ಸೋಲಿಗ ಸಿರಿ/Soliga Siri

I have been wanting to upload this book written by Somasundaram and Jade Gowda about various aspects of the day-to-day life of the Soliga people (ಜನಜೀವನ), their folk-songs (ಜಾನಪದ), some extracts of their cultural heritage (ಪರಂಪರೆ) and reflections on the theme of world peace based on the Adivasi culture. The first author has literally built (along with Dr. Sudarshan and various other people) the Vivekananda Girijana Kalyana Kendra in BR Hills, an organisation that has been working with the Soliga people in the district on various issues.

VGKK published the book as a limited print edition and it has been out of print for a long time now. I uploaded the copy I had with me on Archive. I struggled a bit with stitching together mulitple scanned PDF pages. Although OS X Preview allows to drag & drop PDF pages across files, doing this for an entire book is cumbersome. Thanks to tips (from Twitterverse), I was able to locate (apart from online free PDF tools like ilovepdf.com), I found some lovely FOSS: pdfarranger (via Github) and PDFSam (which has a convenient Mac version). The version above is done with PDFSam. Although the software was helpful in stitching together the scans and producing an integrated PDF for upload, I now realise I need some kind of ebook editor of sorts to separate the pages in each scan because Archive annoyingly does not detect if I’ve scanned two pages or one at once. So each page on Archive now shows 4 scans! (To be fixed soon)

Given very limited written form of knowledge among many Adivasi communities, the limited work available is often mediated through development professionals or other people (like me) who have had a passion work working with the Adivasi people. In this case, Somasundaram has at least chosen to work with Jade Gowda, a Soliga scholar who is today the President of VGKK. This, I thought must be made available online.


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