Ecology in ancient texts

The Atharvaveda (AV) contains a special status in Vedic literature, since it was considered to be the ‘Veda for the masses’, containing philosophical expressions which oscillate between the mundane to the higher planes of philosophy which deal with the central questions of ordinary man and his environment. Jena tries to highlight how Indians during the Vedic period perceived the environment or were conscious of the environment and hence through the enquiry focuses on a study more of human awareness and human behaviour through a study of the AV during that time.

In the verses pertaining to the Earth, it is clear that in ancient times the Earth was seen as the seat of creation as in most other civilizations. Particularly interesting however, is the kind of qualities that were attached to the Earth, ‘it was a provider of food, strength, desires, progeny and nourishment’. The earth was praised for its ‘firmness’ which in turn ensured firmness of the mountains, the heavens and the people. It is through the earth that oceans, rivers and waters, food and fields are born and come into existence. Hence she is a ‘treasure house’ , the reminder of the whole universe, the gods and forests that stand on it. It seems that our ancestors were far less conscious of national, regional, religious divisions on the earth then and freely called upon the gods of the world and the universe to protect and tread softly on the earth. In the verses on water, water was considered medicinal, the nectar, that which provides relief and cure from chronic diseases, the purifier and hence also that which had the ability to drive away sin. However it is Agni or Fire which is given far more immortal and universal power than the rest. This is probably an important fact given how fire has been crucial in the human civilisational role distinguishing mankind in terms of ability from the rest of nature. Reference to Air is made in the form of winds, considered the nourisher of birds and in the hymns or verses were prayers for auspicious days, and nights and good constellations and most of all prayers were made to reduce the vagaries of nature, balance on earth and skies and for gracious meteor strikes and prayers to seasons, to ensure their recurrent nature.In the verses on flora and fauna that Jena highlights to probe further into the kind of relationships built with flora and fauna we find a richness in herbal practices. The Munja grass has been praised as a great healing ointment, while other herbs and plants are mystical protectors of enemies, having mystical rather than medicinal properties. 

Though the overall environmental philosophic perspective may not be very rich, hence affecting what the writer has picked or left out of the AV, the book is a good initial attempt for a study of ecological awareness in the Atharvaveda, in the selected sections by the Sanskrit specialist.

Reference: Ecological Awareness reflected in the Atharvaveda, Niranjan Jena

Countering Patriarchal Imaginations: Women and Water Movements

In the journeys of ecological justice movements one has found that since it is women (specifically rural women) who are closely engaging with harnessing, accessing and preserving natural resources, they sometimes encounter deep conflicts as the artificial society expands and tries to constantly arrange and rearrange natural resources in order to rationalize its existence.

I

Rivers, have been a strong symbol in our imaginations. They have been the centres of our civilisation histories. With time however, in our perceptions, and specifically language, rivers transformed from being mere ‘gushes of water across rocks, pebbles, mountains and plain lands’ to ‘navigable streams, deliverers of flood and therefore bountiful crops, symbols of fertility, and mothers and goddesses’. Just as women have had to constantly struggle with the positions that patriarchy accords to them as mothers, daughters and wives, so too in the case of rivers. Even though they may have been associated with the divine, when rivers would overspill their embankments they were imagined to be ‘aberrant’, ‘out of control’ or that which needed to be ‘tamed’, ‘dammed’ or ‘harnessed’. After almost half a century of experiences on damming rivers in India, some scholars critiquing the state of our rivers observe that they have become like older mothers, who are tired, sluggish and slow. Changing our imaginations about water and other natural resources is a crucial step towards thinking of new non patriarchal ways of relating with nature and also women. While a very literal example may be drawn in the imagination of rivers, the same is true for other natural elements such as forests, our lands, the earth and other life systems. 

II

For many people who live further away from rivers and do not directly depend on it, the river becomes more and more remote in their imaginations where it is merely a part of the landscape much like a road, bridge or a speck of blue amidst the concrete. Communities whose lifestyles are close to the rhythms and cycles of nature still see rivers as living entities. To a large number of these communities rivers are divine and almost all their daily activities revolve around it. However they have lesser stakes in determining pathways and directions on development policies, usage of natural resources and their rights to livelihood. Their voices or demands are a constant reminder to society to slow down its pace, but most often their thoughts are considered to be just a bundle of ‘inconvenient truths’. 

Most women within these communities have been assigned roles where they are more involved in accessing natural resources for the well being of their families. The universally essentialised roles of women as food providers, water harnessers, care givers, and also their work being mostly ‘manual work and less technology oriented’ tends to place them in serious and conflictual situations as the current artificial society expands itself and continues to arrange and rearrange and shift the way it uses and exploits natural resources. 

In my presentation I highlight snippets of journeys from the lives of women who have experienced conflicts in the light of shifting regimes of natural resources use. These journeys and struggles show that their struggle to retain access has a close link with establishing their own identities while preserving the cohesiveness of nature or the environment around them.

III

My first story is about Tara who is a village head and lives in the same district where the  steel town Bokaro is located on the banks of the River Damodar. The river Damodar was dammed in the 1950s. Tara states ‘Rivers are like the interconnected veins running through our bodies, if you cut off a vein we cannot continue to live. The life of a woman is closely intertwined with the river. We derive our identity from it.’ 

In spite of the Damodar Valley Project being projected as one of the main ‘temples of development’ a substantial number of people faced displacement due to construction of dams in these parts of Jharkhand. People were promised irrigation, jobs and basic amenities by dam authorities when they were displaced, but for many these promises have not been kept. There was a proliferation of steel and thermal power plants in the valley resulting in serious water diversions, drying up of the river and industrial air and water pollution as the DVC developed and shifted away from its initial emphasis on irrigation and flood control to the sole purpose of power generation.

 

Tara’s journey into the public sphere began with her work with women belonging to those communities who had been displaced due to the Tenughat Dam, one among the network of dams for the Damodar Valley project. Tara found that the promises made had not been kept. People were without jobs, and had not received irrigation facilities and basic amenities. In 2001 when she first started to talk to women in the displaced community, she found that accessing drinking water was a major problem. The irony was, that the community which had agreed to give up their lands for the ‘project’ in the hope of receiving irrigation benefits did not even have a drop to drink for themselves. Tara started raising the issues of justice over water resources for this community. She helped to connect the local community with the Damodar Bachao Abhiyan(or Save the Damodar Campaign) network which worked with several local communities impacted by water diversion and pollution in the river. The campaign led by the displaced community did not sustain due to several interferences by political leaders. Tara analyses on hindsight, that one of the main reasons was that the male political leadership did not give enough space to hear out the problems of women. Women not only access the river for waters but also small fish, and riparian vegetables that grow in it. The campaign activities however helped the community gain experience on how to get schools, jobs and other infrastructure, though water remains a contentious issue. 

Being part of the campaign helped Tara to continue her work on social issues. She finally founded an organisation with her colleagues who were part of the campaign. The organisation engaged on raising issues on pollution in the area and also worked on revisiting cultural practices which were more in tune with nature within this industrial landscape. 

Tara’s community considers the river to be ‘sacred and pure’ making it very difficult for them to accept that it is polluted. And this is a response many women give, as the river plays an important role for them in their daily ritualistic practices which are related to marriage, birth and funeral rites. While these practices along with their domestic chores draws women close to the river, their inherent belief in its ‘sacredness’ also blinds them to the ill effects that industrial wastes or pollutants may have on their health. Probably the blindness or denial also comes from the lack of other options. Ground water is becoming scarcer in these villages neighbouring coal mines along the banks of the river Damodar due to changes in land levels and due to mining underground and recurrent droughts. Wells have dried up in many villages along the banks of the river adjacent to old mines, forcing women to go back to using the river. Tara’s organization documented a few cultural practices all along the river Damodar and also started a village campaign on the river, which were held alongside the ritual activities, to initiate discussions on the need for community consciousness on river pollution. 

