The Better India · 23 hours ago

Inside 'What Is Love?', a 5-Month Art Journey with 15 Women with Intellectual Disabilities in Delhi

In a Delhi shelter for women with intellectual disabilities - many abandoned by their families - a five-month art initiative called *What Is Love?* offered something deceptively simple: clay, fabric, color, and time. What emerged was not just artwork but selfhood, as women shaped elephants from memory, made masks with wild, yard-long hair, and moved, in their own rhythms, from the edges of the room toward the center of it. Suparna Arora, one of three artists who guided the project, arrived on the first day wondering how to leave, and by the second understood she had it backwards: "I probably was just the medium to give them clay - they came up with such brilliant things on their own." The works eventually entered a public gallery at the India Habitat Centre, but the deeper exhibition had been happening all along - one woman helping another at the pottery wheel, a room breaking into song, a brush held with quiet, unhurried care. Founder Madhumita Puri put it plainly: "There are thoughts, feelings, opinions, all buried under distress" - and this project trusted that uncovering them was not a luxury, but the point.