Puvidham Farm School — Sociocratic School of India
This is an account of my visit to Puvidham Farm School on October 22. We drove to Puvidham, which is outside a village near Dharmapuri, Tamil Nadu. It’s a farm school and the home of Meenakshi ji, the founder of the school.
We had our imagination of the place. After living for a week in Aarohi, we had some idea of what a school based on a farm might look like. But we couldn’t have imagined the raw and fresh nature of the space. When we entered the campus, I saw Meenakshi talking to a teenage boy. She saw us coming, so she paused, and we all got introduced. She checked with us if we wished to stay for the night as the living arrangement is very basic and might not be something we are used to. She showed us the room and bathroom facilities and asked us if we were sure we would like to stay. A lot of city people come to Puvidham school, very excited, and then run away after looking at the basic living conditions. We chose to stay.
By the time we reached the school, it was already lunchtime. The meals are prepared by the students in the community kitchen. It was a simple, healthy, and flavorful meal of red rice, dal, curd, and bitter gourd sabzi. I have always been fussy with food but have learned how to manage — by sometimes skipping a meal, or by eating chapati with achar, or just simply eating any one thing that is least abominable. This is what I was doing when Meenakshi saw my plate. And she asked me if I tried the bitter gourd. I told her that I don’t eat that vegetable, hearing which she said, “This is not acceptable here” and served me a spoonful of it. She said “It’s very important that the tongue is tolerant. If one can’t make one’s tongue tolerant, it’s very hard to bring tolerance in any other aspect of your life. That was the first lesson that the saint-like lady taught me.”
If one can’t make one’s tongue tolerant, it’s very hard to bring tolerance in any other aspect of your life.
The Space:
Puvidham is a beautiful campus with a few living spaces, a community kitchen, a library, a natural swimming pool, and a huge farm. It also has cows, dogs, and cats seen playing around. It is also a home to spiders and many insects. Such is village life. Out of all the places I have lived in a village setup, I found Puvidham one of the most challenging spaces. A place that touches and shakes your whole being. It challenges everything that you think. It has the bare minimum required. It was the first time in my life I slept on a chatai( a mat weaved out of thin wooden strands) in a room where I was aware of the presence of other small creatures( ants, spiders…), around me. Food was a greater challenge for me. It was quite an unusual setting. But we had fun. It was the closest I had come to living off the grid. And I felt something stirring in me, which I feel that places such as Puvidham do to you, just if you are perseverant enough to stay.
A place that touches and shakes your whole being.
How did Puvidham Farm School come into being?
Puvidham works with local children and orphans. The school took shape very organically. Meenakshi ji, as she told us, wanted to live off the land, a very sustainable and self-reliant life. She wanted to build a learning space rooted in nature, which teaches students resilience, self-reliance, and how to live in harmony with nature.
She bought the land on which Puvidham exists in a village where she can afford a sizable piece of land in her budget. She started living there and spent time creating learning avenues for her kids and the kids around. Slowly over the years, more kids joined, staff members came in and it became a powerful learning space. It is living through which the learning happens and that’s what I experienced first hand at Puvidham.
We spent the afternoon chatting with her in her home about her life journey, the functioning of Puvidham, and How and Why of the way the space was. She shared with us all she could in the time we had.
- We spoke about how the school started with just 4 kids which included 2 of her children. Other children became curious about what this place is when they saw these kids playing and enjoying themselves. They couldn’t believe that school could be this fun and they joined as well. Slowly more people started coming in, some led by curiosity, some by their aspirations to learn English, and some just simply pulled by the authenticity of the place.
- Meenakshi also shared about a personal incident in her life that made her a believer and proponent of urine therapy. At some point in her life, in her thirties, she discovered a fatal appendix ready to burst anytime. She was in some remote village in the Western Ghats and was too opposed to undergo an operation. Someone among the people there suggested her to try urine therapy. This was the first time she heard about anything like that and rejected the idea at once. Though on little thinking, she realised that her only option was to die due to a burst appendix or try urine therapy. So she gave it a shot. And it worked. Within a few days, her appendix subsided and eventually disappeared. From then on, she is a firm believer in the therapeutic power of urine. She practices it till day. There were multiple other incidents she shared about her trials of urine therapy with community members, animals etc. The students at Puvidham are taught about Urine therapy as well, and they practice it too. This may sound very disgusting and hard to understand to most people but thinking about it — its history, the personal stories of people who believe in it and the ongoing research, makes a strong case to give it a fair consideration before rejecting it as past thinking or blind faith.
- Meenakshi is a woman of Science and Logic — She shared with us many concepts, each with a scientific background and practical experience. She spoke about how we need to balance the pH of our body by including lots of bitter-tasting food in our diet. All sweet things we eat produce acids, which if not balanced causes so many diseases. By just being mindful about what we are eating and how much, we can reverse a lot of diseases. I also learnt from her that the teeth blackening caused due to fluorine content in water can be reversed by eating tamarind, which neutralizes the effect of fluorine. She also told me how water becomes alkaline when kept in sunlight, which is again a good way to introduce more bases in our body. I revisited the fact that there is so much Science in our day to day life, and we all are scientists. We need just keep our eyes open and listen to Mother Nature around us.
