The team at Bookworm wanted more programming for parents within the library, a call that came from years of home visits and interactions with adults who mediate children’s worlds. While we agree that libraries are trusted spaces, they aren’t privileged spaces when competing with school and tuition centres. The team felt strongly that unless parents experience the possibilities of our library practice for themselves, they assume they already know what happens there, and this shapes whether they encourage their children to participate.
This was also a gentle wake-up call for my own practice, which has stayed child-centred more out of comfort than intention. Over 2024–25 I learned from Priya Naik, who runs our Vinay Jean Kalgutkar Community Library, how she built strong relationships with parents through adult-centred programming, much of it grounded in making things and sustaining conversation through make–talk–share. My own grounding is in texts, so when I took this on, I stayed close to what I knew.
I began with interactive read-alouds and conversations around texts, choosing selectively and listening closely to what parents wanted. Within a few months I had a sustained group at monthly sessions, arriving with familiarity and hope, setting aside the week’s routine. But as the pressure to keep programming mounted, I felt the read-alouds becoming just that: routine. When I asked the parents what they’d like instead, one said simply, “I’m happy to just come,” a sentiment others shared. It told me the group valued the space itself as much as any particular format, which gave me room to try something new.
Most of the parents I work with at the Chimbel library have shared their own educational journeys with me, which put them on the margins of literacy: schooled, but often not in the language of educational mobility, many leaving around Grade VII to find work and for girls, a few years later, marriage. Writing, then, was unlikely to be a comfortable mode of expression. Drama and role play felt just as unlikely: using their bodies to express themselves was almost entirely unexplored territory, and in a small community where women’s bodies are closely watched, not everyone was comfortable with that kind of activity. What was left was drawing, something we’ve found, over years of practice, to be primal and free-flowing when introduced gently. I chose Guided Drawing as the tool.
Guided Drawing is mediated through a text, read aloud to evoke visual responses that participants put down on paper. Each person then shares what resonated, what shaped their choice of colour, shape, and form, and what they’re left feeling, usually closed with a gallery walk and talk. Finding the right text took time: browsing our collection, I kept finding pieces that felt too young for the group, too culturally distant, or too thin to evoke strong imagery in a first session.
It was while I was turning this over that Anandita and I attended a Wipro Foundation Education Team meeting that opened with a poem by Vinod Kumar Shukla. Here is a link to the poem. I’d heard it before, but, as poetry demands, I checked my own response again, and found myself struck: by literature opening a workshop, by the choice of a Hindi poem, by its surprising tenderness about doing what one is capable of doing to connect despite barriers. But I also noticed a discomfort I couldn’t immediately place. It turned out to be the poem’s “I.” I’m wary of slipping into the role of saviour, and that wariness was quietly holding back my fuller enjoyment of the poem. Sitting with it longer, I realised what I was discomforted by was that the poet does not make explicit, that in reaching out to the other, the “I” is also kept from its own desperation. That reframing intrigued me, and I resolved to read more of Shukla’s work in translation to embark on more critical inner or outer conversations.
A few days later, that resolve paid off. I found a poem that felt right for the parent group, one that opens with जंगल के दिन भर के सन्नाटे में… I asked Asha Singh, an incredible academic who supports us as a colleague on our Hindi-belt library workshops, whether it would work. She was certain it would: the Hindi was accessible, and the imagery would provoke responses. I piloted the session with a group of Wipro Foundation partner organisations at a workshop in Bookworm, and knew afterward it would work with my parents in Chimbel too.
The pilot surfaced two things worth planning around. The first was the question of what a Mahua flower actually looks like. For many of us, drawing means replicating something close to the original, but Dilshad, for instance, didn’t know the Mahua was a tree, only that the poem told him it grew and fruited, so he drew a living, growing plant anyway. That was instructive: it taught me to also trust the parent group to make sense of the text through their own prior knowledge, since a personal, visual response is the whole point of Guided Drawing. I’d previously planned to show a video of the Mahua tree in its Central Indian forest setting beforehand, but dropped that from the final plan. We could also discuss this as well.
The second was a binary some participants drew between the forest and the “bazaar/village/town,” visible in the brightness of their colour palette, symbols, and mood. This came from the poem itself: a girl unafraid of the tiger while gathering Mahua flowers alone in the forest, but who feels afraid to go to the market alone to sell the flowers. The forest emerged in drawings idealised; the village/town carried the hardness of fear, pollution and cramped living. Yet no one in the pilot group actually lived in a forest, which made me wonder whether the poet was romanticising reality with this binary, or deliberately provoking us to question it. I didn’t resolve that question before the parent session; I simply made a note to hold the conversation open beyond the poem itself, so the group could sit with some tension that could potentially trigger a critical conversation.
That openness mattered in practice. The idea of a guided drawing began with some hesitation, until a parent who’d closed her shop for the session took charge: “Let us listen. If didi says we’ll see pictures in our mind and then put them down, let’s try that.” That single line did more than my careful explanations: the group visibly relaxed, and papers were pulled close. Everyone listened.
The discussion, before and after drawing, kept returning to the need to always be with other familiar humans. No one felt safe alone, either in the forest or market. All the participants were women who’d lived close to extended family before marriage and in tightly clustered settlements after, their sense of safety coming from living among others, even strangers. Danger lived outside: on the bus into town for work,where they had to jostle for space or avoid stares, walking to PTA meetings dreading the conversations that awaited, waiting for a husband to return from a transport trip, the daily anxiety of children coming home from school and tuition. Several women drew the return home from the market as their response to the poem, feeling a woman is only safe at home, provided a parent said, ‘the man does not drink.’
It was in the middle of that conversation, women speaking plainly about where danger lives and where safety comes from, that the group’s engagement with the poem turned a corner. A parent said something to the effect of the poet reminding us about being safe when we work close to the home. Her interpretation provoked another younger parent who has just begun to work outside the home to say, “We must also ask the adivasi girl if she is truly unafraid in the forest. First, I was afraid but now I take the bus to the city alone” It was a small question, but it did something large: it showed me that a personal response, freed through drawing, can build the confidence to question the text itself, rather than simply receive it. It compelled others who had settled into an understanding of where the adivasi girl was most safe to think again. Further, it settled for me my earlier tension that this poem is being written from the outside of the adivasi girls experience. Most importantly, to have parents new to text responses, questioning, turning a poem back on itself, was an outcome I did not fully expect even though this is exactly what library practice that involves critical conversations is all about. It was good to be reminded about what poetry can provoke when working with parents in the library.
Written by Sujata Noronha
July 2026