Jamia Millia Islamia, in a controversial move, denied permission to Jana Natya Manch — a theatre group formed by legendary street theatre activist Safdar Hashmi — for its performance inside the campus. The troupe was invited by a group of students, Faiz Ahmed Faiz Study Circle to perform on January 12 to celebrate the life and works of Safdar Hashmi in the month of his 34th martyrdom day. The students alleged that the administration failed to cite any credible reason for cancellation.

Sanam Hussain, a member of the study circle, told NewsClick over phone that they were not given any specific reason for the cancellation of the play. She said, “We were made to wait for two days. They took our letter without any acknowledgment. Later, we were informed that the permission for the play was denied. I mean it is quite ironic that a campus that has its amphitheatre named after Safdar Hashmi is denying permission for the performance. The amphitheatre has been closed for a while. The students have been denied permission for every cultural activity. Does it mean that administration wants to confine students to their classes?”

The circle, in a press note said, “Faiz Ahmad Faiz study circle aimed to host the program on 12th January to celebrate the life and works of Safdar Hashmi in the month of his 34th martyrdom day. Despite approaching the proctor several times to seek permission for the performance, we received a negative response on the administration’s part. This is a highly shameful act from the administration as they denied permission to the very theatre group which was founded by Safdar Hashmi inside an amphitheatre named after him. Ironically, a prestigious central university like Jamia Millia Islamia with a huge cultural heritage is taking such a stance against the legacy of people like Safdar, who is a symbol of cultural resistance against authoritarianism. It is also deplorable that the Safdar Hashmi amphitheatre is still shut out for the students of the campus.”

It added, “Campus spaces are fertile grounds for the growth and development of ideas and public/cultural spaces inside the campus are of utmost importance for students to have healthy discussions, debates and socialise in general. The administration’s move to restrict students from entering such spaces is a direct attack on our democratic rights.”

A student who requested anonymity told NewsClick that the administration has been denying permission for long to curb the growth of students’ organisations. She said, “A general tendency of the administration has been to see that no political or cultural activity should take place. When our activists were pasting posters about an event, they were issued show cause notices. Those were withdrawn after much protest. Even the poetry events have been scrutinised and cancelled.”

Komita Dhanda, cultural activist and a member of the theatre group said that they were informed by the students associated with the circle that proctors have been denying permission for every cultural programme inside the campus and the denial was not meant for JANAM alone. She said, “We are witnessing a curb on cultural activities; be it plays, debates or lectures across the campuses in the country. A student is exposed to the contesting ideas and ideologies through these activities and they develop their understanding of our society. When authorities curb these activities, they are indeed prohibiting students from learning.”

The development comes days after the Jamia administration dissolved teachers’ association. The teachers’ bodies across the country have condemned the move.

Professor Atiqur Rahman, chief proctor of Jamia Millia Islamia, could not be reached for a comment despite multiple attempts.

Courtesy: Newsclick

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Every year on January 1, the workers of Jhandapur gather to mark the martyrdom of Safdar Hashmi, the founding member of Jana Natya Manch (Janam) who was murdered by Congress goons while performing the play ‘Halla Bol’ at Jhandapur in 1989. This year they are celebrating 30 years of his martyrdom. Here are some snippets from the proceedings of that day. 
 

First published in Newsclick.

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Safdar Hashmi | Image Courtesy: SAHMAT

On 1 January 1989, Jana Natya Manch (JANAM), while performing a street play in Jhandapur, was attacked by a crowd of armed Congress goons. In the ensuing violence, two people lost their lives — Ram Bahadur, a worker, and Safdar Hashmi, JANAM’s founder and an eminent theatre activist. As details of the attack emerged, it became clear that it was a well-orchestrated attack aimed at murdering Hashmi. JANAM went back to the same spot three days later, on 4 January, in defiance of the ruling government’s browbeating tactics, and completed their performance. The event marked a watershed moment in modern Indian political history. The incident led to widespread public outcry. Various individuals and organisations extended their support to JANAM.

