View from the other side

Kirti Jain talks about bringing stories of the Partition to the stage.

December 29, 2016 05:00 pm | Updated December 30, 2016 02:37 pm IST

Kirti Jain, theatre director

Kirti Jain, theatre director

That benign countenance doesn’t betray the implosive synthesis of politics and aesthetics in Kirti Jain’s works. Over the years, she has worked towards creating a collaborative form of theatre. Instead of ready-made plays, Jain picks narratives from stories, interviews and blogs and moulds them into the language of theatre. Her seminal work “Aur Kitne Tukde”, drawn from Urvashi Butalia’s “The Other Side of Silence” reflects on the gendered violence during Partition and rakes up issues of honour, shame and silence that the patriarchy usually pushes under the stage. It is in this context that Jain will present her views at The Hindu’s literary festival Lit for Life in January 2017.

On a sunny winter morning in Delhi, Jain goes down memory lane. “It was my own search for why the theme of Partition was not finding a space in our performing arts. I was reading a lot of Partition literature and that was how I came across Urvashi’s book. Having read that I understood people were looking to wipe out the trauma by not talking about it. I felt it has been 50 years and it is time enough to talk about it.” Jain picked three women’s narratives from Urvashi’s book and a short story by Jameela Hashmi. “The idea was to cover a gamut of situations that women went through and also to highlight this whole notion of choice. What was said at that time was women were given a choice and we wanted to examine whether there really was a choice.”

The one that was most haunting was that of a woman in a village who tried to jump into the well to save the community’s honour but failed. “She tried two-three times but she didn’t die because there was not much water in the well and there were already too many bodies inside. Subsequently, she was shunned by the community for bringing a black mark on the community. When Urvashi started interviewing her, she realised that the man who brought her to this side was her son who refused to admit that she was his mother. I could not deal with this whole idea of honour. Till date, it shakes me completely,” says the former Director of National School of Drama. The challenge for Jain was to find a theatrical language to express those narratives. “It was like looking at the past through the lens of memory. Now the challenge was how to convert them into narratives of today as I was looking at them from a distance,” says the former Director of National School of Drama. In actor-writer, B. Gowri, she found an able collaborator, who structured the narratives into a cogent script. “The rest came together during rehearsal when we were improvising on ideas of displacement and loss.”

Talking of improvisation, Jain, honoured with Sangeet Natak Akademi award for Direction in 2011, recalls how while rehearsing in a school building she arrived at the form of the play. “In the building there was a slide. While working around it, it struck me, probably, I could do the well scene around the slide What if the children were narrating the stories that they heard from their elders or were sharing them with each other. As the scene evolved, it turned out to be a moving sequence which transformed from children playing the game to women jumping into the well.”

It so happened that 80 per cent of her cast comprised Punjabis. “For many of them, for the first time in their lives they got to know Partition stories from their families. They had closed that part from their consciousness. Each one of us needs to come to terms with what we are, what we have been. It was one of the exercises even for me.”

A pioneer in spreading theatre in education, Jain is now busy spreading this methodology among students by training teachers. “It is about making children hear perceptions of the same situation. It helps to broaden their horizon. It is about moving from prescriptive to participative approach. If there are ten people in the class, they should understand each other’s social realities.” She cites the example of the story of Helen Keller to understand notions about race, disability and much more. We asked how would she look like and a kid said, gori hogi (she must have be fair-skinned). I said why and he said because she was not Indian.”

Jain, who has just edited a book on Badal Sircar ( Search For A Language of Theatre, Niyogi Books), admits not much has changed in the field over the years. “You look at the papers of first theatre seminar organised by the Sangeet Natak Akademi – the concerns voiced remain the same today.” What has changed, she says, is that in market economy, culture is also being left to the market. “Theatre has become commercial entertainment. You can’t leave culture to corporate world because then there is no space for protest, no space for taking risks. I do believe commercial theatre can play a role in making theatre a part of our everyday life.” One of the biggest concern for independent theatre practitioners is lack of space. Once upon a time to over come the problem, Jain started the concept of weekend theatre. I t could not last because of lack of affordable spaces.

But what hurts her the most is censorship of content. “I feel strongly about everyday problems in Kashmir and I have material but I don’t know whether I will be allowed to express my anger on stage,” she says.

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