An over ripe imagination in a medieval zenana
Sanjna Kapoor
The school
In the heart of Gujarat, at the edge of the salt-licked flatlands of the Little Rann of Kutch, lies Dhrangadhra, a town that used to be the capital of the 959-year-old princely state of Halvad-Dhrangadhra last ruled by the far-sighted and progressive Maharaja Sriraj Meghrajji III. It was his son, Siddhrajsinhji Jhala that Kanchankumari Katoch (Kanchan) wed. They lived in Dhrangadhra, where in 1988 she began the school, primarily because she knew it would be difficult to find the dream school for her two young girls.
It was Kanchan’s “over ripe imagination”, which she says she “has always suffered from”, that gave birth to the school, Srirajñi (so called, unusually, after the formal title of her mother-in-law!). The school began with the princely sum of Rs. 15,000/-, four benches made at her husband’s craft centre and two children; their toddler daughter and her friend, daughter of one of the workers at the craft centre.
And from what had begun as “an experiment of an experiment”, as Kanchan puts it, the seed was sown. Kanchan watched her own daughter closely and saw how she was learning. Ample effort was put into ensuring that no stone was left unturned. Kanchan herself was learning, as before her marriage she had been teaching at a university and had been more involved with tertiary education rather than primary. But common sense and hard work with a dead serious approach proved fruitful. Within a year the school had 50 students! And more importantly, staff who asked to be employed at the school. But finding teachers was always to be the bane of Kanchan’s life.
One can tell a little of the school’s values and what it nurtured within its cloistered classrooms that engulfed its enchanting courtyard of the medieval zenana that was to become its home for 34 years, from the school’s motto: “Equable in happiness and sorrow, gain and loss, victory and defeat.”
The “idea was neither to cram the classrooms nor the coffers,” says Kanchan, but to maintain a healthy teacher-child ratio.
Two major challenges the school faced in the early years were that it was adamantly co-educational (something that was almost a taboo in those days) and that it “was open to every class of person.” Kanchan’s sheer determination and unstinting family support enabled this social change to take place through a subsidy for those from low-income backgrounds. Kanchan believed that neither money nor social prejudice should ever be a deterrent for access to good education.
The school was an English medium primary school. But right from the start, the idea was always to have trilingual learning, with English, Gujarati, and Hindi. About 90% of the children came from families where Gujarati was the only language spoken, and most mothers did not even know how to converse in Hindi.
Role of theatre
Over 20 years ago I had seen a Srirajñi theatre production and was so struck by it that I broke my rule (of not hosting school shows) and invited them to perform at the Prithvi Theatre, Bombay. I thought it would be inspirational for children and schools to witness the sheer force and joy of the Srirajñi School children’s performances. They performed a wonderful array of scenes from Shakespeare along with their moving adaptation of Dead Poets Society.
And here were these children from Dhrangadhra spouting Shakespeare with such ease and elan! Kanchan was absolutely certain that she did not want to interfere with Shakespeare’s language. As she says, “The beauty and simplicity in Shakespeare’s plays is undeniable. And once the children get the cadence, they just don’t lose it.”
And when asked “why theatre?”, Kanchan’s immediate response is, “I can’t imagine why theatre would not be in a school. It’s such an important part of every child’s life. You play act all the time. You play act to bear the idiocy of the world around you. You play act to have fun. You play act to become the person you want to be one day. You play act to go on flights of fancy and fantasy. So, I don’t know why it should not be there in educational institutions.”
“Play acting and drama also helps teachers and children shed social veneers and makes them work in tandem which sometimes the desk obstructs.”
And so, drama performances came into being, not as an annual feature, but every couple of years or so, when circumstances permitted. Many factors had to fall into place: children’s interests, timetables, supportive teachers and of course parents. Their support was paramount as rehearsals were after school hours, and were demanding on both the children and families. Occasionally, parents were the toughest to convince, but when they saw their children performing characters that they could hardly even imagine existed, with a fluency and flair that astonished them, they realized that the learning their children were gaining from the experience was irreplaceable.
Kanchan goes on to explain, “Through all this dramatic madness the overall development of the children was central to everything they did at school. Understanding what makes each child tick, what this child needs, which area does the child need to be challenged in and what can we do about it? Sometimes you have the most quiet and withdrawn children suddenly coming to life, larger than life, in a simple poem recitation! That’s how it began, with elocution and taking excerpts from interesting things that the children were looking at in their library period. For example, Robinson Crusoe was explored.”
So it was through these performative experiences that children got to know of other worlds beyond Dhrangadhra. Of other perspectives, of other cultures, and other ways of being.
Kanchan clearly brought her own love of theatre, music and the arts into play and ignited in the children a similar love along with all the discipline that it demanded.
