ART FOR HEART’S SAKE
The children of one of the world's largest slums have found their happy place in a tiny room where they come to learn art and leave with lessons on life.
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Himanshu S and Aqui Thami, founders of the Dharavi Art Room
Himanshu: The children of Dharavi grow up in an environment where pleasure is a luxury. They go to overcrowded schools and return home where they are expected to work. They are stressed and hardly have the time to even play. They need some respite, to be able to admire and appreciate things, to find something that feeds their souls. For the past decade and a half, we’ve tried to create a safe space for all this to happen.
In the late 90s, I started visiting Dharavi and helping out in community projects. I’m a trained artist and always wanted to do something on my own, so I initially used art to entertain the children of the area and create awareness about one of Asia’s largest slums.
I gradually started teaching art to the children part-time and about a decade ago, we figured out a way to turn it into a rounded concept: the Dharavi Art Room. Aided by friends and well-wishers, we started partnering with NGOs for art projects and conducted classes in specific spaces, including a temple compound and a bus depot. In 2012, I met Aqui Thami, who was doing her post-graduate studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences. I invited her to join us full-time and she has helped turn us into full-fledged art school.
Aqui: For the past three years, we have had a space of our own in Dharavi. A parent leased us her 100 sq ft room right in the middle of the slum, so kids from all over the vast area can come over.
Every day starts early. Some days we teach in Dharavi while on others we teach at spaces elsewhere in the city such as Bandra so that the children get to travel a bit. In the evenings, we sometimes take the children for outings like a movie.
As for enrolment, the kids just turn up. We may start with just 10 kids, but the next time they bring their friends and we eventually end up 40 children in one batch. In all, we currently work with 450 children from the ages of 6-16, and we try to give individual attention to every child and know them by name.
Himanshu: Every neighbourhood is different from the other, so we design programmes for specific groups of children. But we do have a curriculum. There are four levels and children graduate from one level to the next based on their skills, ability to take instructions, and teamwork.
It starts with an introductory class to get to the know the children, who are initially awkward and scared. The first level involves colour pencils, where we observe how the children portray their imagination on paper. In the second level, they use watercolours and tell stories about their lives. They draw their homes, friends, community.
By the third level, they start looking at the works of masters and compare how other artists have used the medium to tell stories about themselves. They record the outside the world and are exposed to more complex techniques like canvas painting, where they look at photographs and recreate them on the page.
The fourth level is the highest, where they enroll for teacher's training. But because of how these neighbourhoods function we, hardly have kids continuing from first to fourth level as they invariably drop out. A few boys still come but almost all the girls leave. The boys are expected to do more ‘manly’ things, while girls aren’t allowed to leave their homes once they hit puberty. They have a very strict school-to-home, home-to-school routine.
To remedy this, we are expanding our tie-up with schools in Dharavi by trying to get our art classes included in the timetable. Whatever else happens in their day, the children can still look back at the good time they had in those couple of hours creating art.
Aqui: Life skills are attached to everything we do in the Art Room. If we paint a mural together, the kids learn how to negotiate, how to work in a team. They also learn to show and acknowledge kindness. These children are often the most disrespected members of their homes. You never see someone say please or thank you to a child. So we hope that by addressing them politely, they start believing in themselves. Many children have become calmer and nicer to each other, and the older kids take responsibility.
Our primary aim is to give them exposure. We try to get the older children internships and we are currently training training a few kids from Dharavi to teach with us. They used to learn under us and are now in junior college. Their families have asked them to work, so they have joined our teachers training programme on a small stipend and will get a salary once we hire them. We also have volunteers who come and teach the kids different things like craft and yoga.
We’re now also working on a programme where kids can spend a month outside Dharavi. We want to them to experience life outside the slum because they need to know what it’s like to have a working toilet at home, or access to drinking water, to experience life as a human being and not someone’s driver or labourer.
Himanshu: The Art Room is a full-time project for us and at times, it’s difficult to keep going. For Aqui, it’s particularly difficult to work in Dharavi because there are no proper sanitation facilities for women and so she is vulnerable to infection. But we continue to work on the Dharavi Art Room because it’s fulfilling in so many ways. We know it’s the right thing to do. We can see the change right in front of us.
For us, art is just the medium. It’s about creating a safe space for these children. If we are able to achieve that, then we are happy. It may not be a life-changing experience for them, but we hope to make them more ambitious, hopeful and enable them to dream.
AS TOLD TO NILESH PINTO
ALL PHOTOS BY SIDDESH SHETTY