- We spoke about how nature has its way of preserving things. In a dry pond, when the water comes, the fish also comes by itself. Nature has a way of preserving everything, keeping them sleeping but alive, waiting for the opportune moment to thrive. I thought to myself that it’s similar to how a human potential is. It’s right there, waiting for the opportune moment. And all we can do as educators is nurture it or simply preserve it.
- One of her daughters was expecting and was due the same week. That steered us into a conversation around birth. She shared with us that she is going to be the midwife for her daughter and she has already supported many women during their deliveries. We spoke about natural birth, the mindset shifts in villages about — the C-section and medical facilities in general, and old practices around the umbilical cord of the child. There existed a practice of cutting the umbilical cord only after it became blue, drying it, powdering it and storing it in a miniature wood cylinder. This was tied around the child’s arm with a thread to be opened only when you are severely ill. It was called Raksha Sutra. The reasoning behind this is that the umbilical cord is supposed to have stem cells, which were preserved in the Raksha Sutra tied on an individual’s arm. This can be consumed with water to heal a serious illness.
- She shared with us many more things. The rat experiment on a belief system proves people behave according to what they believe in. How that is so relevant in education and how it is very important to ensure that we give our children the right messages about what we think of them. How our thinking about our students shapes their reality and self-belief.
Meenakshi is a saint. She is the strongest woman I have personally known. She is one of those rarest individuals who is not a hypocrite. She lives by her words, by her thoughts. The entire personality, words and actions are in complete sync with each other. She lives a very hard life when looked at from the lens of material comfort. But she was joyous, kind, and full of youth. And I think the same stands true about Puvidham Farm School. Meeting her made me see how a learning space is nothing but the extension of the people who created it. It is not separate and cannot be from the people who run it.
A day at Puvidham:
The days at Puvidham start early at around 4 am. Different groups of children have different chores which include — cooking breakfast and lunch, milking the cows, farming, cleaning etc. By 6 a.m. all children wake up, finish their chores and assemble for their classes. The initial few hours are dedicated to more academic subjects such as language, science and maths and the later half of the day is more hands-on where children spend time doing craftery, carpentry, toy-making, etc. Farming is a big part of the curriculum. Everything done in the space is done in harmony and with nature.
There is some structured learning accessible to children at Puvidham but each child has a freedom to decide whether they want to be a part of a session. They are also free to move without seeking any permission from any adult. The sessions are inspired from day-to-day life and are designed such that children can relate to it. The entire curriculum is tied together through a story. So subjects doesn’t seem like an unrelated bundle of things put together. Pondering over different aspects of a story provides a segway into investigating the concepts, phenomenons and emotions that were part of the story. Re-acting the story or creating any sorts of performance out of the story, brings in social-emotional learning and social skills. So one story acts as an initiator to plethora of learning and experiences. The stories are written by the facilitators such that it introduces children to various different concepts around geography, science, culture, emotions, mathematics and everything under the sun that they sense is the need of the particular cohort of the children they are working with.
The entire curriculum is tied together through a story. So subjects doesn’t seem like an unrelated bundle of things put together.
The decision making about running of the school is done by various student committees which are elected by all the students and adults part of the school community. But it’s not only the vote of the majority that matters. There are various mechanisms designed to reach a consensus or find solutions so as to find a middle ground.
The space holds a fine balance of autonomy and responsibility which each one who is part of the community needs to hold. I took a walk around the place in the evening. The sunset was beautiful. We were surrounded by the children who were all taking a swim in a pool, which they cleaned and refilled half an hour back. I felt as if the time had slowed down. Manyata and I sat watching them, lost in our thoughts.
The meals are cooked by the children for the entire community. That evening I saw a group of children making coconut chutney using a traditional machine that consisted of carved stone and a stick to ground coconuts. Another group of children was busy making Ragi balls. The other younger children were playing, and joking, and some of the lesser shy ones were chatting with us. During the dinner, I got time to speak with a few teachers on the Puvidham staff. They shared their vision for their students, their view of conventional education and why they chose to teach.
We were ready to retire to our room by 9. As the day, the night was different. I could hear the voices of different animals outside my window. It was very quiet. Children also sleep early as they wake up very early in the morning. Manyata and I probably spent a few hours sharing what we think of this space, and how it is different and similar to what we imagined. We made fun of each other and teased each other about our fears and eccentricities. And we finally went off to a deep sleep, in this beautiful as well as challenging space, which changed who we are a little, forever.
Meenakshi must be in her 50s, but she is as active as a child. She has a serene, light, confident and warm presence. I recently learnt the term soft-power. I think that’s something that I experienced in the time shared with her. The raw and fresh energy of Meenakshi is reflected in her work, in her students and in the entire Puvidham community.
It’s a learning space that builds resilience and prepares you for the world. It teaches you to tread softly on the mother earth. It ensures that its students have all the survival skills one needs in life ranging from taking care of their health, food, animals, space and whole-being. It’s a little hard life, quite another extreme compared to life and education in a city, but it is profound and deeply meaningful.
