Eka Nari Sanghathan 

(Single women's collective)


Eka Nari Sanghathan is a Single Women’s Collective in Emaliguda, Rayagada district, in Odisha, India, forged by forty kondha adivasi single women.  

The lived experience of being single, the condition of singleness (as distinguished from singlehood) among women including forest societies, and the process of the public articulation of othering, led to the becoming of a collective where women who have been abandoned by their families, or have been widowed, have been left unmarried, or women whose husbands’ are critically unwell have come together with an objective of paving the Sanghathan's (i.e. the collective’s) own path, spelling out its own well‐being, carving out its own language of empowerment, and taking charge of a possible common future, a future beyond mere and already stated and dictated developmental agendas. This work thus builds on a movement – movement from being single to becoming an emergent and contingent being‐in‐common – the Sanghathan – that premises itself on the one hand, on an ethico‐politics of pluralism, and on the other, on the (im)possible forging of relationships, love and friendship.


This work in Rayagada with single women farmers is being supported by the Rohini Ghadiok Foundation (RGF).