Asking Questions, Sharing a Meal
By Tanvi Kohli and Siddhi Vora
Before we see our meal, we smell it. Scents of smoky charcoal and sweet cardamom flow from the kitchen to our seats at a wooden table in an open pavilion. We watch as a choir of birds flit from tree to tree, their songs filling the air. Green dragon fruit, coconut and mango plants cast long shadows, shading us from the high, desert sun.
When we had set out for our day, we anticipated an itinerary of back-to-back oral history interviews. Homemade lunch at a farm is an unexpected gift from a local contact. We hadn’t prepared for the free time in the middle of the day, but here we are. It’s during this serendipitous and delicious meal that the gravity of the day hits us: This is our last visit for a while.
We’re in Kutch, a district of Gujarat in Western India, as Fulbright researchers to map the worldviews and stories of the petitioners’ communities of the U.S. Supreme Court Budha Ismail Jam v. International Finance Corporation (IFC) case. Our interviewees are fishing workers, farmers and cattle grazers who crossed borders and oceans—from the District of Kutch in Western India to the U.S. Supreme Court—to shatter the legal immunity of international financial institutions, including the World Bank. Their troubles are rooted in the construction of the coal-powered and IFC-funded Tata Mundra Ultra Mega Power Plant, which has decimated local livelihoods and ecosystems. Years after the court case, the communities have experienced very little material change.
“Although we were initially filled to the brim with ideas of how to approach the research, we also felt lost, nervous and confused about how to execute those ideAS.”
We’re in our early 20s, and this was our first experience with on-site research. Our past humanities research was largely archival in nature, and most of our oral history interview experience was with NGOs and similar organizations. Our research in Kutch was the start of a brand-new adventure. Although we were initially filled to the brim with ideas of how to approach the research, we also felt lost, nervous and confused about how to execute those ideas.
So we googled. And we called our supervisors. And then we called our past mentors and advisors. Then we googled again. While we were incredibly grateful for the advice of those willing to discuss, it quickly became clear that the only way to prepare for the trip was to simply go on it. We just needed to try.
“You girls are going to get this interview onto the TV, right?” jokes Baai, pointing to the tiny television set behind her and throwing a mischievous grin our way.
Baai is the aunt of Navinal’s sarpanch (the village leader). Navinal is a village nestled slightly inland from the Arabic Sea in Kutch whose farmers and cattle grazers are directly impacted by the increasingly salinized water created by the power plant. It’s our third time in Navinal and our first time meeting Baai.
She’s sitting on the bare cement floor of her two-room home, where we’ve joined her. The walls are sparse, only decorated by a handful of reverential portraits of deceased family members and framed pictures of Hindu saints. Before we can say no, Baai has placed two steaming cups of chai in our hands.
Word travels fast and news of our arrival travels even faster. Soon new faces peer through the open door, curious to see who is interviewing Baai. Some hesitate at the threshold, but Baai quickly ushers them in, happy to introduce each new child and friend to us. And suddenly, three becomes ten, as Baai’s grandkids, daughters-in-law and neighbors pour in. We abandon our prepared questions and voice recording app as a din of Kutchi, Gujarati, Hindi, and English rises in the cramped space. We’re laughing about one of the children’s stories when a tall man with an orange beard dressed in a white kurta pajama set enters the room.
“We had only meant to stop by and ask Baai a few questions, but instead built a relationship that added a new dimension to the tapestry of resistance that was emerging.”
He’s greeted like an old friend. Baai pulls a hidden, large cloth bag from a corner of the room, and we realize we’re in the middle of a weekly business deal. The tall man is a textile merchant, and we watch as he sits in the middle of the women and children, delicately pulling and counting stitches.
Baai tells us that the women of Navinal participate in a network of textile production, specifically a traditional Kutchi style of embroidery called bandhani. Bandhani is very tedious work; to create the distinctly recognizable pattern, the cloth must be meticulously plucked into tidy, minuscule “bindings,” and the women are paid by the number of bindings they’ve stitched onto the cloth. Teasing and playful banter ensues as we watch girls in their teens and women in their 60s haggle over the counting of the stitches. We all laugh when the merchant agrees to an extra stitch or two with a wink.
Bandhani, similar to many other textile traditions in Kutch, was historically meant to be non-monetized. The women of Navinal only began selling bandhani in recent years. Their trading boomed when farmwork became increasingly difficult and the yield from the labor even more disappointing. The bandhani represents an alternative source of income and a way to supplement the loss of livelihoods from the power plant.
The afternoon light dissipates into nightfall. Our driver calls us repeatedly as we realize we ended up staying in Navinal three hours longer than we had initially planned. We had only meant to stop by and ask Baai a few questions, but instead built a relationship that added a new dimension to the tapestry of resistance that was emerging from each place we visited. Our impromptu conversations that afternoon had revealed more about the social movement than any of our prepared academic questions would have.
“interviewees showed us that change hinges on building and sustaining relationships.”
After lunch, we carry our steel plates to the kitchen. The savory taste of slow-cooked biryani lingers in our mouths as we offer to help wash up and thank our hosts for their hospitality. Without their act of kindness, we most likely would’ve skipped lunch and continued onwards with our day.
The comfort and ease we felt on that final day was hard-earned. Our first day in Kutch could not have been more different than the last. Armed with little more than a pre-written questionnaire and a cell phone connection, we had been two young women in the middle of the Kutchi desert — nervous and out of our depth.
Our interviewees showed us that change hinges on building and sustaining relationships. Over the past year, we learned that on-site research was not a one-way exchange. It’s not a task of asking questions, waiting for a response, recording the response and writing an academic article. Research is about listening, working with interviewees and becoming comfortable with not knowing all the answers.
The interviewees’ lived experiences and knowledge make them experts; their voices ought to be the focus in decision-making. In line with these lessons learned, we ended up adapting our research design to follow the leadership of our interviewees to create questions, analyses and outputs. Certain stories, we found, stay with you long after physically leaving the site of their telling.
Tanvi Kohli
Siddhi Vora
Tanvi Kohli and Siddhi Vora received their B.A. degrees from Washington University in St. Louis in 2020 and 2021, respectively. As 2022-2023 Fulbright-Nehru grantees in the coastal city of Mumbai, India, and the district of Kutch in Gujarat, India, they worked with and learned from marginalized communities fighting structural and environmental injustice.
Siddhi works at Sakhi for South Asian Survivors as a Housing Justice Advocate. Tanvi is a current law student at Stanford Law School.