Seema is 15 years old. She has studied till class V. She had to leave school when her mother died and now takes care of the whole household - cooks for the family, washes the clothes, cleans the house, and sends her younger brothers to school. She is going to be married next year. Twelve months more and she will be pushed into a world of responsibilities and duties, not to mention a lifetime of non-stop, thankless house jobs. Is the scared? Yes, she is. Will they accept me? Am I beautiful enough? Can I be a good wife, a good ‘Bahu’? But she need not worry about being a good wife and a mother. After all she has had plenty of practice. Anju is a bright, chirpy girl. Already eighteen years of age, she is full of questions. Her mother says she is too ‘untamed’. Says she needs to be curbed. Every time Anju laughs loudly or argues her point, she if firmly told to shut up. “What’ll do with this girl, despairs her mother. How will I ever get her married? She can’t keep quiet. She asks too many questions. She can’t even control her laughter. Who’d want a Bahu (daughter-in-law) like that?” Anju and Seema a live with a system that constantly tells them to ‘fall in line’, to stop asking questions, to stop thinking!! “Be a good” girl. In order that you can be good wives tomorrow. Be quiet! Conform! Blend with the backgrounds!! Work silently and stop complaining and never ever demand anything!! They both live in village Meethapur. A private voluntary organisation call Prerna - Cedpa association operates a training centre for the villagers. They run a programme called ‘Better Life Programme’ (BLP) for girls between the age group of 12-20 years. The objective of BLP is to “change the perception of the girl in her own eyes as well as those of the community by offering her better opportunities for self realisation”. Another aspect of BLP is ‘confidence building’ through street theatre, workshops, exposure trips and video workshops. Prerna has been running a centre in Meethapur for over 5 years now. It’s programmes include functional literacy classes, health and family planning and income generation schemes for women. Over the years, the villagers have come to trust the organisation and girls like Anju and Seema visit the centre regularly for courses in stitching, candle-making, etc. Prerna organised a video workshop from Nov 23rd to Dec 7th ‘92. The workshop was conducted by Sebha Imam, a free-lance film maker and myself. We went into the workshop with many questions on our minds. How does one teach something as technical as video to 4 groups of semi-literate girls? How does one cross the obvious socio-economic barriers so that they can relate to us? And last but certainly not the least - what happens after the workshop? Does one provide them with a week o euphoria and then leave them high and dry? Will they ever be able to get their hands on video equipment again? Why expose them to something that twill only increase their expectations with very little hope of ever fulfilling them? How long do we wait before we have the money and the resources for the follow up? The answer came after much discussions and searching. Street theatre. It doesn’t need any money, any equipment and it can help us achieve all the objectives that we set out to achieve, namely: ¨ Confidence building ¨ Personality development ¨ Coherent thinking and articulate expression of thoughts. And we would be leaving them with something - a means of expression that is not beyond their reach. So we went into the workshop with a three-fold strategy. We had to do it in steps. Step one was gauging their visual literacy. Do they interpret symbolic visual easily? How direct and literal does one have to be with them? We chose colour photographs for the purpose. 5” x 4” cut outs from newspapers and magazines were given to each one of them to interpret. Soon we discovered that the girls had been exposed to a fair amount of Hindi movies and could easily identify the familiar symbolism - like a girl behind bars and a bird in a cage were easily correlated. A bird in flight was freedom. And a sunset could mean a number of things. These photographs were also used as a means to explain simple rules of editing like placing of different pictures together and deriving a third meaning entirely different from the original one. Will they ever be able to get their hands on video equipment again? Why expose them to something that will only increase their exceptions with very little hope of every fulfilling them? Step two was shedding their inhibitions. The idea was to break the teacher-student relationship and have a free exchange of ideas as friends. A series of inhibition shedding exercises were designed to warm them up every morning and get them focused. The exercises were followed by street theatre exercise. We moved from simple acting out of expressions like sadness, happiness to role plays in couples and then in groups. Step three was to demystify video technology and make it simple to understand. The approach adopted was a ‘No fuss’ attitude. The girls were free to load, unload the video equipment, connect the cables. The camera was introduced to them in a very casual way, without over-emphasising the sophistication and expansiveness of the equipment. We adopted a hands-on approach and tried to give the girls as much time with the camera as possible. Two weeks were spent getting to know each other, recognising problems, overcoming them, setting new goals, discovering more information and the final achievement!! By the end of the fortnight, the girls had produced two films. One called ‘Hum Chhuenge Asman’ - all about the dreams and aspirations of girls. And the second called ‘Ek Sharaabi Ki Kahaani’ - on the problems of alcoholism which are widely prevalent in Meethapur. It took some time for each one of them to open up, to break the vicious circle of conformity, of group thinking and seeking acceptance as a ‘good girl’. It took some time to recognise that individual creative thinking can be a real pleasure - that there is a world outside and inside of them that is just waiting to be explored, that it is not really wrong to expect more and demand more from life. It took some time to start questioning things that had been mutely accepted hitherto. And for us just as much as for them, it was two week of strain-physical, mental and indeed emotional. But the questions that had nagged us right form the beginning bothered us ever more now. What next? How do we continue what we have started? An advance workshop? Form a core group in the village that can take up video recording assignments for local functions? Continue and develop street theatre? Involve them in the training programmes already on at the Prerna Cedpa Centre? There was the knowledge that it worked to use video. It broke the stereotypes immediately and completely. If freed the mind. But it needed to be followed up. And while we search for solutions - Anju is getting impatient. “Why aren’t you doing something, Didi?” What’s going to happen next?” Aren’t you coming back again”? And all I say to her is “Keep the faith, Anju. We’ll work something out. And I will come back - that’s for sure!!”
The author is a Communication Specialist |
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