Books are hardly made by the exclusive labour of their authors. They are the convergence of ideas, discussions, critique and modifications. This book grew from the experiences of the erstwhile Social Science Programme of Eklavya in government schools of Madhya Pradesh. It was observed that the abstraction of the maps in school books was limiting their potential as geographic tools for young students. This gave rise to a map project through which I studied the problem and also reviewed the maps available in the market... and this paved the way for the development of new maps and also the writing of this book.
And this would not have been possible but for the contributions of several persons who are engaged with political, academic or educational issues or are students.
Artists generally do not find it very exciting to be bound by the limitations of cartography in making the kind of pictorial map used in this book. I thank Tripurarri Singh for taking up the challenge and making the final artwork on the map. I also thank Veena M who discussed the map with students of Govt High School, Mannanthala and Govt Upper Primary School, Kallayam (Trivandrum). I also thank the young student Sunny Sebastian who provided me with frank responses to the pictorial map.
Bindu Thirumalai and Krithika Vishwanathan helped with the collection of secondary materials. They along with Nilesh Nimkar, Prachi Bogam, Karthik Venkatesh and Fiona Fernandez had participated in a writing workshop that was organised at Hoshangabad. I specially thank Nilesh for his concrete contributions to Chapter 2. Young students from Hoshangabad, Promod Yadav, Rajni Verma, Pinky Babaria, Vishal Yadav, Nidhi Verma, Lalit Yadav, Akash Majhi and Pulkit Malviya gave valuable inputs to the initial ideas and the contents of the chapters which were discussed with them. Roopam Gour organised these students who were regular visitors to our library at Hoshangabad.
Manish Jain, Saleel ME, Yogesh Diwan, Alex M George, Kumkum Roy, D Nandakumar, Rajaram Badhu, Rashmi Paliwal and CN Subramanium gave valuable comments that helped to modify the manuscript. Their support is deeply acknowledged. I thank Prasanthan M who took care to understand the spirit of the chapters and the book to make paintings for the cover and title pages.
I thank Boski Jain for the illustrations-layout and Rashmi Paliwal for the editing of the book. My special thanks to both of them for holding on patiently through my jerky rides of rewriting and frequent additions.
The sober prose and pace of this book hide a vast, unannounced project. I am sure the author, and perhaps the publisher too, has an inkling of what they have embarked on. What about the readers? Its intended readers are school children.
They are certainly privileged, in that the author and her immediate colleagues, Le the illustrator and the lay-out designer, have given them something altogether different from the books-including textbooks-available in India for learning its geography. The energy and clarity and the warmth this book exudes all the way from the opening page to the end are rare. These qualities are known to be the heart of learning and education. Few books written for young readers in our country succeed in synthesizing pedagogic values with knowledge of a subject so well.
But this book is not for young readers alone. I say this because it has changed my view of Rajasthan, a state I have visited many times and where I know several friends and institutions. Reading this book made me realize how little I knew Rajasthan, and yet, this awareness remained positive and encouraging. It did not arouse any embarrassment over living for so long with a superficial and flat view of the state of Rajasthan. Noticing how subtly and slowly my ignorance shrank and better sense took its place reminded me that the basic aims of education and health are closely allied. A good doctor and a good teacher start their work anew with each person. Yemuna Sunny does not waste words in telling us how distorted and narrow our understanding of Rajasthan is. She straightaway takes us towards the long and deep and layered view which mixes awareness of the land and its winds with its people, what they do in order to live, and how their life has been through the long centuries of the past and how the land has fared since its longer grological past. You face a panorama, of the rise of routes and cities, music and trades, tribal groups and castes and classes. The warm simplicity of the prose takes you along, with the crisp line drawings that include young people talking to each other as their questions come face to face with impressions formed in the first round of learning something new. The author calls this social geography. So be it. I think her preface is more accurate. There she says that she wanted to 'redefine geography she has done just that.
Considering the spectacular success of her effort, the title Sprout-looks and sounds poetically modest. It tells us how deeply burdened the author must feel by the awareness that our system of education has all along wasted the opportunity that geography as a subject presents to us when we are young to understand the integrity of collective life. As part of the school curriculum, and as a field of knowledge about the nation and its people, geography stretches the limits of every other social science. Indeed, all the other social sciences would mean a lot more if geography were understood the way this book treats it.
Space is something that we cannot do without. It is there in everything that we think and do. Be it the basic aspects of life like breathing, eating, drinking, or children playing, or of processes like producing food and goods, art, music, literature, films, of travel, of states and people, or battles and war, there are stories of space. Hence there is no independent space or space just for oneself.
Moreover, there is nothing permanent about space. It is always on the move. Of course, some changes happen fast, while others would take millions of years to happen.
In our everyday life we ask "do you have enough space?" This could mean space for you to sit in a bus or it could mean your space in a society. For example, some traditional social practices exclude people on the basis of caste, class and gender from accessing water sources, schools and other requirements of life. Why do we often say that women's space is not limited to the kitchen, but that they should get all spaces of life? Why do we see slums in cities as the spaces where the working class people live? Why are the choicest spaces occupied only by the rich people? Why do we see transgender people living outside the usual spaces of society? These various social and economic spaces show the structure of systems of society, family and state/nation.
Space is therefore a story very much like the sprouting of a million seeds. These seeds can be called justice, power, equality, ideas, tradition, modernity, and so on. What grows where? Which seeds get watered where? These are largely impacted by the views and actions of the people, communities and the state. Every relationship of society with nature produces places, which in turn, changes the society and nature. A place could be a forestland, cultivated land or a city. The people of the place could be bonded together through common features like language, food habits or art forms. But the unequal spaces of poverty, wealth, access to nature and to institutions differentiate amongst people within the place. This situation gives way to tensions and to efforts made by people for greater space. This could be opposed by people who do not want to lose the larger space they have gained through an unequal structure of society.
Geographia is the Greek word for geography that is devoted to the study of earth's lands, features, inhabitants and interrelated phenomena. Even as traditionally there are two major branches of the subject the physical (natural) and the human (social) geographies, it is increasingly recognised that we can do justice to the study only if we examine the interrelations between the natural and the social geographies. How can we understand the environmental problems if we do not examine those human activities that are damaging the physical or natural processes?
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