Pune: A two-and-a-half-hour labour of love, scripted by playwright Ajit Dalvi and directed by Atul Pethe, brings to life the memory of Raghunath Dhondo Karve, who opened the country’s first birth-control clinic and initiated family planning among masses in Mumbai in the early 1920s.
The play, Swarajswasthya , charts the life of R.D. Karve (1882-1953), the eldest son of the great reformer Maharshi Dhondo Keshav Karve, and the struggle for social acceptance for his advanced ideas on sexuality and birth control. The play’s title derives from the then-controversial magazine, which Karve, a professor of mathematics, wrote, edited and managed from 1927 it until his death in 1953.
“I have been greatly influenced by Karve’s writings, his commitment to the truth and his fearlessness. His gender politics subverted the dogmatic notions of sexuality. R.D. Karve was the archetypal rationalist, modernist and a liberal, and I just had to do this play,” Pethe told The Hindu .
Dalvi and Pethe pored over more than 200 original issues of Karve’s magazine, besides reading yards of material on his life and personal trials to prepare material for their play.
The role of Karve is rendered sensitively and imaginatively by Girish Kulkarni, with Rajashree Sawant-Wad playing Karve’s loving and understanding wife, Malatibai. Pradeep Mulye’s brilliant set design conjures the atmosphere of 1920s Bombay, while Madhuri Purandare’s costumes lend verisimilitude to that era.
Likewise, Dalvi’s sharp script and his engagement with crumbling value-systems and the battle for ideas, complements the duo’s shared vision.
The play is produced by the city-based NatakGhar, a theatre outfit founded by Pethe in 2013 which specialises in performing experimental plays.
Swarajswastha will premiere at Pune’s Yashwantrao Chavan Natyagruha at 7:30 p.m. on February 28 as part of the 9th annual Vinod Doshi Theatre Festival.