Tara was elected as head of her Village Council 15 months ago. She faces several challenges as a leader. While greater decision making powers are yet to be fully transferred within the working principles of the decentralized village decision making bodies in the federal state of Jharkhand in India, Tara has been trying to convince the Block Development Officer about a recently announced scheme on wells. Ground water being very low, blanket state strategies of sanctioning wells to everyone may not work. The schemes sanctioned at the state level have come with specific diameter measurements for wells and tubewells which is a top down planning approach. Her village has two predominant poorer communities, the landless Dalits# and the OBCs# engaged in agricultural work. Wells have been sanctioned for Dalits, who have no land, and OBCs desperately need water resources for agriculture but since they own agricultural land they do not qualify under the ‘below poverty line’ criteria for sanctioning wells. The predertemined categories of beneficiaries listed through government schemes has made it difficult to realize the potential of these schemes at the village level. Digging more wells may not ensure water availability. In the area where the entire community needs water, Tara has been trying to convince the government that community managed water resources should be supported, and traditional methods of accessing water which only looked at accessing sub surface water could be tapped along with water harvesting practices where people have communitarian rights over water rather than individual rights. This will prevent over exploitation of water in her opinion. 

Tara has also tried to introduce changes in the culture in her Panchayat, where she has been campaigning against acts of untouchability, superstition and child marriage. In a particular case where a Dalit girl died of diarrhea, a village shaman claimed to bring her alive for a sum of Rs. 15000. Tara having heard of this, rushed to the area and shared that she will give a sum of Rs 20000 if he is able to do it. Taken aback by this, the shaman threatened that ‘a witch will be identified and made to dance in the naked in the village’. However Tara managed to drive him out of the village dispelling the fear that many exploitative shamans evoke among women. Tara acknowledges, that her struggles have helped to make her the leader she is and more than anything given her a sense of identity. 

IV

The second story is around the river Mahanadi in Odisha. It shows how crucial it is to encounter marginalized women’s voices within ecological justice campaigns for a more nuanced approach, for ‘definitions’ and points of action. The story revolves around citizen’s resistances against water diversion for industrial projects in the state of Odisha and lays bare the numerous ways in which water is imagined as a resource by different stakeholders.

Cuttack, is the oldest unplanned city of Odisha, and is thickly populated with a large slum population. The city is bounded by the biggest river of the state ‘Mahanadi’ on the eastern side and ‘Kathajodi’ on the western side. The Taladanda canal built during the British period runs through the heart of the city. It is one of the longest river canals in the world, and starts at Jobra linking it to the Mahanadi river with the Bay of Bengal at Paradip. It receives domestic, commercial and industrial wastes which are dumped into the Mahanadi river at Sikharpur. However a majority of the people in the city specifically those living in slum pockets use the water that drains through this canal for their daily needs as well as for cooking. 

Intense industrialization has turned the former commercial capital, Cuttack, into a ‘hot spot’. Factors such as the slow increase in the city’s mean high temperatures over the years have sparked off protests against any further establishment of steel and thermal power plants. Thus it is not uncommon to find that several members of the middle class in the city and its hinterlands have been engaged in environmental movements demanding clean air and water. In earlier Public Interest Litigations, petitioners have also requested the State Government from stopping discharge of industrial and city waste into the Taladanda Canal which is used by most of the city’s poor. Petitions have also been filed to clean up the storm water drains in Cuttack. 

The Mahanadi, unlike the Ganga, is not a perennial river and is largely dependent on rain water. Therefore its limited capacities have to be kept in mind. It is also the only source of water for 12 districts in the state. The waters of the Mahanadi are feeding agriculture, fishing and industrial activities, along with sustaining some of the major urban cities such as Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, Sambhalpur, and Sonpur, in the state. The Hirakud dam, Naraj and Jobra barrages were constructed over the river to cater to irrigation and drinking water requirements of neighbouring districts and cities. However the state has been committing large amounts of water to industries instead. Several citizen protests led by political parties and people based organizations have appealed to the government to stop this diversion and also demanded a setting up of a Water Commission to study water availability in the Mahanadi for irrigation and industrial purposes. The organizations have also found that ground water levels have gone down to below 8m in the city which makes it difficult for residents to ensure their own supply of water, where surface waters are either polluted or being channeled out. Thus the Manch has proposed that the government also take up water retention activities in the area. 

There are two new major projects coming up in the vicinity. The POSCO (steel plant and port) project, which is India’s largest FDI, and the TATA Naraj project. Both these projects have excessive demands for water. Residents in the project site for the TATA Naraj project have vehemently opposed the project and succeeded specifically on grounds related to the suitability of  the project site.  There is a massive movement against displacement of communities located in the POSCO steel plant site and smaller movements around the proposed port site areas as well. In spite of numerous environmental and social concerns around the project several leaders of the movement opposing the project faced state repression. 

The POSCO company in its estimates has given various ways in which the intricate systems of canals and rivers may be used to meet its water needs. POSCO argues for release of water for its activities at the source point near the Jobra barrage stating that this is the most appropriate source where no land needs to be acquired for reservoirs, there will no problem of tampering by locals and unlike in the case of the canals, there will be continuous supply. POSCO estimates ‘Taladanda canal has a designed capacity of 95 cumecs, which includes 15 cumecs for industrial use in and around Paradip. So far the Industrial utilization all put together is less than 2 cumecs. However, annual canal closure is undertaken for a stretch of about 20 days in two spells. So if Taladanda water is used, a large storage reservoir would be required for POSCO-India water usage, meaning extra 400 acre land to store 5.8 million cubic meters water. In addition, it is subject to likely tampering by locals and risks like breaches during floods, etc. In case of Hansua nallah, a new barrage near Khuranta is to be constructed, but during non-monsoon spells, it is to be fed from Taladanda canal through Jaipur escape at 40 km length of the canal. However, the problem of canal closure persists even here. The 2 km long Jobra barrage across Mahanadi has a water pool of volume 4.5 million cubic meters and thus is the most appropriate raw water source. Since the water is non-saline and round the year requirements of the plant could be met without hampering the flow of Taladanda canal and the irrigation system in the area, Jobra barrage have been considered as the most appropriate source.’  It needs to be noted that the Mahanadi is the source for Jobra, Hansua and Taldanda, so the impact of diversion of water will have its interconnected impacts on the entire watershed up, no matter which point POSCO would like to draw its water from. There are protests against discharging water from Hansua to the project, which people share is not a river but a drainage channel, built to channel flood waters into the sea and for irrigation purposes for farmers. Lakhs of farmers and fisherfolk are dependent on Hansua for their daily sustenance. 

In a recent judgment the National Green Tribunal, a fast track Court newly set up for environmental cases suspended the earlier environmental clearances for the project and also gave a judgement that the Company instead of diverting the city’s drinking water organize its own sources of water. 

Women leaders such as Noina Naik one of the members of a local Dalit organization# of Dalit Safai Karmacharis or   those who are engaged in keeping civic amenities in the city clean reside in the slum area of Cuttuck next to the Taladanda Canal. Noina is an active woman’s leader and mentions that her organisation mostly works on issues of domestic violence and women’s rights. In her opinion the three most important needs for Dalit women are education, awareness and economic livelihoods. Discussing displacement issues, she states that though they are living in the area for over 90 years, they are facing threat of displacement. 80 members from among them have filed individual cases to counter the order on eviction. None of them were informed personally, but a Notice came in the name of leaders. People are unsure of why they are being displaced, but they feel that it could be for work on the Taladanda Canal for the POSCO project. The Taladanda Canal is their main source of water, except for the dry spells. Currently the tubewells and handpumps are very few in number, almost 60 people use one tubewell in the slum, hence most of them have to depend on the water in the canal for washing clothes and other household activities. Even though the waters of the canal were severely polluted and specifically filled with city waste, members from Noina’s community have continued to use it. 