JANAM performing in Jhandapur on 4 January 1989 | Image Courtesy: Scroll

SAHMAT, formed barely a month after the horrific event, was created with the vision of being a safe platform for academics, intellectuals, artists, and writers. It commemorates 1 January every year as Safdar Hashmi Memorial Day. In a parallel event, JANAM, along with Centre for Indian Trade Unions (CITU), also marks the occasion by organising a memorial event for Ram Bahadur and Safdar Hashmi in Jhandapur, involving street plays, songs, dances, books, and speeches.

Keeping up with their tradition, SAHMAT organised a day-long Jashn-e-Daura this year too. They also used the occasion to mark 25 years of the Babri Masjid’s demolition and its effect on the secular fabric of the country, especially in the wake of the divisive politics of the current ruling government.

As visitors walked into the Constitution Club Annexe, they were greeted with three exquisitely mounted exhibitions. “Beyond Dispute: Landscape of Dissent”, which involved photographs, paintings, and other works across various mediums, was a reinterpretation of the demolition, as one of its curators, Aban Raza, explained later. This was accompanied by an earlier exhibition by SAHMAT, ”Hum Sab Ayodhya”, which carried photographs, paintings, and texts from various sources, all documenting the long history of pluralism in Ayodhya.

The wall at the far end of the hall was covered with photographs, primarily portraits; it was part of a photo series covering the massive gathering of farmers, the three day “Mahapadav”, that took place in the capital recently.

This space was also where the opening performance of the day took place with the street play, “I Have a Problem”, by the volunteer based theatre group Bigul. The play, a satire, dealt with the rising communalism, intolerance, and the rise of right-wing Hindutva forces in the country. This was followed by JATAN Natya Kendra’s piece, a theatre group from Rohtak, Haryana, who performed four poems as plays. The poems covered a range of topics such as patriarchy and how it obstructs women’s advancement (“Pitaon Ka Chorus”), the rising violence and rousing of communal tensions for political purposes (“Tumhe Zeher Pilayein”), and the execution of those who dare to speak up against injustices (“Maare Jaayenge”).

The plays set the tone for the performances that were to follow.

JANAM (Kurukshetra) sang songs of communal harmony and solidarity. Virendra Saini’s film on Ayodhya was screened next. The filmmaker was also present, having flown to Delhi especially for the event. Ram Rahman, a photographer and one of the founding members of SAHMAT, while introducing the movie, also talked about SAHMAT’s sustained efforts at countering the communal propaganda of the right-wing groups since the demolition.

Almost immediately after the demolition, SAHMAT had called on artists from across the country to come together in solidarity, putting together a 17-hour long musical event, meant to celebrate the secular spirit of the country. They took this event, “Anhad Garje”, to different cities like Ahmedabad, Bombay, and Lucknow. It was during this time, in 1993, that they mounted the exhibition “Hum Sab Ayodhya”, which was exhibited in at least 17 cities. It was Madhukar Upadhyay, a senior journalist—incidentally, he was also one of the first to get the news about the demolition of the Babri Masjid out—who suggested that they take the show to Ayodhya. SAHMAT took the show to Ayodhya, deliberately choosing to have it on 15 August because of its significance in the Independence Movement because it is a movement that the RSS, for all their insistence on “nationalism”, cannot lay claim to. The event, “Mukt Naad”, took place on the banks of the Saryu River in Ayodhya, with over a thousand artists and intellectuals, among others, coming together in a sort of sit-in, to protest against the demolition. Among those who performed were Rajan and Sajan Mishra, Kartik Baul, Kalucharan Mahapatra, Sitara Devi, and Girija Devi. Virendra Saini, who is a noted cinematographer, filmed the entire event, later using it in his film on the history of Ayodhya and its syncretic culture.

The Pune group performing “Mei Safdar” | Image Courtesy: Newsclick

A group of former students from the Brihan Maharashtra College of Commerce (BMCC) in Pune also did a reading of their play, “Mei Safdar.” The group made an interesting use of beatboxing to create sound effects to support the dialogues. Interesting, a little earlier in the day, the group had also performed “Mei Safdar” at the Jhandapur memorial event.
Two journalists also took the mic to recount their experience of reporting about the demolition from Ayodhya.

