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The first thing that catches your eye and ear at the end of a long lane in Shankarwadi, Jogeshwari is a narrow flight of stairs and Nazaria’s Kahani Lab, and all the chatter and excitement from inside.
90 per cent of leadership positions in India media are held by upper caste groups (Oxfam India 2019). It matters that the stories we see and hear come from places that own them. Despite this, marginalised communities continue to be systematically excluded from mainstream media. Run by a collective of artists, media practitioners and educators, the Nazaria Arts Collective is a safe space above all. Nazaria equips youth from marginalised communities to be creative, and build storytellers with strong voices.
"In 2022, my Co-Founder Riddhi, and I were Teach For India Fellows, and as we spent time engaging with more than a hundred teenagers, we realized that our students had so much to say and creativity that was not being tapped into. Nazaria was born out of this realization; that marginalised teenagers desperately need safe spaces to express themselves and that media plays a profound role in their lives."
Nandini Kochar, Co-Founder of Nazaria
Nazaria is a homegrown organisation enabling marginalised youth to emerge as the next generation of storytellers who reclaim narratives in mainstream media. Nazaria’s Kahani Lab, a small incubator in the form of a media lab, becomes the catalyst in change and education, while hosting their flagship Summer Film School that includes a fiction filmmaking programme, 'Reimagine', and a non-fiction filmmaking programme, 'Khoj'. Beyond education also lies the real world impact that Nazaria brings to fore.
"Nazaria has given me the confidence and power to express my opinions. Writing has made me more attentive, as everything around us tells a story!"
Priya Jha (Earned a scholarship to pursue a Creative Writing Course at St Andrews, Scotland)
“Our youth have begun to emerge as job-ready media freelancers: taking on paid media gigs through which they are able to support and run their households,” says Kochar.
While magic brews in Kahani Lab, it’s not limited to there. Media Express is a 3-month media literacy programme for secondary students in Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation government schools and enables them to emerge as both critical consumers and makers of media. Also empowering female voices through storytelling is the Sakhi Radio, a podcast led by and co-created with the women of three low-income neighborhoods in Mumbai — Shankarwadi, Kandivali and Saki Naka.
An ode to subaltern oral storytelling traditions and daily neighborhood gup-shup, the podcast aims to nurture a safe space for dialogue, community, solidarity, joy and active listening — because we could all use more women at the margins talking about the things that matter to them.
Arundhati Roy once said, “There's really no such thing as the ‘voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
The Nazaria Arts Collective's philosophy is simple: if marginalised youth are equipped with quality media training and social justice education, their voices and stories can transform not only our Nazaria, or our way of seeing, but also create a 'Zaria' or a means to claim what has been denied to them.
The students and facilitators at Kahani Lab firmly believe that their stories can be told in their voices and on their terms. Every thing they do is a step towards claiming what has been denied to them for so long.
You can follow and donate to Nazaria here.
