Why Indigenous & anti-caste lens to youth leadership training matter

Haiyya
10 min readDec 18, 2024

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Illustrations by Parth Pawar

For the past two years, Haiyya has been closely working in the Nilgiris Biosphere Region with young Adivasi youth, as part of the Adivasi Youth Leadership Development Program. The primary objective of the program has been to build the capacity of Adivasi youth in the region, to organise amongst themselves and come together to address some of the most pressing local issues that affect the daily lives of their community.

As one of the lead trainers in the program, I built friendships with these youth rooted in trust, and my own identity as a member of the Dalit community helped create a relatable and open atmosphere for them to connect and engage meaningfully.

In the two years, we trained over 270 youth from Irula, Kattunayaka, Kurumba, Muduga, Paniya, Adiya, Bettakurumba, Kota, and Toda in community organising and leadership practices. Using their learnings, the youth then collectivised and ran about 100 local-level campaigns on issues of water, transportation, road construction, and more. With the multiple training and workshops conducted with youth in the region, we have learned and unlearned a lot, and most importantly, we have learned why an anticaste and indigenous lens matter in these training, centring experiences of Adivasi identities.

In this article, I will focus primarily on my experiences training the youth in Attapadi, and the intention of writing this is to forefront our learnings, what works, what doesn’t, and what trainers can keep in mind when facilitating sessions. We hope it can guide those who want to work with Adivasi youth in the Nilgiris region.

Attapadi, the Millet village of Kerala

A 100-meter bridge in Anaikatty (Tamil Nadu) connects the borders between the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The bridge leads us to Tribal taluk called Attapadi in Kerala. Attapadi is a mountain valley part of the Western Ghats near Palakkad district, it shares borders with the Coimbatore district in Tamil Nadu. It is known as the Millet village of Kerala, since the Tribals were engaged generationally in cultivating pulses and millets using their farming method, Panchakrishi. The population of Attapadi is comprised of three tribal communities, namely Kurumba (recognised as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group by Kerala Govt), Muduga, and Irula, and the general population from Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The youth who were part of our training came from these three communities.

Most of these youth had completed their schooling and higher secondary education, and some were finishing college degrees. Others worked professionally as ST promoters, Adivasi actors, theatre artists, sportspersons anganwadi teachers, bridge school teachers, homemakers, and daily-wage labourers. They had many aspirations to empower their communities and bring change, but lacked resources and opportunities, and were usually undermined for their lack of experience.

The challenges and hurdles due to identity

Being a young tribal person means a long journey of challenges that begins from childhood wherein they are discriminated at school, displaced and relocated to residential schools thereby creating a disconnect between their homes, land, forest, people and community. A sense of belongingness gets questioned, impacting their mental and physical wellbeing. As youth leaders, they identified that the key problems included the mushrooming of resorts near their villages, which led to land alienation, restricted farming, and disruption of cultural practices. Additionally, resorts redirect water from the mountains, limiting the community’s access to drinking water, and resort waste is being dumped near their villages, further degrading their environment. Access to basic rights such as clean drinking water, education, livelihood, and transportation, gets impacted, despite having government departments, policies, laws, and acts poorly implemented in the region.

Designing training sessions based on lived realities & contextualising leadership from an anti-caste lens

The development of Scheduled Tribes has long been a subject of concern, debate, and action in India. Since the colonial period, various initiatives by governments and other organizations have brought changes to the lives of tribal communities, with Kerala following a similar historical path. While conditions are gradually improving, many tribal communities continue to face significant challenges, and there remains a noticeable disparity in the level of progress across different areas. Attapadi has seen infinite number of projects and trainings conducted regularly since the Kerala government decided to develop the Tribals along with some major funders from inside and outside the country.

While designing and conducting the training sessions we had to ensure and be conscious that this is not a regular leadership training, but based on their lived realities, and helped the youth address realtime issues on ground. We designed the training program based on the Community Organising Pedagogy to enable them to run their campaigns on the ground by focusing on the urgent challenges and issues in their community, thereby learning the skills to organise their community.

As a trainer, I understood why and how contextualisation of the pedagogy helped in familiarising the youth with these approaches that were deep-rooted in the history of Adivasi communities. We contextualized the training spaces by bringing in voices and stories from within the Adivasi community to make leadership and activism feel more tangible and relatable. We used examples of organising based in Attapadi and across Kerala, like the fight for justice for Madhu, the collective efforts of Pembilai Orumai for tea labourers, the fight of Thaikula Sangam against alcohol abuse and the protests of tribal community for land rights of Muthanga forest. All these anecdotes were decoded using the elements of organising and leadership in the community organizing framework.

In our training, we have consistently used the anti-caste film Karnan to illustrate the principles of community organizing. The movie plays a pivotal role in helping youth participants understand how leaders emerge from within marginalized communities, build collective power, and foster a strong sense of identity. Karnan also emphasizes the importance of legitimizing the struggles faced due to caste-based discrimination, a reality that is still deeply prevalent in Tamil Nadu. By connecting the film’s narrative to real-life situations, we were able to facilitate deeper discussions on leadership, identity, and the fight against caste and tribal identity-based oppression.

