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FOLK MEDIA AND DEVELOPMENT

COMMUNICATION

..........................

MYTHS AND REALITIES

A Report on Experiences in People's Communication i n Mexico,

India and the Philippines

by

NEVILLE JAYAWEERA

In collaboration with

David Briddell, Ricardo Avilez, Augustine Loorthusa my, Sarah

Mathews, Sanjib Sarcar and Felix Sugirthiraj

A Joint Publication of the Asian Social Institute, Manila, and the

ISPCK, Delhi, in cooperation with the World Associa tion for

Christian Communication

Copyright 1991

Asian Social Institute, Manila, and the Indian Soci ety for Promoting

Christian Knowledge, Delhi

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Printed in the Philippines by the Asian Social Inst itute Printing

Press 1518 Leon Guinto Street Malate, Manila

Translated into Sinhala by Prof Tissa Kariyawasam o f the

Jayewardenepura University - Sri Lanka

.

CONTENTS

Introduction 7

Chapter 1. Background 10

Chapter 2. Assumptions and Methodology 13

Chapter 3. The Mexico Experiences 18

The Barley Growers of Tlaxcala Fight Back

Oaxaca Peasants Organize Themselves

Searching for Drinking Water in Michoacán

The Slum-dwellers of Carmen Serdan Struggle for

Emancipation

Observations on the Mexican Experiences as a Whole

Chapter 4. The West Bengal Experiences: 32

The Abyss of Poverty in Puruliya and Thagram

Some Reflections on the West Bengal Experiences

Chapter 5. The Tamil Nadu Experiences: 39

The Dalits - from Despair to Hope

The Lessons of the Tamil Nadu Experiences

Chapter 6 . The Manila Experience: 53

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Fisher folk Fight for their Rights

Benefits of the Manila Experience

Chapter 7. What We Learned 62

Selected Bibliography 68

Appendix 1 How Drama Productions Tackle

People's Issues 70

Appendix II Social Action Through

Sound slide Production 77

End notes 91

INTRODUCTION

This book records and interprets, in a narrative form, how groups of

villagers and fisher folk in Manila (Philippines) in West Bengal and

Tamil Nadu (India) and in the States of Tlaxcala, O axaca and

Michoacán and in a suburb of Mexico City (all in Me xico) tried to bring

about social change through what one may call "people's

communication".

"People's communication" is a mode of communication which depends

for its efficacy on people's energies rather than on technology. Generally,

people's communication has the following characteristics:

• Its main impetus comes from a heightened social awareness and an

overriding desire to obtain release from some form of socio-economic

oppression.

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• This heightened social awareness is sustained by an ideological

interpretation of the problem.

• While it does not altogether eschew technology-based

communication, its reliance on technology is marginally confined to what

the people themselves can own and use.

• It relies heavily on communication modes that are rooted in the local

culture, such as song, dance and drama.

• The emphasis is on "people" rather than on "communication". That is

to say, "people" must always stay in command of communication, not

"professionals" or "technicians" or "experts".

• The criteria of what is "good" or "bad", "right" or "wrong" in

communication is generated by the people themselves and not by

professional communicators. In fact, there is no "professionalism" in

communication, understood as a body of standards that has been

constructed and pre-determined elsewhere. Criteria are, therefore,

subjective and phenomenological rather than objective.

• The dominant criterion is "does communication bring about the

liberation and enhancement of oppressed people?" If it does, good

communication is deemed to have occurred. If it does not,

communication is not necessarily considered "bad" though it is deemed

not to have occurred! "Communication" and "liberation" are, therefore,

synonymous and the proposition that communication must produce

liberation, a tautology.

• As a corollary, people's communication must result in the

strengthening of "community" and communality, and in the erosion of

"individualism".

• Regardless of ideology, people's communication is generally the

spontaneous response of people who are marginalized by oppressive

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systems, and is inconsistent with the perpetuation of oppression as an

acceptable socio-economic formation.

The experiences recorded in this book occurred between 1982 and 1986

in different locations, widely differentiated by geography, history and

culture-in the Philippines, in North and South India and in four

different states of Mexico.

A team moderated by David Briddell recorded the experiences. Briddell

chaired the team's meetings when it met once a year to look at overall

policy. Ricardo Avilez worked with the villagers of the different locations

in Mexico. Augustine Loorthusamy was involved in the activities of the

fishermen of Manila. Sarah Mathews and Felix Sugirthiraj worked

among the Harijans or untouchables of Tamil Nadu, and Sanjib Sarcar

worked among the villages of West Bengal.

Neville Jayaweera was responsible for the overall design of the project,

for the ongoing month-by-month operational coordination of the whole

programme, for collating the individual reports and for writing the final

report.

The team members were not mere passive "researchers". They did

not go out to the villages as disinterested observe rs, bent merely

on observing what others did. They were activists. That is to say,

they shared, and identified themselves with the pro blems the

people had to confront and worked alongside them to solve them.

The team's choice of methodologies was influenced b y the nature

of their relationships with the people. The team shared with the

people a commitment to change the people's social a nd economic

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environment. To that extent their emotions, hopes and aspirations,

their successes and failures, were those of the tea m as well.

The team did not bring into existence any of the groups identified in this

book. Neither did the team manipulate the groups for purposes of study

and observation. All these groups pre-existed the team's involvement.

Overall, the team learned much more from these experiences than they

ever contributed towards them. The lessons the team members brought

away with them have helped them in no small way to look critically at their

own policies and systems and remould them in a fresh light.

The six-year global programme was a major benchmark in the evolution

of the policies of the World Association for Christian Communication

(WACC), which sponsored and financed the entire programme. The

seminal idea to launch this programme came from the WACC's former

General Secretary H.W. Florin who, having set it in motion, could not

stay on to see its completion.

Thanks go to scores of individuals and institutions who helped the team

along the way. Among them are Don Roper, who coordinated the

programme in its initial stages, the late Dr. Chandran Devanesan , one

time vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, who was a leading

light during the first two years, and Dr. Sarah Breimer, who worked as a

colleague in the WACC for the four year duration of the programme.

Thanks are also due to Dr. Mina Ramirez , the president of the Asian

Social Institute, and Fonz Deza, also of the same Institute. Shelton

Gunaratne of , who edited the manuscript with great care and devotion -

many thanks to him.

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Above all, the team owes thanks to the hundreds of unnamed

peasants and fishermen whose names are never likely to appear in

print. Their leadership, wisdom and commitment cons tituted the

foundation and substance of this book.

The team dedicates the book to those unnamed peasan ts and

fishermen of Mexico, India and the Philippines.

Chapter One

THE BACKGROUND

Three factors contributed towards the launching of this

programme.

1. The failure of mass media to achieve desired social change . For

more than a decade and a half, the WACC relied on mass media for

achieving social change. The '50s and the '60s were the heyday of faith

in mass media. Mass media were in fashion. Prompted by a coherent

body of academic thinking in the U.S. around that time, most Third World

governments believed that the quickest way to create an environment

conducive to development was to invest heavily in mass media,

particularly in radio.

