Learning to Hold: Inside the Sambhaavnaa Fellowship

Written by Rijuta Dutt 

Photos by Rachel Andrews

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Region: Himachal Pradesh

Organisation: The Sambhaavnaa Institute of Public Policy and Politics’ 

Area of Work: Political, Ecological, Educational, Advocacy, Gender

About The Sambhaavnaa Institute of Public Policy and Politics’

The Sambhaavnaa Institute of Public Policy and Politics, founded in 2004 and located in Himachal Pradesh, and focuses on nurturing value-based leadership and fostering discussions about social and political change. The institute provides a platform for individuals and organisations to engage with societal injustices, promoting critical perspectives and encouraging action aimed at creating a just society.

“We thought that the fellowship might not work out,” Mohammad recalls, his voice half amused, half reflective. “But people kept coming back, some after six months, some after a year, after their course, wanting to do more. We experimented with a few ideas. There was a lot of thinking, and honestly, a lot of learning on our part, on how to engage people meaningfully and purposefully. We kept discussing this with our team. After a few hits and misses, we decided to try the fellowship model out. It wasn’t fully designed. We just wanted to experiment, to see where things could go.”

Mohammad is Sambhaavnaa’s Programs Convener and a Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner. Over the years, he has become a central figure in shaping Sambhaavnaa’s learning spaces, designing workshops, curating pedagogical formats, and facilitating reflection. With a background in participatory theatre and a deep commitment to critical political education, Mohammad works closely with young people across programs to help surface the questions that matter. A soft-spoken but incisive presence, he has witnessed the Sambhaavnaa Fellowship grow from an uncertain experiment into a space of intentional, evolving practice.

The Sambhaavnaa Fellowship doesn’t preach answers; it invites people to sit with the questions. It doesn’t offer a curriculum. It cultivates a climate. Rooted in the ethos of reimagining the world through practice, the Sambhaavnaa Fellowship is a living, evolving experiment of alternative learning and a co-creation space that matters. And for those inside it, it is transformative in quiet, cumulative ways.

Sambhaavnaa as a Place and Pedagogy

Located in Kandbari village near Palampur in Himachal Pradesh, the Sambhaavnaa Institute of Public Policy and Politics was set up with a simple idea: that political education should be accessible, situated, and rooted in real struggles. Over the years, it has become a gathering space for activists, learners, and practitioners exploring issues of caste, gender, ecological justice, democracy, and development.

Its programs span across short workshops, intensive trainings, and seasonal learning spaces like Nayi Dishayein, a summer school that draws fresh, curious young people from across the country into conversations about what development really means, and what alternatives could look like, amongst many other programs. 

This isn’t accidental. As Mohammad says, "We see the work of the campus as political work. You can’t separate the content from the context. The way we do things is also what we’re learning."

How Expectations Evolved

When the fellowship began, neither the team nor the fellows had a firm blueprint. "Honestly, we didn’t know what we wanted them to do," Mohammad admits. "We had to figure it out together. But we were sure that we wanted people who came to us to have more than just some volunteering experience. We wanted to share some of our immersive learning with them."

From the beginning of the fellowship, fellows were expected to take responsibility for the workshops, managing logistics, helping with facilitation, and documenting sessions, but the expectations were never only task-based. The space demanded presence, responsibility, initiative, and care. Fellows were also encouraged to shape parts of the program themselves.

Over time, this open structure became a central part of the pedagogy. It allowed fellows to bring their whole selves to the space and learn not from a defined curriculum, but through collective navigation. For the Sambhaavnaa team, too, working with each fellow helped clarify what kind of support and scaffolding were needed. “We now know that holding structure doesn’t mean overdesigning,” Mohammad reflected. “It means building enough trust to let things emerge.”

Who Are the Fellows?

The Sambhaavnaa Fellowship selects one to two fellows each cycle, youth between the ages of 23 and 30, who live and work full-time on the campus for 8 to 10 months. It is open to individuals with a strong interest in social justice, critical inquiry, and collective learning, irrespective of formal degrees or professional backgrounds. The selection process intentionally resists rigid filters. Mohammad shared, "We look for people who are willing to ask questions, not just come with answers. We don’t expect them to be activists, but they must be open to discomfort and change."

Each fellow brings something distinctly their own to the space. Ritika, who joined the fellowship in 2022, brought a sharp feminist lens grounded in both academic learning and everyday lived experience. Rachit, her co-fellow from the first cohort, worked primarily in Hindi and local languages and had a natural inclination for facilitation and building comfort in groups.

Rachel, part of the current cohort, arrived at Sambhaavnaa after attending Nayi Dishayein. With English fluency and a background in history and critical thinking, she contributed to facilitation and documentation, along with taking charge of social media. Tiroj, who joined alongside her, brought the sharpness of grassroots politics. Shaped by years of work with MKSS, he grounded many conversations in the realities of rural mobilisation and movement building.

