What Mutual Aid Teaches Us About Solidarity Beyond Charity

By Aditi Singh

In India, help has always existed in informal forms — neighbours sharing food, women pooling money, communities stepping in when institutions fail. Long before the language of policy and welfare entered public discourse, survival often depended on collective care. Yet in recent years, assistance has increasingly been framed as charity: something given by those who have to those who do not. Mutual aid offers a different way of thinking — one rooted not in generosity alone, but in shared responsibility.

Charity tends to move in one direction. It assumes a giver and a receiver, often reinforcing hierarchies of power and gratitude. Mutual aid, by contrast, works horizontally. It recognises that vulnerability is not a personal failure but a social condition, and that roles can shift over time. Today’s helper may be tomorrow’s recipient. This understanding is particularly important in a country like India, where inequality is deeply structural and crises — economic, environmental, or social — are rarely isolated events.

Across India, mutual aid quietly sustains lives. Community kitchens run by local women feed migrant workers during lockdowns. Informal libraries emerge in small towns where formal education systems fall short. Neighbourhood groups raise money for medical emergencies, school fees, or rent, not as acts of pity but of solidarity. These efforts rarely make headlines, yet they reveal a powerful truth: care does not need permission from authority to exist.

For women, mutual aid often becomes both labour and leadership. Women organise food distribution, manage shared resources, teach children, and provide emotional support — often without formal recognition. This work is rarely labelled as “activism,” but it reshapes communities in lasting ways. It creates trust, safety, and resilience — qualities that cannot be imposed from above.

Mutual aid also resists the idea that dignity must be earned. In charity-based models, assistance is frequently conditional — tied to behaviour, identity, or perceived worthiness. Mutual aid rejects this moral sorting. It treats support as a right arising from shared humanity, not as a reward. In doing so, it restores agency to those receiving help, allowing them to participate rather than merely accept.

In a society marked by caste, class, and gender hierarchies, this distinction matters deeply. Mutual aid does not erase inequality, but it refuses to reproduce it in the act of helping. It creates spaces where people are seen not as problems to be solved, but as participants in collective survival.

At its core, mutual aid is not about replacing the state or institutions. It is about filling gaps with care, and reminding us that solidarity is not an abstract ideal but a daily practice. In choosing mutual aid over charity, communities choose dignity over dependency — and that choice quietly reshapes the meaning of social justice in India.