Nineteen-year-old Ahana Sood aims to inject new life into the folk form of nautanki
A dying art form might just have got a lease of life thanks to a 19-year-old theatre enthusiast, Ahana Sood. The folk art of nautanki dates back to the 16th century and played an important role in India’s freedom struggle. It continued to present social messages in an entertaining package with songs, dance and drama and is said to be the inspiration for Bollywood. However, today it has lost favour in face of modern technologies and tastes. All might not be lost though as this aspiring social entrepreneur has now taken it upon herself to revive it.
Ahana has founded ART NAY (Association for Revival of Traditional Nautanki Among Youth), a theatre group that works for and with nautanki artistes to save the art from an untimely death and to create a future audience for it. “Interactions with grieving nautanki artistes struggling to earn their livelihood in this culturally reputed field gave me the idea,” says Ahana, who was a class X student at Heritage School, Gurgaon, when she first discovered nautanki.
“It was on a visit to Thathiya, the birth place of Gulab Bai, the first woman to perform nautanki,” she recalls. “As an actor and a theatre enthusiast, I was blown away by the magnitude of it all and saddened that I was previously unaware of this magnum opus.”
After completing school, Ahana decided to take a year’s break to follow her passion and set up ART NAY even as she readied for a career in social entrepreneurship. Armed with pre-college courses on the subject from Columbia Business School and Brown University, she paved new ground with ART NAY.
Talking of the problems plaguing the industry, Ahana shares, “After extensive research I found that there were three major issues — lack of monetary resources, lack of awareness and lack of performance opportunities.”
So ART NAY’s business plan has a three-pronged focus in initiating fundraisers in schools. “live performance in schools spreads awareness of the art form. The media helps the movement by spreading the word. We have also convinced schools to take nautanki as an artform in their respective theatre societies and do at least one performance each year,” she says.
The movement has begun with institutions such as the Millennium School Noida, with the support of the Sangeet Natak Akademi. Another 15 schools in 11 Indian cities have signed up to further this initiative this year. ART NAY is also working on providing artistes with increased performance opportunities.
The group aims to reach 30,000 students this year and “eventually expand ART NAY’s reach throughout the country”.
Is nautanki still relevantIJ “In today’s world, nautanki performances can be used to convey social messages such as women’s empowerment, birth control, educating the girl child, toilets for women, Swachh Bharat campaign, HIV prevention, alcohol addiction, and many more burning issues,” feels the founder of ART NAY. “They can also be used as economical forms of entertainment for depicting mythological and other historical and contemporary stories to today’s generation.”
Will it survive the test of timeIJ Ahana insists so as she persists in her struggle to keep this tool of political awakening and social reformation alive.