By the mid-'7Os, faith in the effectiveness of mass media had declined

sharply, especially among Third World practitioners and theorists. Far

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from helping Third World governments to realize their development

goals, excessive reliance on mass media had, in fact, generated

consumerism and a new individualism which, in turn, had stimulated

demand to a degree that was beyond the capacity of the economy to

absorb. The drifts to the cities had increased, sprawling slums had

added to the burden of Third World welfare programmes and local

industries had lost their markets through unequal competition from

imported products as advertised on the mass media. The drift to the

cities by armies of rural unemployed searching for the good life

advertised in the mass media, and the failure of the economy to meet

their expectations, brought in their wake deep frustrations which, in turn,

produced social upheavals, insurrections and terrorism. To cope with

these violent manifestations, governments had to divert scarce

resources from agriculture, industry, education and welfare to massive

militarization programmes. In turn, militarization led to the weakening of

the civilian administration, the eventual seizure of power by the military

juntas, and the increasing brutalization of civil society. The new military

regimes, in turn, backed up their military muscle with increased control

over the mass media to strengthen their hold on the people.

Thereby, a vicious cycle was set in motion. Reliance on mass media led

to discontentment, social upheaval and militarization. And militarization

in rum led to a further strengthening and dependence on the mass

media.(1)

2. The Weight of the Findings of Critical Research . The findings of

critical research carried out in the '60s, particul arly in Latin

American countries, were heavily biased against con tinued faith in

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mass media. Reliance on the mass media for achieving social change

had grown out of a tradition of positivistic research pioneered by Harold

Lasswell, Paul Lazarsfeld, Daniel Lemer, Lucian Pye and Wilbur

Schramm. This tradition had stressed the cognitive factors, e.g.,

individual attitudes and values, as central to the problem of

development. They had argued that for development to take place Third

World people should change their perceptions of the world. They did not

say that attitude change was sufficient, but emphasized it as both

necessary and primary.

On the other hand, two decades of trying to change attitudes and values

had convinced the Third World countries that no amount of attitudinal

change could produce development, unless fundamental structural

changes were also undertaken simultaneously, both nationally and

internationally. Research carried out by a few Latin American scholars

reinforced this perception. Romero Beltran, S.R. Parra, G.D. Cuellar,

J. Gutierrez and Diaz Bordenave seriously undermined the

"modernization" and "diffusionist" models proposed by US

scholars.0*

3. WACC's Own Research Experiences in India . Responding to the

growing disquiet among Third World communication thinkers over the

irrelevance of the paradigm proposed by US scholars in the '50s (which

had, in the course of two decades, become the dominant paradigm), the

WACC itself decided to test the water, and launched a major research

project in India.

The project, designed by Prof. James Halloran of the University of

Leicester , was executed by a team headed by Paul Hartman of

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Leicester. B.R. Patil and Anita Dighe of the Council for Social

Development of Delhi comprised the rest of the team.

This research effort lasted four years. Its central concern was to

determine to what extent and in what ways mass medi a produced

social change. The findings generally confirmed the view that mass

media did not produce the kind of social change tha t Third World

countries were seeking and that interpersonal commu nication was

far more important in this respect than mass media. They

emphasized that attention to the "local situation" was far more

important than disseminating information from centr alized mass

media .(4)

It was to this "local situation" that the WACC then turned. It became

clear that it was not possible to achieve desirable social change in the

Third World by treating people as if they were isolated objects, living

outside a social context. It also became clear that development

communication could not occur without taking into consideration the

culture of the local people and the socioeconomic structures within

which they had to live. It was evident from research carried out in Latin

America and India that mass media tended to consolidate existing

structures of inequality and further polarize societies.(5)

Thus the WACC had to consider the alternatives to m ass media

technology and the modalities under which social ch ange can

occur most widely.

This was the background to WACC's involvement in th e "people's

communication" programme. The programme was not a r esearch

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project in the usual sense of the term. It was esse ntially an action-

oriented programme, geared to achieving certain sta ted social

goals. The WACC team wanted to see for themselves, at firs t hand,

how masses of ordinary people, who had no access to mass media

or competence in the handling of technology, set ab out achieving

their goals .

Chapter Two

ASSUMPTIONS & METHODOLOGY

The programme rested on a cluster of assumptions ra ther than on

a single overarching hypothesis. Stated briefly, th ese assumptions

were:

Firstly , that in certain Third World societies, there still exist modes of

communication that are capable of producing social change on a scale,

and at a pace, different from those associated with the mass media.

Secondly, that these modes of communication are:

• indigenous

• low cost

• accessible to people

• capable of being managed by them

• participatory

• capable of influencing consciousness and raising awareness

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• using minimum and appropriate technology, and

• producing change that is self-generated or endogenous rather than

externally directed or exogenous.

Choice of a Methodology

At the outset the team decided that the programme was not going to be

a conventional research undertaking, where the researchers set out to

observe, analyze and generalize about a reality which existed outside.

They confronted two broad epistemological models, subsequently

reduced, by Yvonne S. Lincoln and Egon G. Guba to two antagonistic

paradigms: the "positivist'' and the "naturalist", summarized as

follows:

Positivist Paradigm

1. Reality is an aggregate that is tangible and frag-men table.2.

Knower and known are independent entities (dualism).

3. Generalizations are universal. They are time and context free,

4. All events have causes which precede or occur simulta¬neously

with them.

5. Inquiry is value free.

Naturalist Paradigm

1. Realities are multiple, constructed and holistic.

2. Knower and known are interactive and inseparable (monism).

3. Generalizations are time and context bound. They lack universality

and are

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only working hypotheses.

4. All entities are in a state of simultaneous transformation, so that it

is impossible to distinguish cause from effect.

5. Inquiry is value bound.

The team chose the "naturalist" paradigm . And this had far

reaching implications for our methodology, which had the following

characteristics:

•The local context was all-important. Team members carried out their

observations within the total context of interaction, involvement and

struggle.

•Team members were not passive observers. They were more than

participant observers. They identified themselves fully with the

community when problems had a claim on their attention. This involved

an active sharing in their struggles.

•They accepted tacit or intuitive knowledge as legitimate, not only

conventional prepositional knowledge.

•They allowed a theory to emerge from the data rather than imposing

an a priori theory on the multiple realities they encountered.

•They adopted the case-study reporting mode in preference to the

"scientific- or the technical mode.

The team went beyond the participant observation mode which seemed

to place reality too far outside themselves. A reality outside themselves

was not only epistemologically but also morally, untenable. They wanted

to become a part of that reality, not merely participants in observing it.

They wanted to change that reality. They were engaged actively with the

groups, trying to achieve common goals. They shared the group's

hopes, successes and frustrations. They did not pretend to maintain

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their "objectivity" or their "academic detachment" in relation to their

goals and purposes. They identified themselves with the group. They

made the process of obtaining knowledge and uncovering general laws

governing social reality subservient to the primary objective of changing

it.

