‘The Revolutionary Optimists’: Growing Up in the Indian Brickfield

“Salim used to tell me, “Shikha, there’s a place I go, where they teach art and stuff. Like puppets you make dance on a string.'” Remembering when she first heard of the school inside the brickfield, Shikha Patra slows down and glances up. “So I asked him,” she goes on, “‘Where is that?'”

Here 11-year-old Shikha turns to her off-screen interviewer in The Revolutionary Optimists, her face intent, emphasizing the significance of this moment in her short life. The scene to a shot packed with children and puppets, faces beaming as they watch Shikha manipulate a wooden marionette’s paddle. The frame adjusts, moving with her, then refocuses to show the man who’s teaching the kids “art and stuff.”

This is Amlan Ganguly, the lawyer who, in 1996, founded Prayasam, a child-driven community organization in the slums of Kolkata. He’s wearing a red baseball cap and crouches, watching every puppet move, then instructing the puppeteers. “You’re looking at him first, then you’re talking,” he says, “Practice moving your hands and talking at the same time.” It’s a concept central to Prayasam, doing more than one thing at the same time. It’s hardly a new one for the children who live here, as you see throughout The Revolutionary Optimists, screening 13 March at Lincoln Center, then opening on 29 March at Cinema Village, and airing in June on PBS. More often than not, they’re working multiple jobs, doing chores at home, working in the brickfield to help pay the rent, standing on long lines to fetch water from the community tap, and, if they’re lucky, going to school too.

All this makes for kids who are at once ambitious and hopeful, as well as exhausted and sometimes frustrated. The film, by Maren R. Monsen and Nicole Newnham, directs most of its storytelling energies toward Amlan, a charismatic and forthcoming subject, for the camera and also before his students. At home, he prepares lunch while his father — wearing a Dallas Cowboys t-shirt, sits at the kitchen table wit his newspaper. Amlan remembers his “vivacious” mother, and notes that while his father is “reticent,” he also “in his own way, supports me.” Ramesh speaks in his own interview: “He’s a mother’s son, totally,” he says, now wearing a blue dress shirt and seated before shelves filled with books and stuffed bears and snowglobes. “He was a slow beginner, a very slow starter.”

Here you glimpse what drives Amlan, who encourages his young charges to press forward even when those around them express doubts. He has them think about their lives as rivers, full of highs and lows: as they draw and color in pictures of rivers, mapping their lives, the film comes back to a focus on water: each day the kids must fetch it from a communal tap, and much of it is unclean, regularly making the squatters colony members sick. And so, in addition to learning how to dance and paint, take photographs and perform puppet shows, the kids at Prayasam also undertake the mapping of their community, going door to door, asking questions about daily habits and water usage. They mean to take the project to the local Councilor, hoping to gain access to clean water.

The children who appear in the film embrace this huge project enthusiastically — and for some time. Shikha and her classmate Salim Sheikh are 11 when the film begins, and by its end, they’re 14. They live with their mothers, who appear on camera occasionally to marvel at their achievements and, sometimes, to indicate just how hard it is for the children to achieve anything. When Salim is invited to present the group’s mapping project to Parliament, his mother smiles quietly in the background. She nods when someone observes she must be proud. “I never thought he would go so far,” she says, echoing Amlan’s fathers low affect.

Amlan has a theory about this. At a Prayasam board meeting (half the board members are children), he urges them to take heart in spite of obstacles and “reticent” adults. “The aspiration level,” he says, “has gone down. The community feels they don’t need anything better. They no longer have hope.” His earnest expression suggests he’s been through this particular low in his own river before. “If a person gets used to something bad, he no longer hopes for something good.” The children nod. They want to keep hoping.

That’s not to say that such optimism is easy. While the film keeps focused on Amlan, it sometimes loses track of the children with whom he’s working. Whether this is a function of their adult guardians’ choices or heir own, you see the difficulties and some consequences. Kajal Kahar, who works in the brickfield, carrying loads of bricks atop her head, becomes the only wage-earner at age 14, when her mother is no longer able to work. While Amlan works out a system so that she can study at home, it’s clear this presents hardships, even in brief scenes that show Kajal studying late at night by dim lamp-light, or her mother hovering in a doorway, silent.

Amlan maintains his hope that Kajal will be able to make her own choices, even as her mother suggests that selling her into marriage remains an option. The girls here have the hardest time: Priyanka Mandal loves to dance and study, but leaves school before she graduates. This disappoints Amlan, who knows that at home, her brother is abusive and she “isn’t getting any kind of shelter anyone.” She insists that she’ll go back to school, that everything is fine. The camera pans back and forth between them as Amlan expresses his disappointment that she’s not using her “brains.” Priyanka looks away, without an answer. When you spot her later with her abusive new husband, you can fill in what she doesn’t say.

This is the balance the film manages, celebrating the efforts at Prayasam and the successes, while never losing sight of the crises that define daily life for the kids growing up in the Kolkata slums.

RATING 8 / 10