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- Sonal Kapoor spotlights the Protsahan India Foundation, which hosts storytelling and art workshops to support women in rewriting gender and caste narratives.
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At Protsahan India Foundation, creating art isn’t an extracurricular activity; it’s survival. Within the urban slums of Delhi, teenage girls pick up brushes not just to paint but to reclaim their own stories. In the art and storytelling workshop, they look to the fierce beauty of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and the resolution and resilience of Indian teachers and social reformers Savitribai Phule and Fatima Sheikh not as icons but as mirrors.
“When I met Frida on the canvas ... something in me opened” shares 17-year-old Deepa, who is participating in the organization's art and storytelling workshops. “She didn’t hide her face. She didn’t wait to be approved. And for the first time, I thought maybe I don’t need to be approved … Maybe I can be a little messy, a little unsure ... and still be whole.”
Deepa is one of a number of migrant girls aged 15 to 18 who have participated in Protsahan’s storytelling and art workshops. Within the feminist spaces of these art and storytelling workshops, trauma-informed facilitators and artists introduce girls to self-expression and self-reflection as a way to challenge social norms governing women’s relationships with their bodies, politics, and identity.
A typical session of the art and storytelling workshop begins with a short, interactive lesson introducing the feminist women icons through archival photographs, short YouTube films, artwork, and storytelling. Facilitators then guide the girls through reflective conversations on topics like: “What is beauty, and who gets to define it?” “How does our body carry memories of caste, control, or care?” “What parts of your identity do people ignore or erase?” “If you could paint your truth boldly, what would it look like?”
Following these discussions in the art and storytelling workshops, session leaders offer the girls paint, paper, mirrors, and time, often surrounded by music or poetry, to craft self-portraits that speak to their lived truths. The focus is not on artistic technique or perfection; the process is about emotional release and finding strength, resilience, and hope. Indian and Mexican cultures converge as girls are invited to blend Kahlo’s magical realism with India’s traditional folk artforms like Madhubani painting and Kalamkari textile printing. A self-affirming unibrow meets a bindi. The result is a redefinition of girlhood in India: unflinching, unapologetic, and free.
Read the full article about the Protsahan India Foundation by Sonal Kapoor at Stanford Social Innovation Review.