Goals of the Programme

Stated in concrete terms, the team's objectives were:

1. To identify groups or small communities who were striving to

overcome the social, economic and political barriers to obtain a decent

life.

2. To involve themselves with the groups in their struggles.

3. To learn through that involvement how the groups use the

available communication tools (of whatever shape or form) to achieve

their objectives.

4. To arrive thereby at a new understanding of communication and of

the relationship of communication to social change.

Choice of Groups

The following criteria guided the selection of the groups:

•The group should have been actively engaged in trying to solve

some social or economic problems that confronted the people, prior to a

team member's arrival on the scene.

•The principal actors had to be the people themselves. They had to

define their problems, devise strategies for solving them and carry out

their own observations and rethinking.

•The communication tools employed by them had to be mostly of

indigenous origin and manifest a strong cultural quality. Wherever they

used modern technology, they had to remain in control of it.

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•The interaction or participating mode had to be manifest as their

dominant style.

The team members had to take great care to ensure t hat they did

not assume a leadership role. There was the risk of the team

members assuming that they were more "educated" because they had

more "information" at their disposal, and were backed by the "funds"

available to them through their Institutions. They were conscious of the

need to keep a low profile. While they recognized theoretically that social

change was invariably either set in motion or at least speeded up by

catalytic influences, they were very careful to ensure that they did not

assume a catalytic role.

Applying the aforementioned criteria, the team sele cted four broad

areas for involvement: Mexico, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu in

India, and Manila in the Philippines.

What follows is a narrative account of the team members' experiences in

these areas. This report refrains from mentioning the names of many

individuals for reasons of personal security. In many places, individuals

who found themselves in leadership roles often risked exposure either to

the state security apparatus or to the power of the dominant elites.

Definition of Terms

At this point, it is useful to set out clearly the meanings attached to

words used in this book.

Community: refers to the local group with whom team members

worked. It occupied a local space within a defined physical area.

Popular : means belonging to, or springing from, the people and,

therefore known and acceptable to them.

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Development: an Inclusive socio-economic- political process involving

qualitative and structural change, resulting in the improvement of the

quality of life of the community as a whole.

Culture: the totality of human expressions and manifestation of a

community, both material and non-material, which enjoys a certain

permanence and has been or can be transmitted from one generation to

another. It includes paintings, music, architecture and sculpture,

religious beliefs and practices, dress habits and life styles, values and

attitudes; forms of government, and all the tools and artifacts that human

beings construct for various purposes.

Communication: an interactive process through which persons or

groups relate to each other and share Information, experiences and

culture. Communication is deemed not to have taken place in a one-way

transmission situation or where there has been an inordinate dominance

to the detriment of sharing.

Traditional Communication: communication modes that have their

origin in predominantly agricultural or rural societies, relatively

independent of modem technologies, and adopt local cultural forms for

their expression.

People's Communication or Popular Communication:

communication systems or forms that are put together by local groups in

the course of their struggles to achieve a fuller life. An essential element

of such systems is that the local people are constantly in control of them.

Such communication systems may combine traditional forms and

modem technology-based communication tools, but the people remain in

control of them.

Chapter Three

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THE MEXICO EXPERIENCES

The experiences in Mexico cantered on three peasant communities in

three states, and on one slum settlement in Mexico City. Ricardo

Avilez, a Mexican , and a group put together by him made up the team

working among these communities.

The three peasant communities were situated in:

The state of Tlaxcala 1,150 sq.m. in extent and situated to the

Southeast of Mexico.

The state of Oaxaca . 36,000 sq.m. in extent and situated on the South

west coast of Mexico, bordering the Pacific.

The State of Mlchoacan 23,000 sq.m., in extent and situated in the

central zone.

Carmen Serdan suburb in Mexico City, a slum settlement comprising

some 2,000 families and about 10,000 people.

The state of Tlaxcala - The Barley Growers of Fight Back -

Tlaxcala is a predominantly agricultural region with a population of more

than 500,000 people.

The Problem. The focus of concern was the oppression of the barley

growers (small holding peasant communities) by a monopoly barley

corporation named 1ASA in the Altiplano region of Tlaxcala. lASA's

managing director, told the barley growers, "You have to accept your

role in life, and yours Is to work. Each one has his function in society,

and yours is to produce barley and to resign yourselves to that role."

This statement summed up the problem.

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The problem of the 20,000 barley growers was two-fold. On the one

hand, with a growing population, their land was getting increasingly

fragmented and atomized, resulting in boundary disputes and inefficient

land use. On the other hand, four brewery companies to whom the

barley producers sold their produce had decided to form a single

organization to eliminate competition among themselves. They were

then able to fix the prices, and the producers had no option but to sell at

the buyers' price.

There was nothing unusual about this. It was the classic problem of

smallholding farmers all over the world, particularly of those who

cultivate cash crops and depend on the middleman and the monopoly

purchaser for their market. In the absence of intervention by the

government, the smallholder is entirely at the mercy of those who are

able to control the market. Consequently, the producer received rock

bottom prices for his produce, whether or not prices rose sharply, the

middleman and the monopoly purchaser siphoned off the surplus, and

the producer was left perpetually caught in the poverty trap.

Smallholding farmers who are forced into total dependence on a single

purchaser dared not antagonize their patron. For it was to their patron

that they had to come for small loans and temporary cash

accommodations so the oppressed came to depend for their very

survival on their oppressor!

However, a time comes when, driven by the overwhelming injustice of

their predicament, unable to accept any more hardship and having

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nowhere else to turn to, the smallholding fanners decide to organize

themselves.

The Response. So in Tlaxcala, by 1979, driven to desperation by their

poverty and by their lack of bargaining power, the barley growers began

to organize themselves.

As often happens, the initial impetus came from outside. In April 1979, a

group of students from the University of Iberia Americana, who were

doing their masters degree In rural development and who had to live and

work with the barley growers for obtaining their data, developed contacts

and explained to a few enterprising farmers the nature of their

oppression. They persuaded the farmers to organize themselves for

improving their living conditions. The role of the university students

proved crucial. They had set in motion the process of conscientization.

First, the students and a few enterprising peasants took a census of the

barley producers and found that there were, in all, about 35 identifiable

communities of barley growers numbering about 20,000. Next, they were

able to persuade a few farmers within each of these 35 communities to

form themselves into cells within the villages of Tlaxcala. Within these

cells, a process of discussion and analysis got underway. However,

there was still no recognizable organization but only a ground-swell of

educated and focused discontent.

The first target of the new consciousness was the middleman. The

producers saw that the middleman was raking in more than the price

that they got from the buyer, and for doing a job that they could do

themselves. But to replace the middleman the producers had to have an

organization. So they formed a cooperative of barley producers with

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rights to buy from the producer and sell to the market. The producers

owned the cooperative and shared its profits.

