Bodies (that matter):

The experience of bodies ... of pain ... with women. 

Public Meeting of Women from 8 villages in May 2016

Moments: From Development Practice to Transformative Social Action

From 'Resources' to 'Relationships' - From Group to Sanghathan

I laugh.

I look at her cry and I laugh.
I listen to the other suffering; and I laugh louder.

It becomes even more difficult to control my laughter, as one more breaks down ...

I am asked constantly,
"Why are you laughing?"

Everyone seems angry; I laugh as pain and suffering unfolds!
I ask myself, "what makes me laugh?"

Comes my turn. I feel like laughing again -
at my pain, my suffering, my loneliness ... at my life.
The sound of pain tells me,
pain is to be laughed at.

Something grips me, my body trembles, my voice chokes,
my lips dry and my eyes give up
Someone help! How do I laugh now?

This time I cry, I cry my heart out,
I cry for all those who cry
I cry for myself
I cry as loud as I laughed, as uncontrollably ...  as I laughed.

Is to cry any different,
from what it is to laugh?

I cry in pain, as pain cries in me,
I laugh at pain, as pain laughs at me.

[This reflection builds on a meeting with the 'didi-s' I had in village Dhamolima, in Sikarpai panchayat, in Kalyansinghpur Block, and in Rayagada district of South Odisha. In this meeting, a particular didi (whose name I withhold) keeps laughing as the other didi-s narrate their their stories of sorrow, pain, loneliness, and singleness. I keep wondering: why is she laughing? What is there to laugh? But when her turn comes, she breaks down ...]  

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).