Mumbai schoolchildren build a robot to revive interest in Maharashtra’s traditional puppetry

(Left to right) Anaya Gupta, Rajveer Kothari, and Kian Contractor

At 11, Anaya Gupta, Rajveer Kothari, and Kian Contractor are already asking what happens when an art form starts disappearing? Their answer is decidedly 21st century - build a robot.

The Grade 6 students from Ascend International School, BKC, Mumbai, have created a robotic puppet theatre called String Theory, combining robotics with Kalsutri Bahulya - Maharashtra's traditional string-puppet art. Their project was developed around this year's World Robot Olympiad theme, "Robots Meet Culture", and has taken them from the Mumbai regional round to the national stage.

For Gupta, the connection between the two forms was almost obvious. "The theme this year was Robots Meet Culture, so we had to pick something Indian. Most people were doing art or dance. I kept thinking about puppets because when I was younger, my stories came alive through finger and hand puppets, and then somewhere it all became screens. Then we realised something. Puppets already move. Robots move. A puppet is kind of already a robot, someone is just doing the moving by hand. So instead of inventing something new we thought, what if the motors did what the puppeteer's hands do?"

The project also introduced the trio to a tradition they knew little about. "Honestly, almost nothing," admits Contractor, "I think I had seen Rajasthani Kathputli somewhere, the ones with the big skirts. That was it. I did not know Maharashtra had its own puppet tradition at all."

That changed when they met puppeteer Chetan Gangavane and learnt about Kalsutri Bahulya. "The thing that shocked me most was how few families are left doing Kalsutri Bahulya," says Contractor, "When you hear about something disappearing you think it means less popular. But, it actually means there are people right now who are the last ones who know how to do it. That is very different."

Their research also changed how they viewed the traditional puppeteer's equipment. "Once we met Mr Gangavane and saw the cross he uses, we stopped thinking of it as a craft thing. It is a machine. It has axes. It just runs on a human instead of a motor," says Kothari.

Their robotic theatre has three components. The String stage controls the puppet, the String cross allows a person to operate it using a joystick, while puppeteer workshop String Studio, lets users programme movements by dragging blocks, much like Scratch.

Underneath the child-friendly interface, however, is some serious engineering. "The puppet hangs from a gantry made of metal extrusions. One NEMA17 stepper motor pulls a timing belt to slide the puppet left and right across the stage, and limit switches stop it from going off the edge," Kothari explains, "Inside the unit, one motor makes the puppet jump up and down, another one turns it left and right, and two small N20 motors lift the hands."

It took plenty of trial and error to get there. "Turning. It sounds like the easy one and it was the worst," Kothari says, "When we turned the puppet, the whole housing spun and all the wires twisted up with it." The team eventually redesigned the mechanism so that only the internal shaft rotates. Contractor sums up the process more simply, "I think we broke more things than we built."

Meeting Gangavane helped these child masterminds see technology as a way of extending tradition. "We asked him straight out whether robots were replacing his art, because we were a bit scared of the answer," says Gupta, "He said technology has an honest place in keeping it alive, in museums and airports and places like that. That changed how we saw our own project."

Their automated show, The Stolen Ring, uses the familiar characters of Akbar and Birbal, making the traditional form accessible to children. After winning the Mumbai regional round, the team showcased their theatre at the Museum of Solutions on Independence Day, performing seven shows for around 200 people. "The best part was not actually winning," says Gupta, "More than 100 of them tried the String Cross themselves. Almost none of them had heard of Kalsutri Bahulya that morning. By the evening many of them made a puppet move."