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Home 19
Mandla, Madhya pradesh
Mandla location map

N was an energetic and small woman. We interviewed her to the mischievous delight of her family, friends and neighbours who both encouraged her to participate and teased her about it. The categories of friend, family and neighbour are quite amorphous here.

There was a thin cluster of jackfruit, hibiscus and guava trees in the courtyard of the house and right at the entrance stood a jhhaad (tree) of neem. The front yard was also used to wash dishes and was furnished with a rope bed (charpai) for when people want to sit in the open. , N lived with her husband, son and mother’s brother in the house her parents built, who dies several years ago.. Her husband’s sister (bhabhi) and her family lived across the street from them. N had buffaloes, bulls and cows and her house was one of the larger ones in the village. Her son, who resembled his father very much, spent his days working in the neighbouring fields and jungle. Foraging for raw materials was a common practice among the villagers and trees like mahua gave them fruit and other plants supplied fodder for cattle and goats. They used timber to build houses, make bricks,and as fuel. N told us that because of a shorter monsoon they had run out of wheat husk for the cattle and was feeding them corn husk instead. Despite this symbiotic relationship with the jungle, villagers appeared wary of signalling over-reliance to the government and making it take any action against them. Quite a few people mentioned that the government was providing gas cylinders to people to wean them away from the jungle, but it doesn’t seem to be working — nearly all the kitchens we visited seemed to be using wood fired cooking stations.

N had decided to slowly renovate her house and add a functioning toilet, replace the mud and wood with concrete and bricks and the parts of her land not in use were being used to make bricks. Two brickmakers, along with their families, lived in a temporary structure made of bricks and tarpaulin attached to N’s house.