Ruchira Gupta | Image Courtesy: Newsclick

Ruchira Gupta, who was a journalist with Business Line at the time, spoke first. She reiterated that the demolition was pre-planned and intentional; it was not the result of mob violence, as is popularly believed. It became clear to her, from a conversation that she was privy to between L K Advani and Pramod Mahajan, that a team had been especially called to raze the domes of the mosque to the ground. She also spoke about the violence against journalists that the kar sevaks were indulging in at the time. For instance, Mark Tully, who worked with BBC at the time, was locked in a room by the kar sevaks. She asked Advani, who was aware of the developments, to make announcements saying that the kar sevaks restrain themselves from indulging in violence. But he did not do so.

Mahmood Mamdani speaking while releasing the calendar | Image Courtesy: Newsclick

Towards late afternoon, the SAHMAT calendar for 2018 was released by Mira Nair and Mahmood Mamdani. SAHMAT also launched three books at the event. The first was a new edition of The Republic of Reason: Words They Could Not Kill, Selected Writings of Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi, and Lankesh. The previous edition did not have Gauri Lankesh’s writings. However, after Lankesh’s assassination, SAHMAT decided to include her writings as well. Ghulam Mohammad Sheikh released the book with the words, “This is what we need today. This is the need of the hour!” The other two books, introduced by Rajendra Sharma and released by the Hindi poet, Manmohan, were Doh Sarfarosh Shayar: Bismilla aur Ashfaqulla and 1947–2017: Azaadi ke Sattar Saal.

Arman Ali Reza Dehlvi at the event | Image Courtesy: Newsclick

As the day approached evening, Arman Ali Reza Dehlvi took the stage, captivating the audience with his classical singing. The event ended with a concert with Deepak Castelino (guitar), Pandit Pritam Ghosal (sarod), and Madan Gopal Singh (harmonium). The trio was later joined by Amjad Khan, playing the table, and Jasbir Jassi.

From L to R: Deepak Castelino, Madan Gopal Singh, and Pandit Pritam Ghosal | Image Courtesy: Newsclick

What made this cultural event unlike the rest in the city were its political underpinnings. All the plays, songs, performances upheld the values of tolerance, love, secularism; while also denouncing the proliferation of hate and violence among communities on the basis of religion, caste, gender. In light of the ruling government’s legacy of using divisive politics and violent communalism to win elections, and because of the national elections slated for next year, the palpable sense of urgency, felt by almost all those who were present, was not misplaced.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum
 

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Peter Brook begins his book, The Empty Space, with the words: “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”

But in street theatre, as indeed in life, there is no empty space. The actor knows immediately, feels it in the gut, that this is a contested space. There is a claim being laid to the space by a people who are denied space virtually everywhere else.

Jana Natya Manch (popularly known as Janam) is perhaps India’s best known street theatre group. Founded in 1973 by a group of youngsters that included the late Safdar Hashmi, Janam has performed over 8,000 shows at nearly 100 streets and prosceniums.
I first acted in a Janam play in the summer of 1987, when I was an undergraduate student at Ramjas College in Delhi University. Some DU colleges in the mid and late 1980s, including Miranda House and Deshbandhu College, had become a stronghold of the Students Federation of India, and ideas of the left were very much in the air.

I have no pictures of that time. This is one of my earliest pictures in Janam. This is in 1988, and we’re performing Raja Ka Baja at Deshbandhu College. That thin fellow with black hair in the centre is me, playing Rameshwar Dayal, an unemployed youth. Encircling me are, from left, Brijender Singh, Sanjay and Shikha Sethi. This picture was taken by Safdar Hashmi.

The Janam play I acted in was called Samrath Ko Nahi Dosh Gosain, on inflation and the public distribution system. Safdar Hashmi had seen me act in college and called one day to say that Janam was desperately looking for someone to play a small role in their production. I agreed, not realising that my role would involve singing. Later, when I told him that I couldn’t sing, he thought I was being modest – that is, until he heard me. He took me to Kajal Ghosh, the music director, to find my scale on the harmonium. As soon as Ghosh announced triumphantly that my scale had been found and pinned down, the damn thing would escape. I had no idea what the two of them were talking about.