When I asked Kanchan “Why Shakespeare?” She said, “You know there is such a fear about certain things. I did a play from Kalidasa and people were aghast! We adapted Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, and projected her the way I felt she should be projected, exploring many choices she needed to make, along with all the beauty of the forest, dances, and costumes. But it was still Shakuntala that we did!”
Kanchan got to see how drama conveyed the complex and “strange vagaries of life, even at a child-like level.” And that there was something that everyone could take from it. And that’s when the penny dropped and Kanchan realized, just like British climber George Mallory famously said in 1923 in reply to a reporter’s question as to why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, “Because it’s there!”. Similarly, so was Shakespeare there! Kanchan loved Shakespeare, having studied him as a child in her convent school. She says, “The children understood the themes, the characters, the stories. It is universal, absolutely universal. We did Indianize some of it, like Shylock in the Merchant of Venice was a Munimji in a dhoti with a chopda under his arm! And so, it became immediately accessible and the fear was gone. It did wonderful things for the confidence of the children. It did wonderful things for the parent’s belief in the children too!”
The children of Srirajñi had endless opportunities to shine. “The idea was to literally take each child and let him find his own area of work. And to share that area with those people he loved the most: family and friends.”
“Once the children’s personalities began to develop and they realized they could make decisions on the interests they wished to follow in school, then their success levels in the classroom shot up.”
“The children were “not a flock of bamboozled sheep that were being led from class to class by some strange grown-ups with their own aims and objectives. There were no aims and objects. The aims were the children!”
This was possible because Kanchan believed that listening to the children was of paramount importance. And it was exactly this that was the greatest challenge for the teachers. Listening is not one of the skills that is taught at teacher training schools. Teachers are generally taught to constantly talk, speak, convey and seldom to listen. At Srirajñi all the co-curricular activities forced the adult to listen to the children. But for grown-ups who have never had any exposure or training in this approach it was very difficult to inculcate the art of listening.
Kanchan explains how working with these extracurricular activities impacted the children exponentially. The aim was never to get 90% results. But to get each child to perform to his best capacity and to develop well-rounded personalities, which the arts catalyzed. So along with their academic and co-curricular work, the children grew to be aware of who they were becoming. An essential yet much ignored part of growing up! And within this framework at least 85% of the Srirajñi children excelled in their academic performance.
Interestingly, the girls did much better than the boys. Kanchan thinks that this was the place that actually prepared them to drop their social pretences. Not to rebel or swim against the tide, but to find their own voice within the prevailing social norms. She modelled her personal beliefs and progressive world views in every breath she took at the school.
“Yes, they saw that it was possible to be an individual. And see an individual’s struggles and achievements, whilst being part of a whole that could possibly be saying very contrary things to what you are trying to be. This had a huge impact on the girls. As they then realized how to dignify their understanding of themselves.”
This also had a very strong impact on the boys as well. The boys, and now young men, seem gentler and more accepting than those from other schools. What Kanchan noticed from an early age was that both boys and girls grew to be respected members, just as they were respected at Srirajñi. And they became part of decision-making in their families, which led to interesting choices, be it where to study, work, or whom to marry.
Kanchan says, “There was a great need to be my pal, but also a great need to be respected by me. They could cross that boundary and still have that mutual respect, that’s where the victory was. It’s all about the interactions at the school. If I had just taught, they would have said, “Great teacher!”, and gone away. That’s it! But there was a lot more.”
And to Kanchan it is this “lot more” experience with the arts that “breaks down barriers, forces children and adults to engage in real ways; opens up a forum of sharing ideas that they would never be sharing otherwise.”
“I am convinced that doing things is far more important than having a brilliant lecture, which is easily forgotten. The plays were number one! And then other activities as well. Together they all added up to contributing to a rounded personality in each child. I think we have succeeded here in ensuring, through these experiences, that the right attitude was taught from a very early age. That’s what’s going to go a long way with each child.”
The key to Srirajñi’s success is that it demanded authentic engagement with clear intent, never shying away from hard work and above all the application of the same rules and behaviour of oneself as one expects from others. Pretty much the same rules that the arts demand too. This was the key with which Kanchan ran the school for 34 years. The school shut down in 2022.
As Kanchan says, “If somebody wanted to really be nasty, they could say she was not running a school, she was doing Nautanki!” But it was this ‘nautanki’ that was the heartbeat of Srirajñi in the best sense of the word and with the very best results!
I began my conversation with Kanchan wanting proof of my theory of the transformative powers of the arts but have now ended with the realization that the theory needs to include a strong base for belief, conviction, and courage!
“Equable in happiness and sorrow, gain and loss, victory and defeat.”
The author is a former Director of Prithvi Theatre and Co-Founder of Junoon Arts and Education Foundation, current Founder and Facilitator of The Artful Teacher Workshop Programme, a 3-year hybrid experiential workshop programme for in-service primary school teachers to discover their own creativity and artfullness. She can be reached at theartfulworkshop@gmail.com.
