A quiet, patient act of remembering.
ROOTS Cultural Foundation is a Section 8 non-profit registered in India, working across rural Maharashtra with community partners, folklorists, and public institutions — with plans to expand nationwide.
Founded on a promise.
ROOTS began the way most quiet, important things do — with listening. Snehal Warekar grew up in a home where her grandmother sang Ovee at the grinding mill, told stories through winter afternoons, and passed on knowledge that had never been written down.
Years later, as a PhD scholar researching India's oral traditions, Snehal travelled through rural Maharashtra — Satara, Kolhapur, Latur, Nanded, Jalna — meeting women whose voices carried entire libraries. Women who had never attended school. Women who could neither read nor write. And yet, women who were creators, poets, storytellers, historians.
They had authored an entire literature without ever writing a page. And in most academic conversations, they didn't exist.
That absence became the promise. That these voices would be recorded, translated, credited and preserved — with dignity, and with the communities who own them.
On 24 October 2025, that promise became an institution. ROOTS Cultural Foundation was registered as a Section 8 non-profit in India to document, research and safeguard the country's living oral heritage — one grandmother, one verse, one village at a time.
People behind the archive.
ROOTS is currently led by its founder, with a growing circle of volunteers, community researchers and advisors joining the work. If you'd like to be part of the team, we'd love to hear from you.