Public presentation by Samarth: Thursday, 6th November 2025 | 6 - 8pm
Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation invites you to a special public presentation by Samarth, recipient of the Leela Mukherjee Artist-Educator Grant 2024, as he reflects on a year of working with children at The Happy Children’s Library, Seem, Uttarakhand.
Jaya and Atul Shah, founders of The Happy Children’s Library, will also be joining Samarth to speak about their vision for their library and their collaboration.
Thursday, 6th November 2025 | 6 - 8pm
Venue: Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation
K-29, Upper Ground floor, Lajpat Nagar 2, New Delhi
This event is free and all are welcome
About the project
In February of 2024, Samarth, a graphic novelist and arts-educator based in Uttarakhand, began conducting weekly arts and comics workshops at the Happy Children’s Library, located in the village of Seem in the Nainital district. The motivation, for him, was an opportunity to bridge the divide he sensed between his practice and his context. In his words : “i couldn’t see comics in the environment around me, and the environment around me was missing in comics.”. These workshops at the Happy Children’s Library offered him an opportunity to find the relevance of his medium beyond the confines of his desk. Across the year and 10 months that have followed, over 30 children have worked with him closely, and the outcome has been a wonderfully rich immersion into the context of Kumaon. Since the workshops focus on visual narratives, the activities have ranged from working with comics, picture books, puppetry, animated films—enabling the children to not only work with stories but also understand what good storytelling is and what it can evoke in people. After all, the best storytellers are the ones who see the world with curiosity and compassion, and that has been the guiding principle of these workshops. The role of an arts educator is invariably transgressive in such environments, and so these spaces prove to hold the potential for much more than just ‘artefact building’. These workshops have presented an opportunity for the children to depict their own lives, and in the process, turn a more thoughtful, critical eye at the microcosm that they inhabit.
The Happy Children’s Library was opened in 2016 by Jaya and Atul Shah as an extension to their home in Seem. In the last 8 years the library has expanded, with the main reading room now housing over 1600 books, an additional studio space and a small accommodation arrangement for volunteers. Today, it caters to roughly 150 children, all of them coming from either Seem, or one of the many adjacent villages. Over this time it has grown to be a second home, a safe haven and a space of nourishment and growth for all the people associated with it. The space is such that one does get absorbed, sucked in, and it is difficult to place what gives it that retentive quality — the children, the environment, Atul and Jaya themselves. There is an abundance of love that exudes from the space and the people that make it.
Children pour into the library a short while after their school closes for the day, and on holidays one would find them reading, studying, or working away on a project from as early as 8 a.m in the morning. Membership at the Happy Children’s Library is free, or rather, the system of ‘membership’ doesn’t exist in a systematised manner—the doors are open to anyone eager and willing to spend time learning. The members vary in age, the youngest being 7 and the oldest being 18. Most of the children are enrolled in the nearest government schools, and the rest go to locally run private schools. The infrastructure in both, the government and private schools, is far less than ideal, with a lack of available teachers and an inadequate quality of teaching. These are the gaps that the library strives to bridge. The library premises is also used to host workshops in sports, theatre, dance, and art, all of them being conducted by professionals working in various parts of Kumaon, or volunteers who come to work at the library for shorter durations.
The Leela Mukherjee Artist-Educator Grant was instituted by Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation with the support of Welham Old Boys’ Society in 2024. It is an annual grant that seeks to support artist-educators in India who are engaged in developing and running an art education project with school-aged children (5- 18 years of age), either within or outside the classroom. The grant encourages artist-educators whose project integrates local knowledge, and lived environments and experiences into their learning and teaching methods.