Maria Schirmer
Kolkata (Calcutta), West Bengal, India
Jana Sanskriti Center for Theatre of the Oppressed
As I sit down to write this post, my first post, I am struggling. How do I begin to explain what I am witnessing here, to explain the work of Jana Sanskriti? I started this morning reading the local English paper, The Bengali Post, and discovered a reprinted editorial from The Guardian about Western social/political bloggers that are hired by NGO’s to go on trips to the field and report back on what they’ve, thus raising the awareness of not only the organization and but cause. Sadly this can often become online “poverty tourism,” that exacerbates a global North, global South divide. The reader can pity and then what? So how can I explain the situation in rural villages here in West Bengal without perpetuating this problem?
In a quote from one blog an American women who recently went to Bangladesh writes, “right now I’m trying to make sense of the luxury it is to be able to brush my teeth with tap water without fearing that I might catch a disease that could possibly kill me.” Frankly, my first though was, exactly. But I did not come half way across the world to relish in my modern comforts and bemoan those who have so little. It is arguable whether my life is so much better. My suspicion, which is proving to be true, was that the mythology of Jana Sanskriti while situated squarely in the local could be translated elsewhere. So while their work deals with issues of violence against women, political corruption, poverty (and much more), in a rural Bengali context, these are issues that plague all nations, certainly including my own.
Jana Sanskriti Center for Theatre of the Oppress uses the techniques developed by Augusto Boal to enact social change. Boal was an innovative and influential Brazilian theatrical director, writer, pedagogue and politician. Theater of the Oppressed is a political, theatrical form originally used in popular education movements, growing up alongside Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Theater of the Oppressed is a system of games and creative techniques that aims at developing, in the oppressed citizens, the language of the theater, in order to help them fight against their oppressions and to transform the society that gives rise to those oppressions. Jana Sanskriti has been very successful in developing this work. Since its founding in 1985, Jana Sanskriti has grown from a group of five members to working with thirty groups throughout West Bengal and has affiliations with other organizations across twelve Indian states. Jana Sanskriti works with the most impoverished people within their society, those whose socio-economic status is deemed so low that have no voice in their own governance. Through the use of Theatre of the Oppressed, Jana Sanskriti allows the communities they serve to enact their own participatory democracy, giving voice and empowerment to those who are cripplingly poor. Their main tactic from the Theatre of the Oppressed arsenal is Forum Theatre, in which a social problem is posed in the form of a play. The audience is then invited to come on stage and act out solutions, turning the spectator into a “spect-actor.” Boal’s theory is that after acting onstage one will act in life. Does this work? For Jana Sanskrit, yes it does. They have 13,000 member Human Rights Protection Committee (HRPC) made up of spect-actors that work in all the villages Jana Sanskriti has a presence. The HRPC takes the issues and ideas brought up during the forum plays and uses them to create concrete change, be it working with local politicians to improve village food distribution or working to enroll girl children in school. Recently I visited a village for a two day HRPC meeting and witness first hand the commitment these people have towards improving their community. (More on this trip in a later post)
I have been here for three weeks and I am still trying to grasp that magnitude of Jana Sanskriti’s work within the context of a greater human rights debate. My first thought is they have the answers but perhaps I am just being seduced by kind hosts, spicy food and the cool breeze that comes with the monsoon rains. There will be many more struggles, and many more posts. Namaste.