An image from Satyashodhak, a play on the life and times of Jyotirao Phule. It seems strange to say this now, but back then, Phule was virtually unknown in North India, the BSP still a fringe party, and Dalit Studies was at least two decades away from being an academic discipline.

Safdar was a lovely singer, so he couldn’t figure out why I found that simple thing – sticking to scale – so hard. My career as singing star died a premature death. My friend Sanjay Maharishi also acted in the same play: he could sing, but wasn’t available on all the dates required. So the singer ended up doing a few shows in a non-singing role, while the non-singer did all the shows in a singing role. Cumulatively, we were a bit of a disaster, though Safdar, bless him, assured us otherwise.

One of Safdar’s favourite pastimes used to be doodling logos for Janam. He doodled many, some with the stereotypical laughing-and-crying-masks, others more playful, twisting and turning the typeface in Hindi and English. Presumably none satisfied him, so Janam didn’t have a logo until 2007. Finally, this logo was designed by artist Orijit Sen, 34 years after Jan Natya Manch was first created. Image courtesy: Sudhanva Deshpande
 

Revolution on the street

After five years of doing large stage plays in the open, often for an audience of thousands, Janam had reached a bit of a dead end. The Emergency was over, but the organisations which hosted our shows – mainly the Kisan Sabha and trade unions – had become impoverished, as a result of having to work underground during the period.

Image courtesy: Sudhanva Deshpande

In the late 1970s, it cost about Rs 5,000 to mount a show, set up a large stage, hire lights and sound technicians. It was a lot of money. The organisations that usually gave us space to perform, needed our plays but could not afford them. So Safdar said, “If we can’t take big plays to the people, we’ll take small plays.”

This is how Janam’s famous play, Machine, was born. It was written jointly by Safdar Hashmi and Rakesh Saxena, inspired by a worker struggle at a factory in Ghaziabad, called Herig India, where six workers were shot dead for asking for a small parking lot for their bicycles and a tiny bhatti, or oven, to heat their food. The play was barely 13 minutes long. It was poetic, funny, moving, and inspiring.

The idea of performing in a circle, with the audience all around us, emerged naturally while Machine was being made. Without quite knowing it was called that, Safdar and his comrades had “invented” street theatre. Of course they hadn’t really invented it – street theatre had an older history, one which they were not aware of and, remarkably, at the very moment that Janam was creating Machine, Samudaya, a theatre group in Karnataka, was also creating a play called Belchi, using very similar techniques and form.

It was nearly three years before the groups realised they were both doing the same thing at the same time. Street theatre, in its modern Indian avatar, was born in reaction to the Emergency, as a form of resistance to authoritarianism. Today, as we see an unprecedented authoritarianism in our polity, street theatre acquires added edge, because it helps us forge, protect, nurture and push the idea of democracy not as a once-in-five-year ritual of voting, but as practice on the streets.

Moloyashree Hashmi in 'Aurat'. Image courtesy: Sudhanva Deshpande

Moloyashree Hashmi, Safdar’s partner, was the only female actor in the group at the time. Safdar found a poem by a revolutionary Iranian schoolteacher Marzieh Oskoui, called I am a Woman, and the play Aurat began with a rendition of that. Moloyashree played three women: a child wanting to go to school, a college student and professional and, finally, an old factory worker with six (male) actors essaying a variety of other parts.

Playwright Habib Tanvir loved Aurat, calling it a “poetic abstraction realistically encapsulating sharply etched out vignettes of a woman’s life”. Like Machine, Aurat was also jointly written by Safdar and Rakesh. It was translated and performed in several languages all over India and in Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh. Along with plays like Jyoti Mhapsekar’s Mulgi Zhali Ho (Marathi) and Theatre Union’s Om Swaha (Hindi), Aurat gave voice to the feminist upsurge of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Moloyashree performed this play about 2,000 times and I performed with her at least 500 of those times. It remains, to my mind, the finest piece of acting I have seen in street theatre. Her performance was tender, vulnerable, moving, poetic, powerful, all at the same time. I know that for thousands of young women, just watching such a powerful performance in the open, in a public space, was inspiring and empowering.