At this stage, the monopoly IASA, seeing that an organized peasantry

was becoming a threat to its own power, refused to negotiate or bargain

with the peasants' cooperative. Normally, individual producers would

have capitulated and sold out to the monopoly. But now they had a

sense of solidarity and they held their ground. The dispute became a

public issue for the first time. The mass media took up the debate. The

peasants' organization grew in numbers and public sympathy veered

round massively to its side.

Sensing the possibility of widespread civil discontent, and desiring to

contain the agitation, the government itself intervened on the side of the

peasants, and compelled IASA to negotiate with the producers'

cooperative. Thereafter, prices continued to be fixed through direct

negotiation between the monopoly and the producers without the

intervention of a middleman.

Two consequences followed immediately. First, through the elimination

of the middleman and as a result of being able to negotiate from a

position of power, the producers were able to increase their income by

almost 100 percent. Second, the producers were able to acquire the

sophistication and the market knowhow to bargain in the open market,

bypassing even the monopoly. This has served to tame the monopoly

and compel it to pay the cooperative's more realistic, if not fair, prices.

The Communication Component . The fundamental changes in the

power relationship between pauperized peasants, on the one hand, and

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a powerful monopoly on the other, was brought about primarily through a

process of communication.

The communication strategy used for achieving this major shift in

power relationships had the following characteristi cs.

No one, at any stage, sat down and reflected on the concept of

"communication" or asked questions such as "How do we

communicate?'" or "what" or "to whom" do we communicate?

Communication was not an adjunct grafted on to the programme.

Perception of the reality and action to change that reality were

fundamental. Communication was the process of altering both the

perception and the reality. Communication meant mor e than the

tools of communication, more than the media or the technology or

the content or any of those things that are usually subsumed under

that term. Communication in this context meant the whole range of

activities involving educating, analyzing, organizi ng and

negotiating, that underpinned the efforts of the sm all producers to

improve their conditions.

The role of the animateur was crucial to the whole process . In the

absence of the post-graduate students from the University of Iberia

Americana who were pursuing their studies in rural development in the

highland of Tlaxcala state, it was highly unlikely that the barley

producers would have organized themselves.

The base of the communication system was interperso nal, face-to-

face communication. That was the point at which the first stirring of an

altered consciousness occurred. The use of various tools of

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communication, whether they were newsletters or cartoons or posters or

audio-cassettes was entirely secondary. They were used primarily to

widen or reinforce changes in consciousness that had already occurred,

albeit incipiently, through person-to-person communication.

Once consciousness began to grow in complexity, dif ferent tools

of communication were harnessed. First, they produced pamphlets

with crude drawings; then, occasional newsletters and bulletins; and

finally, audio-cassettes which they duplicated and distributed widely.

They had no pre-determined views or inhibitions about the use of any

particular communication technology, either on grounds of culture or

ideology, provided the communication tools were within their capacity to

purchase, maintain and control.

Oaxaca Peasants Organize Themselves .

Oaxaca has a population of more than 2 million. In this state, the team's

involvement was limited to the isthmus of Tehvantepec . As in most of

the Third World, more than 70 percent of its population live in rural

areas. The majority of these people are Indigenous to Mexico, and 80

percent belong to the ethnic group called Zapotecas.

The Problem. Before the arrival of the Europeans, the people owned

the land communally. But, progressively, the newcomers took over the

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lands, evicting the indigenous people and crowding them into small

villages.

As the villages became overcrowded, the displaced peasants drifted into

cities where they became victims to drug use, alcoholism and crime.

Those who stayed behind lived by subsistence agriculture, cultivating

maize, wheat and chilli. But their agriculture and land use patterns were

quite primitive and the income from these sources was not adequate for

sustaining life. Therefore, they had to look for other sources of income.

They earned supplementary income working as agricultural labourers on

the large estates of the newcomers. Their wages were abysmally low,

and their living conditions deteriorated.

The problem was twofold . First, they had a feeling of apathy and

despair but they did not know what the problem was. Second, they had

no organizational instruments whatsoever.

The Response . As in Tlaxcala, the response began with a group of

animateurs. In early 1981, a dedicated group of church workers, priests

as well as lay people, moved in. Deeply committed, they worked from an

ideological and spiritual impetus.

But they did nothing for a year, except buy some plots of land, settle

down among the peasants, and cultivate the land along with them. They

shared their lifestyle, joined their social round, and participated in their

sports activities.

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The first to take notice of them were the local youth. They put the

football matches to good use for starting discussions and for sharing

information.

The peasants took the first positive steps when they formed a council.

The number of cells multiplied and soon they had a network. They

collected money and invested it in slide projectors. They organized slide

shows in various villages to show how villagers in neighbouring regions

lived. This gave rise to awareness that the problem they faced was not

peculiar to a family, or to a neighbourhood, but was widespread and

affected a whole social class.

Then they got down to analyzing their problem - its origins, its structural

mechanisms, its consequences, and what they could do to solve it.

At this stage the church came in and began to support the emerging

umbrella peasants' organization that had been set up with government

recognition. When both government and church gave the organization

legitimacy, they acquired the power they needed to act.

The results were spectacular. Several other peasants’ organizations

sprang up. The producers formed cooperatives and eliminated the

middleman. Prices paid to producers rose sharply and almost every

peasant household became a member of one of the peasant

organizations. In the course of five to six years, an apathetic and

disconsolate peasant community transformed itself into a self-

respecting, politically conscious and action-oriented social force.

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Communication Component. As in Tlaxcala, the catalyst was a group

of dedicated animateurs - not money, not technology, but people fired

by a vision.

Again, as in Tlaxcala, consciousness raising through interpersonal

communication and institution building, preceded the application of

technology.

Every available form of communication was ultimately pressed into

service-slide projections, cassettes, newsletters, bulletins and mass

media.

A significant innovation was the harnessing of the church and of the

Eucharistic Celebration-normally conservative forces-for progress.

Another innovation was the use of sport-the football encounter-which

was, next to the Eucharist, the single most powerful factor in the life of

the peasants because it gave an opportunity or platform for

disseminating ideas.

Also, as in Tlaxcala, the people remained steadfastly in control of their

communication tools.

Searching for Drinking Water - in Michoacán

This state, with a population of 2.5 million, is largely a forested area. Its

principal economic activity is forest exploitation and cattle rearing. Forest

exploitation is almost entirely in the hands of foreign entrepreneurs.

Local peasants carry out cattle rearing without modem technology. Their

26

subsistence-scale agriculture did not yield much productivity. Like in

Oaxaca, the peasants are forced to hire themselves out as labourers on

the lumber exploitation centres. Michoacán comprises 18 municipalities.

The WACC team worked in three of these, viz., Uruap an, Parachan

and Charapan.

