When Children Participating in a Play Becomes a Crime
On 4 July 2024, at Virasam’s 54th anniversary meeting in Hyderabad, Telengana, India, a group of amateur artists/writers comprising children, youth, and adults performed a play, This Forest is Ours, on the ongoing war against Adivasis in the state of Chhattisgarh (Operation Kagar). The performance resulted in unexpected repercussions for the participants. The following is a translation of an article by Ashok Kumbamu, first published on the Kolimi website in Telugu, which elegantly explains how it is precisely this kind of repression that shows us how deeply rooted our academic freedoms are in the arena of public education and why we must stand in solidarity with those who are engaged in public education to ensure the longevity of our own individual and collective academic freedoms.
When Children Participating in a Play Becomes a Crime: In an Oppressive Regime, Who Inflicts Psychological Trauma on Whom and Why?
Ashok Kumbamu
In the academic institution where I work, there is a solidarity group for Native Americans. Most of the group’s members belong to the Dakota Native American tribe. Others are like me, who joined the group to learn from the Indigenous people and to support them. We meet once a month. At these meetings, mostly Dakota elders share their social and personal histories, and the violence and insults they have experienced. Sometimes they narrate these as personal experiences, and other times as stories.
Storytelling is a major part of Native American oral history. When members of tribes share these stories, everyone present is often moved to tears because these histories and lives are filled with so much violence. As far as I understand, there may not be another community in the entire history of humankind that has experienced such violence. This is why the trauma they experience continues inter-generationally. It is to ease some of that pain that they gather and share their experiences and wounds.
Once, at a meeting, as a Dakota woman of about 40 years began to speak, the atmosphere in the meeting hall became very solemn. The tribal people generally speak very gently and slowly, their words infused with, and their voices full of, sorrow. The Dakota woman was sharing her reflections on her life with the group. She had been just a child when she was separated from her family and placed in a residential school. She spoke about the situation back then and its impact on her.
Enrolling Native American children in residential schools was justified by settler-colonisers as necessary to “civilising” an entire Indigenous peoples. Upon entering these residential schools, Native American children were first given haircuts (Native American men and women both traditionally maintain long hair). They were given ”new” clothes, and their dietary habits mocked, while new (white) dietary habits were imposed on them. Speaking in their own language was punished, and the children were forcibly taught English. They were given the Bible and pushed into believing that it was the solution to all problems. In short, all traces of the children’s Native American identity were forcibly erased, and white culture imposed on them. Overall, these Native American children were alienated from themselves. Their families and people seemed strangers to them. As they grew, the children became people who could not become part of Native American culture and history.
The Dakota woman speaking that day, who had been taken to a residential school in her childhood, was then adopted by a white family. She grew up without knowing her roots. It was only after she turned 40, that she fully understood she had Native American heritage and looked back at what she had lost in her life. Such looking back is not just about recalling memories. The woman described the alienation she had experienced and the pain it caused her. She said that now she makes it a point to tell her children about her Native American heritage and their sufferings. Hearing this, an elderly white man in the room immediately responded by giving her unsolicited advice: “Don't tell your children about the violence you experienced and the pain you endured because it will affect their mental state and personality development.” The woman’s voice, which had been soft until then, suddenly became louder, a mix of anger and pain running through it.
“For 40 years of my life, I lived without knowing who I was. I lived without knowing whom to share my pain with. I was an outsider among my own people. I was a witness to the destruction carried out in the name of civilisation. Until now, I had only heard others tell my community's history. I never had the chance to speak about myself. Now that I want to talk, to tell my children, you come and say it’s wrong. But I feel that by telling my children, I am giving them the opportunity to grow more humanely,” she responded. Everyone in the room clapped in agreement.
This incident happened about four years ago. But every time the question arises about what is civilisation, what is development, what is personality development, and by what standards these should be evaluated, I remember that woman. Like when I learned about how, once again, the police had intervened to take away the children who participated in the play This Forest is Ours, based on the violence against the Adivasis in India and performed at a meeting of the Revolutionary Writers’ Association (Virasam) and then put on another show in the name of counselling.
On 4 July 2024, Virasam celebrated its 54th anniversary meeting in Hyderabad. The meeting was against the war being waged by the Indian government on the Adivasis in central India for corporate benefits and to strengthen the Hindutva fascist regime. There are mineral resources worth billions of dollars in central India. The Adivasis are protecting those resources, and revolutionaries are working with them. The meeting aimed to explain how the so-called rulers of India are implementing Operation Kagar to annihilate the Adivasis in stark violation of the Constitution.
