Engaging Mussoorie: Aina Arts and Cultural Agency in India
by Amar C. Bakshi ‘06
Last summer, eleven Harvard peers and I set out for the town of Mussoorie, India, to work in the visual and performing arts with 200 children in five underprivileged schools. All of us are members of Aina Arts, a not-for-profit organization that provides arts education for children in marginalized communities through the use of local art forms. In India we collaborated with community artists, teachers and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
When we arrived in Mussoorie on June 3, we were confronted with a troubling scenario: the teacher-student ratio at the Kozi Government primary school where we worked was one to 41. One exhausted teacher, with only a few textbooks, sat her class in a dark room and told them to read silently. Though she often used a stick to punish miscreants, she rarely used chalk to elaborate lesson plans. Unfortunately, throughout much of the state of Uttar Pradesh, teachers are underpaid, undertrained and underappreciated.
In the classrooms, girls were underrepresented and many who did attend were painfully reticent. Similarly, children from lower socio-economic backgrounds were reluctant to participate and were often absent. While corrupt oversight, inadequate financing, and ingrained prejudices threaten equity in Mussoorie education, we saw local NGOs and some passionate teachers fighting to compensate. What was lacking in these schools was certainly not intelligence but personal attention, community involvement, and inspiration.
Because 6- to 12-year-old children are exempt from the labor obligations of older siblings, they are the most available for schooling. Engaging these children in their education from early on is critical. We wanted to help teachers show their students how education is relevant to their lives, bring parents into the classroom, provide kids a way to share their talents with their community, and have fun in school.
By embracing a broad definition of art, which considered the ritual protection provided by rice powder rangolis and the religious stories embedded in Gharwali dance equally as art, we began to develop a method of looking at these art forms to examine community issues. First we researched the different artistic forms, broadly defined, in the community. Then we provided the materials necessary for these artworks, letting the children create anything they wanted with them.
They would change the lyrics of an old song, or add Bollywood dance to a traditional play. Christian children would use materials that for years had been employed in making conventional miniature Hindu shrines to create nativity scenes. By always asking why the kids chose different approaches, we engaged the process of their art-making directly.
Teachers in the community said that they had never seen the children so energized. By the end of our time with the Kozi school, the children were not just sitting in a silent room and reading, but actually enacting lessons from their texts, using rangolis to celebrate their school, and Gharwali traditional song to address equity in education. Even beyond our work with them, girls were speaking up more in class and attending school with greater regularity. For our final projects, we brought parents, teachers, NGO heads and community leaders to watch their work.
One group of 30 children in the Mussoorie Public Girls School (ages 14 to 16) used theater and sari costumes to explore issues of gender discrimination in their school environment, putting their show on before the whole school and the wider Mussoorie community. Hindu, Muslim and Christian children reclaimed a vacant post-partition Muslim home using symbols in painting to open the building to all religious faiths. Using clay and cow dung, we made sculptures with the children about deforestation in their subsistence community.
The children have since formed a social action group called Prakrati (“Nature”), which uses the arts to confront social issues and develop practical means of action. Their model is being emulated by neighboring villages.
In the future, we hope to develop more flexible “process plans” that will spur sustainable groups like Prakrati. We will continue to research and work this summer, bringing another team to Mussoorie. We hope to foster more links with NGOs and local art schools and colonies to create lasting networks of public service opportunities.
This coming summer, we are also initiating a new project in Masiye, Zimbabwe, under the guidance of an Aina alum, Proud Dzambukira. The Zimbabwe group will work with children in an AIDS orphanage and similarly focus on cultivating an indigenously engineered arts education project curriculum.
Aina Arts has received invaluable support from Harvard University, the Office of Career Services, the Office for the Arts, and the South Asia Initiative, and looks forward to guidance from the Cultural Agents Initiative, a project of Harvard’s Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
For more information, visit Aina Arts at www.AinaArts.org and the Cultural Agents Initiative at blogs.law.harvard.edu/culturalagency1/.
Amar C. Bakshi ’06 is a Social Studies and Visual and Environmental Studies joint concentrator interested in the intersection of the arts and social/political change. He is a native of Washington, DC and resides in Leverett House.
