Changing a girl's life, one kitchen garden at a time

This is not a fairy tale like Jack and the Amazing Beanstalk. There is nothing magical about the bottle gourds and sheem and pui saag Monika Barman grows in her little kitchen garden in a small village in Cooch Behar in northern Bengal. But those unexceptional vegetables, part of daily fare in homes across Bengal, have proved to be unlikely stepping stones into a brave new future for Monika.When Monika failed to get through her school leaving examinations a couple of years ago it seemed the end of the road for her. Her father did not have the Rs 250 she needed to reenroll the year after. Her elder sister Kanika was already a mother at sixteen. The family started to look for a decent husband for Monica as well. As her father says “A girl is not something you keep around at home.”It’s tempting to say a bottle gourd changed everything.That is obviously a gross oversimplification but the kitchen garden is one of the ways an NGO named Landesa helps empower young women in rural Bengal. “What’s happening while she is growing her garden is at the first level she is providing food for her family and the family is eating better. And at the second level while she is learning gardening skills she is learning her rights. She is learning she has the right to inherit land. She is learning it’s illegal for her to be forced to be married before she’s eighteen,” says Megan Mylan.[caption id="attachment_1848295" align="alignleft" width="380"] A screengrab from the film. Agencies.[/caption]Mylan is an Oscar-winning filmmaker. And her latest film is After My Garden Grows about Monika Barman and her kitchen garden. Mylan’s Oscar was for Smile, Pinki and she won it for Short Documentary the same year Slumdog Millionaire swept the awards. “It was really embraced by Indian audiences and I was able to translate the silly excitement about the Oscar into some meaningful awareness of the issues in the film.”That film was about poor children with cleft palates and the NGO that finances surgeries to fix them. That transformation is dramatic and visual and a feel-good story right there for everyone to see. After My Garden Grows is about change that’s far more subtle. “If it had been a Hollywood movie as soon as she made the first sale her father would have given her a high five and they would have embraced. But that’s just not the relationship here.”When Monika takes her vegetables to market for the first time, she makes a modest 60 rupees at the market on that first outing. But then her father makes Rs 200 on a good day when he catches some fish to sell. It’s not like Monika becomes the Gourd Queen of Bengal and sets up a flourishing organic empire. “I had friends joke if she only could get those organic girl-empowerment greens to the Berkeley farmer’s market she would make a mint,” laughs Mylan.The change, says Supriya Chatterjee of Landesa, is about perception. “The big reason for vulnerability at home for girls is their valuation is low,” he says. “Parents think girls are just there to be married off and then they will have no more contribution to the family.”Monika is one of 50,000 young women changing that preconception.And her biggest ally might be her own sister Kanika. “My father sees me and knows and understands now that you should not just marry her off ,” she says as she cradles her toddler. “My sister had a lot of desires and wishes,” says Monika looking at her. “But after marriage, a child that’s all finished. You can’t do what you want at your in-laws home.”Mylan says she did not want to demonize the father. “Tradition and economics told him the best he could be a good father was to marry her off, to find another family to take care of her.” And she says at no point did she want to turn Monika’s garden into a silver bullet that would magically fix all the problems that beset girls in rural poverty most acutely.She laughs as she remembers one young woman at the anganwadi discussion group complaining that her sister waited to finish school before getting married and now has neither a job nor a husband. There are no sure fixes. But the larger truth is undeniable. There’s value in allowing a girl the chance to finish her childhood before she becomes a wife and mother.Monika is getting more than that chance. The young teenager for whom Cooch Behar was a big town has flown to Delhi and Mumbai, given answers with great poise at receptions at five star hotels, hobnobbed with Maneka Gandhi, Naina Lal Kidwai, Kiran Rao and most excitingly for her Bengali filmstar Ranjit Mullick. But then she will go back to her garden and life as usual in her little village of Bhutkura.But it will be a little different. “My father is not looking for a husband for her right now,” says Kanika. She is back in school and she will get another chance to clear than examination. “It’s my last chance. If I cannot make it then it’s the end of my studies,” says Monika.However even that was a choice she didn’t even have a year ago. “Changing social norms does not happen with the sale of one bottle gourd,” admits Mylan. And then she adds with a smile “But it’s also not impossible.”You can see the complete film After My Garden Grows on www.growagirl.in