We want everyone to see for themselves why the University of Colorado, Columbia University, Haverford, and many other leading colleges and universities have ordered our award-winning documentary film, “Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!” for their libraries. To make it easy for professors to preview the film, we are offering a special back-to-school sale: normally $7.99, for a limited time you can watch “Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!” online for just $3.99. That price includes online viewing for one year as well as a copy of the film you can download to your hard drive. (This offer is for personal viewing, if you want to use the film in your class we ask that you have your university purchase the DVD at the institutional price — that’s what makes this deal possible for us.)

For an in-depth review of the film as an educational tool see Christian Hammons’ review in General Anthropology [PDF].

Also, later this year, Kerim’s article “Collaboration against ethnography: How colonial history shaped the making of an ethnographic film” will be published in Critique of Anthropology. Whether you are teaching ethnographic filmmaking, post-colonialism, social movements, or research ethics, this article makes a perfect companion piece for the film. You can read the abstract here.

Read what others have to say about the film:

“A thoughtful, moving and, above all, important exploration of the power of theatre to impact a generation and incite a revolution.”
– Sonia Faleiro (Author, Beautiful Thing)

“I see the parallels of what happened to the Chhara and what has historically happened to the African American and Native American populations in the US…”
– Sharbari Ahmed (The Daily Star)

“a personal and emotional case study of colonialism and its legacies”
– Christian S. Hammons (General Anthropology)

“…despite the seriousness of the topic, I enjoyed watching this film… it managed to be fun and was very compelling.”
– Lavanya M. Proctor (Anthrocharya)

Over sixty million Indians belong to communities imprisoned by the British as ‘criminals by birth.’ The Chhara of Ahmedabad, in Western India, are one of 198 such ‘Criminal Tribes.’ Declaring that they are ‘born actors,’ not ‘born criminals,’ a group of Chhara youth have turned to street theater in their fight against police brutality, corruption, and the stigma of criminality — a stigma internalized by their own grandparents. “Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!” follows the lives of these young actors and their families as they take their struggle to the streets, hoping their plays will spark a revolution.

For more information about the film, as well as purchasing options, please visit our website: http://dontbeatmesir.com

If you have any questions, or would like to arrange a screening, please contact us at: info@fournineandahalf.com

(Kerim will be in Chicago mid-November if any schools in the area would like to arrange a screening.)

For those in Europe, the film will be playing Etnofilm in Rovinj, Croatia later this month and Ethnocineca in Vienna in mid-May.

Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir! has also screened at numerous festivals since our last update. For the full schedule of screenings please see our website

In addition to festival screenings we’ve done a number of university screenings followed by Q&A sessions we’ve conducted via Skype. These have worked out surprisingly well and we are always happy to work with schools to organize such screenings. Just drop us an email if you are interested.

We hate paying for things which we don’t get to keep, so we are especially pleased that Vimeo offers filmmakers the option of including file downloads as well as online streaming. If you watch our film online on Vimeo you can also download a copy of the film to your own hard drive and watch it whenever and wherever you want.

Since we first released the DVD people have been asking us about online access, and after looking at all the available options we feel that Vimeo On Demand offers users the best possible viewing experience. If you haven’t seen the film yet, we hope that the ease of using Vimeo On Demand will convince you to watch it today! If you do watch it on Vimeo, please be sure to let others know how much you like it by leaving a review.

Although Vimeo On Demand splits revenue 90/10 with the filmmaker, there is a hefty annual fee. For this reason we aren’t sure how long we will be able to keep the film online, so consider this a limited-time experiment. We don’t expect to turn a profit, but we do need to break-even…

Online streaming via Vimeo as well as the downloadable movie file are intended only for individual viewers. We ask that those interested in holding public screenings of the film, such as classroom use, continue to purchase the DVD via our via our website. We offer discounts on DVD purchases by individuals, non-profits, and community colleges.

Thanks to your help we were able to get a beautiful new master tape out for the Busan International Film Festival in Korea, where we are having our “World Premiere” next week. For anyone whose seen the film before, the new sound mix and coloring, done by some of the same studios responsible for Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films, will knock you out of your seats. It is like looking at an entirely new film.

