(by G.V. Nair, Telegraph 22 December 1994)
If you want towork for the uplift of the villagers, the first thing to do is to go and live among them. “No one could grudge Rabindranath Tagore the right to give this advice, for he himself, scion of an aristocratic family in Calcutta, pent the larger part of his adult life in villages. From Vidyasagar downwards , Bengal has seen a stream of men and women work, leave the cities to work in rural ideals are held at a low premium ; and sometimes, it is a flood, as in the late sixties, the Golden Age of revolution.
Lakshmindra Kumar Sarkar and his wife Srabani, who could be seen sitting in a tiny bookshop, “R.B. Sarkar Prakashani” at Khatra, a small town wedged between Bankura and Purulia districts, have kept alive this tradition to this day. Selling books comes secondary, a way to earn a frugal livelihood. The main concern is their work among the tribal population.
The bookshop also happened to be the office of the Khatra Adibasi Culture and Development Centre, there these two might be found in the bookshop surrounded by a group of young Santals walking along dusty village paths talking to young adibasis.
Mr. Lakshmindra Sarkar, a journalist from Calcutta till two years ago, had met Sraboni in one of his frequent visits to tribal villages in the Bengal-Bihar border area. She was doing research for her doctorate on the ‘Bengali Influence on Adibasi Culture,’ marriage soon followed. Editing the first adibasi newspaper Adibasi Sambad, and writing two books one a chronicle of the antidan movement in Purulia and the other a history of the Santali language and literature, are the high watermark of Lakshmindra’s interaction with the tribal life and culture. He must have found the combination of daily grind in a city newspaper and work among the adibasis increasingly impossible to sustain. One morning there appeared a notice one room flat in pottery road “Left for villages, never to return, New address – R. B. Sarkar Prakashani, Khatra, Bankura district.
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