On stage of affairs

A scene from the play

Sameep Singh didn’t disappoint with his stage adaptation of “Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa”.

“Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa” presented by Shri Ram Centre For Performing Arts Repertory in its auditorium last week brought alive with telling effect the anxiety, worry and inner turmoil of the mother of a young revolutionary killed in a fake encounter. With intense trepidation, the mother goes to the mortuary to identify the body of her son and subsequently visits the places and people her son was in contact with. She comes to know for the first time the world of her son, his commitment to the cause of revolutionary transformation of a State based on exploitation. She meets the mother of the young man who was killed with her son by the police in collusion with hardcore criminals. She has an intimate meeting with the girlfriend and comrade of her son. These meetings set in motion an emotional journey within Sujata. She becomes gnawingly conscious of her upper-middle class smug world and its hypocrisy. A timid working woman, she is suppressed by her husband. Now she realizes that her son is killed by the State because he was fighting to “establish the political power of the peasants in the rural territory.”

Written by Mahasweta Devi, the crusader of the rights of tribals and suppressed masses, “Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa” is the stage adaptation of celebrated Bengali novel “Hazar Chaurashir Ma” in Hindi by Shyamanand Jalan and Avijit Dutt. Against the backdrop of Naxalbari movement led by Charu Majumdar in 1967, the play focuses on the State violence perpetrated against urban youths. This is a highly provocative and disturbing piece of theatre. This bold and gripping play in Hindi was first produced and directed by Shyamanand Jalan and Avijit Dutt who also played leading male roles in 1978-79. The play stirred the Hindi theatre world which largely avoids burning political issues.

The same script was staged by Abhiyan under the direction of Rajinder Nath. Based on the original novel, its English translation by Shamik Bandyopaghyay, Hindi version by Shyamanand Jalan and Avijit Dutt, poems by Nabarun Bhattacharya and documents by Charu Majumdar, the National School of Drama Second Year students presented this comprehensive script of “Hazaar Chaurasi…” under the direction of Santanu Bose in 2010. We have also seen the screen version of the novel directed by Govind Nihalani in 1997 with Jaya Bachchan in the lead role of the mother. The latest production of SRC despite a few flagging patches retains the captivating power of the play.

The narrative

Directed by Sameep Singh, a seasoned actor and director, the production opens with the mood of celebration with an undercurrent of anxiety. It is a happy occasion to solemnise the engagement ceremony of the daughter of Divyanath, a successful man of high society with influential connections. His wife Sujata is a working woman. It is also the birthday of their younger son Vrati who is considered a stigma on the family and shunned because of his revolutionary ideology and involvement in the Naxalbari movement. He remains mostly absent from home. Sujata is morose and disturbed about the absence of Vrati. She has no heart in the preparations of the engagement ceremony in which well-known personalities of the society of the town are expected to attend. The telephone rings and Sujata picks up. She is told by the caller in a gruffly and stern voice to come to the mortuary to identify the body of her son.

Instead of mourning his son’s death , the father uses connections to hush up the matter. Vrati's body is not claimed. His body is just 1084 in the police file.

Because of father's influence the media does not disclose the name of Vrati among the bodies in the mortuary. The family honour is saved. The grieving mother who returns home after seeing the body of her son is isolated. She leaves home to discover the kind of life her son led and who were her friends and what he wanted to do in his life.

A well-executed production

“Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa” is by far the best production of director Sameep Singh. His design is imaginative. The entire upstage is used to enact flashback scenes. The action that takes place in the present is enacted downstage. The engagement scene unfoldson the entire performance space with enough room for the movement of the performers. The torture chamber and fake police encounter scenes are effective enough to evoke a sense of horror, severely indicting State violence. At times, the engagement scene tends to drag. Director Sameep has pruned the scene, deleting a few characters like that of the journalist enabling him to quicken the pace and focus on the inner world of Sujata. This scene is vital to depict the decadence of high society, its hypocrisy and cultural nihilism. Sujata is present in the ceremony but as an outsider and irritant to the excited family members. In a surrealistic ambience created with stylized lighting design, the mother of Hazar Chaurasi Ki awakens to the strong waves of resistance against the State oppression.

Powerful performances

Delineating the character of Sujata requires a complex creative process. It has to be played with restraint. Sugandha Srivastava in this challenging role follows this technique with sensitivity, internalizing the intensely agony of her character, creating a powerful portrait of a meek and vulnerable woman gaining enough strength to oppose the philistine values of her class and empathise with the oppressed masses. Nisha Jindal as Nandini truly lives her character. Her Nandini is a comrade of Vrati in love with him, participating in the movement Vrati was passionately involved in. She is on parole and narrates to Sujata the excruciating and inhuman torture she was subjected to in the torture chamber while in custody. The brutality inflicted on her has ruined her eyesight. In intense anguish she tells Sujata that “Nothing has changed. Yes, a generation of youngsters between the age of 16 and 24 has ended — a whole generation has been massacred.”

Mujibur Rehman as Vrati, Gaurav Kumar as Divyanath, the debauch husband of Sujata, Prahlad Bisht as brute Sergent and Smita Parihar as the mother of Samu, victim of police fake encounter, create striking portraits of their characters.