Tucked in one of the inside gullies of Shahpur Jat in South Delhi, a café housed on the second floor of an insignificant building played host to a storytelling session on a sultry Sunday afternoon. With a select audience of about 50 odd people of all age groups, the place was small with chiks, wooden stools and minimalistic lighting providing the requisite ambience.
Sans costumes, make-up, props or background music, the two-hour session that got stretched for the sheer love of it, was a different take on solo theatrical performances. Peppering stories of known Hindi writers with anecdotes from life, contemporary social situations, a bit of poetry and the like, the four actors brought to life one story each by Saadat Hasan Manto, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Kamleshwar and Mohan Rakesh.
Titled Ek Baar Ki Baat Hai , the stories were enacted by K. C. Shankar, Shashwita Sharma, Manjeet Mahipal and Vicky Ahuja, all television and film artists and members of Jashn-e-Qalam, a group founded by Shankar in 2014. Even as each story unfolded, the audience was held spellbound; each sitting in rapt attention much like an eager child all ears for grandmother’s tale. And so even as Shashwita switches between Sukhiya, the newly-wedded bride and the groom’s sister and mother, she carries the narrative with a finesse of a seasoned artist. Armed with a perfect diction, voice modulation, she uses the Hindustani language to her advantage to convey the nuances of each character with their oddities and idiosyncrasies. Bedi’s story Chechak ke Daag becomes the high point of discussion as the story comes to a quiet end. The women in the audience identified with the theme and the fact that societal norms in India do not ever change comes forth rather as a revelation.
When Vicky battles emotions in Rakesh’s Parmatma ka Kutta , the audience is choked and cries at the helplessness and haplessness of the common man’s fight with the system, the babudom and the bureaucracy. The story written more than 50 years back holds relevance even today. With alacrity in swiftly playing the protagonist, the durbaan, the clerk and the commissioner, Vicky uses his body language and gestures in a way as to bring the story alive in a charged atmosphere. Ditto with Manjeet. Except that his eyes emote much more than his body. His facial expressions convey the coyness of Rukma and the mad passion of Abdul Karim in a way as to make the audience visualise the whole scene as it unfolds through the powerful words of the actor in Hasan’s Padhiye Kalma .
Shankar’s take on Kamleshwar’s story Apne Desh Ke Log is a fairly modern one. He depicts an office scenario where righteousness is dissected and eliminated from the system. A satire on modern day development and its lost meaning, Shankar begins the narration with a poem written by Kais Jaunpuri, “someone who had come to watch our play and ended up being a part of our group,” he states. So is space not a constraint? “We have performed in classrooms in colleges and schools, in black-box theatres, parks, ghettos and slum areas. The beauty of storytelling form is that it is not dependent on infrastructure,” he says. And it is the interactive sessions after each story that are the high point of these sessions. “When people begin to share their views on the story, when they begin to tell us what they were visualising during the narration or enactment, and the social context of the story, then we feel it was worth the effort. That we did reach out to the audience. That in whatever small way we are making a difference to the society”.
A very strong point that Shankar makes here is also about preserving and popularising Hindi literature. “There is such a vast treasure of literature in Hindi that needs to be explored and brought to the people. And not only is it engaging but also relevant to the present times,” states Shankar. Agrees Shashwita as she explains the amazing audience response they receive after each show. “Despite the presence of such overwhelming entertainment available to us through television and the internet, people come to watch us. They need a breather,” she says.
Manjeet, who hails from Dadri, entered formal theatre in 2004 and believes that “even our lives are more of a story than drama”. So fond of storytelling he was that he narrated folk tales even when he was in school while Vicky has been doing theatre since 1991 and joined Jashn-e-Qalam just two months back. For him, it was the first experience of performing in a small space with limited audience. But he liked the idea of a few people engaging in the session with a lone artist.
As for the venue, it is rare that a theatrical performance is organised in the closed and small confines of a café. Says Mohit Yadav, co-owner, GreenR café, “The storytelling session was held here for the first time but we have organised two music sessions earlier. Since its inception it had been a part of plan to do small interactive sessions, workshops and other such activities so that it merely doesn’t become a place to eat but also a centre for art and culture and meaningful interactions, especially for creative minds.”