Almost Rs. 98 crores is currently being invested by Asian Development Bank and Odisha Government to revitalize the canal. Odisha’s Integrated Irrigated Agriculture and Water Management Project a project report by the ADB assesses that 2,10,000 poor people reside in the command area of the canal, however most of its estimates are around small and large farmers, crop production etc. with no estimates of urban poor populations who also use the canal. 

Noina states that most of them have been fighting their cases of eviction individually and have not got any external support for the same. However she agrees with the large anti displacement movements and feels that it is necessary for the well-being of poor and Dalit families and if ‘we are called we will surely go’ she adds.  Discussions with Noina reveal that a lot more work needs to be done by women activists to engage and seek out those from Noina’s background into the larger ecological movements in the state. It is clear that Noina’s life in the city of Cuttuck is impacted by the decisions of the POSCO project being set up outside the city some kilometers away from the area in which she lives.

 

IV

My last story is on how conservation programmes have affected rural women engaged with low technology livelihoods. 

The Sunderbans in West Bengal are the world’s largest deltas. Here the biggest challenge for people is nature’s unpredictability. The numerous distributaries flowing into the Bay of Bengal play in tune with the tidal waves of the sea, sometimes draining the river waters of the larger Ganga-Brahmaputra river systems, and at other times bringing in the waters as the sea swells (which many say is due to Global Warming). These small distributaries are dynamic swelling and flooding their banks, depositing fresh silt at times or eroding at other times. And through this dynamic activity are formed the little inhabited islands of the Sunderbans. They have been given the description ‘Kham khayali’ or whimsical by the habitants. It has been three years since the disastrous ‘Aila’ cyclone but the communities are still attempting to recuperate from the problems left here. A large percent of the population has migrated out. Paddy cropping has failed for the third year due to high salinity in the soil. Fishing has become an increasingly hazardous activity as fisherfolk navigate through creeks in the mangrove forests due to atrocities meted out by the forest department and the dangers of tiger attacks. Fishing is precarious also because of the stiff competition to catch stock with large trawlers and bigger boats. Fish populations have been reducing greatly. The serious competition, low returns and heavy debts incurred on boats and fishing equipments means that fishermen are also becoming more aggressive with fishing.

Many women in the Sunderbans are the heads of households as their husbands migrate outside for work. Many others have lost their husbands to sea. There are serious problems of agriculture, fuel wood and safe drinking water in this disaster prone zone. Here is where there is water everywhere but not a drop to drink. Due the fragility of eco resources and eco restoration after flooding, people are forced to go outside in search of work. The most important issue identified by women themselves is the regular breach of embankments by the rivers that surround these islands before entering into the sea.  

In these parts women do not go fishing in the boats but are instead engaged in manual fishing with hand nets. At a coastal village, Jharkhali the fishworker’s Union has managed to register women in the Union. This is a new change in attitudes since women unlike male fisherfolk are engaged in manual fishing mainly to catch prawns. However this manual fishing has destroyed mangrove forests as women tread across them back and forth on foot and hence due to conservation laws they have been forbidden to do manual fishing. Thus while on the one hand the larger interests of conservation have been served there is no work for women in these parts. Conservation programmes at local levels need to assess livelihood impacts and resultant impact on the poor.

V

These journeys and experiences of women throw up some important things to think about for organisations engaged with ecological issues and women’s issues. Allowing women to lead ecological campaigns has contributed to their improved self identities, especially rural women for whom these environmental resources have a close connection to their daily lives. In fact women can become confident decision makers within governance systems as well. Governance on environmental resources needs to be decentralized and universal categories does not work in all contexts especially with respect to use of environmental resources which have impacts on the entire community. This needs to be decided at the local level as per local dynamics and interconnected with the larger problems. Bridging the voices of women in ecological campaigns and the voices of urban and rural poor women brings in nuances of the complex impacts that large industrial projects have on their lives. New potentials can be realized in furthering the questions on the relationship of women’s issues with environmental justice issues. Patriarchal notions of control of environment, has also flowed into conservation of resources today and this needs to be countered.

The above piece was presented at the 2012 AWID Forum by the author in a session co supported by Global Fund for Women and Global Greengrant Fund. The narratives were collected during the author's  field work 

Words

Black ink flows into shapes and forms
What if the letters danced
With each other
Shoulder to shoulder
Escaping out
From the sheafs of paper
Into a flute
or the lament of a mother
Or simply the silence
In the woods
Would they matter?

Sunderban

Sunderban. What images does this word evoke in my mind. Part of the darker consciousness of most city dwellers like me residing in Kolkata, Sunderban mythifies
itself into a land of tigers, snakes and crocodiles, mangroves and little creeks, migrants, floods, hazards and sea swells. It’s amidst this well held inflicted plague of popular imagination that I try to get a map of the place through conversations with people in the city from different walks of life who have been there, worked there, go there. As I try to make sense of things I am told over and over again that ‘It’s a maze and it could take a lifetime to really know Sunderban.’ When I try to insist that there are maps, and couldn’t I use a map, I am told that half the places in Sunderban are not marked on the map, besides those that disappear are not deleted from it. This is the dynamism of the world’s largest delta that one has to contend with, when one accesses it.

I am keen not to give up and search the internet. Here I find some blog experiences of a camera crewman from Kolkata discussing his harrowing journey to the place. It seems like he had quite an adventure, but he does mention a route till Sajnekhali, and I make a mental note, as I tell myself that I need to discuss routes to get there, when I ever write about Sunderban. After a bit more time spent on unfruitful searching I find only two big names that resurface over and over again, Sajnekhali and Gosaba. I finally get the help of a doctor who has lived and worked there for more than a decade who explains the intricate systems of river routes and bridges and the multiple ways in which people’s transport operates in the area, connecting the islands from one place to the next. I decide to take the local train and then use buses and jetties to cross over to the different islands. It is only when one does this, does one realize the arduousness of the journey from one of these islands to the ‘mainland’. As I return from my first pilot trip from Kalitola Panchayat, Hingalganj block, and reach the mainland, that is Hasnabad Station that I leave behind the uncertainties of the turbulent tides of whimsical rivers and waterways onto what at least artificially feels like a ‘firm piece of ground beneath my feet’. In fact this is the truth that Sunderban provides to any Kolkatan, the fragility of our existence, the insidious floating waters beneath our lands, and that we might just be swept away any day.

The memories of the most recent cyclone which haunts every person living in these parts is probably the more recent reminder of Kolkata’s connected fate with Sunderban, but as the sun rises, today, three years later, where people struggle for the third time to grow paddy on the salt ravaged lands swept by Aila, with partial success, and life wheels itself slowly to normalcy, the city and its hinterland slips back into a sense of complacency about nature’s unpredictable actions. I am repeatedly reminded that storms, cyclones, floods and death are embedded in the memories of everyday life here, “It is not just Aila, we have seen this before” is the mindful reminder and warning that the solutions to dealing with ‘disaster’ in the Sunderbans needs informed and experiential thinking rather than top down approaches. However what touches me the most is something seemingly different from what is usually said of disaster landscapes flushed with relief and funds, not a single person I meet forgets his neighbour, a striking similarity in the narrative of those explaining the problems of Aila is ‘that those further south were much worse off than us’ and shockingly at Kalitola which is one of the southern most islands before the forest begins, I am told the same thing, till I read between the lines of a song composed by a folk artist from among this proud community, which talks of the devastation and lack of wherewithal to deal with this destruction, and then deeply thanks the common people of the neighbouring country(Bangladesh) who came across to offer their village help as they remained cut off from the world. Conscious again of the disconnect of these
parts from where I come from, I am reminded of the anger of the activists at Gosaba who strongly criticized relief workers who were ‘more ‘disaster tourists’ than anything else’.

