Growing up in a family of artistes, it was the norm to be surrounded by books, music, drawings, art materials and the messy chaos of works in progress. It was only when I started attending the ‘big school’ that I realised my childhood was not the same as that of my classmates. Their parents had very different jobs and their homes looked very different from ours. Watching my mother and father spend days sketching, making costumes, writing, rehearsing and performing was what felt normal to me. It was only later in life that I could comprehend the huge role of the arts in my childhood. But more than the skills and exposure, I think the sensibility and aesthetics that were inculcated bit by bit, drop by drop, nurtured my interest in the arts and theatre.

Over the last 15 years of working with the Gillo Repertory Theatre, we have tried many ways of sharing the experience and joy of the arts with children and young people across India. During this journey, I came across a document titled ‘Charter of Children’s Right to Art and Culture’ which includes 18 principles “to affirm in 27 languages the right of girls and boys from every part of the world to art and culture.” The charter was created in 2011 from an idea by La Baracca – Testoni Ragazzi, a group in Bologna that has been involved in theatre for children and youth for almost 50 years. The charter firmly believes: “Children are citizens who, since the beginning of their lives, have the right to experience and enjoy the physical and mental spaces that art and culture can offer, sharing with adults a condition of closeness and belonging.”

This one-page text has had a profound impact on me and helped me gather my thoughts into tangible actions and projects. It has helped me fathom why I work in theatre for young audiences and what my goals are. It has especially helped in shaping our project ‘Gillo on the Go’, under which we have travelled across parts of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Uttarakhand, taking culture-based engagements to children in remote and rural areas. One of the core ideas is to provide access to theatre and the arts.

In India, some states have a thriving performing arts culture that is deeply embedded in the social fabric of the region. In others, children are far removed from the performing arts and only have mass media and digital content to engage with. So much so that at Gillo, more than 50 per cent of the child audience experiences a live performance for the first time in their lives. I am sure it is similar for other troupes that perform for children. As daunting as this may feel for the artistes, it always fills my heart when we bring theatre to a child for the first time. The sparkle in their eyes, the body leaning forward as if to become a part of the performance, the smile on their faces and giggles in between make for a very fulfilling sight. The way a child shares the fears of a character, or even warns an actor about dangers they are unaware of, are instances of audience involvement that never cease to enthral us. This total involvement of children, when they buy into the story and the world the play creates, never misses the mark. I have seen actors perform with half conviction or struggle to be truthful because they don’t really feel the story or its world, but as soon as they share the space with children, they dive in and create magic with the audience.

Artistic experiences have proven to be a powerful medium for lifelong learning, for sparking curiosity and imagination. They provide a sense of identity and belonging, a space to understand the self and the world around us, and ways to be part of a collective. The arts are central to human development as they help build us as a people and as individuals. And that is why we say that all children should be provided access to the arts, not just as a service, but as a right. I remember an eight-year-old boy who came to watch our play She-He-Shey in Kolkata. After the performance, his father asked what he liked best, and the child replied, “The horse, it was beautiful.” The father said he didn’t see any horse onstage. The child replied, “I saw the horse because the actors told me about it, and they saw it too. It was beautiful and majestic.”

Some people consider arts experiences for children a privilege. It is time we saw them as the norm. From time immemorial human civilisation has had the arts embedded in its everyday life. In a country like India, we are blessed with a myriad of ways in which the arts are intrinsically woven into our social fabric. We have a treasure that can and should be shared with the next generation. Not necessarily to ‘preserve’ it, but to make it a part of the continuum of our living culture.

Recently, we spent a day at a primary school in a small village outside Udaipur. Through the day we performed short plays for children, played games, sang songs, danced and laughed together. All these are the earliest ways in which babies and their families interact, and these are the same impulses that stay with us over our entire lives. At the end of the day, as we were packing up, I overheard a student tell his friend, “Aaj meri poori zindagi ka sabse achchha din tha!” (Today was the best day of my whole life). And this child was only seven.

Anyone who has sung a lullaby or danced to soothe a child or been a keen audience to their imaginative adventures has, knowingly or otherwise, infused the arts in a young person’s life. Many teacher-artistes working with theatre in-education have created beautiful explorations and memories for everyone involved. Studies have proven that arts participation is closely linked to children’s social-emotional development. So why are we not able to provide this experience to all children?

I urge fellow theatre artistes to share a small part of their year with children around them. A week or a month or more, whatever is possible. If we do this, we will soon have children all over the country living their childhood through the arts.

Whether we look at theatre for children through the lens of education or art, we can create a wide range of experiences so that children can build a relationship with the arts. By doing this, we are more likely to become an empathetic and connected society in which children have a sense of belonging to a land, a people—with an outlook that embraces the world.