MJ Rajeeva Gowda

Rajeeva Gowda is an arts teacher at the Kuvempu Centenary Government Higher Primary School, in Cheemangala village in Chikkaballapura district. With 27 years of teaching experience, he is also the member of the Committee for Mathematics Textbooks of the Karnataka Education Department. He has been a facilitator at national level trainings for Social Science, Kannada and Math.

People have always migrated from one place to another - whether to fulfill immediate needs or in search of a better life. Their movements have had an impact on societies and environments in their native regions as well as in the new locations where they have built homes. They have crossed natural boundaries such as mountains, rivers and deserts, as well as political borders of states. They have travelled as families and communities as well as individuals, and have carried their habits, customs and culture with them. Rajeeva Gowda, a teacher, writer and passionate genealogist, aims to work on this project on histories of families and their stories of migration in an attempt to understand their impact on local history.

Through this project, the students will focus on their own community in the Cheemangala village. They will learn about their own migration stories through interviews with community elders and create geographical maps of these journeys. The maps will become part of the workbook that will be published at the end of the project. These migration stories will challenge the students to reflect of their own identities as individuals and as a community, within the larger history of the state and nation.

The outcome of this project will be a workbook of these collected stories and maps. The deliverables from this project will be a copy of the workbook, photographs and the video documentation of the entire project.

This grant is made possible with support from Citi India.