Stages of Play: Studio Safdar and Children's Art

Studio Safdar was the realization of Hashmi’s long-held desire to build a training ground for street theatre, offering both infrastructure and inspiration to Delhi’s creative communities. A crucial street in the capital’s cultural centre, Mandi House, was renamed after him, in recognition of his achievements as a street theatre artist and the street’s own storied history as a site of protest and citizen-led resistance movements.

Janam set up the space to provide rehearsal facilities, training programs, and access for underprivileged youth. Since its inauguration in 2012, Studio Safdar has facilitated performances, workshops, exhibitions, and community engagement, serving as a nucleus for socially conscious theatre in Delhi.

The Annual Theatre Festival: Shadipur Natak Utsav

A hallmark of Studio Safdar is its Shadipur Natak Utsav, an annual theatre festival that foregrounds community involvement and diversity. Unlike conventional festivals, the plays are curated by a committee made up of local Shadipur residents, who are trained by the Studio in curation and dramaturgy. Curators for the 2025 edition include Kamlesh Kumari, who is a retired employee of M. T. N. L., and a resident of Shadi Khampur; Dheeraj, who is a tailor by profession, and Teena, who is a student. This commitment ensures the festival stays accessible and relevant to its neighbourhood audience. Productions come from multiple Indian cities, representing both amateur and established groups.

Kitaab Ghar

Studio Safdar’s commitment to fostering community engagement and cultural literacy extends beyond theatre and activism into the realm of children’s education, epitomised by its vibrant children’s library, known as Kitaab Ghar. Established in May 2015, the library functions every Sunday morning and is designed to introduce neighbourhood children to the world of books and collective storytelling, creating a welcoming space for curiosity and creativity.

The children’s library also intertwines with Studio Safdar’s annual theatre festival, supporting educational outreach and sometimes directly contributing to performances and storytelling events. Through its work, Kitaab Ghar embodies the belief that community spaces can nurture not only audiences, but future artists and cultural advocates, ensuring the ethos of SAHMAT and Studio Safdar endures for the next generation.

Pioneering modern Indian artists like Chittaprosad, Asit K. Halder, Jamini Roy and Abanindranath Tagore engaged deeply with the visual language of children’s art as part of a broader effort to rejuvenate artistic practices in India. They frequently illustrated children’s books; and in Tagore’s case, also wrote stories for young readers, drawing from oral and folk traditions, mythology, and historical narratives, many of which were documented or written down during the period of colonial rule. Their work embraced the qualities of simplicity, immediacy, and spontaneity: traditionally understood to be the hallmarks of children's drawings. And they incorporated a playful spirit of whimsy, caricature and 'nonsense' that challenged colonial and rationalist norms in both literature and art, especially those that were promoted in the colonial art schools of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, with which most of the artists were associated as students or teachers. In the late colonial period, artists across the world, such as Paul Klee (exhibited in Calcutta's iconic Bauhaus show in 1922, along with Tagore), would also express similar ideas about the potential of children's art.

Postcolonial Childhoods

These sensibilities extended into the postcolonial era, as artists continued to question the rationalist frameworks of state planning and development. Through a deliberately child-like irreverence for utilitarian forms and orderly design—often imposed by bureaucrats in isolation—artists opened up space for imagining alternative, even anarchic, ways of engaging with a newly independent India, where political liberation was interpreted as a license for creative liberation. This playful yet potent critique, evident in the work of modernists like K. S. Kulkarni, Prabhakar Barwe, Madhvi Parekh and Pratibha Dakoji, reflected the loosening of control that came with the end of colonial rule in 1947. For artists like Parekh, the link extends to earlier figures like Jamini Roy, through her nostalgic evocation of rural idylls that were seen through the eyes of a child. Holding on to the memory of that vision constituted a central impulse for her bold, formal configurations.