The Girl’s hostel at the school (in Harali) started hosting Laman Banjara girls during the pandemic. Our Anandshala program at that time catered to the children of Banjara migrant workers. Come Diwali they migrate to harvest sugarcane and are away till February/March. With the AshramShalas still closed, young kids especially girls would have migrated with parents and all the efforts to keep them in school with help of Anandshala project would have been wasted. So the school temporarily accommodated banjara students in the hostel for 3-4 months. Then many of them joined the school and stayed on for the next year.
Visiting days and times for the girl’s hostel are fixed but Banjara parents arrive to see their children at ‘random’ times. Because they missed them intensely. Or because they thought of the kid while eating mutton curry. Or because they are leaving for the harvest and do not know when they will be back. Some reasons seem somewhat logical to the school staff, some outright absurd. Some staff members felt that the parents just don’t understand or do not want to follow rules.
For the last couple of years, the school started a scholarship program for bright girls to join the school in 5th grade and stay in the hostel. Most of the girls who got the scholarship did not join. Their mothers or grandmothers got emotional with the thought of parting. They are from within a 25 km radius of the school. It is not excruciatingly difficult to travel. One of the grandmothers said “She will get married and leave, why send her away now, so soon.”
This is unfathomable for the facilitators and JPH staff who worked hard to prepare these students for the ‘opportunity’. Some of the staff are urban and some are from the villages around. But neither could relate to this angst. It comes from the history of the community as nomad traders. In olden days, when a person joined another Tanda (a caravan) or got married and moved in a different direction, the probability that they will meet again was low, given that both of them would be on the move. This separation angst from the social memory is kept alive through wedding songs describing parting and loss.
In modern times, the girls get married to somebody within the community, many times in the same Tanda or nearby. But the historical memory and separation anxiety plays up in seemingly illogical ways affecting many facets of their life. You can’t wish it away or juxtapose a structure of another system on it to keep it in check.
Unless it is acknowledged, we can’t move forward.
In Harali, this is a constant struggle. Would bussing in be better to provide opportunities for Banjara girls, acknowledging the socio-cultural milieu? How can we make rules that work with the ways of the community?
devayani tirthali 