Sharanya Nayak

Sharanya Nayak is a farmer and feminist activist from India. She has been working with indigenous communities of Koraput district in Odisha toward regenerating climate-resilient traditional farming systems and building local skills around reviving traditional livelihoods. She is also learning from various indigenous people’s movements against mining and big dams by engaging with them and volunteering with them. She has also been part of fact-finding missions with human rights organisations to expose political, military, industrial, and fascist complexes in different parts of India. 

Sharanya is part of the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD) Breaking Out of Marginalisation (BOOM) Programme Organising Committee (POC).

APWLD interviewed Sharanya in December 2020 and below is her story.

Becoming a feminist and indigenous peoples’ rights defender

After I finished my postgraduate studies in Sociology, I was determined to become a writer, inspired by two people. One was Sainath who was a rural development journalist and brought a very distinct and critical perspective of our villages—what is happening, how the government interacts with communities, and what it is doing with the communities. The other huge influence was Mahashweta Devi who was a radical writer, poet, and activist for indigenous people— a storyteller of indigenous peoples’ lives and their struggles and resistance. She was not indigenous herself, but she dedicated her life to their cause. So, when I finished my studies, I wanted to either be a journalist or a storyteller. I got offered to work in a newspaper in my own state, Orissa. After three years of working for the newspaper, I realised that a mainstream newspaper would inevitably be blind to indigenous people’s narratives, stories, struggles and resistance. I resigned.

In 1999, I started working with migrant workers, then moved on to working with indigenous communities around issues of forest rights, land, women’s lives, and their resistance to violence. By the time I started working with indigenous communities in the southern part of my state, they were already experiencing military occupation of their lands, corporate control over their resources, and conflict with the dominant ruling class—the upper castes who had very racist and violent attitudes towards indigenous people. I focused on building communities’ resistance to the violence in their lives due to military occupation. How should they counter the mainstream dominant societies’ violence over their communities by using their own cultural knowledge systems and their stories? This has been my focus for the last 20 years. 

We organise communities to reclaim their forests and lands which have been grabbed by private money lenders, feudal lords, mining corporations, and the Forest Department of the government in the name of plantation, forest protection, and conservation. We slowly build community-centred schools or learning spaces within communities where children and youths can reconnect to their culture and knowledge systems, which is the backbone and immune system of their resistance.

Growing together with APWLD

My ever-growing relationship with APWLD has been fruitful. I acquired a deeply feminist perspective from Development Justice, which is the very essence of my work. APWLD’s Development Justice framework is comprehensive and very powerful, yet very simple for indigenous women to understand injustices imposed on them, and to see the injustice that is part of their everyday lives. It provides an easier and clearer articulation of the demands and future of indigenous women. When we look at the ruling class’s development rhetoric through the Development Justice framework, our analysis always resonates with what the indigenous peoples’ knowledge systems have taught them.

I think highly FPAR (Feminist Participatory Action Research) and the GFMP (Globalisation, Fundamentalism, Militarism and Patriarchy) analytical framework, both of which I find effective. The former capacitates me to interrogate development injustice more consciously through a feminist lens. The latter facilitates indigenous women’s understanding of injustice and helps them formulate and articulate their demands and the directions their resistance will take. In my experience with indigenous communities, capacity building is a central theme in the resistance movement. A crucial first step and challenge is to break the welfare and development narratives that so often sugar-coat resource grabbing. The government and the ruling class should be made aware of their action and inaction. 

The impact of GFMP on different communities in different countries has unique particularities. In India, we have the caste structure, so oppression is a combination from class and caste, resulting in burdens doubled for the communities and tripled for the indigenous women who have to deal with patriarchy as well. So, when we try to use the GFMP framework in India, we cannot talk about injustice and oppression without talking about caste hierarchies, and how the dominant Hindu culture has been trying to appropriate the indigenous peoples’ narratives as part of the caste structure. While internationally, the GFMP framework is common to all communities, it plays out differently in every country. I call for the enhancement of the framework’s capacity in addressing the particularities arising from different countries’ social and historical contexts. I especially hope that APWLD will expand its analytical framework to include the caste system. 

APWLD places an emphasis on common understanding among its members and staff and on solidarity with the grassroots. APWLD fosters a holistic understanding of injustice, which ensures smooth and comprehensive communication. APWLD advocates for indigenous fighters to be heard by the international community.

My journey with APWLD also involves an observation: APWLD does not employ hierarchy between members or different positions in the power structure that has plagued many international organisations. I enjoy working with everyone from APWLD. They are so dedicated and committed to their work and to fostering radical non-judgemental sisterhood, encouraging dissent, and giving spaces for discussion and consensus. APWLD’s work culture is just beautiful and inspiring.

Ways moving forward

To strengthen indigenous communities’ empowerment and resistance to oppression, to take our work to a deeper level, we must further challenge the current power structure, decolonisation of language, culture, technology, education, and research methodology. When the government is communicating with indigenous communities, the language of communication should benefit the latter rather than the former. When indigenous people are perceived as uneducated, the overlooked fact is that they are, in truth, educated in their own educational system. High technology should be employed to remove barriers facing indigenous people when they make international appearances. Our research methodologies and analytical frameworks, which are so often developed based on or influenced by theories with orientalist and colonial traditions, should be examined and reworked. In so doing, indigenous communities will build a more robust collective identity that demands to be acknowledged and reckoned with. We will achieve solidarity at another level, a level that no longer conforms to the current social power structure and the racist post-colonial traditions.

APWLD has always successfully advocated for indigenous fighters to represent and present their own movement in international forums and conferences, and it needs to sustain this success. Moving forward, we need to reflect on the ways in which we—in the capacity of activists, researchers, and practitioners— work with the indigenous communities. To achieve stronger solidarity with indigenous communities, we should constantly check our privilege and remember our role as enablers. Speaking from experience, whenever I represent the RITES forum, I would ask myself: Am I taking privileged opportunities away from that community woman? Even though she doesn’t have an identity card or she can’t get a visa, so she is not able to represent herself and her community? What mechanism can be activated within APWLD, so that a community woman can still be seen and heard even without a passport?