When I repeat this story about relief workers at Kalitola, the boatman from Samsher
Nagar gives a new meaning and restores some faith as he narrates his own experiences as a relief worker navigating the swelling waters to reach each of the islands in these parts, witnessing how a woman’s life was saved by her husband, and then many lives that werenot. As we wipe away a sea of tears, and he steers the boat, skillfully managing it around the eddy currents, almost second nature to him, shining a torch on the pitch black waters once in a while or along the banks sometimes, he asks me if I know of somewhere where he could find work in the city. “I want to leave this place.” he says, “and maintaining a boat is much too expensive”, he explains. “I have studied till class 12, only I cannot type on the computer, all other work I can do.” I sit helplessly wondering whether to convince him that his life in these parts is much better than the currents he will face in the city or not, till he breaks the silence adding, “there are many honest girls here looking for some work in the city, if we go through known contacts like you, we could organize safe domestic work for them, rather than them getting trafficked. Our women are very hardworking he explains, just a little simple and unexposed, if you teach them, they will learnand look forward to earning about Rs. 1000-1500 a month for full time domestic work.I would be happy to keep your number Didi, it is important for us to know someone in
Kolkata, at least we can rest assured that there is someone we can call.”

I am taken back to the thoughts I had traveling on the local train towards Hasnabad. For many a Kolkatan these trains are carriers of teeming numbers of ‘labourers’ who come to work in the city and go back. For those a little more aware, they are also dangerous pathways through which trafficking of women and children takes place. It is the ‘source zone, this Sunderban’, they say. On my ride to Hasnabad when I cast these lenses off I realise that am sitting amongst a group of fellow travelers who had gone on a conducted tour to see the Taj Mahal and were returning home. A young man among them was animatedly narrating an incident about Kamala Mashi, a middle aged woman, plump and big built, who sat chewing paan and laughing sheepishly, while the rest of the group had gone into peals of laughter around her. It seems that Kamala mashi and her poor skills in Hindi, had created quite a stockpile of jokes for the group, as they travelled across North India. One such incident of when Kamala Mashi had managed to adequately create shock and amusement was the story of ‘Kamala Mashi and her Lunch Coupon’. Like most Bengali women of her generation, Kamala Mashi, had the common, judicious and careful habit of stashing all valuable things under her blouse. It so happened that during one of the day trips on the conducted tour of the group, Kamala Mashi had also carefully tucked away that day’s lunch coupons in her blouse. A young man explains, “You see none of us can speak in Hindi, but Kamala Mashi was the worst. When she reached the lunch counter, she realised that she had lost her coupon. In her panic, all Kamala Mashi could remember were two words of Hindi, so gesticulating madly at her bosom, she kept saying ‘Gir gaya, gir gaya’(It’s fallen).” It seems that horrified, the men at the lunch counter gave her, her food, and quickly looked away. The remembering of that incident created an uproar of laughter, as the train came to a halt and the group disassembled out into their own destinations.

At Gosaba we have to negotiate hard with the Union leader to allow us to speak to women in the village. A Sat Sang leader seems to have passed away, and the Union leader a bit drunk with grief is not happy with this ‘urban nuisance’ that has presented itself before him and now wants to start off conversations with women in Sunderban. ‘What for?’ he keeps asking. Finally, we are given a village address and
two men with us, as we head our way. When we reach we meet a couple of school
teachers and then a small group of women begin to gather and start conversing with
us, till we ask them to point out the single most important issue in their village. To
this they say, ‘embankments’. Habitations are now far lower than the sea level, making them prone to flooding. While speaking about it, one of the women explains, ‘As the joar and bhata play in the rivers we keep thinking about what is happening with the sea. We cannot sleep at night in fear of the unpredictability.’ Looking around at the little habitation, and then another across the river, it is almost impossible to tell what is happening. The horizon is immediate, waters interspersed with islands of habitation. Back in Kolkata as I finish penning this piece, there is a clap of thunder in the sky and imminent reminder of the worries of women in Sunderban.

On work and finding a work identity

The 21^st century has given rise to many new questions in our mind. While on the one hand we have to deal with the meltdown of the economy on the other hand we also have to deal with the meltdown of the earth. This probably has made this generation of humans wake up to the reality of several uncertainties in their lives and hence relook at many things our previous generations took for granted. One such element is the sense of security. With the financial crisis one has seen several workers being laid off, many have been fired and many have simply left their jobs, given the growing pressures to perform within these institutionalized and yet competitive settings fighting over scarce resources. The rat race has become a much tougher race in modern living and slowly we are trying to seek out other identities for ourselves beyond identities that work provides for us.

I have encountered many such individuals in my life who have had bright successful careers and then had to rethink the entire route they took from scratch as the presumptions of the market changed. Several of these members have at this point in their lives emerged as deep philosophical beings and it is here in these discussions that I began to wonder about ‘work’ and ‘what it actually means’. ‘Work’ or ‘jobs’ have made some people excruciatingly sad and pained, and it is interesting that while many see in a job a sense of self worth, it is not for long, till they begin to see it as a drudgery or an imposed regime on their everyday existence. It is through these discussions that I realized that beyond the conception of ‘work’ or a ‘job’ which for most takes up almost more than half their days existence is the very act of living one’s life. It is fortunate that I came across this wonderful article by Tim Malnick, ‘What is my work in the world’, which brings in some of the very questions that me and my friends have often discussed and gives some insights into how one can take a middle path and find work that springs from within. Happy Reading!

 

WH AT I S M Y WO R K I N T H E WO R L D ?

A paper based on a talk by Tim Malnick

Edited by Sarah Bird

source:

http://www.schumachercollege.org.uk

I want to talk about work in the context of Living and Loving in the 21st Century. How does our work help us live and love in the 21st century, and more specifically, what is the role of our work in helping us address and respond to some of the pressing social and environmental challenges of our time? And what

does Buddhist thinking and practice have to say to these tricky questions? How might Buddhists engage with their work, and how might Buddhist ideas and practices be helpful to the many people who are struggling to find a way for their work to be more satisfying and a more positive contribution to society.

I would like to do four things. First I want to say a little about the nature of work and point to the ways in which so much of our identity can be wrapped up in our work in the world. Then, based on my experience working with people across a wide range of sectors, who are trying to respond through their work to the question of how to make the world a better place, I want to suggest two main ways that we can get stuck when we try to engage with the huge challenges out there in modern industrial society.

Having identified these two main traps, I want to then suggest a middle way between these two extremes that might be the place from which a Buddhist inspired response to the challenges of work will come. And finally, I want to flesh that middle way idea out a bit, and give a few principles and practical examples, based on my experience working with people who are consciously changing the way they work.

WORK

So first work. Work is a big deal. Although there were promises a generation or two ago, when the modernist industrial myth was at its strongest, that we would by now be living in an era of leisure, with machines doing all the work, it hasn’t turned out like that. Economists David Boyle and Andrew Simms suggest that in actual fact modern Britons work harder than medieval peasants, with more working hours and less time off, citing this as one of “the many paradoxes of 20th century progress”.

A lot of our sense of self is bound up with the notion of the work we do. It seems to me that many people have their life energy residing in and around their work. I think the sickness, both physical and mental related to both working and not having work is a sign of this.

And whilst so much of our sense of self can be wrapped up in work (why is the first question we ask new acquaintances not ‘are you happy?’, or ‘what do you find beautiful in the world?’, but ‘what do you do?’), work as currently conceived also makes many people tremendously unhappy. Work is a necessity in our modern culture, and yet the experience of work for many is still quite unfulfilling. E.F Schumacher in his famous study of Good Work suggests that, “No management is unaware of its duty to avoid accidents or physical conditions which impair workers’ health. But workers’ brains, minds and souls are a different matter”. So, much of our time, our life energy and our sense of self is bound up with work, and yet work in modern life if often unfulfilling and soul destroying. And work that destroys the soul links very strongly to organisations that then damage and disrespect the wider world.

Work is important. In Buddhist terms work is a limb of the noble eightfold path – Right livelihood -something to be perfected on our journey of awakening. The question of right livelihood is much more complicated now than it would have been in the time of the Buddha. Originally, conceived relatively simply as avoiding certain professions that cause harm, today we need to explore a more Mahayanist conception. By this I mean that many people not only wish to avoid harm through their work, but are asking themselves, ‘how can my work in the world be a source of good, of benefit to others’?

