When questioned about her playtime activities Zainab Makeen, student of a Government School in Karachi’s Shireen Jinnah Colony, said, “We often play alaish palaish, pakram pakrai or haathi ki soondh.” Karachi is a concrete jungle which is surrounded by the squalid overpopulated, ill planned dwellings/slums that can barely sustain the people compressed within its confines. So how and where do the mohalla children play, express, explore, learn and make sense of the world?

A one of its kind art-centred community service project in Karachi, ‘Bachon Se Tabdeli’, exhibited recently at the VM Art Gallery examined the existence and role of public spaces in the lives of children from low-income communities. Working on the premise that “children are active social agents who on a daily basis produce and sustain public spaces in their neighbourhoods” project organiser Shahana Rajani and her team comprising artists Madiha Sikander, Rabeya Jalail, Sadia Jamal and Fahim Rao collaborated with class V students at 11 government schools in areas of Gulshan-i-Iqbal, Lyari, North Nazimabad, PECHS and Shireen Jinnah Colony to document their perspectives.

Artist and art educator Sikander pointed out that the school children “used very poorly illustrated books which limit their imagination.” The Prince Claus Fund sponsored project workshops motivated students to identify their play activities and intimate surroundings and then visualise/translate them on paper as post and greeting cards, posters, picket signs, pop up pictures and collaborative map making.

Creative and crammed with content the exhibited artworks were rich in detail and invited up close reading rather than casual browsing. Rendered as basic crayon coloured line drawings they opened up as lively itineraries of objects, people, places and fixtures the children cherished and interacted with on their journey from home to school to play spaces.

The role of public spaces and disadvantaged children

“I actually got to know the neighbourhood through the way they talked about it and expressed it through their drawings,” remarked printmaker, IVS faculty and Fulbright Scholar, Rabeya Jalil, while describing her six-week interactive work sessions with the students of government schools in Shireen Jinnah Colony.

Visual disclosures of routes and gallis the children regularly walked through, the play spaces where they hung out with friends and the games they played made for some insightful revelations about the cultural and social landscape of the mohallas and colonies in question. Facing greater restrictions from parents girls opted for safer, closer to home play spaces like the building stairways, rooftops or home courtyards (where they played alaish palaish, pakram pakrai or haathi ki soondh) even if their heart was in the exciting matches being played in the streets.

With cricket and football as top choices, boys enjoyed the freedom of playing in grounds, empty plots or improvised spaces. Childish picture postcards of Peoples Ground, KPT Ground, Ganji and Bhayyia Grounds defined the precariousness of play spaces in troubled Lyari. Clandestinely playing under or dunking in the neighbourhood tankis (water tanks) emerged as another favourite. A drawing of a very crowded residence quarter containing a small well lit washroom was striking.

Another art educator Sadia explained, “It is indeed unusual for a child to leave his entire home aside to lavish attention on a bathroom. The boy when queried explained that apart from parents, ‘we are 12 siblings — this is the only space where I can enjoy some privacy’.”

At each school children worked together to draw a map of their neighbourhood which translated as an amazing bird’s-eye views of the localities. By far the most aesthetically appealing the map by class V students of B.F. Cabral Government Boys Primary School comprised an engaging medley of images detailing the Lyari and Lee Market gates, revealing typical interiors of various students’ houses, ladoo, mithai and cheez ki dukans, a host of mosques, playgrounds, a Malabari hotel, utensil shop, darzi, Medina Bakery, Ismail and Usman parks and very imaginative portrayals of coaches, buses, rickshaws, trucks, cars, bicycles and police vans, Chippa ambulance numbers 1020 as well as qabaristan enclosures.

Art as tool of empowerment was visible in the stories and experiences of these students from localities that are routinely disregarded or in the news for all the wrong reasons — criminal activities, sectarian violence, etc. The artworks highlighted the natural creative urge inherent in all children, expression of which is their basic human right. ‘Bachon Se Tabdeli’ has made obvious this overlooked segment of humanity — the children of government schools who too have the potential to evolve as responsible citizens of a nation — provided they are given the opportunity to do so.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, June 8th, 2014