Knowledge and People's Power - Multiworld India

the weight of the development and social and economic enrichment of otherclasses-and to establish or promote grassroots organisations such asco-operatives, trade unions, handicraft and cultural centres, education andhealth brigades, which would allow the people to cope with real lifesituations through recourse to justified popular mobilisation, create newemployment opportunities, increase incomes and improve the standard ofliving in the communities studied. Indeed, these processes and changes werewitnessed in the field during these years, as described and explained in thefollowing sections. There was a real process of transformation and materialand intellectual progress congruent with our personal and institutional aims.This process is still alive, and it has sometimes gone beyond our expectations.If such were our intellectual, social and economic objectives, they werenevertheless subordinated to another general goal of a more practical kind.Our referents were and still are the representatives of the interests of thepeople with their capacity for becoming (if they are not so already) efficientand enlightened leaders, members of a new type of service vanguard whowould be non-sectarian and non-messianic, and who would not impose theirviews vertically from above. Together with them, we wanted to contribute inour own way and within the limits of our abilities to changing the unjust andviolent society which we have inherited, so that together we could initiate thenecessary transformations.Thus the intellectual and practical aspirations of all of us were rooted in asingle and shared experience, in which distinctions between leaders andsubordinates had no part. With this philosophy as our spiritual anchor, wetested the different techniques for creating and communicating knowledge,with the appropriate adjustments being made in attitudes and values. Thesetechniques are described in the following sections. Nor did we forget theproblems of organisation and interaction implied in the popular struggles orthe need to support and reinforce the workers' own organisations.As participatory researchers sharing the land and life of the people, wemet several times in the three countries to compare experiences andinformation, discuss ideas and techniques and to clarify our positions. Ofcourse these meetings, which sometimes included colleagues from other partsof the world, strengthened the comparative approach of our work and, asnoted above,14