It is easy enough to mistake the bronzed figure of an intrepid woman warrior from the Indian insurrection of 1857, installed at one of the entrances to the Taj Mahal, to be that of Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi. She rides a highly strung horse in mid-flight, and her familiar stance is that of the battle-charging combatant that history has long paid obeisance to. A closer look at the accompanying sign, however, reveals the equestrian statue to be that of Jhalkari Bai, a Dalit chieftain in Laxmibai’s women’s army. Indeed, a baby isn’t strapped to her back, and her crown is reminiscent to that of a Hindu goddess, unlike Laxmibai’s more unassuming turban. The likeness is not entirely coincidental. Jhalkari is best known (although this is only mentioned in passing by mainstream accounts) for standing in as a decoy for the Rani, holding fort on the turf of battle as the queen escaped, and ultimately earning herself a martyrdom befitting a head of state. It is only in recent decades that the contributions to the wars for Independence by Dalit resistance fighters have started brimming to the surface, with Jhalkari resurrected as an icon at an equal footing with Laxmibai.
A new play set to open this month, focuses on Jhalkari and her short-lived (she died at just 28) but eventful life, that took her from the pastoral world of her childhood to the royal citadels of Jhansi, where she became a queen’s confidante and advisor, and not purely because of the close resemblance. Director Neha Singh has an ensemble of six actors (including playwright Punarvasu) in the eponymously named Jhalkari , a play that makes extensive use of the Bundelkhandi dialect. During a fact-finding trip to Jhansi, Singh and her team took a detour to Jhalkari’s village Bhojla where her family still lives in their ancestral home. Songs from women in the village are part of the colourful musical texture of the play, which also employs elements of folk theatre and kalaripayattu. Singh’s previous project was based on Vijaydan Detha’s Dohri Zindagi , where she enacted a woman brought up as a man. In Jhalkari , she retains her feminist gaze to recount the tale of a feisty female icon relegated to history’s margins. There is no dearth of material on Jhalkari, but they are drawn from the fringes of an academia enamoured by upper caste heroines like Laxmibai. Books like Mohandas Naimish Rai’s Veerangana Jhalkari Bai and Vrindavanlal Verma’s Jhansi ki Rani were invaluable tomes, but the play includes several speculative interludes that attempts to create an interior world for its title character, even if it does adhere to the broader structure laid down by history on record.
In her play, rather than placing them in opposition because of the disparate manners in which history has treated them, Singh creates a unique kinship between Laxmibai and Jhalkari, played by Dipika Pandey and Kritika Pandey (the two actors are not related) respectively. The play will attempt to view the women through the prism of caste and gender politics of the time, as also the political upheavals that were taking place in the country, with the British East India Company insidiously encroaching on Indian princely states. Laxmibai’s husband, Raja Gangadhar Rao, the easygoing patron of the arts whose decadence perhaps led to the fall of Jhansi, will be portrayed by Punarvasu. Jhalkari’s younger avatar will be enacted by NSD graduate Annapurna Soni. Apart from these principal characters, the actors all portray several others, conjuring up crowds, courtiers and soldiers chanting up a storm during the play’s fervent battle scenes.
Making the play has taken the team on a path that allowed them to excavate many truths and nuances about the experiences of a Dalit veerangana. “Earlier the understanding of her life was at a theoretical level, but now the entire team feels very passionately about it, becoming much more emotionally involved in Jhalkari’s story,” says Singh. They were able to contextualise this insight with the realities that Dalits face even in a so-called contemporary India. The play’s weave of cultural references and themes become all the more diverse and inclusive as the ensemble progresses along Jhalkari’s journey.
Jhalkari will be performed at the Whistling Woods Andheri Base, Andheri West on December 17, at 8 p.m; for more details see bookmyshow.
