Bhoji is a celebration marking the end of our agricultural work and embracing of our produce post harvest. Its the time for the Sanghathan to get together, cook meals using our produce, drink, dance, play and welcome leisure after the intense year of agricultural production. Bhoji is also the time when we invite our friends, mentors and well wishers from outside Emaliguda to come and join us in this grand annual celebration. Next to the Nagaballi river, under the mangrove, we all gather, cook together, sing, dance, play and share a meal at the end of the day.
Eka Nari Sanghathan
Thursday, 19 November 2020
Monday, 3 August 2020
Singleness and Sanghathan
The Story Retold
Postdevelopment in Practice
Collective agriculture: Towards a postcapitalist-feminist future
Since 2017, women in the Sanghathan have been leasing
agricultural land in order to engage in collective farming on a common piece of
land. Apart
from collective production and distribution of food crops, the attempt at ENS
is also to engage in ecologically sensitive farming methods and techniques.
This involves moving away from cultivation of high yielding seed varieties
bought from the market (which have gained immense popularity, thanks to
capitalist interventions of NGOs in the area) to sowing folk seed varieties
that used to be part of traditional agriculture practice. Moreover, natural
fertilizers and plant based pesticides are being used by ENS instead of
chemical fertilizers (that are generally used by the farmers now) to ensure
healthy food and ecologically sensitive agriculture and enable an ethical
relationship between human and more-than-human forms- driven by care of the
fellow being, soil, water, microorganisms that live in the soil, birds and
insects snakes and frogs, crabs and fish, and everything else constituting the
complex ecosystem, which helps nurture and sustain every other life form within
it.
This year apart from rice cultivation we are also venturing into the production of finger millets and black gram on upland, where mostly cash crops like cotton and eucalyptus are being grown. Going against the tide and foregoing cash income incentives of cash crops, ENS has chosen to produce food crops for social and ecological well-being of humans and more-than-human others.