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Khwaabgaon, a grassroots art practice in Jhargram, works with Lodha-Sabars and other Adivasi communities across 12 sites in West Bengal’s Jangal Mahal region.
The project uses murals, workshops, weekly art schools and local materials to raise awareness on tribal rights, forest rights and cultural memory.
Its work responds to a landscape shaped by industrial expansion, forest loss, groundwater depletion, pollution and the continuing struggle for Adivasi rights.
By treating art and culture as part of community practice, Khwaabgaon offers an alternative way to sustain livelihood, memory, resistance and belonging.
Gaon Chodab Nahin! Jungal Chodab Nahin! Maaye Maati Chodab Nahin! Ladai Chorab Nahin! We will not leave our village. We will not leave our forests. We will not leave our mother earth. We will not give up our fight.
The song, inspired by Bhagwan Maajhi during the anti-bauxite mining movement in Kashipur, Odisha, in 2008-09, became a cry for land, identity and resistance. Directed by award-winning filmmaker K P Sasi, recorded by Madhu Mansuri Hasmukh and officially released in 2009, it continues to echo the cultural resilience at the heart of Adivasi movements.
It is in this tradition that Khwaabgaon was imagined.
Conceptualised in 2018, Khwaabgaon is a multidisciplinary grassroots practice initiated by Chalchitra Academy. The project works with Lodha-Sabars, a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group, and other Scheduled Tribe communities, including Santhals, Mundas, Koras and Kurmis, across 12 sites in Jhargram, West Bengal. These include Lalbazar, Arjun Dahar, Khayrasole, Uransole, Kone Doba, Darkhuli and Jorakhali.
Jhargram is part of Jangal Mahal, a region that came to be associated with the ‘Red Corridor’ during the Maoist movement. After the insurgency intensified in 2009, many Adivasi communities in the area experienced suspicion, surveillance and ‘othering’ because of assumptions about their association with Maoist politics. This affected livelihoods and contributed to social and economic fragmentation.
It is in response to this history that artist Mrinal Mandal and the Khwaabgaon project have been working on an alternative economic model, one that seeks sustainable development without uprooting communities or disrupting their relationship with nature.
Adivasi movements across India have long used songs, murals, theatre and collective memory as forms of political expression. Recent movements, including the Sijimali anti-mining protests across Rayagada and Kalahandi in Odisha and the Chita Andolan in Madhya Pradesh, have demanded the proper implementation and reform of the Forest Rights Act, 2006, to recognise the traditional rights of forest-dwelling communities.
Khwaabgaon approaches these questions through cultural practice. It raises awareness on tribal rights through collaborative murals painted on mud houses, with the participation of the community.
For Mrinal Mandal, this is not separate from rights-based politics. ‘The Forest Rights Act has a legal framework, but it also carries a cultural and ecological responsibility within a socio-economic framework,’ he says.
This idea is central to the project. The struggle for rights is not only fought through petitions, protests or legal claims. It is also carried in songs, images, memory, land-use practices and the everyday relationship between people and forests.
Around 300 million people in India depend on forests for their survival. Jhargram is part of such a landscape, dominated by deciduous sal forests and long shaped by the lives and labour of forest-dependent communities.
Over more than a decade, however, the region has faced growing pressure from industrial and real estate expansion. Sponge iron industries, cement factories, particularly around Gajashimul, Jitusole, Bagmuri and Mohonpur, and other development projects have contributed to forest land encroachment, deforestation, declining agricultural productivity, air pollution, groundwater depletion and ecological degradation.
Former headmaster and author Mrinmoy Hota has raised concerns about the scale of groundwater extraction and pollution linked to steel and sponge iron industries.
‘Nearly 2.5 million tonnes of groundwater is pumped out every day in steel plants, causing a disastrous decline in water levels,’ he says. ‘Pollutants such as nickel, chromium, cadmium, arsenic and manganese from sponge iron units have hazardous effects on people living near the plants.’
He also points to what he sees as a contradiction: industries continue to receive environmental clearance despite concerns over possible violations of the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981, and the Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974.
For communities living in these areas, ecological damage is not an abstract concern. Forest loss affects food, fuel, water, livelihoods, culture and health. The erosion of the forest also weakens the social and economic systems that have sustained Adivasi life in the region.
Against this background, Khwaabgaon works at the intersection of art, ecology and livelihood.
The project aims to plant 1,000 saplings every year, including fruit, vegetable and medicinal plants, as part of its concern with ecological restoration and community health.
For the past nine years, its programme Sanglap, meaning conversation, has organised workshops with Adivasi communities on kutum katum, paper-making with local fibre, eco-printing, natural dyes and dokra metal casting. These workshops are led by invited experts and contemporary artists.
The aim is not simply to teach a skill. It is to create a dialogue between different cultural worlds through art. In doing so, the project attempts to challenge social hierarchies that often separate artists, institutions and rural communities.
Recently, the Khwaabgaon Art House was set up to display artworks created through the project and to encourage direct interaction with visitors. Without government or organisational support, the work has continued through voluntary contributions and local collaboration.
The project also runs weekly art schools across different sites. These sessions introduce younger generations to questions of tribal rights, forest rights and cultural memory, helping them carry forward a form of resistance rooted in their own histories and surroundings.
The debates over Adivasi rights, forest rights and protective laws continue across India. In Jhargram, Khwaabgaon offers another way of engaging with these questions.
Its work is not a substitute for legal and political struggle. Nor does it claim to resolve the structural problems faced by Adivasi communities. But it shows how art and culture can become part of a long-term community-driven practice.
By working with murals, workshops, saplings, local materials and children’s art classes, Khwaabgaon treats culture not as decoration, but as a way of sustaining memory, livelihood and belonging.
In that sense, the project contributes to the wider Adivasi movement by creating space for socio-economic development and cultural continuity. It insists that development need not mean displacement, and that resistance can also be built through everyday practice.
For the communities of Jhargram, the fight for land and forests is not only about what is lost. It is also about what can still be made, remembered, taught and shared.
Urmila Banu is an independent writer. Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth