"She knew a hundred words for the forest. I knew none of them."
Why we began
It started with a grandmother's silence.
A boy sat beside his grandmother as she named the birds outside their home in Vansda — koyal, popat, chakli. He laughed, repeated them, and forgot them by morning. Years later, when she was gone, he reached for those words and found only an ache where they used to be.
"We don't lose a culture all at once. We lose it one unspoken word at a time."
Tribal was born from that ache — a promise that no child of our community would ever have to grieve a word they could have kept. We sat with elders, recorded their voices, and turned a vanishing inheritance into something a phone could carry, and a heart could hold.