8. The Sarnath Girls

I had brought a white children's dress from Switzerland. It was one of the dresses I had sewn for a group of migrant girls, used for an art project that confronted them as personalities and as a group. My plan was to repeat this work, done with girls from mixed cultural backgrounds living in Bern, Switzerland, with a group of Indian girls. I was curious to see if this project would take a different route, if there would be similarities in expression, and the impact of the very different cultural environments in which these two groups of girls grew up. Most of the Indian girls I would work with are farmer kids, growing up in a society which postes special difficulties for girls and women.
    I had brought the white dress as a sample, to have more of them sewn by a tailor in India. The girls would have to wear them to protect their own clothes while painting.

From early August until the end of September I worked with sixty girls at a school in Sarnath, a town outside Varanasi, and we concluded the project with a huge exhibition in the school garden. It was apparently the first ever art exhibition at this school, and the girls were really proud to display their artwork.
    Since I had mentioned in my speech at the opening, in front of the thousand school kids, that these girls had expressed their inner life with their colourful paintings, one of the girls confronted me directly, and asked which of her paintings would show her inner world best. When I pointed out one of them, she contemplated it for a while and said: «Then is my heart very colourful».
    It was a mutually enriching experience. We shared the same human condition: the insecurity to express ourselves as well as the uncertainty of pleasing all others. But there was much more uniting than dividing us. The girls wanted to be taken serious, to be accepted, so they could show their creations with confidence. The trouser, which I was wearin here mostly, is still full of blue colour stains that are not washing off. They remind me of the Sarnath girls. Of Singha, who was never sure of herself and kept asking «Good, aunty, good?», of Priyanka, who worked intensely and presented me a beautiful card she had designed. A landscape with butterflies hanging from tiny strings. Into the landscape she had written: «You taught us very nice things. I will miss you very much. I hope you will must come here soon.» And all the other girls, who again and again looked at me with large eyes, having had a first chance at artistic self expression.