Unfortunately, even with your generous donations and Shashwati’s tough barganing skills, we still ended up having to borrow money to pay for this work. That’s why we’ve launched a new Kickstarter Campaign to raise an additional $5000 to make ends meet. We’ve already received $940 in pledges, but because of how Kickstarter works, if we don’t reach our goal by October 15th, we won’t get a dime. If you pledge just $15 or $20 you would be making a huge contribution to the film, and you could earn one of our many prizes at the same time – including the opportunity to download your own digital copy of the film.

Jean Rouch Award For Collaborative Filmmaking

Shashwati and I were very proud to learn that the Society of Visual Anthropology will be awarding us this year’s Jean Rouch Award for Collaborative Filmmaking – the SVA festival’s highest honor. In making Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir! the films of Jean Rouch were a great source of inspiration for us. In particular, we admired the way Rouch collaborated closely with his subjects, employing a variety of devices which we ended up using in our own film. We can’t think of an award we’d be more proud to receive.

Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival

We are also very excited to announce that our film was selected to be part of this year’s Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival (TIEFF). TIEFF is organized by the Taiwan Association of Visual Ethnography and, under the leadership of esteemed Taiwanese ethnographic filmmaker Hu Tai-Li, has grown to be one of the most important ethnographic film festivals in the world. It is truly an honor to be one of the handful of films selected for this year’s festival.

A Note on Donor Prizes

Whether you donated to our previous campaign, or to our new Kickstarter campaign, we have been giving out prizes for each level of donation. These include a poster, access to an online version of the film, the DVD, etc. We have been working hard to make sure that each of these prizes is worthy of your support. We promise to get these to you as soon as they are ready, but we need a little more time. Please be patient.

Those who have access to the online version of the film will be getting an updated version of the film for free. We’ll be putting this up soon after the Kickstarter campaign ends. This new version will include the new sound mix and color correction which were paid for with your generous support.

Institutional Sales

There has been a lot of interest in using the film for teaching. We hope to be ready to start institutional sales soon. If you are interested please send us an email and we will let you know as soon as we’ve finished the DVD. And let us know if you’d be interested in a campus visit or online discussion via Skype.

In order to make the most of this exciting opportunity, we need your help to make an exhibition-ready copy of the film to show at Busan. In return, we are offering our supporters the opportunity to watch a special “Sneak Preview” version of the film, either online or as a DVD. Read on to learn how you can be one of the first people to watch the film by making a donation.

Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!

Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir! is about a troupe of young Chhara actors using theater to fight police brutality and the stigma of criminality. The Chhara are one of 198 communities in India, over sixty million people, whose grandparents were labeled “born criminals” by the British. Although the British are long gone, the stigma still remains.

To learn more about the film and make a donation visit our webpage.

Crowd-sourced Filmmaking

A significant portion of the film’s budget came from individual donations collected over the internet. Donations received during our initial round of online fundraising ranged from $15 to $5000. The film wouldn’t have been possible without every one of these donations. People have also helped out in other ways: translating subtitles, recording music, designing the poster, etc. We also received grants and assistance from The Bhasha Trust, The New York State Council on the Arts, and the Asian Cinema Fund.

Now, after five years, and thanks to your support, we are ready to show the film to the world. Our goal is to have as many people see the film as possible. For a documentary film that means trying to get on TV. Film festivals like Busan are a great way to meet producers and purchcasing agents, but we’ll be competing with hundreds of other films showing at the same festivals. That means having the best-quality exhbition master we can afford, attending the film festivals in person to meet with potential buyers, and even hiring a professional publicist and graphic designer to help promote the film. We can’t do any of this without your help.

See the Film Now!

We’ve been overwhelmed by all the support and encouragement we’ve received, and we’re happy that we finally have something to give people in return for their generosity. Starting today you can watch a special “Sneak Preview” of the film online (this includes a download link) or, for a little bit more, we’ll send you the DVD.

For every level of donation we also have some special rewards, including a signed poster, your name in the credits, your name on our IMDB page, and even (for the most generous donors) a private screening with the directors.

Donate now.

This Sneak Preview is intended for personal use only, and is not intended for institutional sales. If you would like to use the film for teaching, or for public screenings, please contact us directly.