The Problem. The peasants of these three municipal areas lived under

conditions of poverty that were perhaps the most abject in Mexico. Their

per capita income was less than $100 a year . They grew some maize,

wheat and barley, but purely for subsistence. Their principal source of

income was cattle farming for meat, but their cattle were emaciated and

barely fetched market prices.

Among their many harassing problems was that of drinking water.

During the 1970s, the whole area was subject to a prolonged and severe

drought, the effects of which were highly aggravated by the degradation

of the environment due to the sustained and indiscriminate deforestation

carried out by foreign timber merchants. Erosion of mountain sides, the

silting of rivers, the impairment of precipitation and the drying of wells

had added greatly to the hardships of the villagers. Most adversely

affected were the women, who had to trudge longer and longer

distances merely to collect water for their daily household needs. The

team's involvement in this area was confined to working with the

villagers in solving their problem of drinking water.

The Response . The team's experiences in Michoacán was sharply

dissimilar to those in Tlaxcala and Oaxaca . For one thing, there was

hardly any evidence of willingness on the part of even a few villagers to

take the lead in organizing themselves. Untold decades of living in

27

poverty and degradation had sapped all their vitality and initiative and

rendered them incapable even of responding to initiatives that others

took. Internal rivalry among families and adjacent villages, interminable

boundary disputes and sheer apathy made them totally resistant to any

form of organization. A principal reason for their suspicion of the team's

intention was the latter's suggestion that the community should do

something quickly to ameliorate the conditions of the women who had to

walk several miles a day to collect water merely for cooking purposes.

However, starting around 1981, the team set in motion the same

process as in Tlaxcala and Oaxaca. Because no animateurs emerged

from among the peasants themselves, the team took the initial steps.

The members started talking to a few peasants at random and, after a

period of three years, they succeeded in forming an organization of

about 300 members, mostly pauperized cattle farmers and farm

labourers. The team organized public meetings and marches to

convince the local politicians and the local bureaucrats of the need to

provide drinking water to the villages. As a result, the authorities

supplied pipe-borne water to six isolated communities living in the high

plateau of Meseta Tarasca by constructing small dams across streams.

However, soon after the completion of the water schemes that catered to

less than one percent of the population who needed drinking water, the

organization disintegrated because those whose needs were met

dropped out.

Communication Component. There was a lack of a local initiative. The

only initiative came entirely from the team, an expatriate, alien group.

28

Interpersonal and face-to-face communication took an inordinately long

time to bear fruit, partly due to the language barrier. Although the team

spoke in Spanish, it was the Spanish of the educated elite that bore little

resemblance to the local dialect. The absence of the proper dialect

hampered communication.

The production of pamphlets and newsletters never caught on. For one

thing more than 80 percent of the people was illiterate. Those who could

read did not care.

Lacking vitality and authenticity, communication failed to provide the

peasant organization with the nourishment it needed for survival and

growth. Basically the communication was not theirs, so when the team

withdrew, the peasants' organization dissolved and the villagers returned

to their life of apathy and dependence, with only six small pipe-borne

water supply schemes to show for the effort of three years.

The Slum Dwellers of Carmen Serdan - Struggle for Emancipation .

Carmen Serdan, a suburb of Mexico City, is, in fact , a slum

settlement. It came into existence in 1967 when Mexico City's municipal

government expropriated a huge expanse of land that some of the

poorest people of Mexico City had used to obtain clay for brickmaking.

Some of the hundred workers received small plots of land, 50 meters by

50 meters each, in Carmen Serdan. The land, originally allotted to 500

families, was subsequently subdivided to house more than 2,000

families.

29

The Problems. The problems of Carmen Serdan were the same as

those of any slum settlement in the Third World-lack of roads, drinking

water, postal services, telephone facilities, overc rowded and

ramshackle houses without basic toilet facilities o r sanitation, lack

of schools, medical services and opportunities for entertainment

(except the ubiquitous TV), lack of playgrounds or sports facilities

and high rates of unemployment.

By 1977, these conditions had brought into existence a militant

organization, a group of domineering and authoritarian "strong men"

who, in the absence of any government-sponsored civil authority, were

imposing a tyranny of corruption rather than providing leadership to the

people. Under the guise of helping the people, they resolved boundary

disputes arbitrarily on payment of bribes, and they extorted money from

the dwellers on promises of obtaining all sorts of direly needed facilities.

But they rarely fulfilled their promises. They sold off barren plots of land

to hundreds of newcomers thereby adding to the slum conditions. In

reality, they filled the power vacuum created by the government's

inaction.

Therefore, the problem was not merely the absence of the basic

amenities of life and the prevalence of dreadful slum conditions, but also

the imposition from within their own ranks of an authoritarian

organization which greatly added to their burdens.

The Response. The response to this double-tiered problem-the slum

conditions at the base and the superstructure of oppression and tyranny

from within the people themselves-was also two-tiered.

30

But before the people could fight the main enemy (the oppressive

municipal system), they had to combat the enemy within. First they had

to remove the corrupt gangs who were dominating the slums.

As elsewhere, the movement in this direction got underway only after a

handful of youths, in 1981, took the first initiative to develop a

countervailing mobilization. They went from home to home talking with

other youths and formed youth cells.

After they had established a fair degree of mobilization among the

youths horizontally, they began talking to the young women and

mobilizing them in similar groups. All this was done covertly.

Thereafter, the young men and women in each household were given

the responsibility of talking to their parents and other adults to draw them

into the movement. Soon they achieved sufficient strength to come out

into the open.

To cement their institutional or cooperative solidarity, the youth

organization needed to fight some issues. The first issue they took up

was not the internal tyranny exercised by unscrupulous gangs of slum

dwellers. Before they could effectively take on the internal enemy, they

had to demonstrate to the whole community that in the forthcoming

struggle against the internal gangs, they, the youth, were their (the

community's) friends.

To woo the whole community and establish the credibility of their

organization, the youth, who had now decided to call themselves the

"Slum Dwellers Association in Carmen Serdan", took up as their first

battle cry an issue that was agitating all of the slum dwellers: their

31

tenancy and land tenure. This action was in sharp contrast to the work

of the gangs who made money by selling off land to newcomers or by

settling boundary disputes arbitrarily.

Having established their credibility in this way, the youth association felt

strong enough to challenge the power of the gangs. The main line of

attack was to ask the slum dwellers not to patronize them, not to seek

favours or ask for their intervention for settling any of their disputes. This

way, without confronting the gangs head on, the youth association was

able to whittle away their base and their clientele. Apart from that, there

were occasions of sporadic violence whenever the youth confronted the

gangs head on. But the gangs, realizing that the vast majority of the

slum dwellers were now solidly with the youth, backed down.

The youth association then felt free to tackle all the major issues that

confronted their members. For this purpose, they divided themselves

into commissions or departments and set up a secretariat in which the

members worked voluntarily.

Rapidly, they started working simultaneously on a number of related

issues. They got themselves recognized by the Municipal

Administration of Mexico City as a legitimate, repr esentative

institution with rights to negotiate on behalf of t he slum dwellers.

