Diorama presentations by Shishubharati Students

Should you have missed (or loved) the Peabody Essex Museum’s India show a few months back, a group of middle-schoolers had you covered on May 15th with quite a show. Shishubharati, the school of Indian language and culture, held its annual seventh grade diorama presentation for parents, visitors, and a discerning panel of teachers.

In the gymnasium at Lexington High School, the students individually presented topics of their own choosing. From interfaith conflicts in Northern India to the budding Indian space program, they chose topics based only on their personal whims. For practical reasons, the teachers, Sulochana Devadas, Sunil Lulla and Rama Neti, intervened only to clarify scale and importance of the students’ selections; the economy of India was too broad a topic, while Amitabh Bachhan’s dancing was best left to the swooning baby boomers. Certain topics had many takers, nonetheless. As in previous years, many of the girls studied aspects of Indian dance, and some boys did cricket. The ancient surgeon Sushruta, a perennial hit, was conspicuously absent from this year’s presentations.

            Given a really big box, each student created a 3D visual to complement the textual blurbs. On the final Sunday, students individually presented to an attentive horde as it toured the displays. Some read off note cards and others improvised. Seventh grader Akshita Ramachandran narrated some of the Tamil epic Silappadikaram for her project chronicling the evolution of the Tamil language. She said she chose the topic to “realize the history behind my language,” which she also studies at Shishubharati. This, she told me as visitors were roaming freely about the dioramas, a simulated museum setting.

            Pallavi Krishnamurthy made her diorama about the Mumbai riots in the 1990s. “I never really knew the details…why they occurred.” Having completed the project, she said, “I was able to find out enough to make my own opinions.” Ideally, that was the goal of the project: to guide students’ interests in such a way that they might be tempted to study them on their own. Lalita Devadas synthesized another one of her activities with her diorama. She studied the nine emotions of dance, and portrayed each of the nine on elegant masks. Previously, she said, “I never realized that in the Natyasastra they specifically labeled nine emotions.” That discovery in turn affected her approach to dance.

            On another end of the spectrum, Rucha Khanolikar created an Indian food pyramid. “I eat Indian food a lot and I wanted to know how good it was for me.” She found that “some [Indian foods] are really bad, especially the snacks.” She also found that one serving of butter chicken had the same number of calories as a Double Cheeseburger from McDonald’s.

            With these seventh grade presentations and many others, Shishubharati began to wrap up a year of learning. Over the next two weeks, students have final exams in both their language and culture classes. Next year’s group of seventh grade culture students will present their dioramas right around May of 2012. Online registration for the 2011-12 school year opens July 1.

Siddharth Hiregowdara, a Shishubharati alumnus, volunteers in the Lexington branch’s seventh grade culture class. He can be reached at sidhire@gmail.com.

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