Mahantesh Madar

This Project was Terminated by IFA and the Project Coordinator is ineligible to apply to IFA in the future.

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA will engage sixth grade students of the Morarji Desai Residential School in Devarabelakere village in Davanagere district in the study of the production of cotton and history of cotton mills in the region through local stories and folk songs. Mahantesh Madar is the Coordinator for this project.

Mahantesh Madar, a theatre practitioner from Bagalkot district, has a training from Adima Performing Arts Center in Kolar. He has worked under Pramod Shiggaon, Manjunath Badegera, Basavalingaiah Hiremath, and KG Mahabaleshwara as a musician, set designer and as an actor. He has also written and directed plays for children in Rangayana, Myosre. During pandemic he has been part of many virtual theatre workshops.  

Davanagere is a city of cotton. There was a time once when it was filled with cotton mills started around 1936 where each mill provided employment for 15 to 20 thousand people. They made vast contributions to the development of the city as well as its people. Unfortunately, the mills were shut down as a result of modernisation and demand for foreign goods. The manufacturing of cotton reduced and people lost their employment returning to agricultural activities. The projects exploring the journey of cotton mills in Davanagere will provide an experiential learning experience for students. They will study and document the history of the mills in their own words as well as interview villagers and collect stories and folk songs on cotton. Students will be engaged in field visits to cotton farms, closed mills, manufacturing units and retail clothing shops. They will be also participate in a workshop by resource persons on topics such as history of cotton across the country, various kinds of cotton plants, uses of cotton, cotton mills in the city and so on. Apart from this, workers who spent more than 40 years of their life working in cotton mills will be invited to interact with students and share their stories.

All these activities will culminate into a theatre production, to bolster their understanding of the lessons in their Kannada language curriculum. Students will participate in a theatre workshop to devise plot, learn about set and property, music, costumes, and makeup for the performance. This project will encourage creative thinking among students and provide self-confidence, decision making ability, and self-reliance.  

The outcome of the project will be a performance in the presence of school staff and villagers. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will include photographs and video documentation of the performance and the entire project.

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Education programme in the manner in which it attempts to connect students and their curriculum to the ecologies within which they are located.

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.