Thereafter, they presented their grievances to the appropriate

government officials. This was often a slow process and rarely produced

quick results. So they backed up their negotiation with sustained

agitational support-public meetings, marches, demonstrations and non-

formal street wall advertising and sloganizing. In this way, by 1985, the

association was able to achieve some remarkable successes.

32

Among their achievements were the regularization of tenure and

the formal recognition of boundaries, the issuing o f legal

documents to cover their tenure, the laying of wate r pipes to

individual homesteads, the provision of educational facilities and

civil amenities such as public lighting, road clean ing services and

opportunities for education and leisure.

Emboldened by their successes between 1981 and 1984, the

association moved further afield. They enlarged their area of operation

to encompass other slum settlements which encircled Mexico City. They

carried their message of organization, mobilization, agitation and

liberation to 10 other slum settlements around Mexico City, chief among

which was "Camp October 2". Together they brought into existence a

federation of slum dwellers' associations and calle d it the Union of

People's Suburbs.

In the course of working alongside the Association of Slum

Dwellers of Carmen Serdan between 1981 and 1984, th e team saw

the most astonishing transformations wrought not on ly in the

physical environment, such as would not have been p ossible

through ordinary governmental action for decades, b ut also in the

consciousness of the people, such as might have tak en several

generations to achieve. An apathetic, wretched and viciously

quarrelsome collection of individuals evolved in th e course of a few

years into an energetic, self-respecting and united community. A

physical environment which was almost totally beref t of any

facilities which one may call modem or civilized tr ansformed itself

into a reasonably provided, decent urban neighbourh ood.

33

What was the secret of these transformations?

The Communication Component. In one word, the secret of this

amazing transformation was "communication". But

"communication" here means something much broader t han the

instruments of communication or the message or the relationship

of the sender to the receiver. Here, communication means the

whole ambience within which this drama was enacted, a whole

network of relationships comprising people, ideas, institutions and

technologies which is difficult to reduce to any on e of its

constituent elements without seriously distorting t he truth.

The most visible elements of the "communication" phenomenon were

the following:

• As in Tlaxcala and Oaxaca, the role of the animateur was

fundamental, a sine qua non. And unlike in Michoacán, the animateurs

sprang up from within the community itself. In Michoacán, the outside

team tried to do the animation and remained always unauthentic and

alien.

• Unlike in Tlaxcala and Oaxaca, the animateurs in Carmen Serdan

were soon able to enthuse such a broad mass of people, that the role of

animation rapidly passed on to the whole community. Animation soon

ceased to be the responsibility or activity only of a few. It became a

mass activity.

• The initial thrust was almost entirely through interpersonal and face-

to-face communication. A mere 10 animateurs visited 1,500 households

within three months. That Is to say, each animateur had to call on one or

34

two households every evening. They would sit and talk. In most

households, before they left, they were able to recruit one or two older

men, young men and women. In this way, within five months they

already had a base of more than 1,000 members.

• Once they had a broad base, they had to ensure that the

membership did not succumb to a few charismatic leaders. Their

ambition was to make the community a totally participatory one. This

called for a uniform level of awareness. The team realized that a wide

divergence in the levels of awareness among a group working to

achieve a common goal could result in those who were more aware, or

who had the "information", exercising power and dominance.

At the very outset, the youth animateurs were keen to ensure that there

was no room for hegemony within a participatory community. They

achieved this by making "ideas" the common property of all through

seminars or workshops.

• The seminar/workshop was, next to face-to-face communication,

fundamental to the communication strategy. These seminars were not

the structured, sophisticated events associated with the word. They did

not include outsiders except the team members. The agenda was

unstructured and open-ended. Likewise, presentations were informal

and, for most of the time, discussions took up more than 90 percent of

the time. It was at these seminars that ideas fermented and intensified,

and became internalized by the participants as their own property.

• The use of communication tools was purely auxiliary. The seminars

used flip charts, flannel graphs, blackboards, audio-cassettes, drawings

and cartoons. But they gave very little attention to the technicalities or to

the question of how to use them expertly. They rarely stopped to reflect

on "technology". They used whatever pieces of technology served them,

35

and were within their capacity to acquire, operate and control. For them,

communication tools had always to remain within the control of the users

and the intended beneficiaries. Those technologies that they could not

control, they did not use.

• However, they used video to very good effect in their campaign to

spread the word to other slum settlements along the periphery of the

city. Mexico City is a conurbation of more than 18 million people. People

who lived on one periphery hardly knew of people who lived at the

opposite end or even of those who lived immediately adjacent to them.

The business of living was so exacting and tiresome that there was

hardly any interest in others or any energy left for any activity besides

survival. In such a situation of isolation, fragmentation and apathy were

inevitable.

The problem the Carmen Serdan Association faced was how to tell the

others that it was possible to lift themselves up, that it was possible to

break their shackles and ameliorate their conditions.

It was for this purpose that they used video very innovatively. They

filmed their own conditions of living, the proceedings of their discussions

and seminars, and took the tapes across to other slum settlements for

screening. There they filmed their conditions of living and brought them

back to their own community. Within one year, in this manner, there

came into existence a new community of people who for decades had

lived under the same privations but who knew little or nothing of each

other's existence. They now came together in a relationship of solidarity

and common suffering. They were able to share their experiences and

thereby speed up the process of learning. Each slum settlement did not

have to re-invent the wheel or repeat the mistakes of others.

36

• As the movement spread and solidarity grew, the association

started bringing out newsletters, cartoons and a whole range of

educational pamphlets explaining strategies and policies to share

experiences. Slum dwellers themselves wrote all of this literature on

cheap rough paper, and they did not have the character of glossy

magazines produced by advertising companies. They were authentic

and credible-elements essential for effective communication.

• Contrary to popular belief about the strategy of "conscientization"

in Latin American societies, the communication efforts of the Carmen

Serdan Association were remarkably free of theoretical jargon and

slogans. They explained in the ordinary language of the people, in

concrete terms, without recourse to theory or concepts, the nature of

their problem and the possibilities of solving them. They did not discuss

or inculcate ideology, although the animateurs themselves were well

read in Marxist revolutionary theory.

Overall observations on the Mexican experiences

It is pertinent here to record some general observations about the

Mexican experiences as a whole.

1. The team did not encounter in Mexico, at least among the groups

with whom they worked, traditional forms of communication comparable

to those in India. That is to say, the use of dance, drama, music and

song as vehicles of communication was hardly in evidence. That is not

to say that the indigenous Indian people, who comprised 90 percent of

the communities of Tlaxcala, Oaxaca and Michoacan, were totally

lacking In these cultural forms. But they had certainly not developed a

37

level of sophistication to serve as vehicles of communication with a

visible social consequence.

