The thing about maverick filmmaker John Abraham's ‘Naikali' (Dogs' Opera) is that its form and content are evolutionary and amenable to go well with where it is presented. The street play flits in and out of the instruments of theatre to dwell on current issues.
On the New Year day, darkened 23 years ago by the brutal public murder of social theatre activist Safdar Hashmi while his Jan Natya Manch was presenting a street play, ‘Halla Bol' at Shahibabad on the outskirts of Delhi, a team of performers led by theatre personality Ramachandran Mokeri presented a present-day version of John's disquieting ‘Naikali' at Nanappa Art Gallery.
Mr. Mokeri's team, already on a mission to reconstruct ‘Naikali' for performance across the State, further stretched the play's elastic format by incorporating tools of filmmaking to get the spotlight on the plight of the underdog in what they named as ‘I'm Safdar Hashmi I'm Ram Bahadur'.
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While Mr. Mokeri took on several roles including that of Safdar Hashmi, the hunter and the film director, the rest of the team — comprising E.P. Joseph, a former associate of John Abraham; Sivadas Puthenthodu; and Ramanan Vallikkavu — played the pack of dogs howling out the predicament of the commoner.
All the while, on the instructions of Mr. Mokeri, the film director, Pratap Joseph trained his camera on the pack. “Rape with your camera” was the director's decree, suggestive of the obscene power wielded by those who document ordinary human life.
“In every human tragedy, even in revolution, the blood that is spilled is that of the common man… when you have Irom Sharmila in Manipur, when you have Afghanistan or when Marad happens, you don't have freedom. You don't deserve to be free,” said the leader of the pack.
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While Safdar Hashmi was being dragged out and beaten by a bunch of goons, Ram Bahadur, a menial worker who tried to rescue Hashmi, also got assaulted. “While there is a Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust, none remembers Ram Bahadur,” growl the underdogs after smelling ordinary people's blood in the streets.
The participatory performance also wove into its texture Bob Marley's ‘Get up Stand up for your rights…'; a stanza from Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan's ‘Kattalan', which is about the agony of indigenous people; a few lines from a K. Sachithanandan poem on the natives being shortchanged and a poem on the fire for freedom by Subramanya Bharathi to highlight the truth about subaltern existence.
The play left incomplete by John Abraham was further ‘incompleted', as Mr. E.P. Joseph put it.
Earlier, Artist T. Kaladharan, who organised the event, recalled the social significance of friendship circles kept alive by Safdar Hashmi and John Abraham.