Faced with alarming evidence about the growing challenges in 21st century society, and considering the role of the work we do, I find that people, broadly speaking, can form two main types of response both of which, from the Buddhist point of view, are based on confusion, and are ultimately unhelpful, or at least limited in scope.

EVERYTHING’S OK!

The first one is what I call the ‘Everything’s OK’ response. Here we hold on for dear life to the modernist, industrial myth that progress is delivering and gradually moving towards the perfect world. In our current version of this myth, growth through industrial activity will solve all our problems; technology, science and knowledge will conquer all obstructions, and there are no issues outside of our ability to solve them rationally. Work harder, increase growth, trust the power and range of technology, and everything will be fine. We get on with the rat race, climb the ladder, meet our targets, go shopping at weekends, and trust, or try to, in the grand narrative of modernist society that by so doing all will be well.

The other, slightly more complicated version of ‘everything’s OK’ is the pseudo Buddhist response, that conceptually understands that ultimately everything is self-existently pure and perfect (as they would say in the Dzogchen tradition) or illusory and empty as they might say more generally in Mahayana. Here we are mistaking a conceptual view of the world, albeit a profound and inspiring one, for a genuine experience of what the view is pointing towards. I’m not honest about my actual experience of the world if I claim to see it as perfect, without problems. I can aspire to that view, I can be and indeed am deeply inspired by it, and occasionally I may have genuine experiential glimpses. But if I use this as a reason not to respond to the problems we face, when my experience suggests that there are problems, then this is Buddhist bullshit really. Of course the view of primordial purity and emptiness is precious and important, and as practitioners we are often working with inspiration and glimpses. This Buddhist view has much to offer a world full of apparently solid, material problems. We can link the physical problems out there to confused states of mind, seeing how we create and recreate Samsara through fixed habits of thought. But this conceptual view could lead us to cut off from suffering and world problems.

I suspect that we all link into both of these responses at times. Perhaps because of the sheer scale and alarming nature of the challenges we face. It is nice to be able to opt out with the view, that everything’s OK. I summarise this approach as ‘denying the truth (albeit still a relative truth according to some views) of Samsara’ - denying that there is suffering and that suffering is manifesting in particular ways.

I CAN FIX IT!

What is the other side of ‘Everything’s OK’? Well, if we do open up to the existence of problems, and perhaps make a commitment to engaging with those challenges through the work that we do, the other main trap we can fall into is thinking that on some level we can fix everything, and make ‘saving the world’ a personal and material project. We are so uncomfortable with the truth of suffering, that subtly our response and action is linked to some agenda of ambition, personal success, and perhaps the hope that we can through ego-centric effort make these problems disappear.

The great 20th century teacher, and my own teacher’s teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche wrote a book called ‘Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism’. He suggests that we might think that we have abandoned something unsavoury about modern life, and embarked instead on a spiritual path. Maybe we see the

world as overly consumerist or competitive or aggressive so we adopt a spiritual path. But subtly our egos just use this new path to play all the same games as before, so we relate to our spiritual path in consumerist, ambitious or aggressive ways. This often happens when people try to make their work more beneficial – there is something genuine and positive there, but also it can become yet another project, another thing to achieve, deeply bound up with projections into a better future, which of course is only ever arising in the present moment. I suggest that these sorts of projections underlie a lot of the life energy of our industrial growth society – competition, ambition, consumerism, looking to the future for satisfaction and wealth, rather than resting in the present. So to the extent that we allow similar projections to drive our search for meaningful work, and a better future, then perhaps we are actually just perpetuating the confusion that makes the world go round.

If we try to make too solid and personal a project of solving the problems of the world, we can also become materialistic in our approach. Often I find this in people working with environmental issues, and issues of social justice. Although the roots of their work may initially be deep and heartfelt, often the solution of the issues becomes materialistic – the focus becomes on technical solutions, measurable outcomes. This is fine, but from a Buddhist point of view we might say that our view has become narrow, that we have moved from a wish to benefit beings to a fixation on material solutions. Fundamentally from a Buddhist point of view the roots of our problems are our confusion, our greed and our hatred.

These manifest in the problems of the material world, indeed in some sense these kleshas create the material world we are in. Of course material solutions to material problems are absolutely vital. Of course we must give and provide material solutions as best we can to help others, but I think Buddhists have a contribution to make in pointing to and working with deep causes, even while we take material steps.

These responses I class as ‘Shit, there is a problem, it is x and I have to fix it’. We make something overly and, from the Buddhist point of view unhelpfully solid and personal about the problems, our role in solving them and adopt a fixed response.

SO WHAT IS LEFT?

If we are not stuck in denying there are problems, nor in trying to fix them all personally and materially, what is left? What is the middle way between those extremes? When I pondered what I thought was left, it seemed to me incredibly non heroic. When I considered what I thought remained, as a basis for action or work in the world, I found myself thinking “surely there is something more than that?” But then I got interested, and now I wonder if the fact that it seems so

utterly not enough, is indeed a sign that it is truly what we do need to base our work on. Maybe the fact that the middle way I am about to suggest seems so out of sync with our deep assumptions about the world of work, so counter intuitive, is a sign that it is exactly what we need.

RESTING BEYOND SPEED AND AGGRESSION

Trungpa Rinpoche suggests that when people start to meditate in this Western culture, the first thing that we notice is how racy, speedy and apparently out of control our minds are. I think that suggests a lot about how many of us experience our day to day working worlds, and our organisations – a basic sense

of speedy, relentless activity. If we sit with the speediness for long enough, he suggests, our minds will start to settle down, we will start to see things more clearly. At this point he suggests most people will experience aggression – not necessarily in an obvious angry way, but we will see how compulsively our minds resist or try to manipulate the simple truth of what arises within our experience. We will have any number of games and strategies, often not noticed as such, that are fundamentally aggressive – attempts to manipulate the spontaneous truth of our experience, an unwillingness to simply relate to things as they are, preferring to compulsively fix, change, or avoid them. Again there are links here to our work environments, our global business projects and to our personal attitudes to work for many of us. When we are not just speeding along, caught up in the adrenaline rush of work, many of us are working to strategies, and ambitions, held quite heavily and personally, tools for ego in one way or another to assert Its ground. Many of our plans for ‘changing the world’ or ‘saving the planet’ also fall into this category. If we can sit and let both the speed and aggression loosen and dissolve, which they will naturally and gradually do over time, then Trungpa Rinpoche says that we will then exp erience sadness; a tender hearted, raw, open sadness. I have always found this both true and amazing. The idea that just beyond the speed and manipulation of our minds (and thus we may also say our society and organisations) lies a soft, tender, heartfelt, natural quality. This spot is the birthplace of the warrior, the Bodhisattva, the person who vows to work for the benefit of all beings, according to their particular skills, situation and inspiration, until all beings are awake. Linking to this tender heart is the birthplace of the warrior working for the benefit of all. Speed and aggression won’t do it – no matter how many noble plans for

changing the world we have. Sitting with tender open heartedness is the starting point for the one who works tirelessly for the benefit of others.

We can decide for ourselves if this relates to our experience as we meditate, or allow ourselves to settle down and rest in a simple sense of responsiveness to the world, beyond our usual speed. Of course, in current society, full of offices, bureaucracies, and deep cultural assumptions, often untested and unspoken, about the nature of work and success I find that there is little place for tender hearted sadness. Our modern assumptions of work value exactly the opposite of what Trungpa Rinpoche describes. We may get rewarded for speed, for compulsive activity, for aggression – not overt, but the goal fixated, future oriented, manipulating mindset that never rests with what is. Conversely I cannot

remember a time when I saw genuine open tender heartedness manifested by a business leader. Taking this experience as the basis for action is radical, it is political, it is downright embarrassing too, but that is the point. We shouldn’t underestimate just how unusual and powerful such a starting place for a response in and to our work might be.

