Ruchira Das kickstarts her work with Bidya Niketan School

As observed by Anuradha Pathak

Ruchira, the director of ThinkArts, works extensively with children, creating various kinds of performative events and experiences for the children of different age group through her own initiative. In her recent project with Hamdasti for the Chitpur Local -II, she is working closely with the students and teachers of Sri Bidya Niketan Girls High School. Her project started with making art as part of curriculum and generating a conversation amongst the girls and their grandmother and find out more about their surrounding and the bygone eras of their grandmothers. 

Initiating a dialogue with a community is to an extent still comfortably easy but continuing that aspect for long is a difficult task. Through various interactions with the students and their grandparents this barrier became more and more evident. She could speak to some students in groups from time to time but could not sustain a dialogue with the same  set of students, hence she planned her first intervention.    

29th April 2017 was her first intervention which was organized to bring the students and teachers under one roof, away from their school premise to make them think and experience their locality and about own family surroundings and generate a dialogue. The event was organized at the premise of the Chaitanya Library on Beadon Street in Sovabazar, Kolkata. Initially, doubts that the students won’t turn up at the venue did creep in when the schedule time for event was fleeting. Later, the students along with their teachers did come in numbers. Students from class V, VI, VII and even from Class X had come for the intervention.

The event started with the screening of Hamdasti’s film which was on various interventions, interactions and festivals that took place during Chitpur Local I. Since most of the screening was centered around the students of Oriental Seminary School it generated lot of interest amongst the girls as well as the teachers. 

Since this was an intervention to know their own surrounding, develop and know about their grandparents and be aware of their present situation, Ruchira placed 3 papers on the table. One had ‘neighbourhood’ written on it. Second one had ‘Amar Golpo’, meaning my story in Bengali and the third had ‘thakumar golpo, dadu r golpo & didimar golpo’, meaning grandmother and grandfather’s story. Each student was asked to take one colourful post it and write on them as a response to the title. I really like the approach to the whole concept. It was playful yet made them think. One more thing which was well-thought-out was the use of language for communication with the student which was Bengali, not only for verbal communication but even for the intervention. Since the students were well versed in Bengali than in any other language they opened up with ease and communicated profoundly.  Each student wrote about their interaction with their grandparents, observed and wrote about what was there in their neighbourhood and how they have changed and what personal story they had to share.  Later, even the teachers who had come for the intervention also participated.

​The intervention ended with filling up of a questionnaire where they were asked about how they envisioned their role in the project. In most of the responses, one aspiration was predominant and that was of taking on the role of an artist.  Later some of the teachers from Oriental Seminary School had also come and they also shared their experience with these students. 

The intervention ended on positive note that the students will continue to know more about their own locality and keep the dialogue with their grandparents going. The intervention was documented by the team Hamdasti and fellow artists involved in the project of Chitpur Local II.