Tanuj Samaddar: Art Has Always Been Humanity’s Deepest Tool for Change (Artist, Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Puraskar)

Tanuj Samaddar Interview

“My vision is an India where young hands don’t sweep remnants of neglect from train floors, but write new ideas on classroom boards.”

Q. You’ve achieved a lot at a relatively young age—from art to policy and
activism. Was there a defining moment when you realized you wanted to go beyond a conventional path and create a larger impact?

People often expect that question to have a clean, cinematic answer or even a
lightning flash of epiphany. But my true response to that question is much more complex than all those things put together.

I am from Rangia, a quaint town in the Kamrup district of Assam, which is cut off from the avenues of opportunity both geographically and socioeconomically. Being brought up in such an environment makes you aware of certain things at a very young age. You understand, before you have the vocabulary for it, that the world is not arranged equally.

I realised that opportunities wouldn't be served to me on a golden platter; they had to be carved out through persistence, reinvention, and an unwillingness to remain confined within a single identity. But if I were to identify the inflexion point, that was when I was awarded the Pradhan Mantri Bal Puraskar, India’s highest civilian award for the youth. 

It opened doors to chambers for me that had remained previously inaccessible, catapulting my voice to the policymakers. It is within those very chambers that I discerned the flaws in the system. 

Thus was born the need to go beyond the precincts of canvas and colours, and create an impact that would send ripples across domains.
Art has provided me with an outlet of expression; however, it was through art that I began to notice how deeply creativity intersects with systems, institutions, and communities. 

Over the last few years, my goal has been to bridge the gap between brushstroke and boardroom. The defining moment was not singular. It was every time the world told me to stay small. I realised that artists are viewed as visionaries by society until their visions bring about tangible changes to the world around us.

Q. Many young people struggle with self-doubt and comparison, especially in the age of social media. Have you faced such moments, and how did you overcome them?

Gaining international visibility comes with its fair share of discussions. And maybe
The most difficult one, which no one prepares you for, is the inner monologue that being visible triggers. The specific form of torment in self-doubt, which is particularly acute among early achievers, has its own architectural design. While the outside world sees you and recognises the momentum, what happens on the inside is a swirl of impostor syndrome that is so suffocating that all the awards and recognition on your wall start to look like ornaments in another person’s home.

The constant need to be performative at what one does puts a dent on one's self confidence. Breaking into spaces dominated by privilege and power meant that I often had to carve a seat at the table rather than wait for one. There were moments of silence, setbacks, and invisibility. And in the age of social media, such fleeting moments of inadequacies are just amplified. Because what social media does, with extraordinary efficiency, is curate the highlight reels of everyone around you and present them to you as their complete reality.

I have dwelled upon that and I understand its gravity thoroughly. But my sheer ,determination, along with resilience, has helped me get where I am. Yet, resilience does not mean the absence of doubt. True resilience means the ability to remain in that place of doubt and yet walk ahead. 

Secondly, the epistemology of comparison needed to be deconstructed; To compare yourself to someone else's life journey is to commit an intellectual fallacy. It is to equate two variables that are radically different onto a single axis of measurement. For instance, my life journey began in Rangia, a sequestered
township both geographically and economically, is completely different from that of someone who was born in Delhi and has access to systems of power, social networks, and cultural capital passed down generationally.

For those young people who find themselves swirling around in the whirlwind of social media comparison, I want to say this with the full weight of everything I have lived through: The algorithm is not made to give you the truth. It is made to rile you up. It gives you the top but not the trek. It gives you the stage but not the thousands of hours spent practising in an empty room. It gives you the trophy, but not the hundred times you've been turned down before that happened. You are not behind. You just aren’t on the Instagrammed path yet.

Q. Your work reflects a strong blend of creativity and purpose. Do you think today’s youth underestimate how powerful creative expression can be in driving real social change?

We live in a civilisation that has, over centuries, constructed a very deliberate
hierarchy of legitimacy. At the apex of this hierarchy lie numbers: statistics, documents, legislation, and economic projections. They are seen as the tools of transformation. Art, ingenuity, and cultural expression, these have been systematically relegated to the category of supplement or embellishment. 

Of something you do when the job is done, to make the real work more palatable. It is the consequence of conditioning so thoroughly ingrained into our
institutions that most young adults can accept it wholeheartedly without question.
And this means that when youths today consider how they can create social change, they automatically, instinctively, think of legislation, of policy-making, of activism in its most concrete sense. They consider petitioning, protesting, and parliamentary action. 

They do not think of creative expression until very late in the game, if at all. And this is the underestimation. And it is, I would argue, one of the most consequential strategic errors of our generation's approach to justice.

In recent days, the integration of my artistic expression with activism in the context of issues such as mental wellness, climate change, and youth empowerment has received much praise and recognition from various organisations on an international and national level. 

The recognition of the work completed is not what I would like to speak about today. Rather, my focus will be on the mechanism itself. This begs the question of how, exactly, change is created through creativity and art? It is only through understanding the cause-and-effect process that one may argue its importance in any matter.

Every structural injustice in the world: every broken climate treaty, every gender-based Inequity maintained, every poverty cycle continued unbroken, comes about not simply due to the absence of the correct law, but because the right feeling is absent. For the people who can do something about the problem simply lack the awareness of what it is that they are doing. Data enlightens. Yet data alone will never lead to change.

Transformation requires something to move through the body to bypass the rational defences that privilege erects around itself and land somewhere deeper, somewhere that cannot be argued with. That is what art does. That is what creative expression has always done, across every culture and every era of human history.

