The Hindu : New Delhi News : Helping tribal women gain equality, self-respect

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Mar 06, 2006

New Delhi

New Delhi

Helping tribal women gain equality, self-respect

Working for the upliftment of Adivasi women was not easy for Marija Sres, says Madhur Tankha...

Faith in the Almighty can be a great motivating force.

This rings especially true of Marija Sres, a Slovenian national who has been working with Adivasi women in Gujarat for over 30 years.

However, it has not been an easy task for Marija. She had to face great odds while working with the single-minded determination to enable Adivasi women living in Dungri Garasiya of the Sabarkantha district in North Gujarat to achieve economic self-reliance and hold their heads up in society.

She is not only a crusader for the upliftment of ostracised tribal women but also a seasoned writer.

Marija, who was in the Capital this past week, says it all began when Society of Christ Jesus, a religious organisation, deputed her to India. The organisation used to send its people to Third World countries so that they could work for the development there. In 1971 she came to Rajkot and graduated in Gujarati literature.

As a famine broke out she started going from urban areas to the interiors. There was a widening gap between the rich urban folks and the rural Adivasis who were unlettered and facing the brunt of famine. Their main objective in life was survival.

Brought up in erstwhile Yugoslavia, Marija was determined to work to improve the lot of Adivasi people, especially women. "As I grew up in a socialist environment, I had a strong sense of women's equality and professional independence. The world of Dungri Garasiya Adivasis was as different from mine as day was from night. It was a feudal and patriarchal society," she says.

Living and working with the tribals was undoubtedly a daunting task. Theirs' was an alien dialect, which she slowly and steadily mastered. Food habits too were completely different from what she had been accustomed to all these years. "I ate simple vegetarian food, but got used to it. Chicken was a delicacy which they served only during weddings," she says.

Deeply suspicious of seeing a European woman in their midst, at first the Adivasi women thought that Marija had come with the intention of grabbing their land. "They narrated to me a story about how they were cheated by a Patel who on the pretext of giving them loan became the owner of half of their land. Even though they were reeling under poverty they were very self-respecting and told me not to shower them with gifts, which they could not reciprocate. I lived with a particular family in a village for two years so as to learn about their lifestyle and needs. They were simple people who would get up when the sun rose and go to sleep with the dusk. For them nature was God," she remembers.

An important thing that Marija learnt from the neglected tribals was that life was a precious gift from God that needs to be preserved like treasure. "This positive aspect of their life made them cheerful. However, I realised that women were not treated with respect. It was customary for a boy marrying a girl to pay her. She was appreciated for her work. As there was not enough to eat, I started encouraging women to work in the fields. I also got the State Government to sanction funds for them and applied for afforestation projects. They started receiving training in farming and animal husbandry," says Marija.

Her first book in Gujarati "Girasma Ek Dungri" (To Survive and to Prevail) was awarded the second prize by Gujarat Sahitya Akademi in 1974. A special edition of the book was republished in 2005 by the Gujarat Sahitya Parishad as part of the "hundred most significant books in Gujarati literature".

Marija also started three women's organisations at various times, including the Pragati Mahila Mandal that continues to this day. Today she can look back with pride at having succeeded in achieving her goal of empowering women to lead lives of economic self-sufficiency, the most practical way of gaining equality and self-respect in tribal society.

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