In May 2020, during the first wave of India’s Covid-19 pandemic, a collective of indigenous artists and filmmakers associated with Budhan Theatre and Nomad Movies, and belonging to the Chhara DNT community, began an extensive project of documentation of the lockdown and post-lockdown experiences of their communities through theatre, film and digital technology. They produced a series of video podcasts ( Season 1 and Season 2 ) in indigenous languages and circulated through social media platforms, addressing the experiences of pain and loss, telling the stories that did not find space in mainstream public spheres, and providing information and entertainment in a time of crisis, through a blend of performances, poetry, songs, and documentary forms.

India’s DNT communities

India counts one of the largest indigenous populations in the world, also known as Adivasis (original inhabitants). More than 80 million people are officially classified as Scheduled Tribes (STs) and around 110 million people as DeNotified Tribes (DNTs) –- communities that were ‘notified’ as born criminals during British colonial rule under the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act. 

Despite de-notification following India’s independence, the brand of criminality and the lack of citizenship rights and entitlements, continues to shape these groups’ interaction with the state. For DNT groups in particular, the brand of criminality continues to drive their interaction with the state and negatively affects their ability to access basic state provisions –from schools to food and health services. This drives the systemic discrimination when dealing with doctors, schools and the police, and contributes to their structural precariousness in the labour market, as a large part of the community finds work as manual labourers, agricultural and construction workers, performers, sex workers and street entertainers at the margins of India’s informal economy. Their economic poverty is further compounded by the stigma associated with their identity. The representation of these communities in mainstream public spheres is, in fact, marked in very particular tropes (the noble savage, the fetishised snake charmer, the thug, the thief) that reinforce the conditions of their exclusion economically, politically and socially. 

India has been affected heavily, as well as unequally, by the pandemic, which has brought specific challenges to its most vulnerable populations. During the first wave, DNT and Adivasi communities mostly suffered from the disastrous effects of India’s unannounced lockdown when, with four hours’ notice, millions of people who live on the breadline were left to fend for themselves. During India’s devastating second wave, when the country faced a shortfall of oxygen, vaccines, medicines and wood to burn the dead, the virus was left to spread to remote rural areas and urban slums, where people died without diagnosis or care. Yet, the suffering of India’s poor has also been rapidly obliterated from collective public memory. With most reporting focussed on national centres, there has been hardly any way of knowing what happened at India’s margins other than from the images that people themselves produced and circulated through social media.