Two decades after 'Aurat', we made another play on patriarchy. We were determined to make it as different from 'Aurat' as possible: if 'Aurat' was episodic and tried to capture the experience of everywoman, this was going to be a play about very specific characters, rooted in a particular milieu. If 'Aurat' had taken up the most visible aspects of gender discrimination, this was to be about those invisible aspects that we rarely even talk about. I proposed a triptych of stories. In the first, the daughter of a domestic servant (played superbly by Nirmala, pictured above) is gifted red ribbons, but is prevented from playing with them. In the second, a middle-aged woman from a conservative middle class family (Moloyashree in her element) protests against her daughter’s proposed marriage to a “successful” boy because he is accused of corruption. In the third, a woman worker (again Moloyashree) disrupts the unity of the union in her factory by demanding a separate toilet for women. This remains one of Janam’s best street plays.
 

The birth of resistance

On the fourth of January 1989, Jan Natya Manch delivered the single most important street theatre performance in the history of India. The troupe had been attacked on the morning of Sunday, January 1, while performing in a labour colony at Jhandapur in Sahibabad. Minutes after Janam began their play, goons from the Indian National Congress arrived, and demanded to be allowed to pass through the performance area. Safdar asked them to wait or take another route.

The goons assaulted the troupe and the audience with iron rods and firearms. A Nepali migrant worker who was a resident of the area, Ram Bahadur, was killed on the spot. Safdar was grievously injured.

We took Safdar to a hospital in Ghaziabad, and then transported him to Delhi. The news of the attack had gone viral, before we knew what that word meant, in those pre-mobile and pre-internet days.

Hundreds of people came to Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital to stand vigil as it became clear that Safdar was not going to survive. He finally succumbed to his injuries on the night of January 2. He was cremated the next day and his funeral procession was accompanied by 15,000 people.

In this picture are (left to right) Subhash Tyagi, Jogi, Brijender and Moloyashree. The actor she is speaking to, who is not in the frame, is me. Vishwajeet Pradhan, who played the cop, is sitting between Jogi and Brijender. Thousands of people turned up for the show – local workers, of course, but also about a dozen bus-full of people from Delhi.

Less than 48 hours after his death, Janam, led by Moloyashree, returned to the spot and completed the performance. It was a stirring act of courage, commitment and defiance. I acted in the performance, and the memory of that morning still gives me goosebumps.

Then and now, Janam frequently tackles current political issues, because we believe that if your theatre does not take cognisance of the histories of contestation around class, caste, gender, language, region, if your theatre does not take off its fancy clothes and wade into the slush, if your theatre does not stand in partisanship of the poor and the oppressed, your theatre has no meaning.

I remember clearly the day the Godhra train burning took place: We had met for rehearsal in the evening, and we knew, in our gut, that this was something Hindutva forces would capitalise on, but on that evening, we had no idea how horrific it was going to all turn out to be.

Within days of Godhra, we had started improvising in rehearsal to prepare a play. It was not easy. So far, all our plays on communalism had put all fundamentalists on an equal footing, and had ended with the correct, but inadequate, call for people to live in peace with each other. But Gujarat 2002 was more than just communalism – it was a step by Hindu Right to refashion the secular republic as a majoritarian, autocratic, Hindu Rashtra. We had to find a way of saying this dramatically in a play that was to be played in the open, even as the pogrom in Gujarat continued.

Eventually, the play used three registers of speech. It opened in complete silence, with actors holding up placards with text and images that conveyed the horror of what was happening. The audience was invited to bear silent witness.

As the violence had unfolded in real time, a number of poets had written powerful lines about it. We ended up using three of these poems, by Vimal Kumar, Manglesh Dabral and Vishnu Nagar. These poems gave voice to the rage that we collectively felt.

Guru Golgangol played by Ashok Tiwari (centre), and his two side-kicks: Buddhibali (the brainy one, played here by Joyoti Roy, left) and Baahubali (the brawny one, played here by me, right).

The third register was the satirical. At the end of this play, even though people would argue with us about the usual things – calling us Hindu-haters, accusing us of ignoring the Kashmiri Pandits, claiming we gave clean chits to the Muslims – we were never physically attacked. Some part of it, perhaps, had to do with humour: the satire was so funny that it blunted some of the anger. But maybe it also has to do with plain luck. Who knows, if that luck would hold if we were to do something similar today, for instance, a street performance about the gau rakshaks.

