Ghosal Danga Adibasi Seva Sangha

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA will engage primary school and hostel students of the Rolf Schoembs Vidyashram (RSV), run by Ghosal Danga Adibasi Seva Sangha in Ghosal Danga, Birbhum district. This 18-month project titled Integrating Santal Aesthetics into Everyday Educational Practices, seeks to revitalise school education by embedding Santal artistic traditions, storytelling, mural-making, theatre, and indigenous food, customs and attire into the everyday rhythm of classroom learning. The school hopes to bridge formal education and the cultural life of the local Santal Adivasi community, nurturing creativity, cultural identity, and ecological sensitivity among learners. For this project, Sona Murmu and Sanyasi Lohar are the facilitators as well as the signatories, and will serve as Coordinators of this Project

In Ghosal Danga Birbhum district, Ghosal Danga Adibasi Seva Sangha, which runs Rolf Schoembs Vidyashram (RSV), serves approximately 60–70 Santal Adivasi children, offering education from Nursery through Class IV, alongside a hostel accommodating 30 students from Classes V to VIII. Drawing consciously on the humanistic ideals of Santiniketan, where Tagore insisted that education must grow from the soil of one’s own culture, the school seeks to give Santali Adivasi children the rare and vital experience of seeing themselves fully reflected in the world of learning as knowers, as creators, and as bearers of a living civilisation. Given their decades of experience in community-rooted, non-formal education, the school is best placed to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

The students of RSV belong to the Santal Adivasi community, one of the largest and oldest indigenous peoples of eastern India, with a distinct language, a rich oral literary tradition, and cultural practices rooted in music, dance, storytelling, nature worship, and collective social life. Yet this heritage exists today under conditions of deep structural strain. Most students come from economically vulnerable families with severely limited access to stable livelihoods, formal education, and supportive learning environments. In mainstream Bengali-medium government schools, Santal children routinely encounter cultural alienation with their language being unrecognised, their knowledge systems invisible, their ways of learning incompatible with the rigid discipline of conventional classrooms producing chronic patterns of low self-esteem, absenteeism, and early dropout. 

These are not individual failures; they are the predictable consequence of an education system that has historically treated indigenous identity as an obstacle to be overcome rather than a foundation to be built upon. In the current sociopolitical climate, where questions of tribal rights, land sovereignty, and the recognition of Adivasi identity have become increasingly contested across India, this erasure carries a sharper edge. The gradual disappearance of Santali language use, the fading of oral traditions among younger generations, and the displacement of indigenous cultural practices by mainstream media and market are not merely matters of heritage loss, they also represent the slow attrition of a community’s sense of self.

 Ghosal Danga Adibasi Seva Sangha’s response to this reality is both educational and political in the deepest sense: the school positions itself not only as a place of learning but as a cultural space where Santal identity is affirmed, preserved, and creatively reimagined where a child’s mother tongue, community knowledge, and ancestral art forms are treated as the very starting point of education rather than as things to be left at the gate. What distinguishes this project is that the Santal community of Ghosal Danga and neighbouring villages will serve as the primary source of knowledge and the engine of the educational process. Elders, artisans, performers, and parents will serve as co-educators whose lived expertise shapes every stage. The school will open with storytelling and illustration workshops led by village elders, in which students listen to, discuss, and then author their own illustrated narratives in both Santali and Bengali. The tangible outcome is a handmade anthology of illustrated stories, a lasting archive of oral knowledge in written and drawn form that encourages mother-tongue expression, sequential thinking, and visual literacy. 

The project will then move into mural-making workshops centred on the seasonal Santal festivals of Sorhai, Baha, and Dansai. Village elders, the only living practitioners of this craft, will serve as instructors, transmitting an endangered skill, the creation of large-scale murals using mud, terracotta, and natural pigments directly to children. Students will leave with a practical ability in indigenous visual art, an understanding of ecological materials, and a deepened sense of the communal values these works encode. Building on this, local theatre practitioners will guide students through Santali drama and performance rooted in folk storytelling, song, and dance. Students will script, rehearse, and perform short pieces drawn from Santal traditions, developing public confidence, collaborative discipline, and an embodied understanding of how performance carries cultural memory.

In the latter part of the project, parents, alumni, and village elders will lead demonstrations of indigenous food preparation and traditional Santali attire and ornamentation. Students will participate directly identifying and preparing indigenous ingredients, learning the significance of seasonal and ceremonial foods, and reading the craft and symbolic vocabulary of traditional dress and jewellery. The learning here goes beyond cultural familiarity: students will develop the ability to articulate the aesthetic and social logic of practices they have grown up observing, building a critical cultural literacy that connects home knowledge to school knowledge and, in doing so, provides a formal occasion to recognise and honour what already surrounds them. By integrating these community-led activities with classroom learning, the project channels traditional Santal knowledge into a structured educational framework while preserving its participatory and intergenerational character positioning the community not as a subject of study but as an active custodian of knowledge whose lived experience shapes the educational process. 

The project will culminate in a community exhibition and seminar on Santal aesthetics, bringing together students, artisans, teachers, parents, and invited guests. The exhibition will display the illustrated anthology, completed murals, costume elements, and documented performance materials; the seminar will open dialogue on the integration of indigenous knowledge into formal schooling. These events are not merely a showcase: students will gain skills in curation, presentation, and public communication, while the wider community witnesses and affirms what has been built together creating the foundation for a replicable model of arts-integrated education grounded in and sustained by the community itself.

The outcome of the project will be a handmade anthology of illustrated stories, a mural, community exhibition and a seminar on Santali aesthetics. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA along with the final report will be a digital copy of the illustrated anthology, photographs and video documentation of the entire project.

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Education programme in the manner in which it attempts to connect students and schools to the cultural knowledge of the places they inhabit.

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This Foundation Project is made possible in partnership with InterGlobe Foundation.