At the first instance, “Begum Jaan” reminds you of Shyam Benegal's “Sardari Begum”; the story of a courtesan musician who is lost in the folds of time. Like “Sardari Begum”, “Begum Jaan” also has a huge canvas — pre-Independent India, political turmoil, Partition, and an entire community of exemplary women musicians who were pushed into recluse during the nation building exercise. But you realise along the way that “Sardari Begum” addressed questions that were far more complex and less fleeting.
Ekjute, a theatre group that was built by Nadeera and Raj Babbar 30 years ago in Mumbai, was in Ranga Shankara Bangalore with their festival of four Hindi plays and “Begum Jaan” was the most ambitious in terms of its plot. The 150-minute play is a period story woven around the life of a classical musician of yesteryear, and in her you see the shades of extraordinary women of those times; the Begums and Bais. The diva of classical music, Begum Jaan, who has enjoyed proximity with the likes of Jaddan Bai, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan saab, Begum Akhtar and even freedom fighters like Moulana Abdul Kalam Azad and Jawaharlal Nehru, now lives in penury and oblivion. Her only treasure is her past memories.
The play (written by Javed Siddiqui) pits the past against the present rather interestingly. As you keep waiting for Begum Jaan's story to unfold, you realise that it is more about the media's cold-blooded fetish for “information” and how lived lives suddenly transform into dead anthropological material in the present. The tussle is between Begum Jaan and a biographer who steps into her threshold. Even in the face of abject privation, the past is a promise for Begum Jaan. For the biographer everything is saleable, not excluding human relationships.
Strong plot, but weak narrative – the play loses steam. If the gritty and determined Begum Jaan (played excellently by Nadeera Zaheer Babbar) gets too loud and sentimental, the biographer (played by Anup Soni) is cold and confined in his image. Eventually, the play loses sight of everything that it set out to say, and ends up as the story of a dying, old woman desperate to get her niece married. However, you do encounter some beautiful lines in the characteristic lyrical nature of Urdu, and some great music by Farida Khanum, Begum Akhtar and others.
“Dayashankar Ki Diary”, written and directed by Nadeera Zaheer Babbar, was an outstanding solo performance by Ashish Vidyarthi. Dayashankar is a lower division clerk who comes to live in Mumbai with dreams of becoming a film star. His dreams begin to fade and all that he is left with is a dreary monotony — living in a hole of a kholi, travelling in overcrowded trains, humiliation at workplace, milling problems back home. To escape, Dayashankar begins to weave an imaginary world and gradually loses his ability to distinguish reality from imagination.
The way Ashish Vidyarthi traces the journey of Dayashankar from a bubbly, cheerful small-towner who has a fantastic ability to mock at the ways of the city and its inhabitants, to someone who cannot cope with its heartlessness, is poignant. The complex and powerful script has so many stories to tell; Dayashankar is just the face of it all.
In this first person account, Ashish's narration is amazingly fluid. He slips into many roles – from a bania to a grating boss, to jealous colleagues, to his lady love.
His performance is so subtle and if you are high on humour you may miss seeing Dayashankar losing his sanity. The audience continued to laugh at the most distressing moments and when Dayashankar collapsed they drowned it in applause: it seemed like such cruel irony. Silences in the performance may have helped — it would have perhaps drawn the audience into Dayashankar's sinking world.
Ashish Vidyarthi deserves a standing ovation: what an actor!
