From hunters to artists: Investing in the transformation of women of the Pardhi Community

“I had the option of moving to Africa with my husband, who is working with The Neptune Hotels there. The thought of what would happen to the hopes of a better future of the Pardhi community, stopped me. So, here I am working with the Pardhi community in a city called Panna in Madhya Pradesh.”

Meet Shatakshi Singh, the founder of Wildpinesart, an enterprise set up to generate income for local artists and communities. She is a graduate in the arts faculty and has earned a diploma in fashion designing from Delhi, India. She is 1 of 4 children (3 girls and 1 boy), born to a predominantly agricultural family. Her youngest sister is a rifle shooter and now a coach too; her middle sister was a naturalist at Taj Safaris Panna for a decade and is now the lodge manager at one of the top safari lodges of Madhya Pradesh and younger brother is pursuing his PhD in Panna History, from Delhi.

The inspiration: Challenging patriarchy

Despite Panna being a male dominated city, her father never once restricted his children from studying or learning life skills like driving and swimming. He even encouraged his youngest daughter to pursue her passion for shooting.

With a background like that but being disadvantaged by a patriarchal society, Shatakshi wanted to create her own identity and do something that would make her parents proud. Her mother, she says, played a huge role in this thinking. She insisted that her daughters do not have to learn house-hold chores because they are girls and pushed them to constantly think about financial independence.

The spark: Visualizing use of education across industries

Prior to setting up Wildpinesart, Shatakshi worked at the Taj Safaris, Panna where she managed their CSR program. Her understanding of wildlife conversation and the efforts that went into it grew leaps and bounds through this stint. This is when she also learnt more about the Pardhi Community, nomads / hunt help since the time of the Mughals; their (unfortunate) role in the depletion of the Tiger population and their resettlement when Tigers were reintroduced to the Panna Forest.

Her educational background and work experience put her at a fabulous intersection point, where she combined these skills and founded Wildpinesart, with initial financial support from her husband.

Wildpinesart: Hope, creativity, and livelihood

Shatakshi already had the experience of working with / teaching thumb print artifacts to the women at Asha Foundation.

This helped her diversify the product range and include women from the Pardhi community. In conversation with her, she says “This community was marginalized because of their ancestral background. No one trusted them and consequently, earning an honest livelihood became a huge problem.” Because of her understanding of both sides of the story – wildlife conservation and the art side of things, she set up Wildpinesart and invested in the women of the Pardhi Community. 

Navigating challenges: Cannot take even ‘basics’ for granted

Initially, it was a huge challenge, because the women did not even know how to use a needle and thread. So, the training had to be done right from the very basics. This made her extremely nervous, but her girls (as she lovingly calls them) proved her wrong.

While training was a challenge she slowly managed to overcome, access to raw material, connecting with different artisans and providing her girls that access was also proving to be a challenge. She had to travel extensively to build a network of suppliers for raw material and bring new techniques to Wildpinesart.

Seemingly simple things that we sometimes take for granted, were insurmountable challenges for these girls. Getting to work, for example was an arduous task as local transport in Panna is not easy to come by. And what is available is prohibitively expensive. An NGO then stepped in and reimbursed these travel costs. Now unfortunately, the partnership with the NGO has ended, the women are struggling all over again to get to work.

“While I have never sought funding from any external source, it may be useful now to help us provide a permanent solution for transport and consequently, help us scale,” she says when asked about angel investments. "Women investing in women pays forward", she added.

One thing she would like to see happening in the near future

Get the word out there. Panna is a very remote part of the country and getting the message out there, is exceedingly difficult. With the advent of social media, hopefully some of this changes. “What it will also do for us is to shrink the world a little more, so new ideas for raw material, design and product can be researched with more vigor,” she adds.

Changing the narrative: Act local, think global

Shatakshi’s message for women who feel stymied and limited because of their geography / remoteness of their hometown is quite simple. “Go out there and explore. Network, meet new people and explore ideas. Endless possibilities will open up.”

A note about the Pardhi Community

Pardhis are a nomadic community, who since the time of the Mughal emperors, have been hired to help in shikar (hunting), whether it was for sport for the British or for the royal kitchens of the ‘zameendars’ (landowners). In fact, the crash in India's tiger population from some 100,000 at the beginning of the 20th century to only a couple of thousand by the end of it, has been attributed largely to this community. While the tigers were being reintroduced in Panna, the Forest Department officials worked closely with this community and resettled almost 40 Pardhi families to a village outside the Tiger Reserve in a place known as Gandhigram. They also have setup 2 hostels to aid the education of these children. Due to such efforts of mainstreaming, the cases of tiger poaching by Pardhis have dropped to ‘zero’ in the last 15 years in the Panna landscape.

However, in order to maintain the stable tiger population as well as support community reformation, it is imperative to provide the community members with alternative sources of livelihood. This is where Wildpinesarts (https://www.wildpinesart.com/) plays a key role.