Their political locations, linguistic fluencies, and life experiences were different, but what they shared was a capacity to stay with complexity. Each of them expanded what the fellowship could be, not by matching a pre-designed role, but by living into it differently.

Rachel first came to Sambhaavnaa as a participant in Nayi Dishayein. She had never been to the mountains before. Raised in Mumbai, her idea of politics was mostly shaped by academic discourse and online debate. "I came here thinking I would learn about movements," she said. "But I learned to listen instead. That changed everything." The fellowship, for Rachel, became the natural next step. “It felt like I hadn’t finished what had started here.”

Ritika arrived similarly. Drawn to the questions raised during her earlier visits, especially around gender and justice, she returned not just to attend, but to contribute. “I didn’t have a clear goal,” she said. “But I knew that I wanted to learn with my hands, not just my head.”

Tiroj, unlike the others, had already been part of grassroots efforts. His association with MKSS gave him an early political grounding. What Sambhaavnaa is offering him is a time to reflect, a pause to process the contradictions and intensity of movement work. “I knew how to raise slogans,” he said. “But here I learned how to hold silence.”

Work as Learning, Learning as Contribution

Each fellow’s daily rhythm reflects a different kind of pedagogy. One morning, you are fixing a pipe. By afternoon, you are taking notes during a session on caste. Rachel adds, laughing as she remembers, “I thought I’d be doing social media. Instead, I was doing facilitation, logistics, managing people, everything I didn’t think I could do.”

This is not accidental. As Mohammad says, “We see the work of the campus as political work. You can’t separate the content from the context. The way we do things is also what we’re learning.” The refusal to draw a line between the intellectual and the manual, the reflective and the operational, is an intentional subversion. In this frame, politics is not learned through lectures alone. It is practised in how a meal is coordinated, how materials are cleaned, how feedback is shared. This is slow, embedded, everyday pedagogy.

In a world obsessed with output, here is a space where the process itself becomes the teacher.

Place, Weather, and the Political

The fellowship is shaped by more than people. The hills demand attention. The water might run out. Firewood might be low. Monsoons might flood your workshop plans. These disruptions are not seen as barriers; they are part of the learning.

This is ecological pedagogy, not in the narrow environmental sense, but in the broader way of being responsive to conditions. Can your learning model flex when it rains? Does it honour the limits of a tired body, a cracked pipe, a late guest? Or respond to questions that address what failure means in activism, when speaking from the organising lens? These experiences teach attention. They humble urgency. They make visible the real cost and labour of holding space. In a deeply extractive world, this attentiveness becomes an act of resistance.

This rhythm also shifts with the seasons. During the heavy rains of July and August, when access becomes difficult and fewer programs are held, the fellowship naturally enters a period of slowing down. Fellows use this time to regroup, reflect on the months gone by, and begin planning for the winter sessions.

Discomfort, Not Direction

There is no roadmap. No fixed deliverables. And that is unsettling. As Mohammad put it, “Some fellows leave. Some stay confused for months. But that confusion is not a flaw, it is the beginning.”

Rachel shared a moment of dissonance: “In the second month, I wanted a plan. But then I realised I was learning how to hold space, how to respond, how to ask for help. It wasn’t what I expected. It was more.”

Discomfort, in this context, is not an obstacle. It is pedagogy. Learning to stay with uncertainty, to ask for help, to not have a plan, builds capacities that most leadership programs suppress. These are the competencies of alternatives: relational intelligence, self-reflexivity, and slow decision-making.

Visible and Invisible Learning

What is left behind when you strip away KPIs and outcomes? According to Ritika, a sense of relational accountability: “You didn’t want to do something because it looked good. You wanted to do it because someone else depended on you.”

In most fellowships, you collect deliverables. In Sambhaavnaa, you collect moments: an impromptu song after a workshop, a difficult conversation during feedback, a shared silence when a plan unravels. These are not inefficiencies. These are forms of knowledge. The fellowship affirms that not all learning is legible. Some of it lives in the body, in memory, in changed behaviour months later. This recognition is vital for anyone creating alternatives. It calls us to expand our idea of what counts.

Not a Model, But a Mirror

“We don’t think this is the way,” Mohammad clarified. “We think this is one way. And even this keeps changing.”

For others creating alternatives, the Sambhaavnaa Fellowship does not offer a format. It offers a lens to evaluate:

• Can slowness be built into designs?

• Can logistics be seen as pedagogy?

• Can failure be shared, not hidden?

The invitation is not to replicate, but to reflect. What assumptions are you willing to drop? What discomforts are you willing to hold? Where can you make space for the not-yet-known? This is what transformation through practice looks like. Not clean. Not complete. But committed. And sometimes, that is more than enough.