School Run

Poverty brings hard choices. For many Indian girls it means that instead of going to school they stay at home looking after younger brothers and sisters while their parents are working. They have to find their chance to play and express themselves in between domestic work or long hours of child labourer. Vishrantwadi educational hostel in Pune was built to face this problem. It opened in 1991 and today has 83 students, aged between ten and seventeen. They attend local city schools where there is less caste prejudice and standards are higher than in the rural areas where most of them come from.

We ran workshops for a dozen girls from Vishrantwadi and one of the shyest, Vandana Mude stood out. With a camera in her hand she sprang to life and overcame her timidity. The next day we invited her to take us on a photographic journey - the walk that she and her friends make to and from school. She was accompanied by an important role model, Savita Gautam, who lives in the hostel and teaches the girls karate. Savita is in her early twenties and hopes to become a PE teacher. She took up karate when she was thirteen, despite being teased for refusing to conform to the usual model of an Indian girl. She is now passing on this independence to her students.

Vandana is eleven years old, and has been at the hostel for a year. Her father is a labourer and her mother does not work. Neither of her parents completed their education and her elder brother also dropped out of school to work at a petrol station. (Although government slogans on the back of buses exhort "Stop Child Labour", it remains a huge problem.)

Our snapshot of Vandana's day began with a slight detour, the Banana Leaf cafe, where we treated Vandana and Savita to lunch. This is in a new shopping mall, near to the hostel; one of the numerous signs to people from marginalised communities that India is changing rapidly, though not necessarily to their advantage. On the way when asked what she would like to eat, Vandana replied, "rice and dahl", the familiar staple food of her home.

However, once we were inside the neon lit restaurant, she plucked up courage and ordered vegetable curry and nan bread, followed by mango ice-cream with two real cherries on top. She remained awed, if fascinated, by the noisy glamour of the restaurant. This altered as soon as the meal was finished and we gave Vandana a digital camera. Suddenly her whole demeanour changed and instead of merely being a passive observer, she started to assert herself and became much more confident. She was taken seriously and took us on a journey through which she built her own unique picture of a world rich in relationships and connection.

We followed her to a pet shop opposite. For a moment, we became entangled in a playful bundle of puppies that the owners gamely released for us from their cage. In Vandana's hands the camera opened new doors. She grew in stature as we followed her through the everyday routes of her life: school; a cow nosing for food in the rubbish; a man asleep under a tree; an impoverished family in their makeshift home; laundry drying in the sun; visiting a sick friend; passing the masculine world of a barber's shop; a home-based biscuit factory where girls of Vanadana's age work when they should be playing; a sewing class back at the hostel where women from the slums are achieving new skills to improve their income.

Here is a portrait of the small details of Vandana’s world, captured by a delightful girl one December afternoon in India.

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