Narendra

Image rights: Peter Kuria

A shade larger than Belgium, Bastar is synonymous with the adivasi (tribal) universe in India, of which Narendra has been a part for over thirty years. Over the years he has trained himself into a cultural anthropologist, He began with undertaking extensive field-study spread over several years in the early 1980s in the Abujhmad ('Inscrutable Land') area of Bastar. Subsisting on food gathering and hunting, with shifting cultivation as a supplement, Abujhmad had little or no impact of the outside world.

Based on cumulative experience and learning Narendra initiated Dialogue from the Other End (DoE), an idea to comprehend the deep sensitivity and understanding of adivasi notions of forest, ecology, governance, livelihood, knowledge, learning and the outside world, It is also an initiative to incorporate adivasi notion as such into the larger national and global national debate on indigenous people. DoE helps revitalize the adivasi way of life and their mode of governance aimed at preserving the collective memory of ecological traditions, beliefs and values, and practises in everyday living. More importantly, to help re-assert the vital self-esteem, cultural confidence and the self-sustaining adivasi order of things; and to help negotiate on their strengths with the powerful outside world. It is to re-affirm the large value adivasis place in the rapidly disappearing richness of their traditions and sustainable ecological- cultural practises; often how little the civil society treasures them; and how much the modern statutes and protocol marginalises them

Narendra has delivered several talks and lectures at World Social Forums, India Social Forum, University of Tampere, Helsinki University/Group of Citizens, and Delhi University apart from other national and international fora. He has to his credit several papers and articles.

He lives outside of New Delhi with his daughter and estranged wife.