By: Kamal Baruah
Pandemic forced people to close their doors for the outer and real world thereby social media platforms are the most accepted fact of the current trend. With high speed network connectivity, streaming television and web series have taken a huge plunge in the recent years and performing art like theatre is losing its charm over the last decade. Unlike Britishers, who promote Shakespeare dramas in English, there is no such effort to promote India’s theatre.
However Assam’s unique mobile drama tradition takes the stage in a changing world. This is the most encouraging, when live performers’ present the experience of a real or imagined dramatic performance of plays before a live audience in a stage that inspired especially to the rural setup. Although drama is a recreation of human actions and feelings, it reaches the hearts of people where real changes manifest from; hence, it can bring about the expected social change. However the prime audience of younger generation wanted instant thrills and spills and theatre lost its patrons, it basically becomes an amateur activity nowadays. Despite what made people want to go into the theatre?
Related Posts:
The play – “Nathuram Godse, the killer of Mahatma” was another intense, moving and inspiring at Kalakshetra recently. It was heartening to see so many theatre lovers at the auditorium for that historical piece. Dramas actually enlighten people by bringing them from their dark world towards light. It’s such another approach from Pahi production, where tales of violence from the dreadful time faced by the two dominions – India and Pakistan, narrated with facts.
At the stroke of midnight, freedom was attained at the price of the country being divided into two nations. India’s partition in 1947 continues to evoke strong emotions. It resulted in bloodshed and collective trauma, deepening the faith divide on either side of the border. Defining the new national border by dividing the provinces of Bengal in the east and Punjab in the west became difficult. That was the starting point of utter chaos. Violence erupted as faith-based communities turned against one another. Hindus and Muslims who had been living together for centuries were suddenly torn apart. The atrocities were indeed terrible and the desire for wealth was another major trigger for the violence. People were forced to cross borders.
The partition is regarded as one of the largest and most violent political migration. There had been a mass exodus where millions of people either displaced from their ancestral homes and families or murdered in communal riots that history witnessed ever. People tried to seek refuse on the other side of the border to save from the wave of brutal violence and savagery. Sikh women in Pakistan Punjab province committed suicide inside Gurudwara in order to protect her honour. The crowded train in Layallpur, present day Faisalabad was butchered. Victims of partition riots faced inhuman treatment meted out in the national capital. The absurdity and heartbreak of the overnight creation of new borders was reflected in bad shape.
The painful partition of India’s independence perhaps serves as a reminder of the very high cost of freedom. The playwright focused on some of the hidden stories of India’s independence. The killer of Mahatma accused Bapuji of having betrayed India by being pro-Jinnah and soft on Pakistan and even blamed for the bloodshed that marked partition. At upstage, one of the victims (the old Muslim) of partition riots came out on top playing challenging roles. Gandihiji was projected with a bold character at center stage, while Nathuram Godse took pride in stating against his political convictions. His opposition to the Gandhian ideas of pacifism and nonviolence had finally led to kill Mahatma.
Hearing the three shots fired at close range, the house was watching a burst of heart-stopping action at the end. However critics are there to judge the merits of the artistic work that was especially done by the group of artists from Mangaldoi so professionally. The British used religion as a way of dividing people into categories. Later it became a factor in politics that seemed to fail to grab attention through the play. The stage was tactfully divided up into sections oriented based on the performers perspective to the audience. But along with the joy for freedom from colonial rule, partition was painful episode in the history for both the countries. The story of the partition has been told and retold time and again in films and books and certainly the play did a bold step to revisit the violent legacy of Indian partition.
