A village without men forms the charged backdrop of an Indian play, Naqqaash , which was the opening act at the Writer’s Bloc Festival at Prithvi Theatre in April this year. It is a trope that carries dark portents and is not without real-life resonances. For instance, the widowed women of Kosovo’s Krushe e Madhe were a stark reminder of genocide. In 1999, their men were rounded up and summarily executed by the Yugoslav Army. There are villages whose menfolk migrate elsewhere for employment. Many such examples abound, including a hamlet in Bihar’s Banka district. In Kenya, the village of Umoja is a refuge for women who’ve fled child marriage, female genital mutilation, and rape.
Written by Asad Hussain and directed by Rajit Kapur for Rage Theatre, Naqqaash assembles its women into a chorus of sorts. They enter and exit with placards bearing impressions of their lost sons, husbands, brothers or fathers. The women assume a collective identity of both victims and conscience-keepers. In a powerful scene towards the play’s denouement, they muster up all the ugliness at their disposal, and take on the voices of their oppressors. These are policemen and security guards who have quelled a local uprising causing the men to go underground, or so the women would like to believe.
‘Ahesta Boro’, a Persian song most famous in a version by Abdul-Rahim Sârbân, is the anthem of the women. It is an exhortation to a bride and her groom to ‘walk graciously’. Here, the song calls out to Chand (Ajitesh Gupta) and Husna (Alka Sharma), local youngsters betrothed to one another. Chand’s father, Aklu (Shubhrajyoti Barat), is the local knife-maker, and the sharpening of knives is an aural motif that permeates the play’s soundscape. Aklu’s selling of his land to a factory, and the subsequent construction of a ‘four lane’ and a high wall, leads to the scuffle between the villagers and the security detail. Even as a warrant is made out in his name, Chand is killed. Aklu’s disinterment of his son’s body and Husna’s withheld grief leads to a series of well-written episodes involving Chand’s corpse that have an air of the absurd about them. The slow buzzing of bees captures the ennui of a dead man’s lethargy and Gupta dutifully submits himself to a performance of lifelessness that is beautifully sentient.
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Barat leads the charge with a pathos-laden performance that, at its best, achieves a balance between sincerity and irony. Yet in more high-pitched moments, in the release of repressed emotion, he gives in to dramatic hysterics that isn’t entirely consistent with his character’s gravitas. He works constantly with opposing qualities: the befuddlement of a father trying to grapple with the blow destiny has dealt him, and the all-knowing omniscience of a prime mover who is holding the strands of the tale together.
Aklu is a man who has broken picket lines, and occupies an uneasy middle ground where neither the police nor the villagers trust him completely in a milieu where allegiance is not just a byword in the dark. Barat’s range as an actor is certainly stoked, and both Gupta and Sharma lend able support. Yet, the central conflicts at the heart of the tale remain obscured. The evocative passages placed end-to-end give off a sense of a piece that is overwritten, and perhaps losing sight of its core preoccupations.
Much of the action in the play takes place in its characters’ line of sight, rather than in ours, which allows us to create visuals of distance and perspective as we go along. At first, the material stays resolutely in the realm of the imagined. As the specifics are jotted in, and the setting slowly reveals itself, the text becomes merely a series of iterations of a very finite set of events, that don’t allow the play to soar as a parable for our times. Although there are clues strewn about,
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The villagers could be Muslim immigrants, the security forces have a characteristic North Indian swagger, and the predominant dialect has a Bihari twang to it. There are contemporary references that can faintly be accessed like the disappeared persons in Kashmir, or even the symbolic mowing down of agrarian livelihoods by state-owned capitalism.
It is a certainly an elegantly mounted production by Kapur that deserves to be watched for the aesthetic experience it represents. Yet, with its emotional resonances so thin on the ground, the pay-off would always remain the same.
The author is a freelance writer and theatre critic