The voices and visions of Saadat Hasan Manto echoed across the refurbished ramparts of a historical sarai in Hyderabad, courtesy an accomplished work of theatre by Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry and her Chandigarh-based troupe, The Company. Their devised production, Dark Borders , takes off from Manto’s still risqué and edgy short stories (like ‘ Toba Tek Singh’ , ‘Padhirya Kalama’ and ‘ Tamasha’ ) and was staged at the Taramati Baradari indoor auditorium under the aegis of the Qadir Ali Baig Theatre Festival, a ten-day-long annual fiesta that has been a shot in the arm for the city’s culture scene since its inception in 2005. The festival ended on November 6.
Coarse correction
Chowdhry’s team is a curious mix of itinerant folk minstrels (or Naqqals) with a provenance harking back to the courts of Wajid Ali Shah, and a sprightly ensemble of young actors, many of whom have graduated from Panjab University’s theatre department, where Chowdhry taught till very recently. Tasked with putting together the play’s aural universe, the Naqqals create a seductively authentic soundscape that evokes the distance of departed worlds as much as it does the immediacy of a contemporary one. With their instruments, both improvised and traditional, they create atonal patterns familiar yet futuristic, like the high pitched call of an indistinct insect that accompanies a mutinous set-piece or two. Soft wind chimes wash over the most dastardly of acts, almost allowing sinister portents to creep up slowly and catch the audience unaware. It isn't the most settled of arenas but there is an undercurrent of dark beauty, an irony the acoustics capture perfectly. Occasionally, chanteuse Pamela Singh’s soaring Sufi vocals fill the space with its beguiling cadences.
Manto’s characters, or their foils that Chowdhry’s actors fashion, are desperate creatures, ravenous for food, loot or sex in an unwitting anarchy where primal instincts reign. While snatches of text from Manto’s works illuminate each vignette, the ensemble works best in the creation of visual motifs that draw on both the literal and the subtextual although the text itself is never undermined. A young boy (Jagjeet Sandhu) delivers his mother’s (Debina Rakshit) child in a busy street, and the cloth that shrouds her privations becomes the baby in the arms of the child-man, now suddenly a nurturer in his own right. A man (Mahesh Saini) coerces his wife or keep (Navjot Randhawa) into the flesh trade, even if she’s addicted to slumber. When a client allows her to nod off peacefully, there is hope for deliverance and Chowdhry effects a dazzling wedding between the faceless lovers — the red veil restores the woman’s virtue, while the sehra proclaims a treasured manhood. Bodies are frequently dragged across the length of the stage, sleep or death adding to what seems to be the colossal weight of hopes thwarted and spirits extinguished.
Men prey on women, entrails are pulled out of corpses, a woman kills her man with her bare hands — all of it is seen through the lens of an aesthetic approximation. This visual effulgence certainly makes what is an unremittingly bleak landscape palatable, but is perhaps at odds with the perturbation to the psyche that the play might want to effect. The beauty on display adds a lulling quality to the proceedings, and the idea that Dark Borders is a sugar-coated pill takes hold. What the curative potential of such an enterprise may be is not immediately clear, but the richly woven tapestry of images stay with us long after the curtain call.
Sense and sensuality
The play is draped with an overriding eroticism, brought out by the inventive use of water and earth, and the corporeal presence of its agile actors. The women are engorged with both repression and sexual appetite while the rustic physicality of the men casts them as prime specimens spat out on earth like coarse embers of wanton desire. There is an interplay of passion and consent (or lack thereof) that is perhaps only possible under a feminine gaze. Chowdhry typically works with atypical gender expression. Men play women who are violated — this somewhat neutralises the gender baggage these acts of defilement carry. The ablutions of two men (Saini and Sandhu) are likened to homoerotic cleansing rituals. Later, they sit down and meticulously embroider table cloths. It’s an emasculation that speaks volumes about the casual disregard accorded to women’s labour. But the fluidity always flows in one direction. A homeless woman (Ambika Kamal) who passes as a man, if only to embrace the freedoms of the treacherous nights she is lost to, never loses her feminine indignation or her compassion as she hauls a beggar out of the darkness even as he is withering away from hypothermia.
It must be said that the ensemble is uniformly excellent, and each member takes on multiple parts. Saini is occasionally the voice of reason as a bookseller with a propensity for topical invective, and packs a punch in all his turns. The efficient Sandhu and Kamal are other stand-outs. The play abounds with latter-day cultural references — the Delhi gang-rape, the renaming of the iconic Mughalsarai railway station, Digital India — but even if it had steered clear of such a recasting, the potency of its material would’ve remained unequivocally in the present. Manto’s writings, about human follies that brimmed to the surface during the bloodied chaos of Partition, are eerily prescient even today. Pakistan and Hindustan, cruelly separated at birth, stand for the sectarianism that is part of a contemporary reality. Yet, never once do we uproot the stories from the original contexts in which they were engendered.
Ultimately, the simulacra conjured up are fragments that do not conspire to come together into a cohesive whole. Chowdhry ends the piece with the erection of a refugee camp where the characters congregate. It’s a makeshift world of tents and gatherings. This notion of a community provides some succour, even if that is belied when the magnifying lens is trained on individual lives to reveal only dysfunction and little uplift. Symptomatically, a torch in a camp illuminates the clothes of a woman hung out to dry like it were a lynched frame. Lives continue to hang in balance as the wait for another morning begins anew.
