Our culture, our identity! Our identity, our right!
Origin & Intent
We are Ek Potlee Ret Ki (Kaani Nilam in Tamil), an artists-activists grassroots collective committed to reclaiming culture as a site of justice, memory, and resistance. Our journey winds through forests, coastlines, hills, borders, and bastis, into the everyday lives of over 60 indigenous, nomadic, occupational, and minority communities across the Indian subcontinent. Here, our work is shaped not by project plans, but by conversations around chulhas, laughter shared under trees, learning on a fishing boat, holding hands onboard a bullock cart, and the urgencies that communities name for themselves.
Two young people and two community elders
We met and came together at the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) in Rajasthan, a movement that all of us consider our alma mater. We were drawn to a shared enquiry: Oppression is deeply cultural; what we eat, wear, speak, celebrate, and believe are all expressions of who we are, and it is these very markers that are often used to disempower, exclude, or dehumanise us. Yet, resistance is rarely rooted in culture. It is shaped largely through social, political, or economic frames. We began with a provocation: what if culture, too often sidelined or reduced to a performative role, was at the very heart of how we understand and challenge injustice?
This question led us to build what has become one of India’s first collectives focused on cultural rights, truth-telling, and restorative justice. We began imagining this work in 2014, and formally gave it shape in 2016. Today, we are preparing to celebrate a decade of living with, learning from, and supporting the incredible voices of some of the subcontinent’s most structurally excluded communities.
We approach everything, from mobilisation and legal empowerment to documentation and advocacy, through a caste-gender-poverty lens sharpened by experience and trust. In today’s increasingly extractive and polarised climate, we choose depth over scale and facilitation over ownership. We work through a fellowship model: karyakartas, many of us from the communities themselves, offer time, attentiveness, and labour in solidarity. Our processes are intentionally informal, held together by relationships rather than rigid hierarchies. We don’t take corporate funding, and any institutional resources we do access are mostly directed straight to community leaders. Our finances and decisions are openly shared with the communities we walk alongside.
One of our most cherished processes has been co-creating an ethical framework for grassroots cultural documentation. Developed slowly, with care and consent, it has led to a living archive of over 900 hours of footage and 20,000 photographs that hold stories of craft, conflict, memory, joy, labour, and resistance, offered to future generations as inheritance and testimony.
We also work to build community-rooted alternatives to Eurocentric development frameworks, co-creating tools and models that speak to context, culture, and collective wisdom. Alongside this, we engage with various levels of government to advocate for policies grounded in the lived realities of our people, particularly in areas of cultural rights and social justice.
From confronting caste violence in schools to building feminist legal aid, from archiving cultural life in conflict zones to facilitating community-led peacebuilding, we move not with authority, but with attentiveness. Our work rests on a simple belief: that walking with, not for, is the most radical way to reclaim our futures.