The recently held Women Director’s Theatre Festival organised by New Delhi’s Punjabi Academy, opened with “Damru”, a play by Amritsar-based theatre group, Theatre Persons. A contemporary and sensitive take on an urban Indian woman’s life today, the play explored practical ideas rooted in real life. The theatre group’s director, Anita Devgan , talks about the concerns she wanted to address through Damru .
Excerpts from an interview:
A little about “Damru”'s story and the reason you picked this particularly play by Sukhjit?
The original story by Sukhjit is titled “Ji Biwi Ji”. It’s about a girl who wants to live a life she dreams of, and marry someone who is the perfect man. aInstead, her parents get her engaged to a bank manager 18 years older than her in the hope of securing for them a better financial future. The girl doesn’t want to marry the man, and instead develops feelings for a college professor but he backs out when the girl asks him to speak to his parents about their marriage. Her close friend advises her to marry someone who will dance around her, the way a monkey dances when the damru plays. This isn’t something the girl wants herself. Ultimately, she does marry the banker, but tells him that she will never be a real wife to him. They live their lives in separate ways. One day, her friend from college calls and talks about her own happy married life, which makes the protagonist question what is she chasing and whether she is wasting her life fighting her relationship with her husband. She tries to change but by then it is too late.
Today, there are many women with great jobs but they are looking for something they can’t find and wasting their life. In this age of globalisation, the feeling of compromise has reduced a lot in people. I feel to lead a happy life, this compromise is needed. In fact, it’s good sense and intelligence. You have to take life as it comes, accept it with its problems and happiness. So I thought I could convey through the play the things that I couldn’t probably explain across a table.
Do you see more participation of women in As far as theatre from Punjab, and in Punjabi? , is concerned, do you see more women participation today?
Initially, we didn’t even have women artists to play the women roles in plays in Punjab. Boys would do those roles. In the last 20 years though, things have become better. When I started working, there were only three or four other women directors and artists, and the ones who joined did it with their husbands. Now, more and more women have started working by themselves. They are directing, writing, designing on their own. Their work is also getting better, and they are pushing the limits of what they can do. This is a great thing.
Your group also organises the Punjab Theatre Festival. A little on that?
For eight years we have been holding the biggest Punjabi theatre festival in Amritsar. The next edition will be from January 4-11, 2015. We get plays from all over India with different themes every year. Instead of just women directors, we had a women special one year, which expanded the scope of the plays and women in different roles in theatre participated. The response has been great which shows how much women have grown in theatre.
