the ecology of forests, and the connections with nature. A paternalistic attitude towards the tribal people still exists, neglecting the indigenous knowledge and their relationship to the environment. The idea of being knowledgeable is one thing, but deciding that knowledge can be acquired and accumulated in specific fixed ways is a hegemonic practice to maintain a hierarchical system. What constitutes knowledge? How do we determine what can be considered knowledge? And, when ‘civilized’ people, based on some preconceived notions, term tribal culture as primitive or backward, they fail to understand and acknowledge the expertise of the tribal people.

It is not prudent to build an understanding of our surroundings based on a fixed lexicon devoid of contextual understandings. It might be easier for someone to tag these women as poor and marginalized. Such limited understandings reduce the identity of these women and their community as poor and/or marginalized. It is important to remember that whenever we enter into a new space, we generally carry a set of assumptions and understandings of that space; and it is possible that our notion may hinder our access to another culture and restrict our engagements with the people who inhabit those spaces. We all come from different places, marked with a spectrum of socio-cultural identities. But appreciating the different ways of life embedded in a context and by treating every culture with the kind of respect it deserves, we only become better human beings.