When Vinay Bhaat, 25, wants to stage a puppet show these days, he logs on to the Facebook page where his production company, Puppet Kala, lives. The online platform is among the few certainties of life for this erstwhile resident of Kathputli Colony in Delhi’s Shadipur area. Everything else has been in medias res since a contentious redevelopment project demolished the homes of at least 3,200 families of street performers like Bhaat in 2017.
Bhaat, who received the Delhi government’s Street Theatre and Performing Arts Fellowship in February 2020, is a traditional practitioner of the ancient art of Rajasthani puppetry. Puppet Kala helps fellow puppeteers, magicians, jugglers, stilt walkers and street folk artists showcase their skills and network with potential clients through social media. “You have to adapt if you don’t want to be left behind,” says Bhaat, who has never been to school.
Life was never easy for these street performers. Kathputli Colony was itself an unauthorised slum that attracted puppeteers, magicians and singers from Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar from 1950. “It’s a matter of perspective,” says Bhaat. “Some people called Kathputli Colony a slum, while others called it an artists’ village. For people like me, it was home, a place where we were born, and could just be.”
Vinay Bhaat works on a puppet
As per the original plan, the sale by the Delhi Development Authority of the 5.22-hectare Kathputli Colony was sweetened with the offer of low-cost housing in the same area (2,800 apartments in six towers of 15 storeys each) to the former residents, who would, in the meantime, be accommodated in a transit camp in Anand Parbat for two years until the project was completed. Nearly six years on, the transit has dragged on, and the camp has mutated into a health and safety hazard, with poor quality construction, clogged drains, and intermittent electricity. “There are only two taps to serve the residents. So the water fights start from 6 p.m., and continue late into the night,” says Bhaat. “Most of us are afraid to use the water for bathing as it causes skin problems.”
When water woes and neighbourly spats don’t intrude into his creative space, Bhaat sits down in his tiny quarters to create puppets from scratch. “All the puppets are made with seasoned mango wood. I then stitch the costumes and pick out the ornaments according to the story,” he says.
Disappearing act
For Rehman Shah, 49, magic used to be a matter of gathering a crowd and holding its attention with both comic dialogue and sleight of hand. “Now, with social distancing rules, nobody wants to see street magicians at close quarters. And how does one perform tricks with a mask on one’s face,” he asks.
Shah feels the loss of his old home keenly. “Tourists visited us in Kathputli Colony, to take photographs, to see how we lived and worked. We were also more accessible to the people who wanted to book us for events because of our central location. But the Anand Parbat camp has thrown us into a faraway corner of the capital,” he says.
Shah, who was featured in the 2014 documentary Tomorrow We Disappear , directed by Jim Goldblum and Adam Weber, which captured the colony on the cusp of demolition, says that housing is just one aspect of a way of life that is staring at oblivion. “Our earliest performances were held in royal households. After Independence, we’ve had to compete with television, malls and cinema. Those who book us are usually of an older age group, and would have seen people like us in action when they were children, so there’s an element of nostalgia attached to our art,” says Shah.
Rehman Shah.
“But we are still used as cultural ambassadors by the Indian government when they hold heritage fairs abroad,” he says with a sad laugh. “I have travelled to Dubai, Istanbul and Burkina Faso among other places, as part of official delegations. And our craft gets more respect and appreciation abroad than at home.”
Shah’s son has begun to assist him in his magic routines, but he is keen on educating his six children. “A degree will help them become financially independent. And magic will help them carry forward our family legacy,” he says.
Former acrobat Bharti, 32, doesn’t remember a day when she was free enough to hang out with her friends. “I was trained in khel (acrobatics) like rope-walking and balancing acts from the age of five by my parents, and since I was the eldest of four children, I started working with them quite early on. I would combine this with work on construction sites, so there was no chance even to think of leisure,” she says.
An exhibition protesting the relocation in 2014
Facing prejudice
Street performers like Bharti get little respect for their agility and expertise. “I stopped working a few years before marriage because nobody wants to marry a woman acrobat,” says Bharti, who has performed in Paris and Dubai. “People ridicule us for our craft, even though what we do requires years of intense physical training.”
Bharti moved back to Kathputli Colony two years ago to escape her abusive husband and is living with her three children under the care of her brother and other relatives. “We stayed on the pavements for close to a year before we were allotted quarters in the Anand Parbat camp. Times are tough; nobody is happy here,” she says.
Moved by the plight of Kathputli Colony’s artists, 23 students of Delhi’s Netaji Subhas University of Technology started Project Kalakaar in December last year in collaboration with the U.S.-based non-profit organisation Enactus.
Kathputli after the demolition drive
Support network
“Our first step was to put them online, and to create a kind of registry so that clients could contact the artists easily. That’s when we started documenting the issue, and talked to the people affected in Anand Parbat,” says Aniket Burman, a second-year MPAE (Manufacturing Production and Automation Engineering) undergraduate who is the project manager.
Besides consulting people like designer and art curator Rajeev Sethi, the Project Kalakaar team also used the resources of experts like veteran puppeteer Puran Bhatt to retrain artists for a digital world. “By teaching artists how to use the mobile camera and create scripts for a new audience, we are hoping to empower them to bring in business collaborations themselves,” says Burman. “For the first time, people paid to watch Shah and Bhaat’s shows online, which helped them during the lockdown. We have also listed them on sites such as Delhipedia and hobbi.fun so that they can teach online courses.”
Project Kalakaar also helps them market shows in other city venues and educational institutions. It has got seven artists on board, and is aiming to include at least 15 more in the coming months.
“Artists’ villages like Kathputli Colony could easily be a way to promote tourism and also empower folk artists, but this has been ignored by the authorities,” says Sethi. “These highly skilled people are forced to perform on street corners and pavements for a pittance. The new Kathputli Colony project should include a shared exhibition space where they can showcase their talent.”
nahla.nainar@thehindu.co.in
