The 'Inexhaustible Work of Criticism in Action': Street Theatre of the Left

The ‘Inexhaustible Work of Criticism in Action’: Street Theatre of the Left Sudhanva Deshpande I During the past few decades the theatre . has made enormous sacrifices in its efforts to help solve social problems . And it has paid for such services to society by sacrificing virtually every element of poetry. Bertolt Brecht (1994: 12) And the dwarfs who came on-stage and spoke everyday street-language drove poetry out of the theatre. The bourgeois does not understand poetry and is, therefore, suspicious of it. In his concept of realism, only the mundane slang of the market-place has any relevance. Market-place or stock exchange. Utpal Dutt (1988: 32) Consider the following: in 1996, for the second year running, the Department of Family Welfare, Ministry of Health, issued an advertisement in a national daily inviting ‘sealed quotations from reputed parties in the profession, for organising street plays during India International Trade Fair.’ Mark the operative words: ‘quotation’, ‘profession’—theatre has entered the market, you can buy and sell it, just like office furniture. This is what capitalism does, it turns everything into a commodity, it expands the market, everything comes under the sway of capital. And capital moves surreptitiously, insidiously, to engulf, by and by, the entire range of human activity, including art. Thus, film production becomes an industry and the art gallery turns into a supermarket. And what happens to street theatre? In response to its advertisement in 1995, the Ministry had received about a dozen quotations. Far from being ‘reputed parties’, most of the applicant groups were simply hastily assembled collections of individuals out to make a quick buck. There was one exception, however. This was a group which has been doing proscenium theatre of some quality over the last few years. Like other similar groups in Delhi, this one, too, has had to face tremendous odds to simply survive; it is understandable, therefore, that it should be on the lookout for funds. As it happened, this group was eventually selected by the Ministry, and it decided to perform the Jana Natya Manch street play Aurat (woman). What was performed, reportedly, was a completely mutilated version of the play. The problem was not per se the changes in the script: Jana Natya Manch’s Aurat (not to be confused with other street plays bearing the same name) has been performed by literally scores of groups all over India, and even in Pakistan and Bangladesh, by adapting the text to local contexts. In the version done for the Health Ministry, however, the radical thrust of Aurat was itself completely missing. The concerned group had made large-scale changes in the text, to purge it of anything that came even remotely close to radical, left-wing politics. And these changes were made by the group at its own initiative: self-censorship preceded official sanction. This, of course, had to happen. Aurat is a revolutionary play and the state does not finance revolution. Interestingly, the first casualty in the text was the wonderful poem ‘I am a Woman’ by the Iranian revolutionary Marzieh Ahmadi Oskooii, martyred in the struggle against the Shah. Aurat opens with this poem, adapted and translated by Safdar Hashmi: I am a woman . A Worker whose hands turn The great machines of the factory . A woman for whom In your shameless vocabulary 2 There is no word Which can describe her significance. A woman in whose chest Is hidden a heart Full of festering wounds of wrath, In whose eyes dance The red shadows of liberty. A woman, Whose hands have learnt, Through years of toil, How to raise the red flag. All this, and more, was cut out. Quite literally, then, theatre had sacrificed poetry upon entering the market. But perhaps there is more to this story. Several ministries and other bodies commission works of art; Doordarshan and NFDC ask for proposals; the Akademis which administer culture give away awards and grants. The Health Ministry, however, specifically asked for quotations. Why? Every art, upon entering the market, becomes commodified, but is still perceived more or less as art. Street theatre, on the other hand, undergoes a fundamental transformation: it turns into advertising. It does not advertise consumer products—though, reportedly, in Nepal even that has happened—it advertises social messages. There are many, many groups which produce this kind of ‘theatre’ and they sell a variety of messages: family planning, hygiene, protection against AIDS, the evils of drink and even, I’m told, how to cross a road. Not all work for the government; many work for NGOs and often NGOs themselves undertake such social advertising. Such ‘plays’ are sometimes done with the best of intentions, but more often with just philanthropical smugness, and almost always there is money to be made (an