To me, art means more than mere expression; it means resistance, healing, and
transformation. Art is an act of resistance because it is a defiant gesture to speak truth to power in a world where monetised attention and commodified emotion is itself a radical act. Art is also an act of healing because oppressed communities torn apart by violence, brutality, and injustice have often rediscovered the language of restoration through creative expression. Lastly, art represents transformation because every major social change that has happened throughout history has ultimately been a story worth listening to.

Q. You’ve received several accolades and recognitions for your work. Which achievement means the most to you personally, and why?

The recognition I am most thankful for, if I were completely truthful with myself,
is not one bestowed on me by a government, institution or international organisation. The recognition comes when a young individual looks at what I have achieved. The recognition comes from a young individual who looks at what I have built from where I came from: from Rangia, from the lower middle class, and from an almost forgotten corner of the world, and who says, quietly, to themselves: if he could build a door, perhaps I can too.

Awards shall come and go. Visibility, by its very definition, is ephemeral: the cultural attention span is mercilessly short, and what the world celebrates today it forgets with remarkable efficiency tomorrow. The only things that really last are the quality of one’s work, the purity of their intent, and the scope of their reach. I receive my awards humbly and freely. 

Humbly, because they are a symbol of the generosity of people and organisations that chose to turn their eyes towards a little town in Assam and declare that it mattered, because I have learned that you cannot carry the work forward if your fists are closed around the trophies.

While there are multiple awards I wish to mention here, the Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Puraskar takes the special spot. This was a turning point for me which catapulted me to national fame and helped me gain access to networks of changemakers with a shared objective. I received the golden opportunity to interact with our Honourable Prime Minister, along with a few other cabinet ministers. Furthermore, the Karmaveer Chakra award, which was bestowed on me by iCongo and UNDP, reaffirmed my belief that social impact and creative expression need not exist in separate spheres. 

The recognition strengthened my commitment towards using art, advocacy, and research as interconnected tools for community engagement and systemic change. From my involvement in the youth constituency (YOUNGO) within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), I have been given the privilege of representing India at the World Conservation Congress organised by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Abu Dhabi. 

In this congress, I delivered an important discourse pertaining to the conservation of wetlands and biodiversity in Assam. Last year, I received the Billion Acts Peace Fellowship Award from the US-based Peace Jam Foundation
to expand my social impact initiatives beyond my local community, using a microgrant of five thousand dollars.

My very own social impact initiative, ‘Action for a Resilient Tomorrow’ (ART) is a product of this grant. We are now working with 3 rural schools in my hometown, catering to over 500 students and 60+ faculty members. We aim to improve their digital literacy and communication skills in addition to making them job-ready. We have followed the PDIA approach and have gamified their curriculum to make learning more accessible, engaging, and context-sensitive.

Q. Awards often come with visibility and responsibility. How have these recognitions influenced your journey and the way you approach your work?

“The giant looks in the mirror and sees nothing”. I want to sit with that image for a moment before I explain it because it contains, I believe,the entire philosophy with which I have tried to receive every recognition that has come my way. The giant peers into the mirror and sees nothing. Not because the giant is blind. Not
because the giant is unaware of himself. Because the giant who understands his own magnitude and its meaning has already ceased to measure himself by his own image. 

The giant, who is constantly looking into the mirror, ends up immobilised by his reflection – be it due to self-inflation or self-degradation. In any case, he stops moving. And movement is what counts.

Because awards, insofar as they are accepted in true intellectual integrity, do not produce certainty. Awards produce responsibility, and responsibility, if truly felt, is a form of productive anxiety. What is dangerous about being recognised is the possibility that it may make you think you’ve already made it. 

That it’s mostly done. That your prize represents an end point, instead of being just another station along the way. It is my story about building bridges across the divide between activism and scholarship, local and international, imagination and factuality, through a brush stroke, a scholarly article, or a social movement.
Such links will never fully be made. They are a negotiation in progress, demanding your participation imperfectly and consistently, well beyond the moment of cheering and trophy- cabineting and press clipping.

Q. Looking ahead, what are your future goals, and how do you hope to expand your impact in the years to come?

Looking ahead, I aspire to broaden my engagement within the domains of public
policy and social impact, particularly at the intersection of grassroots advocacy, education, and institutional reform. To this effect, I have already laid the foundation of my very own social initiative christened ‘Action for a Resilient Tomorrow’ (ART). I wish to scale this up from a regional to a national level campaign with branches in every state of India. 

With a long-term goal of improving educational access, eradicating child labour in the high-risk microgeographies and enhancing educational infrastructure in Assam, a state that usually remains underrepresented in mainstream policy discourse. I further wish to work with the government and civil society stakeholders at the grassroots level to develop sustainable and community-led interventions to tackle educational and developmental disparities. 

By engaging in policy-making and participatory governance, I aspire to help create an inclusive institutional structure that enables marginalised communities, digital literacy, civic engagement, and equitable opportunities for youth in disadvantaged areas of India. My vision envisages an India where young hands don’t sweep remnants of neglect from the train floors but wipe boards to script new ideas, ideas which will inspire generations to fight the Good fight.

Bio

Tanuj Samaddar is an Indian artist, researcher and activist. He is a recipient of the Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Puraskar from the President of India, Karmaveer Chakra and the US President's Education Award. He was nominated for the International Children's Peace Prize and Assam's third-highest civilian award: 'Assam Gaurav' by the Government of Assam. 

He is a former Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), UK, and is currently a Young India Fellow at Ashoka University. He has been a finalist in the prestigious Erasmus Mundus Scholarship Programme funded by the European Union. 

In 2025, he was awarded the Billion Acts Peace Fellowship by the US-based PeaceJam Foundation. Earlier, in 2023, he received the Kentucky Colonel Commission from the Governor of Kentucky. He is the founder of the social impact initiative titled 'Action for a Resilient Tomorrow' (ART).

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Interviewed By Irene Elina Eldhose