A play about girls' education, staged on Independence Day

Zanjeerein was performed in Hindi at a school on Independence Day. The play is about girls' access to education. "Choosing a day tied to freedom for a play about a freedom many of these girls don't have was deliberate," Yushika Khandelia says. Many in the audience were parents, and she wanted them "to sit with that specific discomfort rather than a generic patriotic one."

It was the first full production of KahaaniGhar, a rural theatre programme she runs across three villages in Rajasthan, working with about 250 kids combined.

“People don't fail, systems do.”

Yushika Khandelia

The idea behind the programme is that building a play trains the same skills advocacy requires. "You have to build a coherent argument out of a script. You have to hold a room that doesn't owe you its attention." Kids who have never been asked to think analytically or speak with confidence get both, she says, "through something that doesn't feel like schoolwork."

She started it after meeting a few girls in middle school who were already married. "That was the moment the problem stopped being something I'd read about and became something I'd have to actually respond to," she says. "I'm not naive enough to think a theatre programme undoes child marriage or the structures behind it." But she was committed to doing something concrete, "and this was the something I could actually build."

What she has learned so far is less about theatre than about logistics and trust. Getting three villages' worth of families comfortable with their kids spending hours on something that does not show up on a report card takes longer than writing the script does. "Trust is the actual currency this runs on, more than talent or material resources," she says.

The constraint now is materials. Sets and costumes are pieced together locally, production to production. The shows go on, but she says a makeshift production "quietly tells the kids performing that what they're doing is provisional, a one-off, not a real production." She wants a proper, reusable set and costume kit so the next production can be built on top of the last one instead of starting over from zero.