2. The lesson from the team's Mexican experiences was that one

should not understand communication as "media", "content" or even as

the totality of the elements that are normally said to contribute to the

communication process. Communication is a total social process

involving organizational work, struggle, interperso nal and face-to-

face exchanges, and all types of media, leading eve ntually to the

transformation of consciousness.

3. The end of communication, as the team perceived, was the

liberation of people from poverty, oppression and limitation. Where

communication failed to produce socio-economic transformation and

major structural changes, they deemed that communication had not

occurred.

4. The role of the animateur was crucial . In almost all instances, it

was the committed animateur who set the process in motion. It was

evident that, left entirely to themselves, all of the communities in

question would have continued to wallow in apathy. In most instances,

even the intrusion of the animateur initially caused resentment among

the people because it disturbed their apathy and confronted them with

realities they would much rather ignore.

However, there was an important rider to the role of the animateur. The

animateur had to be someone from within the community or close to it.

In the absence of such a person or persons, an outside animateur, even

though Mexican in origin and culture, failed to achieve results. Even

though an animateur had to come from within the community, he/she

could not remain merely a catalyst (a catalyst is a chemical substance

that produces change in its environment without itself undergoing

38

change). In that sense, the animateurs had to be more than catalysts

because in the process of Interaction, of having learned from others,

they had to modify their own positions and show evidence of change

themselves.

5. Effective communication was inseparable from establishing

networks and

building institutions. After the original impetus had worn off, it was the

institution

and the network that guaranteed momentum.

Chapter Four

THE WEST BENGAL EXPERIENCES

The Abyss of Poverty in Puruliya and Thagram

In West Bengal , the team's experiences were of an entirely differen t

order from those in Mexico. While in Mexico (even if only after some

initial work by the animateurs), impoverished people were willing to

confront their problems head on and deliberately and systematically to

develop a consciousness of struggle and militancy, in West Bengal

people sought to cope with their problems in a more gentle way, even

tangentially, but no less effectively.

There are complex historical and sociological reasons that account for

this disparity that this book cannot explore. All it can do is to relate the

39

story of how an ancient people, steeped in tradition and culture,

responded to their experiences of impoverishment, and communicated

and shared that experience among themselves and with the world

outside.

Background. West Bengal, a state within the federation of India, has a

population of more than 54 million people of whom more than 40 million

live in villages. It is divided into several districts, each of which has a

population of several million. The team worked in two of these districts,

Medinapur and Puruliya, which lie about 150 miles to the west and

about 250 miles to the northwest of Calcutta respectively.

In Medinapur, the team worked in a cluster of eight villages in the

subdivision of Jhagram , with a total population of 5,500. In Puruliya,

they worked among a cluster of five villages with a population of 10,200.

The WACC team approached these villages through a group led by

Sanjib Sarcar, head of the Center for Communication and Cultural

Action in Calcutta , a man who has for many years been dedicated to

using local song, dance and drama for social ends. As in the case of

Mexico, the WACC team arrived on the scene long after Sarcar and his

assistants had already gotten involved with the villagers.

The Problem. Stated in simplest terms, the problem in both Jhagram

and Puruliya was social discrimination and grinding poverty.

In Jhagram, out of a population of 5.369 in 1985, 98 percent belonged to

the "low castes"; and in Puruliya, out of a population of 10,204 In 1985,

95 percent were "low caste". In both villages, 91 percent of the people

did not own any land and had to eke out a living by working as

40

agricultural labourers on lands belonging to the Brahmins or the high

caste. In Jhagram, there were only 38 literate people i.e., less than 1

percent; Puruliya had only 238 literates, i.e., less than 3 percent. Neither

village had any regular medical facilities. The only medical attention

available came in the form of a "self-qualified" homeopath who

distributed free medicine. Drinking water was limited to a single well in

each village, both in Jhagram and Puruliya. These single wells were set

apart for exclusive use by the majority "low caste" population. There

were, of course, other wells, but they were for use only by the "high

caste" Brahmins.

Percentage of people owning

Watches Bicycles Sewing Machines Radio

Jhagram 7 50 .08 18

Puruliya 4 21 .07 12

Poverty was so abysmal in these villages that the majority did not have

one full meal a day. The very few who managed to accumulate some

money and move to a higher economic level, rapidly integrated

themselves into the dominant system, so the poor and the marginalized

were constantly without leadership.

The Response. Quite simply, there was no response from within the

villages to this state of abysmal poverty, except quiet resignation and

total apathy. Among the people, there was hardly a stirring of protest,

nor even the most rudimentary awareness of the injustice of their

degradation. The possibility that they could remedy their conditions was

41

not conceivable to them. Thus the team's approach had to be entirely

different from those it adopted elsewhere.

The team selected a few young and middle-aged men. (Women will not

talk with outsiders and are totally subservient; the assumption by them of

any leadership role would be absolutely unthinkable). After long talks,

team members were able to persuade a few selected groups to organize

some traditional song and dance performances which had been a part of

the tradition of the area for centuries.

In Jhagram, they organized an evening of music and song, attended by

some 1,100 people. These took the form of drama, dance and song

Indigenous to Jhagram:

Darma - a tribal drama performed by Santal tribesmen.

Karam - a ritual of worship of the deity Karam.

Panta - a collective dance based on Karam.

Jawa - songs accompanied by dances, also associated with Karam.

Tusu - collective songs related to the worship of the deity Tusu.

Bhuaug - a group dance of the Santal tribe.

Jhumur - collective songs.

Garpa - collective dance by Santal tribe.

The evening made use of all these forms.

A characteristic of these cultural forms is that they are, which enables

the incorporation of whatever message the organises may choose.

Generally, whenever they had been used in the past for articulating any

social message, the message had been limited to imploring the gods to

deliver the people from their misery. The team tried to amplify and

42

broaden this message to suggest that people themselves could remedy

the problems they faced.

Before the evening's entertainment commenced, a local animateur

spoke to the gathering about the problem that the villagers had to face

and explained the nature and evils of the social system. He explained

how the people could help each other to reflect on their problems.

At the end of the long evening (the performance went on for more than

four hours), it was clear that the people were greatly entertained. The

lyrics were catchy and, for weeks thereafter, people were heard singing

them. But there was no evidence to suggest that, beyond a limited

entertainment value, the evening had made a social impact.

The team organized a similar evening in Puruliya where some 60 artists

participated.

The evening used four cultural forms:

Chou - a very famous dance form using decorated masks and

costumes.

Jawa - songs used in the worship of Karam deity.

Jhumu r - a powerful folk song selected for Chou dance.

Machan - a folk drama using gestures, mime and song as well as

dance.

The process and impact of the Puruliya evening was similar to the one in

Jhagram. The people enjoyed the entertainment and went away

humming the tunes but there was no evidence of any great social

consequence.

