ShIt is a sad Bengali ditty: "They told me it was child's play/ And then they sent me far away/ Now they never come to see me. / I'm a wife, I have a new role/No longer daddy's little girl/ How I wish I could be the old me." When Sunita Mondal first heard this song, the 11-year-old didn't quite understand it. Some told her it was about her best friend Mamoni Das and the girls she used to play with in their village of Gobindapur in West Bengal's Nadia district. Then "Kalachand sir" explained to Sunita the lyrics he had written. It was indeed about many of her friends-those who were married off to elderly men in the neighbouring villages because their families couldn't take care of them. "But Kalachand sir said this would not be my fate," says the Santhal girl. Now when Sunita sings the song on festive occasions, it is poignant with meaning.

SHOW IS ON: Das' actors are in the vanguard of a quiet revolution in Nadia

For Kalachand Das it is a satisfying reward. This theatre enthusiast is staging a quiet revolution in the impoverished pockets of Nadia. Das quit his job in a Kolkata development organisation in 1997 and carried out a survey of his home district. He found that in Nadia, plagued by poverty, caste problems and every ills of backwardness, children were the hardest hit. Child marriages and child labour were rampant. In some areas 80 per cent of the children worked in houses or shops, tilled land or pulled rickshaws.

Das targeted these children and decided to school them through the medium best known to him-theatre. "I wanted them to study, grow up and make a good life for themselves," he says. "But the message had to reach them in a way that it would be ingrained in their minds forever." With the help of local clubs, schoolteachers and panchayat members, Das went from house to house, asking the villagers to send their children to his workshop. "At first they were sure I would spirit away their children to Kolkata and sell them," says Das. "Then they started coming." He wrote the script-hilarious ones interspersed with local slang as well as serious plays. With a handful of children, Das began to stage skits in various villages.

Today, Das has a troupe, Shishu Nattyam, with over 50 actors between eight and 15 years old. Their stage is marked out by bamboo poles and partitioned with a clothesline, they make masks out of egg crates and discarded wool becomes moustache and wigs. The battered "multipurpose" make-up box that pops creams, paints and brushes is worshipped before every performance. With a budget of Rs 50 for a production Das can't afford props, so he makes do with actors. A boy becomes a water pump; a girl acts as a grain thresher.

The troupe's talent was soon acknowledged and they began to be invited to Kolkata for performances. Some have become skilled make-up artists and can turn their friend into an old hag in minutes with a few lines on the forehead and some wrinkles on the face. Some are serious scriptwriters. Couched in witty dialogue and satire, the issues they tackle are anything but child's play-illiteracy, child marriage, civic problems, female foeticide. While their play Fire was based on the Gujarat riots, two of their recent productions deal with the problems of young domestic workers. Yet social problems sometimes encroach on their stage-the villagers once objected to a cobbler's son playing the role of a Brahmin. However, their achievement outshines their problems. When Ratan, a 13-year-old, was forced to work for long hours in the sweetshop, Shishu Nattyam put up a show in front of the shop every day for two weeks till the owner relented. Now Ratan is a troupe member.

Says Atindranath Das, senior manager of Child Relief and You (cry) which selected Das for the 1998 cry-Rippan Kapur Fellowship, "There are lots of people working in theatre and with children. But Kalachand has that unique ability to bring out the creativity in a child and nurture it."

At the troupe's bi-weekly meetings Das tosses an idea. Then he sits back and proudly watches a script taking shape. "The youngsters are familiar with all kinds of theatre parlance," he says. "Some of them are good enough to make a career in theatre." At the moment, though, they are busy bringing in social change. It could be a coincidence but in Nadia's Chakdah block, where Shishu Nattyam is based, the number of school dropouts has come down and there are fewer child marriages. According to Das, in Gobindapur, Gorpara and Udaynagar-the villages frequented by his actors-only two teenagers were married off in 2001 as compared to around 12 in the previous years. To set a stage for a new age, sometimes all it takes is a small band of children.