- HOMEGROWN WORLD
- #HGCREATORS
- #HGEXPLORE
- #HGVOICES
- #HGSHOP
- CAREERS
- ABOUT US
- CONTACT US
Gram Art Project in Paradsinga, Madhya Pradesh, is empowering rural women by turning their lived experiences into art and economic agency. Through Be.long.ing — the eighth act of Artsforward’s ‘At the Still Point’ annual event in Kolkata — and the durational performance ‘Cotton Stainers’, women reclaim their relationship with land, labour, and community, challenging patriarchy, precarity and top-down development models that threaten forest-dependent lives.
Imagine a world. A world you know — the only world you know. A world with its own unique ecology — fruits, flowers, plants, animals, and landscape. Imagine you rely on this world for sustenance. You draw water from its rivers. Forage from its forests and cultivate its fields. Imagine a life built within this world and around it. A life that belongs in this world. What would you do if this world were taken from you? Where would you belong?
For many forest-adjacent and forest-dependent communities in India, this loss of belonging is a reality. As the long fingers of technocratic development reach for the natural resources these communities have relied on for generations, their traditional ways of life are increasingly at risk. The inhabitants of Paradsinga, Madhya Pradesh, are one such community.
Paradsinga is, in many ways, an ordinary Indian village, shaped by the contradictions of contemporary rural life: debt-ridden agriculture, migration in search of employment and dignity, patriarchal and hierarchical structures, and a model of development that has steadily disrupted ecological and social harmony in pastoral India.
For Be.long.ing, the eighth act of ‘At the Still Point’ (ATSP) — curated and produced by Artsforward in Kolkata — the lived experience of Paradsinga’s women found expression in the work of Gram Art Project, a rural collective of women, farmers, and artists based in the village. Through the women’s lived experiences, Gram Art Project reframes belonging as a relationship with land, labour, resources, community, and the more-than-human world. The collective seeks to hold space for multiplicity while questioning systems that concentrate control over resources, production, and decision-making. It does not romanticise the precarity of rural life in India; it examines how these conditions shape the people who live within them, and how those people might collectively reclaim agency over their own lives.
This philosophy shaped ‘Cotton Stainers’, a durational performance presented as part of ATSP Act VIII at The Urban Theatre Project in Kolkata last month. The work brought Paradsinga’s women’s experiences to the foreground: their hopes, dreams, memories, secrets, burdens, and the histories of labour and hardship that define rural womanhood. Embedded in the women’s bodies, garments, objects, seeds and materials, the performance moved across the boundaries of testimony, dance, and material culture, insisting that experiences often rendered invisible by social and domestic norms also deserve to be seen and heard.
The women themselves produced the cotton at the centre of the work. Hand-spun, hand-woven and naturally dyed using tea and other natural pigments, it was made from indigenous, non-hybrid, organically grown cotton. Its story contained the politics of its production. Under the patriarchal conditions of Paradsinga, as in many villages across India, women do not generally find time for leisure from household chores. By giving women a length of cotton fabric they could use to strain tea and stain in the process, Gram Art Project enabled them to justify taking respite during tea time while also making their leisure time economically productive. The collective uses the stained fabric to produce garments which they sell to fund their projects. One such garment — a tea-stained jacket — was part of the performance.
“Since we started meeting, we have found courage in each other. We are no longer alone. A lot of things changed: we learned to fight for ourselves, for what is right,” the women said after the performance. “It finally feels like we are someone. We have to fight for ourselves and speak up for ourselves.”
About Artsforward and At The Still Point
Artsforward imagines compelling artistic and environmentally sustainable experiences for communities, while using solution-driven thought, communication and methodologies towards building an ecosystem for the arts. In the last 15 years AF has designed, curated, created and led fellowships, youth projects, corporate engagements, public art projects and socially engaged art.
At the Still Point (ATSP) is India’s first and only completely community-financed formal arts platform, fostering critical connections and building spaces of collective energy. Curated and produced by Artsforward in Kolkata, it features artists whose work is edgy, dynamic and extraordinary in the way it contributes to current social and political discourse.
Follow @artsforwardindia and @gramartproject on Instagram.