Goalposts

We’ve created a series of goalposts for this final round of fundraising. Each goalpost we reach will exponentially increase the film’s chances of success. The first twenty-two thousand dollars are essential—they will pay for an exhibition quality mix and color correction—after that we will spend as much on travel and publicity as we can raise. Everything we raise will go towards the film. All donations are tax-deductible (for U.S. taxpayers).

Donate now.

1st Goalpost: $24,000 for an Exhibition-Ready Copy.

This involves color correction and an “online” edit at a professional studio. [Watch a short video about the difference color correction can make.] Even the HD tapes required by some festivals are expensive. We urgently need to reach this goal in time for the Busan International Film Festival in October.

2nd Goalpost: Travel and Accommodation for Three to Four Festivals or Markets @ $3,000 each (max $12,000).

Since we live in Taiwan this is more expensive for us, and high oil prices mean tickets are more expensive now. But it is essential that at least one of us attend in person if we are going to close a deal.

3rd Goalpost: $10,000 to Hire a Publicist and a Graphic Designer

If we can raise a total of $44,000, the last $10,000 will pay to hire a publicist and a designer. To really do things properly we need to spend money publicizing the film. Making posters and post cards is cheap enough, but if we could higher professional graphic designers and a publicist we feel we could have an even bigger impact.

Donate now.

Other Ways To Help

The easiest way you can help is by spreading the word. Share our page on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+. Share our trailer. Like our Facebook page. Or just tell your friends about the film. Independent documentaries like ours live or die by word-of-mouth. You are our buzz-machine and we depend on you to help get the word out.

If you have a blog or newspaper or journal and you’d like to review the film, just let us know and we’ll send you a review copy of the DVD. If you are a graphic designer or publicist who can donate your services, you could help us meet our third goalpost before we’ve even started fundraising. And if you have another way you’d like to help just let us know! Thank you.

Not in the mood to read? Why not watch our new trailer instead!

With a brand-new soundtrack which includes music by John Plenge.

A Big “Thank You” & Some Exciting News

First of all, we want to thank everyone who responded to our last e-mail. We were overwhelmed by the outpouring of support. We raised $3,600 and numerous people volunteered their time and services. We are deeply moved by your generosity. Every penny is essential for the successful completion of this film. As you may have noticed, however, we did not launch the August fundraising campaign we had announced in our last e-mail. This is because of some very exciting news…

Over the summer we learned that we had been awarded a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (all the more amazing given the huge cutbacks in state funding for the arts!) and were also one of only seven non-Korean films selected for the Pusan International Film Festival’s (PIFF) Asian Documentary Network which includes a small cash award. Between your donations and these two awards, we now are closer to our goal of scoring the soundtrack, cutting the final edit, and post-producing in a world-class studio.  Of course this wouldn’t be possible if people weren’t extremely generous with their time. We would especially like to acknowledge the contribution of Daniel Kent, a sound designer based in Montreal who is doing the sound design and mix for the film, free of charge. Valerie Keller has come on board the project as an editing consultant. Valerie has over twenty years of experience editing documentaries, and is providing valuable assistance and feedback from Philadelphia. And we are very grateful for the continued support of our executive producer, Kurt Engfehr.

We are finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. We will still need to raise money to submit the film to festivals and pay for travel to the festivals we get into, but we are going to wait to see how much money we can save before we begin fundraising for that stage of the project. We are, however, soliciting unused frequent flier miles to cover our travel expenses. (See below for more information.)

Pusan International Film Festival

Even more important than the money and prestige associated with being included in the PIFF Asian Documentary Network is the event itself. From Sunday through Tuesday we will join the six other Asian documentary filmmakers and four Korean filmmakers for a series of workshops with some of the leading people in the Asian and European documentary film world, followed by one-on-one meetings with potential co-producers and distributors. Even if nothing concrete comes out of this, it will be an incredible learning and networking experience.

In preparation for our ten minute presentation we’ve updated the film trailer with an all new soundtrack which includes new music by John Plenge. You can watch the trailer here.

Status Report

So when will the film itself be done? We will start sending the film off to film festivals in November. But a documentary film is never really done. In addition to the festival cut we are working on a shorter TV-length version, and if we land a co-production deal we might even go back and shoot additional footage. But we are really happy with where the film is now. After years of struggling we finally cut the two-hundred plus hours down to a coherent feature-length narrative with a compelling story. Of course, a lot of good stuff ended up on the cutting-room floor, and we are already talking about turning some of that into another short movie… but that’s another story!

