It is a refrain most of us, women, hear all our lives, something that has been dinned into us - ‘Be careful’. What we wear is, unfortunately, congruent to the idea of being careful, the inference to be drawn being that dressing ‘appropriately’ ensures safety. Theatre practitioner Mallika Taneja draws from this, our ‘collective experience’, of being told to be careful, for her solo play Thoda Dhyan Se (loosely translated - be careful).
She has been invited by Sacred Heart College, Thevara, Kochi, to stage the play as part of a national seminar on ‘Body as Text’. It is fitting - her body is the text in the play from the moment she sets foot on stage. The play, in two acts, is a satirical take on how a woman is seen through the eyes of patriarchy, and how she is inured to it.
Mallika talks animatedly, almost angrily, about the factors that led to the play, one of them being victim blaming - ‘why was she there?’ ‘who was she there with?’ - that ensues every time a crime is perpetrated against a woman/girl. “Why? Why doesn’t anybody ask what the perpetrator was doing there? Why isn’t the perpetrator questioned like that?” The provocation was what she read in the aftermath of the Shakti Mills rape case. It angered her and it was her tipping point. “All the years of theatre, of living in the city, reading, listening...it all culminated, burst out as this performance.”
The play starts with her, what she calls, ‘uncoded’ body on stage. Sans the baggage of clothes, she is the most powerful entity in the performance space, “mine is the most powerful body in the room.” As the performance progresses she begins adding layers of clothing - “it is not about the clothes, it is everything we don’t do. We can’t but we won’t. What are clothes? How many responsibilities can we pile on? The layers indicate whatever you want to make of it. It is your story to make.”
She terms herself an ‘angst-y’ person, her angst tempered with the knowledge that there is no quick fix for change. The play was first staged in 2013, and it still is relevant, and unfortunately “I can do it for another 30 years.” She’d like to move on to other things as she realises that it is possible to work different things at the same time.
A post-graduate in English literature, she says her experience with theatre at Delhi’s Kirori Mal College was a big influence. “My ‘training’ was involved with provoking questions. Asking questions.” She was also involved with the Tadpole Repertoire.
Though, being a woman in Delhi is at the heart of the play, she says the theme resonates everywhere. Mallika has travelled abroad with her play. “Women, everywhere, irrespective of which part of the world they are from, associate with the play. It is not about India or Delhi...in London and Paris also it is the same.” The second act of the play is a conversation that looks to find meaning. Women, she has realised, tend to share more, while some men get introspective, and some who don’t ‘get it’. But she respects them for trying to engage.
Over the last three plus years she worked around apprehensions and body issues by devising methods of dealing with these. The play also taught her that “Indian audiences are way more advanced and are more than what we give them credit for.”
The arbiters of art make her uncomfortable, “the fear is never of the audiences, it is always of somebody who is not.” This is her second time in Kerala. She staged the play the first time in Thrissur at the International Theatre Festival of Kerala (ITFOK) where she performed to an audience of 300-odd people, sometime in February.
As she wraps up the year with a performance here, in Kochi, she sees it as forming a full circle.
The questions, however, remain. “How do you raise a fearless daughter? How do you tell her this is her world also?” Indeed, how do you?
( The play will be staged at Sacred Heart College, Thevara on December 19 at 5 p.m. )