acquaintance of mine, year before last, made a lakh-and-a-half, after paying his actors and other expenses, in three months flat), money that often comes from foreign sources. I admit that I have not seen an enormous amount of this kind of work; but I have seen some and know about more: and I am yet to see a single ‘play’ of this kind that stands on its own as theatre. There is no dramatic tension, only the most tired cliches, and loads of boredom. It simply isn’t theatre: it’s advertising, plain and simple, and bad advertising at that. (I am excluding from this discussion those NGOs which work within the women’s movement. One reason for this is that STQ has already devoted one issue to it—No. 9, April 1996. The other, more important, reason is that the plays produced by them do not fall within the category of street-theatre-as-advertising. Very often, these plays do reflect the lived experience of the movement, and often their central concern is to empower the activist herself by encouraging her to play out the oppressions that define her life. This kind of work constitutes a separate stream within Indian street theatre and deserves separate analysis: of its theatrical merits or otherwise, its theoretical basis, its role within the larger women’s movement, its aesthetic choices and strategies, its conditions of production, its sources of finance, its efficacy, and so on. A truly critical analysis of this kind has not yet, at least to my knowledge, been done. It needs to be done, and by someone within the movement.) The literacy movement has had a curious, mixed impact on street theatre. On the positive side, literally hundreds of street plays have emerged from the literacy movement, involving thousands of young people in some kind of theatrical activity. Also, these plays have undoubtedly helped in some manner to mobilize local communities for literacy. On the negative side, however, the overwhelming majority of such plays have been quite terrible. I have myself read about 150 plays collected by the National Literacy Mission. The best among these were to be published and the selection was to be done by a panel of street theatre persons. There was not even one play that could be published without major reworking: they simply had no drama. Anyone who has read or seen literacy plays would agree that most plays are sermonizing and dull. It is somehow presumed that talking to illiterates means talking to ignorant fools—which is the general problem street theatre faces—and such talking becomes talking down. Most plays put forward a narrow, merely utilitarian view of literacy (‘If you know how to read you will not board the wrong bus, you can write your own letters, shopkeepers will not short-change you,’ and so on), instead of seeing literacy as a window to the world, as empowerment , as a weapon of struggle. Such plays are, then, merely ‘devices’ of ‘communication’, not theatre. 3 Much like school textbooks, they are lifeless, boring: as if learning cannot, should not, be fun. And audiences, therefore, regard them as objects of deference, not sites of engagement—to be received in solemn, temple-like silence, and then . forgotten! Faced with this deference, actors begin to imagine that their plays have had tremendous ‘impact’ (whatever that means), their ‘message’ has gone home, even, in extreme cases, that their plays have brought about literacy; the real participation of the entire community, the mass movement on the ground, the months of hard work by dedicated volunteers, all this is conveniently forgotten. I am not trying to run down the literacy movement. On the contrary, I am arguing that the literacy movement is a part of the larger struggle against exploitation of various kinds, and if street theatre does not recognize this, it comes perilously close to sermonizing at best, advertising at worst. In fact, this would be true not just for literacy plays, but street theatre as a whole. This has had a disastrous result: not only does advertising pass off as theatre, the feeling has grown that all street theatre is advertising, social or political. Street theatre of the Left is not advertising. [By Left, throughout this article, is meant the official Left.] It may be of uneven quality, it may at times be marked by proselytizing zeal, it may not always be aesthetically rich, but it is not advertising. So what is ‘street theatre of the Left’? II (The political theatre refuses) to accept the bourgeois interpretation of the neutrality of art. As the theatre is an important instrument in the working class struggle for freedom, the stage must reflect the purpose and life of the proletariat fighting for a new order in the world. Erwin Piscator (Van Erven, 1988: 9) Contemporary Indian street theatre has been drawing in equal measure from our folk and classical drama as well as from western drama .

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