We received a lot of help this summer from Nishit Jadawala, an experienced Indian film editor who we were able to bring to Taiwan from India with the help of your generous donations. Because of language issues, it was just not possible to find a suitable assistant here in Taiwan, and Nishit has worked closely with the Chhara community, including editing Dakxin Bajrange’s excellent film “The Lost Water.” It was his first visit to East Asia, and his grandmother wanted to fill his suitcase with the kinds of food Gujarati merchants take on long trips, but Nishit quickly learned the joys of cold sesame noodles and bubble milk tea. More importantly, with an extra set of eyes and hands we were able to make significant progress on the film.

Our Trip to Chharanagar

Back in January we brought the latest rough cut of the film to Chharanagar. There we showed it to an audience made up of Budhan Theatre members and their families. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Hardika, the young girl whose photo graces the Vimukta.org website, came up to us afterwards and told us that nobody had captured the struggles of their community with such sensitivity. Those kind words are more than enough reward for these past five years of hard work! We were also relieved that apart from a few minor changes, the community did not object to any of the content. The film does not shy away from problems within the community, and we had been nervous about their reactions to how we depicted those issues.

While we were there we also did a test run of a project we would like to do once the film is done. We went with Budhan Theatre members to some other DNT communities and showed the film followed by a group discussion about DNT issues. We traveled to a Madari (snake charmer) community in Lunawada, Gujarat and a Nat village in the district.  The trip offered us a glimpse into the diverse issues facing these other communities. When our DVD failed to play in one village, the Budhan Theatre members accompanying us related the film to the community in a brilliant oral narrative we wish we had caught on tape. The Madaris, who used to make a living through snake charming and magic, are increasingly having difficulty with the police who now require them to have a license to perform in public, whereas the people in the Nat village we visited were doing much better, having some of their own land to fall back on when not working as acrobats and musicians. We hope that once the film is done we can do more visits like this to DNT communities throughout India.

Miles To Fly Before We Sleep

We should be OK to finish post-production of the film, but the next step is to get it in front of the viewing public. In order to do that we have to do a lot of traveling to film festivals and film markets trying as hard as possible to promote the film. Because travel to the US and Europe is so expensive from Taiwan we need your help. If you have unused frequent flier miles please e-mail us and we’ll tell you how you can donate those to the film.

Of course, cold, hard cash is always appreciated as well. Even $20 is a big help. Please click the link below, or go to our website and visit the support page (where you can find other options, including a PayPal link for those outside the US).

And you can also donate your time to supporting the film. We will need help translating the subtitles into multiple languages, and help promoting the film online. Anyone who would like to help out is encouraged to contact us.

Thank you so much for your support!

Kerim & Shashwati

http://fournineandahalf.com/

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* “Thank You” Photo by Paul Downey under a CC Attribution License. Other photos by Kerim under a CC non-Commercial Share-Alike License.

This July 4th will be Kerim’s 40th birthday, and he’d like to request a very special birthday present. But before we explain any further, if you haven’t done so yet, please watch the trailer for our film… OK, here’s what Kerim would like for his 40th birthday: we need to raise $20,000 to pay for post-production of the film in Thailand (a very good deal for high quality studio work). This will give us a glorious HD copy of the film which will really shine at film festivals. We know we can’t raise all that money at once, so we are asking you to do one or more of the following:

(1) Support us by donating your creative talent or your time. The latest trend in fundraising is to offer prizes to people who give over a certain amount of money. Actually, public broadcasters have been doing this for a long time: donate $50 and get a tote bag, donate $100 and get a DVD, donate $1000 and get tickets to a show, etc. We realized that we know so many incredibly creative and resourceful people, and we thought that we’d ask if you could donate your talents and your time to make our fundraising even more effective. What we’d like are truly unique gifts from our friends: original music, paintings, photographs, perhaps even a short story with the donor’s name, handmade objects, whatever you can think of! We would then offer these as prizes on a site like indiegogo.com or kickstarter.com.

