Imagination Gets a Nudge

When Aditi Chitre held a visual arts workshop for children in Chizami,a village in Nagaland,last year,she was in for a surprise. There was a marked difference in the way these children took to the craft and how city-bred ones did. Chitre,who spent four years travelling in and around the state to make her animation film Journey to Nagaland,realised that it came from the children’s uncluttered minds,free from formal education in art,and the region’s inherent artistic environment. “I was told that it was not rare for children who like painting to be admonished by their parents for wasting paper,but at the same time it is the land of musicians and singers,” says Chitre,an animation filmmaker and painter from Mumbai,now based in Delhi.

This workshop was funded by the India Foundation for the Arts. Her experiences in the workshop,Chitre says,are relevant to the state of art education across the country. “We have good art education only when one specialises in higher studies. At school level,it is in bad shape. It is taught like mathematics,with set ideas of good or bad. There is no tolerance for different ideas,” says Chitre,an alumna of the MS University of Baroda. She modelled the three-phase workshops so that they encourage children’s imagination through applied creative exercises that she calls “story-triggers”. “Once we took them to the Nagaland State Museum in Kohima and asked them to pick any two objects — it could be a hairpin or a spear — and weave a story around it. Or,we would ask them to distort or improvise their own versions of traditional folk tales,” says the 33-year-old filmmaker.

The workshop culminated in a book and a series of paintings that were exhibited in Chizami and Dimapur. Chitre sees the books as compact records of children’s achievements,and a tool to liberalise educational institutes and parents. She hopes that this

experience will enable them to think beyond the restrictive environment of the region and find their voices.