Sixteen-year-old Monika Barman climbs onto her terrace garden, gathers a handful of greens and plucks off an enormous bottle gourd. When her married sister visits, young son and husband in tow, she serves them rice and curry made from her tiny kitchen garden’s harvest. “Sister, how do you like the gourd greens? Want more?” she asks. “Your gourds are quite big. Some look kind of funny,” replies Kanika, with a laugh. As talk veers to her marriage, Monika tells her father to get her married only “after my garden grows”.
At the local women’s centre, the girls of Bhutkura meet to exchange notes on their gardens. They talk of their gourds and mushrooms and the vitamins they’ll get. “When the mushrooms grow, they look like a frog’s umbrella,” Monika explains to the others. They talk about getting back to school and avoiding early marriages; group member Moushumi gets quite emotional. On market day, Monika picks the fattest gourds in her garden, puts them in her basket and rides to the Bhutkura mandi on her father’s bicycle. She drives a hard bargain. Not less than 20 taka, she tells customers.
Monika is one of the 40,000 young girls enrolled in The Girls Project across 1,000 villages of Cooch Behar district, West Bengal. In 2011, the state government, partnering with Landesa, an NGO working for land rights, introduced a micro-agriculture project to arrest child marriages. Two years and a magazine article later, filmmaker Megan Mylan arrived to document her experience of “hanging out with Monika for a week in her life.” This resulted in a 10-minute documentary, After My Garden Grows, which offers a peek into the lives of the girls of West Bengal, where one out of five girls is married by the age of 15, more than a quarter of the girl population is married to men 10 or more years older, and where half of the girls are pregnant by age 19.
“Casting was essential,” says Mylan, who won an Oscar for her 2008 documentary Smile Pinki. “There were 40,000 girls to choose from. But I knew who I wanted — someone who had dropped out of school, started a garden but had never been to market, whose parents were contemplating marriage and had an older married daughter. Monika was that choice.”
One year after the documentary’s filming, Monika is back in school. Her kitchen garden is blooming. She contributes to the household income. She can read land pattas better than her father. “I know the three conditions for secure land rights,” she says confidently. Bhutkura’s centre, which started with five girls, has 22 now, growing vegetables, going to school and marrying later. Monika has even hired a private tutor with her earnings to make up for lost time. On her first visit outside her district, she is touring Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata this month with her sister and nephew, promoting the film, telling audiences her dream is to be “completely self-reliant.” The marriage talk has all but disappeared.