In keeping with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and the National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF-SE) 2023’s policy guidelines for holistic education, for the first time, arts education that involves introduction to Indian art forms, including classical music, dance, theatre and the visual arts, have been introduced in the primary and middle school curricula from the 2025-26 session.
As a dancer, I believe that learning dance is a transformative experience; it connects the body with the mind and leads to a sense of harmony. But, today, my concern is beyond dance. I view arts education in a holistic way in which, rather than compartmentalising it, theatre, dance, music and the visual arts form one single segment of education.
How do we teach it and how do we make the next generation feel proud of our legacy? How do we empower them to take it forward? Above all, in today’s stressful environment, how can they use the arts to de-stress themselves?
This brings me to question the way in which arts education is approached in schools. Frankly, it is mere tokenism at the moment. Dance/performance education is restricted to annual days, August 15 and January 26 functions. To put it bluntly, our schools — both private or government — are simply not equipped to produce artistes or even an artistic bent of mind. They do not have the time nor their teachers the wherewithal to provide the intense attention to detail and training needed to produce artistes.
What is required is a tweaking of our aspirations for arts education in schools. Arts education should not aim to create artistes. Instead, it should be about creating rasikas (discerning audiences), teaching students how to appreciate our diverse cultural dharohar and be able to use arts as a de-stressor.
We have missed this boat simply because the experiential part of the arts — to just sit and listen to great masters, watch legendary dancers — doesn’t happen in our classrooms at all. We are so preoccupied with the performative aspect of arts that we always want to teach children to perform. But that can only come much later. First, one needs to experience a performance or an art form simply by sitting with a single musical note and understanding how it can calm one’s whole being; how experiencing bhava can yield unending rasa.
In some of the schools I have been involved with, we have tried to use the tanpura as background music when students enter the school in the morning. This simple act calms them down. They may have been yelled at by their mothers to get ready on time; they could have had a fight while travelling to school. They could be stressed about incomplete homework assignments or an upcoming test. The strains of the tanpura put them in a positive frame of mind. Small things like this from our cultural virasat needs to be used beyond the classroom.
Are schools equipped to create artistes? I am afraid not. With limited time available in schools, serious arts training remains difficult. Here, I must speak up for the dance and music teachers in schools. They are expected to create magic in that one or two periods that they are given. They are expected to teach bharatanatyam, kathak, mohiniyattam, kathakali, ballet and what have you. This is a waste of time for the student and an unrealistic expectation from the teacher.
I would like to refer to an experiment that I have initiated in a wonderful school in Faizabad, UP, where over the past decade or so, we have tried to create interdisciplinary learning through the arts. In one of my recent visits, I saw a music teacher engage students with the tabla. She had a tabla set in the room and the children were exploring it — turning it upside down, fiddling around to see how it was made. Then came a guided viewing of a maestro’s performance. The teacher was stopping the video from time to time, pointing out where the laya/ pace changed, and how different fingering alters both sound and rhythm. She then invited the Physics teacher to talk about sound transmission, echo, tone, etc. This is the kind of interdisciplinary and integrated learning that we need. Such experiments will only be possible when we create meaningful dialogues between music, dance and theatre teachers in schools and then take it further and synergise with other subject teachers. We need to break silos and see equal merit in education through the arts.
Many schools take pride in the fact that in Class VI, students are given the opportunity to choose one activity and pursue it for the next three or four years, during which they are expected to delve deep into that subject. Though this is an opportunity to delve deep into one activity, unfortunately, it is myopic: If a child opts to pursue music, he/she becomes oblivious to other forms of expression. Theatre, dance and visual art do not figure in her scheme of things. This is not the way to go forward.
Guided viewing can be a huge resource to amend this. We have to craft a basic arts education curriculum that brings together different art forms, and some amount of exposure to writing on the arts. Such a curriculum should offer an overview of various forms of expression in India — of the classical, but also the vernacular and the folk. This will lead to a more holistic understanding of our culture.
The writer is a bharatanatyam dancer. Her envisioning of the role of arts is based on over four decades of working with schools and teachers and listening to young students
