Warli Art and Public Education: Do! Travels to Mexico

A year ago, we were busy finalizing plans for a rather unusual picture book. Featuring art from the Warli indigenous community whose home is western India, this book was to introduce simple verbs to the very young child. Comprising line, triangle, curve and circle, Warli art is fluid, dynamic and elegant. Children relate easily to it. Do!, the book that we eventually produced, is handprinted in white on brown kraft paper – simulating original Warli art that is painted on mud walls, using lime and chalk. Each page of the book houses a verb, with all images on that page illustrating that one action.  (To watch the making of the book, click here)

A month ago, Petra Ediciones, publisher friends from Mexico, wrote to say that they would like to publish Do! in Spanish and would also like to submit the book to a government library program. It appears that each year the Ministry of Public Education, Federal Government of Mexico, calls for book submissions under a book acquisition program called Bibliotecas Escolares y de Aula. A team of 32 selects titles from the submissions they receive, and the chosen ones are then sent to every public school in Mexico.

Petra Ediciones entered Do! as a book in the kindergarten category – and sure enough, it was chosen. We learnt to our great excitement that it would be made available to children in over 90, 000 schools! We were especially gratified with the prospect of small children in a distant land looking at Do! and making sense of an art form that is at once exotic and yet perhaps curiously familiar. Here was a way in which the state primary school curriculum could be enlivened.

In 2008, we had in fact done something similar ourselves – we had developed a teachers’ resource book for the primary Tamil language classroom titled Pillaitamizh, which had been accepted into a similar program in our home state of Tamil Nadu. The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) or the Movement for Education for All, supported by the federal government, had acquired this book for its teachers and educators. Subsequently, we went on to work closely with them to develop a set of over 80 innovative picture books in Tamil for the 6-7 age group. We put our office library to good use – and our collection of picture books from across the world served as a valuable source of ideas and inspiration to those who worked on this project.

While working with the SSA, we were very conscious of what we could and could not do. Our skills are in the area of conceptualizing book projects, text and visual editing, and graphic design. We also invariably related a book’s core idea to the larger social world of which it is a part – calling attention to issues of history, social class and gender. So, while working with the state, we were glad to help where we could. We understood only too well the latter’s intent to put out books that answer diverse needs and address issues of social exclusion intelligently and creatively. But we realized that we could not print these books ourselves; nor produce them with the care that we bestow on all our titles. The state’s deadlines, its ambitious outreach plans and the fact that it wanted to do very large print-runs were matters that we had to build into our book projects – simplicity was the key.

This is also perhaps why Do! traveled where it did – its brilliant simplicity, the almost hieroglyphic style of Warli art that allows people across cultures to decipher its images as their own, and the fact that it links art with learning in an entirely unselfconscious way have made for its universal appeal. Now that it is in Mexico, we hope to have it accepted into the Indian school system as well.

Yet in all this, there is also much to feel poignant about. This is on account of the state of education in India and Mexico, where the hopeful things we have referred to are only small parts of a large, complex and somber picture. In Mexico too, like in India,, the state is the chief educator. Mexican children have a right to education and schooling is free for the most part. As we know from the Indian experience, the mere existence of a right does not get children into school, nor does it enable them to learn effectively – there are other factors that count, and this includes an attractive curriculum, interesting books and engaged teachers. They are as important for less privileged children as for more affluent ones. In India, we have not, until recently, paid sustained attention to these factors. Rather, teaching is often only a transfer of information, and school remains a context for shaping recalcitrant and often rebellious children into rigid obedience. Unsurprisingly, schools do not pay attention to or work with a child’s needs – sensory education is neglected, a child’s kinesthetic talents are ignored, and rote learning is routinely encouraged.  Also, given that Indian society is unequal and socially unjust, school becomes a place where children from poorer and less privileged homes are ‘taught’ their place. In Mexico, it would seem, the issues have been much the same.

In both places the problem of creating pedagogic models which take into account the diverse and often unjust worlds – that most children who go to public schools come from – remains to be solved. Debates about the medium of instruction at the school level, whether it ought to be English, or the national language Hindi, or the regional language have long haunted our public sphere. In Mexico, this debate also has to reckon with the presence of large indigenous communities that do not speak Spanish, and who, like the adivasis or original settlers of India, are poor, exploited, and often overlooked. Not being able to speak one’s language in the classroom or read textbooks that reflect their lives and worlds have kept adivasi children away from state schools in India. This appears true of Mexico as well.

On the other hand, active communities have come up with solutions where the state has failed. In Mexico’s south, in the province of Chiapas, indigenous communities under the leadership of the insurgent Zapatistas have evolved curricula in various native languages – drawing on their own traditions of art, mythology, and craft – which enable children to make critical sense of their present lives. In central India too, where such insurgent struggles are afoot, schools that address adivasi cultures and needs have come up. And here, folk memory, art, and fiction provide much of the content of the curriculum; apart from maths, science and the social sciences, these form the core of what children are taught to value.

Looked at in this context, Do! fits right in. It was all the more gratifying to learn that the book will appear in a bilingual edition in Mexico – in Spanish and Nahuatl, a native language.

V. Geetha
Director & Editor, Tara Books