43

After these two major events, the team sponsored several similar

cultural evenings in the villages of both Jhagram and Puruliya

districts . Although on a somewhat smaller scale, the strategy and

structures were the same. Before the evenings' proceedings

commenced, the presenters, performers and organizers met and

discussed what problems they should address, in what form, how and to

what audience. Then they improvised and adapted their song or dance

and shaped the content of their presentation. Thereafter, they engaged

themselves in days of vigorous rehearsing to define and develop the

content. The events received wide publicity and, generally, the entire

village attended. The open-air performances lasted five to six hours.

Before the start of the performance, an animateur talked to the audience

and explained the reasons for the presentation. Without attempting to

make a political or propaganda speech, the animateur discussed the

social evils the people suffered and the reasons for their poverty and

degradation. After the hours of songs, dance and drama, all with a social

content, the people gathered for a round of discussion.

Audiences of 1,000 plus were common. They not only enjoyed the

presentations as entertainment but visibly benefited from the discussions

that both preceded and followed them.

In the village of Jambad, in the Puruliya district, one performance went

on throughout the night attended by more than 2,000 villagers. In some

villages, even without the initiative of the animateur, the local villagers

organized their own dance and drama evenings. Some villagers even

banded themselves into groups and started touring the district on foot.

44

However, the enthusiasm for these cultural evenings had more the

quality of a cultural revival than the character of a social movement. The

villagers delighted in the song, dance and drama and were grateful to

the team members for taking the initiative to revive their traditional

cultural forms. But it was not clear whether they had even perceived the

social goals that drove the team's endeavours. No movement got under

way to construct more wells for drinking water. Neither was there any

agitation for better health and education facilities. There certainly wasn't

the slightest evidence of the 92 percent "low caste" majority even

thinking of challenging the supremacy of the miniscule percentage of

high caste people.

The Communication Component . Nothing would have happened

without the few animateurs. However, their motivation was far less

ideological than it was in Mexico. This does not mean that they were

less committed or less hardworking, rather that their motivation came

more from a deep sense of compassion and humanity than from a

structured, theoretical or ideological understanding.

The choice of communication styles, tools and content reflected this

cultural bias. The communication effort was essentially cultural (in its

most limited sense) rather than ideological or organizational, persuasive

rather than militant. They were content to wait a long time for results to

show rather than go for short-term goals.

The cultural forms in which Sarcar and his team were involved belonged

to the folk-art category. They had their origins among the common

people. Consequently, these forms lacked sophistication, were

unstructured, were not bound by rigid rules, were open to adaptation

45

and were not subject to control by a professional class of artists. They

were invariably associated with agricultural events and were addressed

to the folk gods. Generally, they sought the gods' intervention for the

removal of some agricultural or social disability, or they gave the gods

thanks for some favour bestowed upon the community.

The principal forms used were the Karam Panta forms, Tusu and

Jhumur songs and, most famous of all, Chou and Machani dance

forms. They had a high potential for diffusion. These song, dance and

drama performances were never held before small audiences; rather,

they were always organized as festivals to which thousands of villagers

came from all over the district. So the potential for diffusion was high.

Unlike sophisticated dance forms, these folk-art forms had a high degree

of participation in them, and there was no rigid professional artists' class

who kept the "secrets" to themselves. This meant that anyone interested

enough could join in. The potential for adaptation and flexibility gave an

opportunity to many people, besides the performers themselves, to

fashion the content of the presentation. The period of vigorous

rehearsals that followed the preliminary discussion was also highly

participatory.

Unlike many sophisticated dance forms found elsewhere in India, the

folk-art forms used in Jhagram and Puruliya did not originate as

instruments of a dominant Brahmin class. Neither were they used as

instruments of oppression. Even though they might have been

addressed to the gods, and might have tended to make the people

apathetic and dependent, they were, in fact, always fashioned to

articulate the problems of the people. However, it is possible that as long

46

as the grievances were addressed only to the gods and not used as

material for disturbing the prevailing order, the ruling classes were quite

content.

Some Reflections on the West Bengal Experiences

The principal lesson learned in West Bengal was tha t where

poverty was absolute and where the consciousness of the people

had been smothered by centuries of apathy and acqui escence, no

communication device or mode could stir the people to action .

Even to be able to respond to the strongest stimulation, there had to be

some vitality in the people. No evidence of such vitality existed among

the villagers of Jhagram and Puruliya. While this may sound extremely

patronizing and pretentious, this comment is not a judgment on the

people themselves but of the dreadful social oppression under which

they have to live. Centuries of oppression have literally sapped the

vitality of the people to such a degree that they cannot even dream that,

except through the intervention of their gods, they can find release from

their oppression.

There has been much talk lately of the need to use folk

communication as a means of promoting social change . In rural

societies, folk media have, unquestionably, many ad vantages over

mass media: they enjoy greater credibility with the people, the

symbols and forms they employ evoke a deeper resona nce; they

are Inexpensive, easily manageable, more accessible and do not

serve as conduits for alien cultures. All these cla ims were true in

West Bengal. But to go from there to claim that fol k media can

47

serve as a social catalyst is to indulge in a fligh t of romanticism or

escapism from reality. Certainly neither in Jhagram nor in Puruliya

was there any evidence to support such claims.

This is not to deny that folk media may be used in a supportive role

to a movement that has already got under way. Howev er, the sine

qua non has to be that the seminal stirring of cons ciousness

should have already occurred and that this new cons ciousness

should have already come forth as an incipient move ment. Once

other forces have given the impetus, external or in ternal, folk media

may be harnessed to step up the momentum.

Even the use of the animateurs has its limitations. Both in Jhagram and

in Puruliya, animateurs who had their origins in the villages themselves

were involved in the work. But their impact was negligible, except in their

ability to organize the music, dance and drama festivals.

The principal benefit that came out of the attempt to use the folk

media of Jhagram and Puruliya for social purposes w as revival of

folk art itself. Certainly, the revival of dormant folk communication

media, which are fast disappearing under the onslaught of modernism, is

a good thing in itself. Folk culture has a legitimacy of its own and any

contribution towards its revitalization can be a good thing.

Lastly, one may wonder whether in situations such a s those found

in Jhagram and Puruliya (which are certainly no exc eptions in

India), it Is not wiser to fall back on the much-ma ligned radio as a

way of inducing "psychic mobility" and stirring the consciousness

of the people into wanting better conditions of liv ing. The principal

48

problem seems to be that people do not perceive the mselves as

being oppressed or as living under conditions of ab solute

degradation. Thus, there is a need first to lodge i n the minds of

these villagers a different perception of what life should and can

be. It is relevant to mention that the capacity to do precisely that

has been one of the principal criticisms levelled a t radio. In fact, the

criticism against radio has been that it tends to d o this in excess,

so much so that people get so discontented with the ir present lot

and generate such wild expectation that societies, finding

themselves unable to cope with this "revolution of rising

expectations", go into upheaval. However, when one compares the

abject poverty and apathy of Jhagram and Puruliya w ith the

discontentment, the conflict and the violence of so cieties which

have had the benefit of "development communication" , one cannot

be sure which option is preferable.