Ramu, a tribal activist and leader from the Muduga community, shared his leadership journey, illustrating that leadership is not a distant or unattainable concept. His story highlighted how tribal leaders are often overlooked in mainstream narratives, making their achievements seem unreachable to the youth. Similarly, Panali from the Kurumba community shared his struggles as an Adivasi youth facing discrimination for speaking Malayalam with an accent, a challenge that resonated deeply with the participants. His experience of being marginalized for his language and identity reflected the ongoing struggles faced by many Adivasi youth, including younger generations, who continue to face similar discrimination in schools and other spaces. These stories helped the participants understand that their own experiences are valid and that leadership can emerge from their shared struggles and cultural roots.

Focus on ownership, caring & rooting for each other

Besides contextualising the trainings through case studies of tribal movements, we also had an intentional focus on ownership and care. The power structures within the training spaces were dismantled from the get-go, as participants freely addressed me and others without formality, and together we set norms for the space. This allowed the youth to dive deeper into the issues affecting their communities, examining the root causes of these problems. Initially, there was some hesitation due to the traditional approach they had experienced in previous trainings, but we intentionally created an environment that encouraged growth, learning, critique, and fearless expression.

After initial fear of writing and sharing their personal stories, they showed immense courage in voicing their experiences of marginalisation and oppression within their communities and beyond. Their comfort in using their tribal languages was significant, as many were not fluent in writing Malayalam or Tamil, often relying on help from fellow participants. Despite early hesitations, the youth quickly became comfortable sharing their stories and listening empathetically, creating a space where everyone’s well-being was a priority. With limited spaces and amidst tribal hierarchies, they rarely had the opportunity to discuss adivasi issues collectively. The youth leaders felt that all the injustices that have happened in Attapadi affected every tribal community and it was important to address these systemic and structural problems. The realisation of how they should own up to their identities and practices even within the training spaces was visible. They created bonds with youth from other tribal communities and took remarkable ownership of training spaces by actively supporting one another and forming strong alliances.

  • The impact
  • What did it result in
  • Youth being able to share their personal experiences
  • Youth addressing community issues that stemmed due to identity and create change

The youth expected the space to have a one-way communication with less involvement of theirs but it turned out the other way around where our trainings brought out their perspectives of why Adivasis remain marginalized. The space offered them an opportunity to introspect and also bring different communities together. This was one of the first times they had come together and discussed as a collective and shared ideas and networks among them and that was the nuances that the training space offered.

During the activities, the focus was on understanding the three organizing principles: people, power, and change. Through this process, the group revealed a strong sense of collective identity, rooted in their history of self-reliance and interconnectedness with other tribal communities. They once had a functional tribal governing system, which has since become ineffective due to state interference, causing their traditional leaders to lose power. The group believes that if youth actively engage with their communities, they can drive significant change, especially in addressing the negative impacts that have worsened their living conditions, employment opportunities, livelihoods, and rights over the past decade.

These activities encouraged the youth to reflect deeply on their own communities, while also facilitating the exchange of information with youth from other tribes, revealing many shared challenges. Some youth even proposed solutions to these issues, focusing on building relationships beyond their communities to restore traditional tribal governance and organize regular community meetings.

As a facilitator, I observed the youth evolving from individual to collective leadership during the training. They supported each other, took ownership of group activities, and embraced responsibility in unlearning key aspects of team building. It fostered a sense of allyship, with youth from different communities stepping up to present, share, and critically engage with the material. They showed a strong commitment to helping both their own and other communities, providing feedback and posing thoughtful questions to refine their campaigns. Given the tribal tradition of interdependence, there was a significant focus on building collective strength and community togetherness for future organizing efforts. The “story of self” exercise allowed them to empathetically listen and connect over shared values and purposes, strengthening team bonds. Many who were once hesitant to speak took leadership roles, showing newfound confidence. The positive response and mutual support in the training boosted their confidence and commitment to continuous learning and unlearning.

The youth managed to organise not just with each other but also with their respective communities to lead over a 100 projects to address local issues of water, transportation, road construction, and more, and many saw their efforts yields results as the achieved the change their campaigns were seeking.

Conclusions

Reflecting on the past three years of working with youth from various communities, it is evident that a strong sense of camaraderie has been fostered. The youth have demonstrated remarkable resilience and determination in building and sustaining their teams over the past two years. In our discussions about their vision for the future, they shared a dream of creating a space where Adivasis enjoy equal power and opportunities, free from the exploitation of their communities by organizations and institutions under the guise of social service. As a team, we are now committed to transforming this collective vision into a larger movement, empowering Adivasi youth to organize and advocate for their rights.

Written by Prathicksha, Haiyya’s Program Manager from Munnar, Kerala. She has completed her Post Graduation Diploma in teaching English from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad and also her second master’s (MSW in Community Organisation and Development Practice) from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Guwahati. With a zeal to contribute more to the field of education, Prathicksha has handled projects & activities to train teachers and students in her previous work. She worked with IGNIS careers private limited, Hyderabad, wherein she was employed as a teacher educator. Eventually, she worked on developing modules, training teachers for Deshpande Foundation at Hubli, and handling their teacher coordinators in the project United Way Delhi. She has a very strong inclination towards teaching and she’s enthusiastic about a job in the education field. She is an animal & book lover and is always up for fun and adventure.

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Haiyya
Haiyya

Written by Haiyya

Haiyya is a youth-led feminist movement building organization that works at the intersection of youth leadership, social justice and people power organizing

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