Paper short abstract:

Pardhis, a denotified tribal group live in the slums of Bhopal as ragpickers and engage with Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed, through an organisation called Muskaan. The potential of education as transformation against the government policy of assimilation in the name of integration is examined.

Paper long abstract:

Denotified tribes (DNTs) are a diverse collection of peoples, comprising several hundred groups with a population of 110 million, who suffer exceptional levels of discrimination, far beyond the well documented stigma and oppression faced by Dalits and Adivasis. This category came into being through the British-era Criminal Tribes Act of 1871; and discrimination was perpetuated post-Independence with the Habitual Offenders Act (1952), which changed the nomenclature from 'Criminal' to 'Denotified' tribes, but otherwise did little to correct the institutionalised targeting these groups suffer by the police and other groups. In 2003-5 a National Commission for De-Notified, Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Tribes was set up to ameliorate the situation. Yet the stigma and institutionalised behaviour towards DNTs prove hard to change, and the self-immolation of a DNT woman from the Pardhi community in Bhopal in November 2017, after being targeted by police demanding money from her and threatening her family with jail, drew nation-wide coverage and outrage over the DNT situation. Pardhis were formerly a hunter-gathering tribal community, with their own language. Since they had no tradition of cultivation (unlike most 'Adivasi' groups), they had no land title, became classified as encroachers on government land, and have been displaced in large numbers into urban areas, where they mainly work as 'rag-pickers'. In Bhopal, they live as second generation migrants, and an organisation called Muskaan organizes education using Freire's ideas of conscientization, uses multilingualism and constructivist methods of knowledge building, as well as action in defence of their rights as pathways to transformation.