And this tender heartedness is not just a private experience to be wallowed in or fixed. It is the starting place for an active response, for our work – beyond trying to deny or fix Samsara, and beyond habitual speed and aggression. The idea is that to the extent that we can first rest in an open minded and open hearted, non conceptual responsiveness to a situation, the more skilful, compassionate, and wise our subsequent action will be. So the practice is to rest in this place and to gradually gain confidence to use this place of tender heart, rather than our usual hard hearted, ego-centric strategies and projections as the basis for true and skilful action in the world. We may find ourselves saying or doing something surprising or timely. A response may also be a longer term vision, inspiration or intention – that becomes a plan.

But a vision or plan that comes from the heart. The warrior, the one who truly works for the benefit of others, has confidence to rest beyond strategy and then respond. This may be radical, but how many more rational goal oriented action plans do we need in the world? Are our 21st century problems because we haven’t yet found the right action plan, or don’t yet have enough of them, or is there a deeper question of how we conceive of work and action, about where those things come from?

Finally, I think it is really important to acknowledge the sense of shame, awkwardness and embarrassment that we may have, at least at first, when we rest in this place of tender openhearted responsiveness to the world. Many cultural and organisational theorists have written about the way that certain experiences and behaviours are normalised within a culture, rendering other parts of the experience of being human, marginalised, abnormal, and therefore somehow shameful. Consider for example the idea of the ‘professional’, both a noun and an adjective, a word that I suggest has huge power for the way we think of work, and yet power that is rarely examined. To be ‘professional’ implies a person who is unmoved, rational, dispassionate, logical, not personally involved. There is little about tender heartedness that we see in contemporary notions of what it is to be professional. Is this a big con trick that we are all playing on ourselves?

Organisations, and the people in them, cry out for innovation, passion, inspiration, and yet in the subtle uses of language, the very thing that gives rise to these juicy energies is simultaneously marginalised. ‘Be innovative, passionate and inspired, but don’t you dare bring your raw and tender heart into this boardroom, that simply is not professional’. Part of our work, individually and collectively, is to heal this split, for it is this split that allows so much corporate and professional activity to damage the very world it professes to serve. And healing this split, in each moment, is heroic and courageous and thus part of

the work of the warrior of awakening.

So, I suggest that if we are to avoid the twin traps of denying problems or trying to fix them, then the dynamic middle way is to learn to rest as openly as we can with the truth of our experience as it arises, beyond our particular conceptual notions of how it is, or should be, or how we should make it.

Somewhere in there is a natural connection to a heart response, the essence of our wise and compassionate minds, from whence all true and noble volitions may come.

FINDING OUR WORK

The Bodhisattva is one who works in the world according to the inspiration of these deep heart volitions – in each moment, and over countless eons, according to his or her particular connections, skills, and inspirations. There is no limit to the ways in which we may work in the world for the benefit of others. There are no bonus points for being an activist rather than a politician, a doctor rather than a

businessman. There are no boundaries to the ways in which we may serve. In my experience of working with people, I think that many people, maybe all people, have some sense of what for them a true volition for working for the benefit of others might be. I have seen small business advisors longing to follow a path making hand sewn silk knickers, sales advisors joyfully retraining as plumbers. I'm not sure how such shifts inform the wider questions of global challenges, but I do recognise heartfelt longing when I see it, and I do see how people change when they allow their work to follow that.

The psychologist James Hillman suggests that all of us have an implicit sense of what the work of our soul is about but may spend years denying, confusing or avoiding it. Of course soul is not an easy word for Buddhists but let’s not unpick that here. What I want to suggest is that many of us do in fact experience some connection, maybe a hazy one, to a deeper heart sense of what our work in the world might be. And due to our incredible ability to confuse ourselves and complicate the simplicity of our experience, many of us spend years doing a damn good job of not responding to those deep volitions. Now I would like to consider some practical things that I have learnt working with people trying to find

and manifest their work in the world. These are things that I have found helpful for noticing the ways that we do and do not follow the heart.

MONEY

First, money has nothing to do with any of it! I have observed that for many people, hopes and fears about money, about having enough or not yet enough, constrain them from moving in a direction that feels meaningful. I have done some amazing work with a man called Peter Koenig. He has studied what he calls the phenomenology of money for 25 years. He points out that money is empty, a social construction, it is nothing much at all, other than what we make it through our projections. But what we make it becomes immensely powerful. If money is to us security, value, whatever, then it can drive us as we search for these things. A Buddhist perspective can be helpful in helping people unpick and

examine the ways we project our human hopes and fears onto money. As we liberate ourselves from those, the possibility of action becomes vaster.

FEAR

This raises the general area of fear. I think fear of not having money limits many of us from choosing to do the work of the heart. The Bodhisattva is committed to overcoming fear, in oneself and in others.

Noticing the many fears we have of following our deeper inspirations is powerful and helpful practice. I find in my own work that organisations, particularly large bureaucratic ones, are often fuelled by fear.

Grown adults acting like frightened children who simply cannot and will not say what they believe in through fear. This is tragic. Overcoming fear in skilful ways, and helping others to do the same, can be important work for people in any type of organisation. The teaching of the wheel of life, and the idea of the six realms, the six core styles of confusion that beings can have, is illuminating here. I think that many organisations are within the realm of the Asuras, the Jealous Gods. The key style of confusion is a sort of frantic paranoia. The competition, aggressiveness, and paranoia of being attacked, having to hold one’s ground, seem a good metaphor for many organisations. Being able to work open heartedly with the fear and paranoia that may arise for self and others when we try to work from the heart is important.

This leads onto one of the core teachings that Buddhists may consider in their work, the 8 worldly dharmas. These list 4 pairs of things that are inevitable to all of us in our lives, and which nevertheless we put huge effort into chasing and avoiding. These worldly concerns fuel our organisational and work related paranoia. The teaching says that we habitually:

Avoid pain and seek out pleasure

Avoid ignominy and seek out fame

Avoid defeat and seek out victory

Avoid loss and seek out gain

As a diagnostic tool for what goes on in most organisations, helping us to understand the paranoid games of the jealous gods, this is the best there is! People chasing victory, gain, fame and pleasure and avoiding at all costs the opposite. Once again I suggest there are clear links between our personal practice, the experience of organisational life and the wider societal impacts of work. We will always have victory and defeat; we will all have times of gain and loss. Could we just not get caught up in the game of trying to avoid some and chase others at work and in work? What energy or possibility of action might open up if we were less caught in fear and paranoia?

COMMUNICATION

Next, I want to say something about speech, about communication in the work context. Many people I work with who hope to create change, begin with a strong distinction between action and communication.

Somehow, initially at least, they see their response in terms of action, perhaps a new job, starting a project, doing something. But actually there is a wealth of literature in leadership and management that strongly suggests that speech, the act of communication is absolutely key to creating change in work, organisations and society.. Indeed when we analyse modern work activities, we don’t actually make things in the UK anymore, we find that actually what we are all doing most of the time is communication – meetings, emails, phone calls etc. So paying attention to how we communicate, and considering that a part of the work we do, is part of the Bodhisattva path. Indeed speech is a key aspect of Buddhist practice – one of the five precepts concerns speech – to speak truth in a way that is skilful and respectful. If we fixate too much on having to be ‘a person with a

project’ we can ignore the reality of what we are actually doing moment by moment, and the natural field of possible action that presents itself to us. But more than this, I suggest that lack of open, honest courageous speech is one of the most powerful things that keeps organisations acting in ways that harm people and planet.

Whatever our role, if we can find skilful ways of speaking truth, of naming or questioning what is actually going on in a situation – the damaging impacts of corporate activity on the wider world, the yearning of our collective hearts for something more inspiring, then we are taking powerful action. This doesn’t mean just blurting out our own biased projections and causing trouble that way. But developing skilful speech, developing courage to speak truth to power, what the Greeks called Parrhesia, can be a major contribution of Buddhist ideas - seeing through the confusion of a situation and naming that with gentleness and compassion.

There are connections here between speech, meditation and the idea I mentioned earlier of responding from the place of open and tender heart as the basis for action. All of these can be considered essentially an act of communication between self and world. As we breathe in and out naturally there is always some communication going on, some exchange between what is deeply inside oneself going out into the world (the outbreath) and then something of the world entering intimately into oneself (the inbreath).

In my tradition, we talk about formless meditation, shamatha vipassana. The idea here is that the outbreath dissolves into space carrying our awareness with it, and we are left in a gap, a brief pause or rest in openness if you like, before the inbreath returns, from the world, all of its own accord, into us. So meditation is an act of letting the breath take our awareness into the limitless space of the world, or of experience, having a gap, where we are not clinging to our fixated notions of the world, and from there allowing the world of experience to enter into us. I am suggesting that this simple act of breathing, linked into in meditation as we gradually train to open out ever more fully to the world, is in fact the basis for

any activity, response or work that we might skilfully do – responding from our heart, opening to the communication coming from the world, beyond our stuck notions, concepts and assumptions. It is significant that when we find our true work in the world we call this a ‘calling’ or ‘vocation’, words that suggest an act of communication and responsiveness between self and world.

DEVOTION

Finally I want to talk about the importance of devotion. This is a risky word in our material modernist era. It is wrapped up in concepts of blind faith, of dogma and religion. But faith and devotion are incredibly important; they are natural human dynamics – we are in fact doing them all the time, just often without noticing what we have faith in and show devotion to. People have great faith in the concept

of economic growth for example, even though evidence is all around that it is flawed. People are devoted to the idea of progress, personal or cultural – the idea that we are working for some better future.

If we are to develop courage to act with true responsiveness, the courage to move towards our true work in the world, we absolutely need faith in something beyond our individual selves. This is of course a key idea in Buddhism. Faith, Sraddha, sometimes translated as ‘confidence’ or ‘conviction’ is needed to encourage us to go into the unknown. We are back again to the idea of letting go into space. All real discovery, all new action requires this sort of jumping off. We can be clever, we can intellectually understand new possibilities, but a new act, a genuine responsiveness to the world beyond our fixed ideas, requires some faith that entering that space of tender openness is the right thing. We trust the situation, the naturally wise and compassionate nature of the world. It doesn’t mean that everything will always go well – in our limited sense of that phrase - but rather that we have a deep faith in some underlying compassionate quality in the universe, and in some innate natural wisdom in ourselves that is way beyond

our ego-centric hopes and fears. This is incredibly important for everyone in this troubling day and age.

Devotion relates to this idea. If we are to take action in response to the problems of the world, if we are to test out our courage to speak, act, rest with open hearted responsiveness, then we need to feel that it is not an individual act, not personal heroism or personal screw up. That doesn’t make any sense at all

from a Buddhist point of view. The Mahayana tells us that the universe is pervaded by living qualities of compassion and wisdom, that there are Buddhas in each and every atom in space – we can take this as literally or metaphorically as we like – but the point is that the universe is alive, inter-connected and

imbued with living qualities of wisdom and compassion that are beyond our conceptual imagination.

And we need to ask ourselves, what is our relation to this view? Really. When we think of the problems of the world, when we question the work we are doing, when we ponder a deeper response, what do we truly feel is supporting such questions, and whatever response we can offer? I would argue, and I think

Buddhist teachings would say this, certainly the ones I have received in the Tibetan tradition, that as long as we think we are solitary practitioners, individual Bodhisattvas doing our best, without a lived sense of the vastness of our connectedness to the living wisdom and compassion of the universe, then we are

doubly doomed. We are doomed because ego cannot go beyond ego, there is always a need for something to come from beyond ego – so our practice will be dry and stunted. But more than that, we are more likely to be doomed as a society too. The problems of our modern world can be seen as problems of

modernist ways of thinking - and these emphasise a separated, individual, goal-oriented, materialistic relationship with a world divided clearly into living beings, and dead things.

Devotion is ultimately about trust in something profound and genuine in the fabric of the universe itself – wisdom, compassion, and teachings are all around us. This view sustains people who are trying to act for the benefit of others, and is in itself the very sort of view we need as a culture to move beyond a dry modernist worldview with its many problems and fixation on technical solutions. When we have this world-view, our work is an outbreath and an offering.

CONCLUSION

So, to draw to a close. Work is a big deal for most of us – it needs looking at because of the personal and societal questions it raises, particularly in this strange day and age. And that when we try to connect our work with the immense challenges in global society we need to watch out for two traps – we need to stay open to the nature of suffering involved in work, in business and globalisation, not kidding ourselves that all is fine. But we also need to stay open enough to know that we don’t know the answers, that we cannot improve things by using our work, even our work to save the world, as yet another ambitious, goal oriented project that we subtly hope will give us the solid ground, security and personal credentials that we long for. That is just more of the same old stuff, far too seductive.

And where that leaves us is in a raw, tender, heart centred place, a place of great movement and of not knowing. Resting with confidence in that place, and allowing responses and actions to arise naturally is both act and path of the courageous Bodhisattva, the place where we might find our true work in conversation with the world, and also, a radical place when we consider how antithetical such a state is to modern work environments. In so far as we learn to rest in and act from that place, our actions are likely to be wiser, more compassionate and more genuinely responsive to what is needed – in both moment to moment situations, and across years and decades too. And in so far as we make that connection, and respond to some sense of calling – calling from the living world and from all beings perhaps, then we are also required to cut through our fantasies around money, hope and fear, victory and defeat and just act.

And finally I suggested that acting may be the same as speaking truth kindly and that we could, indeed must, see all of this as an act of service and offering to the world that sustains our activity.

The tender raw heart, the place of true volition and action is both a place of joy and a place of sorrow, and we need to be able to rest with and respond from both to find and do our work. I’d like to end with two quotes, apparently opposite, that illustrate this point.

David Whyte, borrowing from another poet W H Auden asks us ‘what hurts you into your work?’ As we open up, maybe something in the world will touch our hearts, will prick us into responding. Our calling may come from that in the world which hurts us.

Another quote says, ‘your work is where your joy meets the needs of the world’. I am not sure where this came from, I have seen it attributed to three different people on Google, so I will attribute it to the kind person who told it to me, David Ballard.

Just as the world may touch us, hurt us into our work, so we may also feel a deep sense of joy associated with a particular avenue, possibility or activity in the world. This is to be followed and trusted too.

Ultimately the place where our joy and our hurt meet the needs of the world is the same place, the place of our natural awakened heart. We all have that natural awakened heart fully present. It is there always. Perhaps our work is simply to

trust that, gain confidence in that, and knowing that awakened heart will express itself in an endless myriad of forms, simply respond, respond simply, from there.

Tim Malnick is affiliated to the Ashridge Business School, and practices with the Longchen Foundation.

He can be contacted at: tim@differentspace.co.uk, blog www.differentspace.co.uk

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Contemplations on ‘Labour Rights of Women Workers in the Unorganised Sector’

 

To understand the labour rights of women workers in the unorganized sector it is crucial to explore the notion of livelihood and unpaid work. Sometimes, the discussion on ‘work’ becomes too limiting considering the gamut of issues that impact women workers in the unorganized sector.

Of the unorganized: A way of life rather than work

The sharp differences in the philosophy of work between the village and the city were stark while traversing to a small artisan village in West Bengal. In contrast to the extremely difficult situation of migrant workers in New Delhi, and weavers in the city of Benaras, who have given up their looms, facing abominable conditions of work, the voices of the weavers at Taatipada, were encouraging. For them ‘weaving’ was a leisure activity and a skill which held a place of pride. There were only a few number of hours that they would sit on the loom. Many among them were engaged in allied activities such as agriculture, animal husbandry and poultry farming thereby supplementing their needs with other income activities besides weaving. Though women continued to perform the more meticulous work of spinning thread, for them too, this was part of their everyday life. In contrast, the Benaras weavers who have slowly turned into wage workers on a machine, spend their entire day on the loom owned by someone else, with limited allied activities, high levels of job insecurity and poor health and working conditions. While the deteriorating situation of weavers is well known, the differences seen in Taatipada and what its people tried to communicate in terms of a way of life and philosophy, needs some thought. The transitioning markets have managed to convert ‘livelihoods’ or ‘ways of living’ into ‘work’ and in this process limited our understanding of ‘work’? What does this thus mean for the ‘unorganised’ or ‘self employed’?

