Community

Families are connected not only within themselves but also with other families and the people around them. Such a group of connected people may be called a 'community' (the word has other meanings too, depending on the context). No family can do everything alone: when someone falls ill at night and the family is away, it is often a neighbour who drives them to hospital.

Members of a community come together for many reasons: festivals, feasts, weddings and other events. In some villages people help each other with farm work such as preparing the land, sowing and harvesting.

Over time, communities often agreed on ways of using shared natural resources such as water, grazing land and forest produce. Many tribal communities do this, and to some extent village communities in rural India still do.

Such practices (we may call them 'rules', though they were rarely written down) gave communities secure access to resources. But they also mean that every family and person in the community has duties to perform; otherwise the community will not run smoothly. Rights and duties come together, even where nothing is written, just as a function goes well when everyone has been given a job.

A real example. Year after year, the area around the town of Jhabua in Madhya Pradesh suffered from a severe water shortage. Following their halma tradition of coming together to help any person or family in a crisis, the Bhil community decided to plant thousands of trees in hundreds of villages.

The Bhils also dug many trenches to save rainwater and built other water-harvesting structures. They were not paid for this work; they did it as their duty to their community and the environment. In the halma tradition, the aim is to serve Mother Earth. In 2019, Shri Mahesh Sharma of the Shivganga movement received the Padma Shri for his work with the Bhil communities.

A city example. During the Chennai floods of 2015, roads turned into rivers and people could not move about. Almost all shops were closed and services stopped. Many private groups, especially spiritual and religious organisations, cooked huge amounts of food and gave it to people who needed it.

There are many more examples of people coming together for the good of the community without expecting anything in return. Have you heard of any?