If you’d like to help, please fill out this form. And if you’d like to help, but aren’t sure what you could do, don’t worry, just fill out the form and we’ll figure something out. We could also use volunteers to help with online fundraising and promotion, so you can help out with that as well – just fill out the form.

(2) Donate, if you can. Anything, even $20 is a big help (we raised thousand’s of dollars via such small donations last time we did this), please click the link below, or go to our website and visit the support page.

When you are done please fill out the form to let us know you donated. And if you don’t have the money now, or you’d rather use a different way to pay, that’s OK too. Just fill out the form to make a pledge. We’ll be sure to remind you!

(3) Finally, if you are feeling especially generous, we’d like to ask you to make a matching grant. That is, to say, if we raise X amount from individual donors, you’ll match those funds with an equal grant. Having such a matching grant will really motivate people to donate. If you’d like to do this just let us know by filling out the form.

Your support will help make this a very special 40th birthday for Kerim. Thank you, and stay tuned for a proper update later this summer!

Kerim & Shashwati
http://fournineandahalf.com/

A look at why Chharanagar is the land of lawyers

Chharas say it is the only profession where their past is not a consideration

P Kerim Friedman

Walk through the narrow, twisted alleyways of Chharangar, a small ghetto on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, and you will see dozens of houses with a black lawyers plaque on display. There are over 120 lawyers here. Why are there so many lawyers in Chharanagar? A cynic might say it is because there are so many criminals. But the truth is that becoming a lawyer is one of the few jobs the Chhara can get simply by obtaining the necessary credentials. You don’t have to face the humiliation of getting turned down for a job because people think you are less than honorable. As one Chhara lawyer put it, “I felt that if they are going to keep calling us thieves I might as well learn what the law is.”

This reputation for thieving is a legacy of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 under which the British branded entire communities as “criminals by birth.” Even if there are some thieves in the community, such collective punishment violates the most basic principles of human rights; and yet the Chhara, and over sixty million other De-notified Tribes throughout India, continue to be punished for simply being born into the wrong community.

A Chhara with a master’s in English literature might get turned down for teaching jobs because “Even though we would love to have you, the parents of our students aren’t so enlightened.” Or a business owner might think, but not dare say aloud, “We like you, but how do we know that your friends and relatives won’t use you to steal from us?” And forget about finding an apartment outside Chharanagar. The neighbours won’t speak to you, and eventually the landlord will be pressured to kick you out.

Despite all this, some Chhara manage to make a way for themselves. Over the past five years my wife and I have been filming a talented group of young actors known as Budhan Theatre. Not only have volunteers of Budhan Theatre succeeded as actors, some are going on to the prestigious National School of Drama, but they also do important community development work. They run a library, a children’s magazine, and an informal school. But more than anything else, theatre allows these youth to dream of a world where being a Chhara does not just mean being a lawyer or a thief, but whatever they want it to mean.

P Kerim Friedman is an assistant professor in the Department of Indigenous Cultures at National Dong Hwa University, where he teaches linguistic and visual anthropology.

Restoring human dignity through arts

Of late, members of Chhara community are sensitising people about themselves

Political power changes the identities of people overnight. It brands communities as desirable or undesirable through law. It makes hell of a life of a community branded as undesirable. The British rule in India wanted to prevent 1857 like people’s risings. It decided to break the network of the natives, itinerants that was behind the rising of the Indian masses.


The British rule notified in 1871 that certain nomadic tribes were ‘criminal’ tribes and they needed to be controlled for the security of the civic people. Sansis or Chharas were one of the ‘criminal’ tribes. Since then, the Chharas, along with other such tribes, have been on the run. They have been kept in settlements. Chhara children were kept away from their parents. Chharas had to work hard for the British rulers. They had to go back to the settlement before evening. This all happened in Chharanagar in Ahmedabad during the last century. They were denotified from the list of ‘criminal tribes’. They live in different parts of the country like Delhi, Bhopal, Mumbai, Bhavnagar, Rajkot, and Ahmedabad. Their total population in Gujarat is about 15,000.


The stigma of criminality has not daunted them. Many Chharas have been tortured in police custody and few have even died in the police custody. Even today in cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Ahmedabad they are suspected for any crime held in the neighbouring areas. The police and the society still believe that no community other than Chhara can be behind any crime. If we go to understand the community the facts are different.