What emerges powerfully from the study of traditional crafts in precolonial South India is the symbiotic link that exists between crafted objects and craft persons. In the striking contrasts to the standardization associated with the industrial mode of production, traditional crafts were characterized by asymmetry. In the colonial period a recurrent phrase in the English Company records is the injunction to the Company Agents to ‘Please make them weave to “the perfection of the pattern” which went against the very ethos of the craftsmen who would not kill his individuality and creativity through monotonous repetition.’[1] It is crucial to revoke these elements of our civilisational memory as we head on into a new industrial phase where the agrarian-artisan ways of life continue to argue with post colonial industrial plans. The forms of work and technologies are changing so as to compete with the markets. Similarly informalisation of the formal work force has increased risks and costs of production for households of informal workers. However fewer support systems are made available for these activities and rather than looking at them as entrepreneurial sustainable options for the self employed, there is an unregulated exploitation of these occupations in a free market. More engagement with the ways of life and culture of these communities could point towards working on sustainable and secure livelihood options.

Women’s work: A way of life which is invisible

In fact the distinction between ‘work’ and ‘livelihood’ is crucial to understanding the issues of women workers in the market context. Women are largely engaged in care work, household activities and all allied activities within the household. These activities have traditionally been regarded as ‘non work’. All of this is ‘unorganized’ and has been so for many years. Like the weavers of Taatipada, women across the country, perform many activities which they consider to be a part of everyday life, crucial to survival. These productive activities include domestic duties, maintaining homesteads and kitchen gardens, preparation of cow dung cakes for fuelwood, collection of water, household poultry and dairy, collection of vegetables, fruits and herbs, paddy husking, grinding grains, preservation of pickles etc.  Structural factors contribute towards exacerbating this ‘the double burden of work’ and hence women from poorer, rural households, or SC/ST or minority communities do more unpaid work than their urban counterparts. Women’s movements have continued to emphasise the need to recognize women’s unpaid work in the National System of Accounts as a crucial step towards better welfare policies for women, which includes supporting them with productive activities and opportunities within their households, improving their access, ownership and control over resources and assisting them to retain autonomy through low cost regenerative solutions.

The unorganized sector: the poorest and most vulnerable

The terms ‘unorganised’ and ‘informal sector’ work  are used interchangeably in India to broadly mean those household level or other enterprises or labour activities which do not come under the purview of any legal framework. The report by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector(NCEUS, 2007)[2] states that informal workers now constitute 92 percent of the total workforce and that there is a high congruence between this segment of the workforce and 77 percent of the population in the "Poor and Vulnerable" category.. The report also highlights the disparities in income and inequities in the Indian economic system. In the categorization of expenditure classes per day, only 23.3 percent of the total population belonged to the Middle and High income group while 76.7 per cent of the total population belonged to the Poor and Vulnerable group in 2004-05. 95 percent of women were engaged in unorganized sector work force, evincing that the unorganized sector, is the primary source of employment for women.

There is a dearth of research capturing women’s contribution to the economy. While feminization of sectors such as agriculture and unorganized non agricultural home based work has come to be broadly accepted, more macro level qualitative studies are needed to understand the gender dimensions of women engaged with the manufacturing sector and in construction work specifically in terms of their organization and movements. While there is a gender gap in wage differentials, it is also important to note here that women with higher mean years of schooling get the same job as men with lesser education levels. Education has not been a marked factor in improving entry level jobs for women workers indicating gender discrimination. There is a strong sexual division of labour whereby women are segmented into more labour intensive and less paying jobs and in domestic work or the care economy

Recent field case studies have shown that with displacement a large number of tribal women are migrating and forming the labour force in export processing zones and Social Economic Zones where no formal labour rights exist and information is heavily controlled. While this is a broader discrimination of labour rights on the whole, there are few studies on the ramifications of the absence of rights on vulnerable communities in these work conditions which need to be formally assessed and monitored by the State.

Organising and claiming rights

Though the right to freely organize and form Trade Unions is a recognized international human right, informal and unorganized sector workers have found it difficult to organize and collectively bargain for their rights.  Many Trade Union leaders admit that it has become increasingly difficult to organize the ‘unorganised’ for several reasons, there being fear of job loss in the private sector, fear of losing the day’s wages in a situation of irregular flow of work, and lack of avenues for information dissemination. Most often unorganized sector workers are from migrant communities alien to the place of work and hence dealing with several layers of fear and insecurity. However workers have come together when they have felt a sense of identity, or there is a common binding cause for them. Mona Sur who has worked with unorganized sector workers for many years in Kanpur shares, ‘That when the textile mills shut down, the membership of the Kapda Mill Mazdoor Union also diminished since people did not see a purpose.’ A common framework or law, place of work or cause helps to bind workers together. In this context the domestic workers women’s movement has been particularly successful defying all pre existing notions.

Citing the case of Gharelu Mahila Kaamgar Union, Minu Sur, shares that the membership constitutes 6000 domestic workers in Kanpur today, where at least 1000 domestic workers meet every weekend to circulate information amongst themselves. The movement started due to the repeated cases of violence and sexual harassment faced by these women at the workplace or while going to work, who found strength in coming together and have negotiated with the State Government of Uttar Pradesh for the Mahamaya Garib Arthik Madat Yojna for one and a half lakh women. This Union along with this universal pension scheme for all rural poor women has made other demands such as health benefits, housing benefits, BPL and ration cards and social security demands. Other Unions have also preferred to negotiate for the right for a space to sell their skills and labour, accidental compensation and institution of representation of workers in the Board usually overpowered by the employers from the State.

Taking from our ethical universe: Ensuring Rights of Workers

The most crucial component and most powerful of the ethical universe governing the people of India is its Constitutional mandate which was set to build a Welfare State by its Directive Principles for State Policy. The Constitutional mandate relevant to the context of unorganized sector workers clearly commits to protecting and safeguarding the welfare of every citizen in the field of economic, social and political life. To achieve this the principles direct the state to minimise the economic inequalities, create opportunities, securing that the citizen, men and women equally, have the right to an adequate means of livelihood; ownership and control of the material resources of the community; that the operation of the economic system does not result in the concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment; and that there is equal pay for equal work for both men and women.[3]

However as shared earlier, the income differentials are heavily skewed in the country today, with a small minority in  India controlling majority of its resources. 92 percent of the work force constitutes the unorganised sector of which more than two thirds earn less than Rs 20 a day and contribute more than 50% to GDP. (NCEUS 2007). Yet unorganized workers and self employed are penalized through a complex web of licensing and regulatory systems, in contrast to the heavy concessions and tax cuts given to big industrial houses. Rickshawpullers, hawkers, construction labour unions fight for a space to sell their skills and wares and face the wrath of state officials on a daily basis, even going into heavy debts because of the confiscation of their assets.

Unorganized sector workers today are more interested in negotiating with the State for proper health care, social security, education and housing benefits than clashes with employers. Most solutions to these problems tend to be sought from employers rather than workers. State guarantees to these entitlements must be there rather than resting on whims and fancies of owners and given to all workers, organized or unorganized. Unfortunately the Government’s response to the major part of this workforce remains a patchwork of poverty alleviation schemes and benefits rather than a comprehensive law recognizing a set of entitlements.

The article has been written for the forthcoming newsletter published by PAIRVI.www.pairvi.org

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[1] Vijay Ramaswamy, Traditional crafts, techonology and Society, Rethinking a Millenium

[2] http://nceus.gov.in/Condition_of_workers_sep_2007.pdf

[3] A34 to A39, Directive Principles of State Policy, Constitution of India