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In April 2023, i was invited to participate in the fourth edition of Agamishaala held in Ranikhet, in the capacity of a scribe.
Agamishaala is a leadership capacity building experience for individuals working in the social impact sector in India, who are striving to make justice more accessible and equitable. It is curated by Agami in a larger effort to nurture connections and bring innovation into the justice sector. The belief behind Agamishaala is that by healing the self, we can heal the ecosystem. Manish, the lead facilitator and a practitioner of Social Presencing Theatre, takes the participants through various embodiment exercises that guide them to interpret data that the body generates. It emphasises the latent wisdom of the body, with somatic practices being the primary mode of engagement.
I wasn’t entirely familiar with this method and approach prior to the Ranikhet Shaala. But having heard about the process and seen the past documentation, it felt like a true account of the journey might only materialise through a lived-felt understanding of the experience. So i chose to participate in the workshop— instead of documenting the journey as an ‘outsider looking in’, i would be an ‘insider looking at us’.
As the scribe, I had been asked to document the journey of each individual as well as that of the group, providing space for each person’s growth over the 3 days and weaving it into the trajectory that the entire group took. ‘It Takes a Village…’ is the culmination of all the notes, observations and conversations that provided insight into each individual’s experience at Agamishaala.
Playing the role of a scribe was a balancing act. It required me to work with the lens of a participant and an observer in tandem. It encouraged me to notice the interplay between the self, the individual and the collective and the ways in which each of these units grew through the course of those 3 days. The facilitation itself forced me to notice myself in relation to the people around me, amplifying my observation in the process. In many ways, the honesty of the documentation was an outcome of how tuned in we were to the signals of our own bodies and the presence of one another, and I think the grace with which each individual connected with the other made itself visible in the work. It was a deeply moving experience, one that gently influenced much of how my life has shaped up in the past year.
‘It Takes a Village…’ has been written in a bilingual format, switching seamlessly between Hindi and English. This format borrows from the way members of the cohort interacted with one another, and the necessity declared by the space to translate both ways so as to make dialogue and conversations more accessible to everyone involved. The way the book employs this format relies on the idea of equal exclusion— some parts are written primarily in Hindi, with bits of English and others are written in English with some inclusion of Hindi. For exclusively Hindi or English readership, it gives them a sufficient entry point into the writing, and whatever gaps are created by the text is substituted by the images.
The book celebrates the coming together of this cohort, and the duration within which we built relationships that heal an ecosystem known to be fraught with mental and physical saturation. We all left Shaala as friends. The book reflected this intimacy and closeness, and since it contained a lot of exchanges that were quite personal, we chose to publish a limited print run that would only be circulated amongst the participants.
