Syed Merajuddin

Meraj comes from one of central India's most contested landscapes: the edge of Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh. The area is claimed by wildlife conservation, development, the climate crisis and its original inhabitants, the Sahariyas. For Meraj, coexistence means taking pride in the place where one lives and enriching the web of relationships within it. Few have more reason for that pride than the Sahariyas, whose culture, customs, rituals and mythology are so closely tied to nature that they form a cosmology. Yet the Sahariyas, who gave up their lands and livelihoods for conservation two decades ago, remain largely invisible to the outside world.

Through his Champions project, Meraj will support Sahariya youth and elders to tell their stories of origin and coexistence through print, film and audio, social media and maps. With a community group called the Sahariya Lok Sangrah Samiti, the project will seek out elder storytellers and record and publish the origin myths of clans, totems, deities, rivers and mountains. It will also map the Sahariya mythscape and host a Sahariya LitFest celebrating local ecological knowledge and cultural heritage. The resulting archive, covering waterbodies such as Badataal and Kuno, trees such as Mahua and Tendu, and local deities, will be kept alive by a group of young Sahariyas trained to continue the work. Meraj hopes this will revive cultural memory, build pride in Sahariya identity and give the community a voice for coexistence in place of conservation by exclusion.