In 1998, Chhara children and youth started a library. They have a theatre named after a denotified and nomadic tribe member Budhan Sabar. They write plays on contemporary themes. They have produced more than 20 plays, performed in various parts of the country. They have sensitised the judiciary, police, educational and political audiences. This is in itself an immense achievement. Two Chhara youth have been selected for NSD courses. We know of painters like Mansingh Chhara and many senior advocates as well as journalists are from the Chhara community. There are many youths and children who are active in restoring human dignity to their tribe through the medium of theatre and film. They are a politically aware and socially sensitive group. Their latest theatre production in Hindi is based on ‘An Accidental Death of an Anarchist’ of Dario Fo. The production has a serious message for police-controlled Gujarat, the current regime and the literary community.


How can one overcome the injustice perpetrated by history? How can one come out of the abyss of forced ‘criminality’? Chhara youth and children show us the way to human dignity via art.  Bravo! Friends.


(Kanji Patel, a professor of English literature at Arts College in Lunavada, was a member of the Technical Advisory Group to the Commission for Denotified, Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Tribe. A writer, he organises cultural mela DNTs every Shivratri in Lunavada.)

Isolated & potential groups of soldiers were persecuted

The story of communities known as ‘denotified’ is without doubt the most mind-boggling and despicable tale of lack of compassion

The British colonial rule in India was not only a political and economic venture, it was also an experiment in restructuring a complex society. For the first three centuries of the colonial contact, beginning with the arrival of the East India Company at Surat in 1600 to the establishment of the Asiatic Society in Bengal towards the end of the 18th century, the colonial imagination had great difficulties in understanding the complex weave of the Indian society. Out of these difficulties arose many misconceptions and myths about communities and social conventions. At times these were comical as was the idea that India is a country of snake charmers and magicians. But in many instances the wrong reading of the society resulted in untold human misery. The story of the communities known as ‘denotified’ is without doubt the most mind-boggling tale of inhuman collapse of compassion.

During the 1830s, the colonial government appointed Sleeman to prepare a list of instances of assaults on wayfarers in central India. He took to this task with an amazing devotion and produced a voluminous list of violent episodes. The list would not have amounted to much had it not been for the turn of events during 1857 in central India. In the wake of the battles fought and lost by the Indian states, all isolated and potential groups of soldiers, and even those who were likely to be in the supply chain for them, came to be seen as candidates for the Sleeman list. This list became the basis of the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act. The infamous CTA asked for forced ‘isolation’ and ‘reform’ of the communities listed. These included coin makers, entertainers, petty merchants, peasants, wandering groups, nomadic communities, long distance traders, and many others.

The CTA required creation of ‘settlements’ as reformatories. The settlements required ‘strict procedures’. These procedures kept becoming increasingly inhuman. Forced labour became the daily fate of the inmates. The CTA of 1871 went through several revisions, every revision bringing in new forms of ‘punishment’ for being born within the listed communities. The last of the CTA was passed in 1924. By then a total of 191 communities had been brought under its purview. The total population of all these communities ‘notified’ under the successive CTAs is, at present, nearly six crores. That is about five percent of Indian population. After Independence, the Iyengar committee was constituted in 1950 to think of redeeming these victims of the colonial savagery. The process of ‘denotification’ began in 1952. The CTAs promulgated in various Indian states were annulled and replaced by the Habitual Offenders Act. But by the time the HOAs were framed and the denotification was completed, the schedules of tribes and castes had already been constituted. Hence, the DNTs did not find an easy entry in these categories. Some of them were given the status of STs, some communities were admitted as SCs, the others continued to languish.

The country, and the successive governments, did almost nothing to change the sad situation of the DNTs. It was in 1998 that the DNT rights action group was formed in Vadodara as an advocacy group. The national campaign that the RAG ran resulted in appointment of a technical advisory group and a national commission. The reports of these two bodies are under consideration of the ministry of social justice.

In the meanwhile, the DNTs of India continue to suffer inhuman treatment from all sections of the society and from the law-keeping agencies.

Dr Ganesh Devi is a literary critic and a social activist. Along with Mahasweta Devi, he is the founder of Denotified and Nomadic Tribes-Rights Action Group (DNT-RAG).