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

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 mdash build a robotThe Grade 6 students from Ascend International School BKC Mumbai have created a robotic puppet theatre called String Theory combining robotics with Kalsutri Bahulya mdash Maharashtrarsquos traditional stringpuppet art Their project was developed around this yearrsquos World Robot Olympiad theme ldquoRobots Meet Culturerdquo and has taken them from the Mumbai regional round to the national stageFor Gupta the connection between the two forms was almost obvious ldquoThe 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 puppeteerrsquos hands dordquoThe project also introduced the trio to a tradition they knew little about ldquoHonestly almost nothingrdquo admits Contractor ldquoI 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 allrdquoThat changed when they met puppeteer Chetan Gangavane and learnt about Kalsutri Bahulya ldquoThe thing that shocked me most was how few families are left doing Kalsutri Bahulyardquo says Contractor ldquoWhen 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 differentrdquoTheir research also changed how they viewed the traditional puppeteerrsquos equipment ldquoOnce 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 motorrdquo says KothariTheir 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 ScratchUnderneath the childfriendly interface however is some serious engineering ldquoThe 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 edgerdquo Kothari explains ldquoInside 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 handsrdquoIt took plenty of trial and error to get there ldquoTurning It sounds like the easy one and it was the worstrdquo Kothari says ldquoWhen we turned the puppet the whole housing spun and all the wires twisted up with itrdquo The team eventually redesigned the mechanism so that only the internal shaft rotates Contractor sums up the process more simply ldquoI think we broke more things than we builtrdquoMeeting Gangavane helped these child masterminds see technology as a way of extending tradition ldquoWe asked him straight out whether robots were replacing his art because we were a bit scared of the answerrdquo says Gupta ldquoHe 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 projectrdquoTheir 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 ldquoThe best part was not actually winningrdquo says Gupta ldquoMore 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 moverdquo