Courtesy: Scroll.in
 

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My grandmother told me years ago that "Ismat apa", as she always called the illustrious writer,  wrote lying flat on her stomach, in the middle of a room buzzing with people. My grandparents were part of the great current of people who contributed to and were carried along by the Progressive Writers' Movement in the 1940's. While my grandfather was directly involved in literary production, my grandmother's contributions were more tangential, and her observations rather pithy. She told me that she loved visiting Ismat apa's home near Shivaji Park in Mumbai, a far trek from where she lived in Andheri. The windows of this house were always wide open, she recalled, and its curtains billowed all day in the sea breeze. From these observations I formed my own image of Ismat Chughtai, a woman of formidable achievement who wrote in an accessible voice. In my mind, she is the writer who wrote no matter what, belly down on a chatai (mat) on the floor, thriving on the bustle of the household around her.  The prolific writer was in the news recently, when the Rajasthan government decided to drop her stories from school textbooks. It also removed poems and short stories by the late theatre activist and writer Safdar Hashmi.
 
In her life, Chughtai was adept at offending people. Her work dealt with taboo themes and took readers into places that had never before been described. She wrote in the 'ghareloo zabaan': the turns of phrases and idioms of her busy household, the gossip of inner courtyards and women's quarters. I read her memoir Kaghazi Hai Pairahan (translated in English as A Life in Letters) as a college student. It was as transformative a text as other feminist tracts I encountered during those years, if not more so for the immediacy of its setting. Chughtai wrote in a style that was fearless, irreverent and often very funny. She began writing in the 1930s, but the story that defined her was Lihaaf (The Quilt), published in January 1942 in Adab-i-Latif, a literary magazine published from Lahore. The story earned her a court summons for obscenity, along with her friend Saadat Hasan Manto. They both chose to stand trial rather than apologize for their work, and eventually the cases were dropped.
 
Chughtai's canon includes works like her novel Terhi Lakeer (The Crooked Line) and stories like Masooma, Chauthi ka Joda (The Wedding Dress)  and Ziddi (The Stubborn Girl). The latter was adapted into a film script directed by her husband Shahid Latif. The duo collaborated on a host of other films including Arzoo (1950). Chughtai also wrote the dialogues for the 1978 film Junoon in which she played the role of a grandmother. And Chauthi ka Joda formed part of the story for the Partition classic Garam Hawa (1973), directed by MS Sathyu.

The years of student life are made special by exploration, by tuning into the abundance and diversity of nations, voices and realities. All this would be denied to the young minds who read the purged textbooks.
 
In every way, Chughtai stood for progressive values for most of her life.  She had to fight for an education, first from the iconic Isabella Thoburn College in Lucknow and then to gain a Teachers Training degree from Aligarh. She went on to write books that challenged parochialism and patrirachy and championed the cause of social justice. She wrote for all of India, and almost 25 years after her death, she stands as a proud symbol of India's syncretic values and her own compassionate humanity. So to weed her out of textbooks for schoolchildren is a self defeating move.
 
According to media reports, the reason for the removal of Chughtai and Hashmi's writings is that "they were were loaded with Urdu words…" and were "highlighting practices of a particular community." They are sought to be replaced by readings that promote "local cultural practices and beliefs". This runs counter to the idea of Indian plural culture, that takes pride in its diversity. It also fails to understand the entire culture of reading, and of exploring different worlds through words, ideas and books. As a young woman in Aligarh, where Chughtai set many of her stories, I devoured translations of Chekhov and Maupassant, besides the writings of PG Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. It is limiting to think that reading should be about your own life or what is familiar. The years of student life are made special by exploration, by tuning into the abundance and diversity of nations, voices and realities. All this would be denied to the young minds who read the purged textbooks.
 
It is both sad and ironic that Chughtai's works continue to fall foul of government diktats, decades after her trial by the British Crown, in the India of 2015.  Perhaps the only sane response to this is what I imagine Ismat would have done: continue writing, in a room with the windows flung wide open, open to the breeze from all directions.  
 
(The writer is a journalist based in Mumbai )
 

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