Many poets, writers, artists, and public intellectuals explained that a series of massacres were happening in central India and discussed what needs to be done to stop the ongoing extra-judicial killings. As part of the meeting, a play was performed to demonstrate the violence being meted out by paramilitary forces such as the Border Security Force on Adivasi society. The Adivasis have been resisting the forces trying to obliterate their existence with the slogan “Jal, Jangal, Jameen, Izzat” (the right to water, land and forest and to a life lived with dignity).
For the past 75 years, the Indian government has ignored the Adivasis. But it is now laying new roads into the forest in the name of their development, constructing massive highways through the forest where the Adivasis don’t even have bicycles. And not only building roads on the ground, but also building airports to facilitate air travel. All these are unnecessary for the Adivasis, and do not involve their participation. To understand this, one doesn’t need to be a great intellectual. History tells us that the ruling classes work only for their benefit and not for the people at the bottom of society. Hence, instead of looking after the welfare of the Adivasis, the current rulers are declaring them as enemies of the Indian state, simply because the Adivasis are deemed an obstacle to their own interests. The state is filling the forest with paramilitary forces under the guise of the “ultimate war” to eliminate the Adivasis. For this purpose, the Indian government is building paramilitary camps every two kilometers in the Bastar region. From these camps, bombs are dropped on Adivasi villages through drones. They are shooting on sight under the pretext of “encounters”.
In the past six months, the Indian security forces have killed around 150 Adivasi children, members of the public, and the armed revolutionaries who support them. The Home Minister himself is announcing this as a government success. The world is shocked by such violence against the Indigenous peoples of a country that boasts of being the largest democracy. However, the civil society in the country itself does not seem to be affected at all. In such a scenario, when our fellow human beings and citizens are being massacred, the question of where we should stand as a society was posed through the play performed at the Virasam meeting in solidarity with Adivasi society.
The play vividly depicted the war being waged on Adivasis for corporate benefits. In the end, after the killing of Adivasis by Indian paramilitary forces, their children came onto the stage. First they cried upon seeing their parents’ dead bodies, but then, they took up the placards that their parents had been holding before they were killed. The placards had slogans such has “Stop the attacks on Adivasis”, “The Jal, Jangal, Jameen is ours”, “Stop Operation Kagar”, and “We don't want these companies”. This final act of holding up their parents’ placards symbolically suggests that the Adivasi struggle will continue as part of their heritage of resistance. The play then ends. Perhaps the reason for involving children in the play was to uphold the Adivasi culture of resistance and to convey a historical truth: “No matter how many you kill in the name of the ultimate war, there will always be someone to resist you.”
Telangana police in plainsclothes secretly video-recorded the entire meeting (the irony of this cannot be missed as this police is operating under the supervision of Chief Minister Revanth Reddy, who, during his election campaign, promised to protect democracy). These police officials did not find it a problem that the play had shown looting of resources or the killing of Adivasis resisting that looting. However, it disturbed their sensibilities to see children participating in the play. These police in plainclothes then approached two of the children who had come out of the meeting hall. They felt that counselling was necessary for the children who participated in the play and for their father who had encouraged them, claiming that the violent incidents depicted in the play would traumatise innocent children – children they said should not be involved in performances that raise slogans against the state. The policemen took the children and their father for counselling and sent them back only after they had promised not to commit such a mistake again.
Perhaps there are no other police in the country today as “compassionate” as those plainclothesmen? Apparently, when violence unfolds right in front of us, as adults we are supposed to stay unmoved, not react like humans with feelings. While children, of course, should be kept away from such humane acts. What a shining example of liberal humanity the Telangana police exhibited that day.
And what exactly did the police officials do while “counselling” the children? Perhaps, they cleverly hid the weapons from the children's sight. Possibly, they changed the police station into a playroom! They called it counselling, but what did the police actually discuss with the children? If the children had asked the police to call back the “Kagar” military squads chasing their Adivasi counterparts in the forest, chasing them away from their villages, schools and childhoods, what would the police have said? If they have really advised the children not to participate in such plays again, should we assume that the real message of this so-called counseling was that we should abandon empathy, that is, our basic humanity, and submit to fear?
If plays are to be performed, clearly they should be reserved for the ruling classes and hegemonic castes in their legislative bodies. But when the oppressed peoples and the poets, artists, and writers supporting them try to put on a show, well, how can that be allowed? After all, promoting bogus campaigns during elections, winning, and then acting out dramas in legislative assemblies doesn’t harm the minds and personalities of growing children at all, right? But these are just minor details —the Telangana police surely have all the answers to these pressing questions.
Congratulations to Virasam for engaging children in making history while they are still learning it. Salutations to the courageous children who tried to inspire change in a complacent society and to their supportive parents who encouraged them.